This Book Review originally appeared in Post & Courier, August 21, 2005

GOD’S SECRET AGENTS: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. By Alice Hogge. 445 pages. HarperCollins. $27.95.

Two years after the death of Queen Elizabeth, early in the reign of James I, a former soldier who had fought with a regiment of fellow English Catholics in the Low Countries for more than ten years under the flag of Spain was discovered in a cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament with an arsenal of gunpowder kegs.

It was a volatile time in English history, a time of furious religious division between the Church of England and Roman Catholicism. The subsequent interrogation of Guy Fawkes revealed a path of fellow conspirators that, so the story goes, led straight to Jesuit missionaries hidden throughout England.

In “God’s Secrets Agents,” historian Alice Hogge puts this longstanding argument to the test. Did Jesuit missionaries truly have a hand in the gunpowder plot or were the actions of Guy Fawkes and others used as a pretext for taking action against a troublesome religious minority?

Roman Catholics in England had walked a turbulent path since the days of Henry VIII, who cut ties with the Holy See after being refused the divorce from Catherine of Aragon he needed in order to marry Ann Boleyn. Because of this, missionaries often behaved like spies, traveling under assumed identities in order to minister to a small population of Catholics scattered throughout England. Whether they were the conspirators or “king-killers” they were made out to be at the time is a separate, and highly political, question.

Though Hogge’s reassessment of history provokes new questions, her prose style tends to be a bit dry in spots. The opening third of the book pulses with the tension of the English coastal communities as the Spanish Armada drew near, but the midsection simply plods along in the footsteps of the outlawed priests as they move from hide to hide in the country houses of Tudor England. Hogge ties her arguments together well in the closing chapters, however, and overall offers an intriguing exploration of strained alliances and “kingdoms within a kingdom.”

Reviewer Jason A. Zwiker is a freelance writer in Charleston.

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