fn11 The cottage, which was just beyond the London wall, had only three rooms and was used by Garnet ‘when exceptional danger threatened the city’. By day, it was perfectly still and silent. No food was prepared, no conversations were had, no fires were lit ‘even in the most bitter winter weather, for fear the smoke might be seen.’ The cottage was only discovered when a careless priest hazarded a daytime visit. (Caraman, Garnet, pp. 68–9, 122–6)
fn12 The second definition of ‘Jesuit’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘a dissembling person; a prevaricator’. (OED Online)
fn13 In his satire ‘The New Cry’, Ben Jonson revealed the popularity in England of De Furtivis Literarum Notis (1563) by the Italian cryptographer and polymath Giovanni Battista della Porta:
They all get Porta for the sundry ways
To write in cipher, and the several keys
To ope the character. They’ve found the sleight
With juice of lemons, onions, piss, to write,
To break up seals and close ’em …
(Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, p. 230)
fn14 In his sonnet ‘Upon the Sight of Dover Cliffs from Calais’, the famous convert, Sir Toby Matthew (1577–1655), captured the pain of exile:
Better it were for me to have been blind,
Than with sad eyes to gaze upon the shore
Of my dear country, but now mine no more,
Which thrusts me thus, both of sight and mind.
Better for me to have in cradle pined,
Than live thus long to choke upon the core
Of his sad absence, whom I still adore
With present heart, for hearts are not confined.
Poor heart, that dost in so high tempest sail
Against both wind and tide of thy friend’s will,
What remedy remains that can avail,
But that thou do with sighs the sails fulfil,
Until they split and if the body die,
’Tis well employed; the soul shall live thereby.
(Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, p. 216).
fn15 The title-page of the first edition (secretly published around 1593) is illuminating:
The Societie of the Rosary. Wherin is conteined the begining, increase, & profit of the same. Also the orders & manifold graces annexed unto it, with divers other things therunto appertaining.
A thing, which as it was at the first instituted by the Holy Light of God’s Church S. Dominicke as a present remedy against the Albigenses certaine heretikes of his Age: So undoubtedly will be a necessary remedy for all Christians to embrace in this miserable time.
Gaudo MARIA Virgo, cunctas haereses sola interemisti in universo Mundo. [Rejoice, Virgin Mary, since thou alone has crushed all heresies throughout the world.]
fn16 Priests from the reign of Queen Mary, although still law-breakers in the course of their ministry, were in a safer position than the seminarians since they had been ordained before 1558 and were not, therefore, de jure traitors.
12
Virgo Becomes Virago
Henry Garnet to General Claudio Aquaviva on the events of mid-October 1591:
This solemn meeting of ours was fixed for the three or four days before the feast of St. Luke, so that having finished our business we might adopt this evangelist as patron of all our work. We chose for this meeting the house which we had hitherto almost always used for this purpose, belonging to the two sisters, the widow and the virgin, illustrious by birth, fidelity and holiness of life, whom I sometimes in my thoughts liken to the two women who used to lodge Our Lord, or to those holy matrons, sisters also, who continually honour and succour your whole family, especially in Rome.
It was getting near the appointed day when, behold, a Queen’s pursuivant came to the house and knocked at the door. And because he was kept waiting a little while outside until everything that betokened our religion had been put out of sight, this drunken fellow was filled with sudden fury and said that today he had come as a friend, but because they would not receive friends with civility, he would return within ten days with others and they would break open the doors and shatter the very walls of the house. What could be worse!
There was no time to let our friends know of the impending danger and they turned up as arranged. We were in two minds what to do. However, the Lord had already assembled us and everything connected with our gathering would be safeguarded. The only danger was from one filthy fellow, who spent his days snoring in taverns, and it wasn’t likely that he would forewarn us if he really intended to return. If he did come, it was hardly likely to be during the only three days that we were there. Moreover, it was confidently reported that he had gone out of the county, and he couldn’t cross any district near adjoining ours without our friends letting us know at once, and if we had warning, we had a most satisfactory hiding place in a very deep culvert. All things considered, we decided to carry on as usual. After all, we could hardly hope ever to hold a meeting of this sort without the devil issuing some such threats. He had always sent one of his henchmen on previous occasions, at the very time of our being together, and though he had never actually searched the house while we were all in it (in fact it was not known to him), we were about as much put out by his being in the neighbourhood as we should have been by his arrival at the door.
So we passed the whole of that time in peace and quiet, but when we began dinner on the very feast of St. Luke, having finished all our business, something prompted me to say to them that up to that moment I had risked every danger, but that I could no longer guarantee their safety and that those who wished should leave after dinner. My premonition proved to be sound. Four of the nine left straight after dinner. Two secular priests arrived that very day, making us seven in all, and if those four had not left, there would have been eleven ‘merchants’ spending the night there, and that would have led to great confusion, as the sequel will show.
Some spent the whole night, almost till dawn, discussing certain serious matters. When morning arrived the whole house had been surrounded without our having the slightest inkling of it and all the roads were guarded as well. Our horses were being prepared for our departure and the servants were busy about many things, some getting breakfast, some cleaning our hose, some airing our cloaks and everything else that was wanted for a journey. (In Catholic houses all these things, when not needed, are put out of sight, so as not to give away their owners or betray the presence of a greater number of men than it is wise should be seen in public). For some inexplicable reason, a gate in the courtyard had been left open. There was a young layman who has since joined our ranks, who was just leaving the house, quite unconscious of any trouble brewing, when he suddenly spied a stranger. He slammed the door after him, took to his heels and hid in a nearby copse. Meanwhile, two Catholic servants, having discerned the situation, came running from the stable armed with farm implements and threatened to use them on the pursuivants unless they moved away from the door. These men (who are so brave if you show fear, but so craven if you stand up to them) dropped their menaces and resorted to requests. One of them asked the lady of the house to open the door and that then he would deal gently with her.
Only one or two had yet said Mass (though later on in the day they all did so) when the news spread through the house that the pursuivant was there. Doors were bolted, everyone warned, books collected, pictures, rosaries, chalices, vestments and all other signs of our religion were thrown into the culvert together with the men. The mistress of the house was stowed away in a separate hiding-place of her own, both to prevent her being torn from her children and carried off to prison, and also because she is rather timid and finds it difficult to cope with the threats and evil looks of the searchers. On this occasion, as often before when this same pursuivant paid us a visit, her younger sister (the aforementioned virgin) posed as the mistress of the house.
At length, everything was disposed of with such dispatch that not a sound could be heard through the whole house. Then the pursuiva
nt and a companion were admitted. He expostulated with the lady for keeping him waiting so long. She replied:
‘Do you think it right and proper that you should be admitted to a widow’s house before she or her servants or children are out of bed? Why this lack of good manners? Why come so early? Why keep coming to my house in this hostile manner? Have you ever found me unwilling to open the door to you as soon as you knocked?’
He turned to his companion and said:
‘It’s quite true. I’ve always had courtesy from this lady and you can take my word for it that she was not yet out of bed. But I want to know who that man was who fled from the house. I haven’t much doubt he was a priest and if you don’t hand him over, either we stay here or take you away with us.’
At this she was very frightened, supposing the fugitive to be somebody other than it really was, but regaining her composure she said:
‘Oh, he’s a relation of mine (and she glibly called him by a name that was unfamiliar in those parts), I’m starting on a journey with him today.’
She had to add this because they could see the food prepared in the kitchen and if they had entered the stables (which, however, God forbade), it would have been difficult to account for so many horses being saddled for the road.
Then they set about searching the house. Everything was turned upside down, everything was closely examined – storerooms, chests and even the very beds were carefully ransacked on the off chance of finding rosaries or pictures or books or agnus deis hidden in them.fn1
I’ve no idea with what patience ladies in Italy would put up with this. Here we have been sold into slavery and have become hardened to this sort of barbarity. But on top of all this is the endless altercation with these uncivil fellows. The virgin always conducts these arguments with such skill and discretion that she certainly counteracts their persistence and their interminable chatter. For though she has all a maiden’s modesty and even shyness, yet in God’s cause and in the protection of His servants, virgo becomes virago. I’ve often seen her so exhausted by the chronic weakness that she nearly always labours under, that she finds it painful to speak even two or three words, yet on the arrival of the pursuivant she suddenly rallies to such an extent that she has been known to spend as much as three or four hours arguing with him. If there is no priest in the house, she is full of apprehension, but the very presence of one so heartens her that she is convinced that the devil can have no power there.
She had every reason to feel secure from the devil during this particularly rigorous search. She says the pursuivants behaved just like a party of boys playing blind man’s bluff, who in their wild rush bang into the tables and chairs and walls and yet haven’t the slightest suspicion that their playfellows are right on top of them and almost touching them. So it was with the searchers. One of them, she says, was banging on the walls with furious energy, shifting sideboards and upsetting beds, and yet when his finger or foot touched the very place where some article was hidden, he was completely blind to the most obvious significance of what he had touched. One instance was quite miraculous: a pursuivant picked up a silver pyx for containing the Blessed Sacrament and put it down again at once as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Before the eyes of another lay a folded dalmatic of great value and yet though he unfolded everything else, he never even touched this. I should never finish this letter if I put down everything that happened in this and similar searches, all worthy of our admiration. All I will say is that the zeal and courage of Catholics is never more in evidence than at times like this.
The pursuivants soon grew tired of their fruitless search and were invited to breakfast. Then they wanted to interview that brother of ours who had fled. He was a priest and they couldn’t turn a blind eye to that. Having first extracted a promise that if he proved to be no priest, he would be suffered to have his liberty, she ordered him to be called in from the copse. He denied that he was a priest and his word was accepted, for at that date the heretics were certain that no priest could deny the fact without grave sin. Now we gather from the replies of your theologians that it is lawful to do so. Many accept this opinion at once, but there are some that are scrupulous because it is laid down in the canons of the apostles that a priest, who out of fear denies his priesthood, may be deposed. They are in doubt whether this new opinion is sanctioned by human law or is deduced from the divine.
After breakfast the whole house was thoroughly searched again, but when they saw they had no hope of success, they accepted a bribe for the lady herself, and for the man who fled, and they departed …
You can imagine our joy and mutual congratulations when we were brought out after their departure. There could be no lack of angel guardians in a house so angelic, and where so many holy women were consecrated to God. I had such confidence in their devotion and loyalty, which I had experienced over a period of many years, that I went to the hiding place with about as much apprehension as I should have felt in moving from one room to another at a time when there was nothing whatever to fear.1
fn1 The priests’ mattresses were still warm, but as Gerard recalled in his Autobiography (p. 42), ‘some of us went off and turned the beds and put the cold side up to delude anyone who put his hand in to feel them.’ He added that the pursuivants, or ‘leopards’ as he called them, ‘pried with candles into the darkest corners.’ It was October. The raid commenced at 5 a.m. and took four hours, so about half of it was conducted in near darkness.
13
Hurly Burly
‘We were all saved that day,’ John Gerard recalled – himself, Garnet, Southwell, Oldcorne, Stanney, ‘two secular priests and two or three laymen’ – all standing ankle-deep in water for four hours as the pursuivants ‘tore madly’ through the house above them. Anne did not give the signal to come out until the officials had gone some distance, ‘so that there was no danger of their turning back suddenly as they sometimes do’. Eventually ‘not one but several Daniels’ emerged, blinking from their den.1 There is no account of the raid from the pursuivants’ perspective. They would, no doubt, have had other words for Anne’s ‘discretion’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘courage’.
The strength of official feeling against the mission was made very clear the following month when a royal proclamation was issued from Richmond, lambasting all Jesuits and seminarians as ‘seedmen of treason’. These ‘fugitives, rebels and traitors’, it pronounced, had trained abroad ‘in school points of sedition’ and returned ‘by stealth’ to incite rebellion. Two years earlier, a Dominican monk had fatally stabbed his king, Henri III of France (on his close stool). Now, with the Spanish occupying French ports and again threatening the Channel, the Queen was determined, ‘by execution of laws and by all other politic ordinances’, to safeguard the realm. A general muster was ordered and subjects were enjoined to defend ‘their natural country, their wives, families, children, lands, goods, liberties and their posterities against ravening strangers, wilful destroyers of their native country and monstrous traitors’. Special commissioners were appointed in every shire, city and port town to investigate suspicious behaviour. Householders were charged to assist by making a ‘particular inquisition’ of all newcomers and, if necessary, handing them over for further interrogation. Only with ‘very diligent and continual search’ and ‘severe orders executed’ could the ‘secret infection of treasons in the bowels of our realm’ be prevented.2 Had the pursuivants in Warwickshire conducted a ‘very diligent and continual search’ at Anne and Eleanor’s house on the day the proclamation was written, 18 October 1591, instead of the following day, they might have captured every Jesuit active in the country and saved themselves some work.
It was time to ‘shift dwelling’. A seminarian turned informer called Snape had heard ‘for a truth’ that one of Lord Vaux’s daughters was in Warwickshire. He wasn’t sure which one, or the exact ‘situation or state of the house’, but it was said that priests did ‘lurk’ there.3 On 11 February 1592, Garnet informed Aquaviva that he was
living in London in order to give Southwell, who was currently based there, ‘time to breathe’.4 Southwell had just completed his defence of Catholic loyalism, An Humble Supplication to her Maiestie. As a response to the proclamation, it was a great deal more measured than the vicious output of the Continental presses,fn1 but Southwell’s description of the proclamation as ‘so full farced with contumelious terms as better suited a clamorous tongue than your Highness’s pen’ was never going to go down well. Nor were the vivid passages detailing the tortures being carried out in the Queen’s name, nor, indeed, the contention that the late Francis Walsingham had ‘plotted, furthered and finished’ the Babington Plot.5
The Humble Supplication was already circulating in manuscript when Garnet bemoaned, in his February dispatch, that ‘the latest storm we are being tossed by is the worst we have yet suffered in this ocean’. He warned that no further missionaries should be sent to England, ‘unless they are willing to run straight into the direst poverty and the most atrocious brigandage, so desperate has our state become and so close, unless God intervenes, to utter ruin’. The strains of leadership were telling. Four months earlier, Garnet had begged Aquaviva, in vain, for a chance to ‘hand over the torch to someone more expert than myself’ and to be allowed ‘to learn rather than teach, and to run, not by my own discretion, but under the guidance of others’. Now in the throes of what his Antwerp contact Richard Verstegan called ‘the new Cecillian Inquisition’, Garnet was close to despair: ‘More often than not,’ he scribbled, ‘there is simply nowhere left to hide.’6
In the spring of 1592, Anne Bellamy, the 29-year-old daughter of a notable recusant, Richard Bellamy of Uxenden, fell pregnant. She was unmarried and in prison. Her family, from whom she tried to conceal her condition, had ‘hoped that she should have been kept undefiled, being the queen’s prisoner’. They were sure that the man on whose estate she gave birth and whose crony she married was responsible. In an appeal to the Privy Council, Anne’s brother Thomas formally accused the sexagenarian pursuivant Richard Topcliffe.7
God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Page 24