Anthony Tyrrell (1552 – ) was an English Roman Catholic renegade priest and spy.
Origins
Anthony Tyrrell, born in 1552, was son of George Tyrrell. His grandfather, Sir Thomas Tyrrell, who married Constance Blount, the daughter of Lord Mountjoy, was great-great-grandson of Sir John Tyrrell. The family was Catholic in Mary's reign and in favour with the Queen. After the accession of Elizabeth, George retired with his wife and children to the Netherlands, where they fell into extreme poverty.
Ordination
Anthony, after graduating BA in some university, and being unable to pursue his studies for want of money, came over to England to beg from his relatives. He was seized as a recusant, but after some months' imprisonment obtained his release through the favour apparently of Lord Burghley, and he again went abroad. He was one of the first students who entered the newly founded college at Rome, and at the age of twenty-seven he took the college oath, 23 April 1579. In less than two years he was ordained priest and sent upon the English mission, where on 29 April 1581 he was captured and thrown into the Gatehouse. He, however, broke prison and was again at large in January 1582. In 1584 he travelled abroad, and revisited Rome in company with the seminary priest John Ballard.
Political intrigue
On his return to England in 1585 Tyrrell became mixed up with the strange practices of Father Weston, SJ, Robert Dibdale, and others, in the alleged casting out of devils in the house of Lord Vaux at Hackney, and at Sir George Peckham's at Denham. Tyrrell, it seems, wrote some account of these prodigies, or at least had a hand in the so-called Book of Miracles attributed to Weston, extracts from which have been preserved by Samuel Harsnett. The chief actors in this affair were arrested or dispersed in the midsummer of 1586; and Tyrrell, described by Father Southwell as "a man that hath done much good", was taken prisoner for the third time and lodged in the counter in Wood Street, 4 July. For a moment he maintained the genuineness of the alleged supernatural phenomena in which he had taken part, and expressed his grief when the knives, rusty nails, and other objects which he declared had been extracted from the cheeks or stomachs of the possessed women and had been found in his trunk, were taken away from him by the pursuivants. He, however, presently opened communication with Burghley; and a few weeks later the arrest of his friend Ballard so alarmed him that, to secure his own safety and gain the favour of the Government, he made at several times (27, 30, 31 August, 2, 3 September) secret disclosures regarding the Babington conspirators, Mary Stuart, the Pope, and a number of his clerical brethren, mixing up with some genuine and valuable information much that was mere guesswork or absolute fiction. Before long he avowed himself to be a sincere convert to Protestantism, and professed a desire to make satisfaction for his former errors by giving information of Popish practices. He was accordingly in September removed to the Clink gaol, in order that he might have better scope for acting his chosen part of spy and informer among the many Catholic prisoners there, and shortly afterwards he was granted liberty abroad for the same purpose. Meanwhile, he was encouraged by Justice Young to continue saying Mass and hearing confessions, and Lord Burghley wrote to him: "Your dissimulation is to a good end". When at last the suspicions of the Catholics were aroused, Tyrrell asked permission to profess openly his conversion; and it was resolved that he should receive catechetical instruction and license to preach from the Archbishop of Canterbury.