GERARD, JOHN

Jesuit missionary; b. Etwall Hall, Derbyshire, Oct. 4, 1564; d. Rome, June 27, 1637. During his education at Exeter College, Oxford, where he matriculated in December 1575, he left for Douai in August 1577 to avoid taking the oath of supremacy; he later continued his studies at the Jesuit College in Clermont, Paris. After returning to England in the spring of 1583, he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Shortly after his release, about May 1586, he left England and went to Rome, where on August 5 he entered the English College. About a month after his ordination (six weeks short of the required canonical age), he joined the Society of Jesus on Aug. 15, 1588. The same year, in company with Edward Oldcorne, he returned to England, landing at night in early November on a deserted stretch of beach near Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast between Great Yarmouth and Cromer. His adventures during the next 18 years are recorded in his Autobiography, perhaps the most remarkable and exciting narrative of adventure in Elizabethan literature. Between 1588 and 1594 he worked in East Anglia, first in Norfolk and then in Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Essex; he made many converts and established a large number of Catholic centers in the houses of the gentry. Several times he narrowly escaped arrest, but finally he was caught in London, on April 23, 1594. After close imprisonment in the Counter-in-the-Poultry he was transferred to the Clink on July 6, 1594; there he was able to say Mass, instruct converts, and establish in London a house for priests entering England from the seminaries. His success led to stricter confinement and to his transference to the Tower on April 12, 1597. He was never brought to trial; but he was tortured twice, principally that he might reveal the names of the persons who had sheltered him and the whereabouts of his superior, Henry garnet. With the help of friends in London, with whom he communicated by letters written in orange juice, he organized his escape by means of a rope slung from the roof of the Cradle Tower over the moat to the wharf below. This was on the night of Oct. 5, 1597.

Thereafter, though closely pursued, he continued his apostolate in Northants, Bucks, and Oxfordshire. At the time of the Gunpowder Plot a proclamation was issued ordering Gerard's arrest along with that of Garnet and Father Oswald Tesimond. Although innocent, Gerard was a friend of several of the conspirators, notably Sir Everard Digby. Gerard eluded capture and on May 3, 1606, crossed from Dover to the Continent disguised as a retainer to the Spanish ambassador. Later he wrote his Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, which remains a primary historical source. Early in 1607 he was appointed English Penitentiary at St. Peter's, and two years later he was sent to Flanders to help in the training of the novices in the English novitiate established at Louvain. In 1614 a Jesuit house of philosophy and theology was established at Liège, and Gerard became its first rector. He built it from the foundations in a fine style with alms collected from all quarters. In 1622 he visited Rome to get papal support for the new Institute of Religious Women founded by Mary ward; and on his return to Belgium was made rector of the house of the English Jesuits at Ghent, where the newly ordained priests made their "third year" of probation under his direction. From 1627 to 1637 he was confessor to the English College in Rome, where he died.

Bibliography: j. gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, tr. p. caraman (New York 1952). t. cooper, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900, 7:1101–02.

[p. caraman]