Father John Gerard

John Gerard was a priest of the Society of Jesus who operated a secret ministry of the illegal and underground Catholic Church in England during the Elizabethan era. He was born into the English nobility as the second son of Sir Thomas Gerard at Old Bryn Hall, near Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire.

Gerard notably not only successfully hid from the English authorities for eight years before his capture but also endured extensive torture, escaped from the Tower of London, recovered and continued with his covert mission until the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot made it impossible to continue. After his escape to Catholic Europe, Fr. Gerard was instructed by his Jesuit superiors to write a book about his life in Latin. An English translation by Fr. Philip Caraman was published in 1951 as The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest and is a rare first-hand account of the dangerous cloak-and-dagger world of a Catholic priest in Elizabethan England. A second edition was published by Ignatius Press in 2012.

John Gerard was born 4 October 1564, the second son of Sir Thomas Gerard of Bryn Hall, and Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Port of Derbyshire. In 1569, when John Gerard was five years old, his father was imprisoned for plotting the rescue of Mary, Queen of Scots, from Tutbury Castle. His release in 1571 may have been influenced by his cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard who was Attorney General at that time. During that time John and his brother were placed with Protestant relatives, but his father obtained for them a Catholic tutor.

In August 1577, at age 12, he was sent to the English College at Douai, which relocated the following March to Rheims. At the age of 15 he spent a year at Exeter College, Oxford. This was followed by about a year of home-study of Greek and Latin under a tutor, a Mr Leutner (Edmund Lewkenor, brother of Sir Lewes Lewknor Master of the Ceremonies to James I). He then went to the Jesuit Clermont College in Paris. After some months there, followed by an illness and convalescence, in the latter part of 1581 he went to Rouen to see Jesuit priest Robert Persons.

For the next eight years he continued his ministry among the English people before he was recalled to the continent to train Jesuits for the English Mission. He was implicated by Robert Catesby's servant Thomas Bates in the Gunpowder Plot although he denied any involvement. He stayed at Harrowden again, hiding in a priest hole. During a nine-day search of the house he wrote an open letter protesting his innocence, and contrived to have copies scattered about the streets of London, denying the charges allegedly made by Bates. He eventually escaped from there to London. He left the country with financial aid from Elizabeth Vaux, slipping away disguised as a footman in the retinue of the Spanish Ambassador, on the very day of Henry Garnet's execution. Gerard went on to continue the work of the Jesuits in Europe, where he wrote his autobiography on the orders of his superiors. He died in 1637, aged 73, at the English College seminary, Rome.