God's Secret Agents

One evening in 1588, just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, two young men landed in secret on a beach in Norfolk, England. They were Jesuit priests and Englishmen, and their aim was to achieve by force of argument what the Armada had failed to do by force of arms: return England to the Catholic Church.

Eighteen years later their mission had been shattered by the actions of the Gunpowder Plotters — a small group of terrorists who famously tried to destroy the Houses of Parliament — for the Jesuits were accused of having designed “that most horrid and hellish conspiracy.” In an unusual turn of events, the future of every Catholic they had hoped to save would soon come to depend on the silence of one Oxford carpenter, a man being tortured in the Tower of London for building priest holes, those bunkers in which the Catholic clergy hid from English authorities.

Using contemporary documents, Alice Hogge’s brilliant book God’s Secret Agents pieces together a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between priests and government spies, as Queen Elizabeth and her ministers fought to defend the state, and English Catholics fought to defend their souls.

Alice Hogge was educated at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She lives in London. This is her first book.

“[A] vivid and moving portrait of the Counterreformation in the Elizabethan age … God’s Secret Agents is fully alive to the drama of all the Catholic martyrs’ lives.” — The Spectator