I first heard of John Gerard years ago when I was day-dreaming during a history class; I have never forgotten the teacher’s electrifying description of his escape from the Tower of London; it was meant to be impregnable, yet here was a man whose daring and effrontery had been an overmatch for it. Reading this new edition of the autobiography, first written in Latin in 1609 and translated by Philip Caraman, has been a second, more detailed and more enduring history lesson.

John Gerard was born in 1564, the same year as a lad from Stratford, whose later dramas in the Tudor playhouses obliquely reflected the struggles and defeats of his fellow Catholics. Already by 1584 he had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea, where he encountered several priests “who, with a light hearts, were awaiting sentence of death”. On his release he went to Rome where he was ordained a Jesuit; then in October 1588 he returned to England in the disguise of “a gentleman of moderate means”, landing on the Norfolk coast.

He ministered secretly as a priest in East Anglia until his arrest in 1594. In 1597 he was moved to the Tower, where he was tortured. It was in October 1597, while still recovering from the effects of being hung up for hours by his arms, that Gerard made his bold escape with the help of friends: a rope was slung across the Tower’s moat from the battlements on the roof above his cell; he and a fellow prisoner swung themselves across it and were spirited away down the Thames by boat. Amazingly, he evaded recapture and was able to continue his ministry in Northamptonshire for a further eight years. The Gunpowder Plot of 1606 forced him into exile; he died in Rome in 1637.

These are the bare bones of Gerard’s extraordinary career. His description of the life of a missionary priest in Tudor and Jacobean England provides the most vivid and detailed account we have of those days: the false personae priests adopted; the subterfuges they employed – such as Gerard’s smuggled messages from prison, written in lemon juice; the generosity of the recusant gentry; and the unsung bravery of so many Catholic servants. He was clearly cool-headed, resourceful and blessed with nerves of steel. He also had a powerful sense of the Providence of God working through him.

In this absorbing chronicle we encounter priest-martyrs such as Henry Garnet and Edward Oldcorne, whose zeal for souls was such that he once fasted for four days in order to convert one obdurate Protestant lady (he succeeded). St Anne Line, whose holy married life was immortalised by Shakespeare in his enigmatic poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, was at one time Gerard’s housekeeper. We also meet villains like Topcliffe, the notorious priest-hunter, whom Gerard says “spoke from the cesspool of his heart.” Above all there is Gerard himself, telling his torturers that “You can do with me what God allows you to do – more you cannot do” and never despairing, even after the Gunpowder Plot, when he writes, “Nearly all my friends were either in prison or so distressed that they could hardly look after themselves.” His final lines show his humility: “Hitherto I have been a sterile plant. I pray that at last I may begin to bear some fruit.”

The obvious parallel to Gerard’s persecution has been the plight of Christians under atheistic Communism. However, his life still matters today when Christians in the UK are more subtly persecuted for their beliefs. The velvet glove of aggressive secularism conceals the iron fist experienced by Gerard and his fellow Catholics. He described a world in which Truth had been stifled. We still have to do battle for it.

© 2007 Francis Phillips

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