by Hogge, Alice
Campion, Briant et al. had been justified, perhaps, in treating the question as entirely hypothetical. After all, at the beginning of the 1580s England was not yet at war. Furthermore, if centuries’ worth of theologians had failed to reach any agreement on the matter, who were they to venture an answer now? But as the Spanish Armada set sail, weighed down by the Pope’s blessing and Philip II’s dynastic ambitions, for both England’s Government and England’s Catholics the Bloody Question acquired sharp new teeth. The concern for the Government was whether it could trust English Catholics not to support the invasion; for English Catholics it was whether, should those invasion forces land and order them to fight, they would be fighting—and dying—for God or a foreigner. The one was acceptable, the other markedly less so for most Englishmen.
In the event, England’s Catholics were never forced to make their choice, but some time in the spring or summer of that year the Privy Council approached the Crown’s lawyers with what seems to have been a highly controversial request. The request built upon a suggestion to Elizabeth made by Sir William Cecil in 1583, in a paper entitled Advice to Queen Elizabeth, in Matters of Religion and State. This suggestion, part of a general summary of the Catholic position at the time, was characteristically pragmatic. Instead of asking Catholics to take the Oath of Supremacy (which might be accounted a religious oath), wrote Cecil, they should be asked the Bloody Question. Those who swore that they would not take up arms against the Pope could then immediately, and confidently, be accounted traitors—and no one could accuse the Government of religious persecution. Interestingly, Cecil, himself, was convinced that most Catholics, however devout, would chose country over conscience at this point. The question remained, though, what to do with those Catholics, like Campion, Filby or Ford, who refused to answer, or who fudged the issue. Could their silence, or fudging, be taken as an indication of their guilt? This appears to have been the proposition put to the Crown’s lawyers. And while the Crown’s lawyers met to consider the case, Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell seem to have called an emergency meeting of their own to decide how best to respond to this latest threat to their co-religionists.23
Whether or not the Jesuits consulted a team of Catholic lawyers is unclear, but their agreed new position, as Southwell explained it in his letter to Claudio Aquaviva that summer, was eminently legalistic. Since ‘it was not a question of faith’, explained South-well, ‘…it was thought more prudent to use language that was truthful and yet would not irritate the magistrates’. Priests should therefore swear ‘that as priests it was unlawful for them to bear arms’. Furthermore, they should declare that they were praying to God for Him ‘to favour the side on which His cause and that of justice stood’: so God could choose who to fight for, Elizabeth or the Pope. Laymen were advised to ask for the chance ‘to prove their loyalty to sovereign and country by defending both against…unjust aggression’, neatly concealing, behind a flurry of promised activity, the fact that some might actually view a papal invasion as just aggression.24
It was the best counsel the Jesuits could give under the circumstances, but it was the Crown’s lawyers who saved the day for the mission. When their answer came back on 20 July it marked a conclusive victory for the forces of justice over the forces of fear. No, the Government could not take silence as a statement of guilt. Nor were those Catholics guilty who declared themselves ‘unlearned and ignorant and so not able to answer’, nor those who pointed out the illegality of being questioned on what they might do at some time in an unspecified future. Certainly those who answered in this fashion were ‘dangerous persons’, but ‘unless some other action drawing them in danger of the law may be proved against them’, they were not traitors and could not be proceeded against as such. With this polite but firm admonishment to the Government for attempting to enshrine thought-crime in the statute books—and removing the right to silence into the bargain—the Crown’s lawyers rendered Cecil’s Bloody Question legally toothless. Morally, though, it still retained its bite.25
John Gerard had now to come up with an answer that would protect him from accusations of disloyalty to the State, while not compromising his loyalty to the Pope as head of the Church. Nor must he provide the kind of definitive judgement on the matter that might be used against other Catholics in the future. All this, while retaining his attitude of studied insolence in the face of Richard Topcliffe’s bullying. Gerard, himself, was clear about the difficulties: Topcliffe ‘had so framed his question’, he wrote, ‘that whatever I answered I would be sure to suffer for it, either in body or in soul’. His answer was a considered one: ‘I am a loyal Catholic and I am a loyal subject of the Queen. If this were to happen, and I do not think it likely, I would behave as a loyal Catholic and as a loyal subject.’ It was a brilliant attempt to square the unsquarable, to assert that English Catholics were bound by a dual loyalty to Rome and Elizabeth, and to redefine that loyalty in terms of individual conscience rather than blind, objective allegiance, but it utterly failed to address the issue at stake. For Rome had ruled that loyal English Catholics could not be loyal Elizabethan subjects, not while Elizabeth remained under sentence of deposition. It was hardly surprising that Topcliffe should regard this as casuistry at work, slippery and not to be trusted. Gerard was returned to his cell while his accusers returned to pondering his immediate fate.26
On 13 April 1597 the Privy Council drafted the following letter.
You shall understand that one Gerard, a Jesuit, by her Majesty’s commandment is of late committed to the Tower of London for that it hath been discovered to her Majesty he very lately did receive a packet of letters out of the Low Countries which are supposed to come out of Spain, being noted to be a great intelligencer and to hold correspondence with Persons the Jesuit and other traitors, beyond the seas. These shall be therefore to require you to examine him strictly upon such interrogatories as shall be fit to be ministered unto him and he ought to answer to manifest the truth in that behalf and other things that may concern her Majesty and the State, wherein if you shall find him obstinate, undutiful or unwilling to declare and reveal the truth as he ought to do by his duty and allegiance, you shall by virtue hereof cause him to be put to the manacles and such other torture as is used in that place, that he may be forced to utter directly and truly his uttermost knowledge in all these things that may any way concern her Majesty and the State and are meet to be known.
After almost three years of an extraordinarily liberal captivity the situation for John Gerard had just taken a sharp turn for the worse.
The chief question raised by this letter is, if Gerard were such a ‘great intelligencer’—i.e. an intriguer—why was he permitted to remain in the Clink for so long, under so little supervision and without any form of action being attempted against him? To put his captivity into perspective, he was arrested on 23 April 1594 and transferred to the Tower of London on 12 April 1597, during which time he was subjected to an unspecified number of examinations, none of which appears officially to have been recorded. Over the same period a total of thirteen other Catholics were executed, of whom nine were priests; of those nine, the two with most bearing on Gerard’s condition were Robert Southwell and Henry Walpole, both executed in 1595, on 21 February and 7 April respectively.
Southwell, too, had experienced an unaccountable delay (between arrest and trial), but he had spent his incarceration in the Tower, in strict solitary confinement, whereas Gerard was lodged in an openly Catholic prison known for its comparative laxity. Walpole, on the other hand, had been fast-tracked from York, to the Tower and then back again to York for execution, a victim of circumstances beyond his control. His case makes for a strange and tortuously convoluted hunt through the State Papers, but it is worth outlining the salient facts in order to indicate how the Government’s mind was working against the Jesuits in 1594.
In the December of Walpole’s return to England—1593—an adventurer named William Polwhele voluntarily confessed—on the grounds of an over-burdene
d conscience—to a plot to murder the Queen. He, Polwhele, was to be the assassin and he suggested the Council investigate a man named John Annias to discover more.28
Annias, under questioning, provided two further names: those of Patrick Cullen and John Daniel, both Irishmen.29
Cullen, in turn, pointed the finger at Father William Holt, an English Jesuit connected with the Scottish Court back in its pro-Catholic/pro-France days of the early 158os and now known to be living on the Continent, consorting with Catholic exiles, in particular the northern rebels. Holt, said Cullen, was the man behind the plot, but actually he, Cullen, was to be the assassin.30
Daniel, when it came to him, pointed the finger wider still. The first name he mentioned was that of Hugh Cahill, yet another Irishman (and yet another who voluntarily admitted to being the assassin-designate). Daniel—supported by Cahill—said that those behind the plot were Holt, Hugh Owen and Sir William Stanley.31
Owen was an English Catholic, living in Flanders and widely regarded as one of the leaders of the discontented exiles. Stanley was a former officer in Elizabeth’s Army who, sent to the Netherlands to fight against the Spanish, had surrendered to Spain first the besieged town of Deventer and then his entire regiment; now he fought alongside Philip’s Catholic forces, stamping out heresy. Holt, Owen and Stanley and a plethora of Irishmen: three names, and an entire nation, long suspected by the English Government as a source of Catholic unrest.* On 17 February 1594, as the confessions flowed, the Council appointed officers to every English port to search, interrogate and, if need be, detain anyone entering the country.32
But it was the very last name Daniel and Cahill mentioned that is of interest here. As he waited in Calais to board a boat for England, said Cahill, he was met by a short, tanned, well-set man, ‘with black hair, very like a Spaniard, about 33 or 34 years old’. The man’s name was Henry Walpole. He was accompanied by a Jesuit named Archer (who specifically urged Cahill on in his assassination attempt). Both Archer and Walpole advised Cahill to travel in secret, a statement confirmed by Daniel. If true, this was sound advice from Walpole to any Catholic Irishman wishing to enter Protestant England, but the implication was clear: Walpole was aware of Cahill’s mission and was therefore a potential accessory to murder.33
In the event Walpole appears to have satisfied his interrogators that he was entirely innocent of conspiring the Queen’s death: witnesses to his trial make no mention of any assassination plot. Under examination he admitted meeting both Cahill and Cullen in Calais, but since all three of them were engaged in the same search for transport across the Channel this was not in itself suspicious. He also admitted that he had heard rumours of a planned assassination attempt while still in Valladolid and that, in hindsight, he now wished ‘he had taken more intelligence thereof, but withdrew for fear of entangling himself’. He believed that ‘if any member of his society had been known to deal in such a horrible enterprise, the General [Aquaviva] would cast him out’. It was not enough to save his life, but it was enough to clear his name of misprision of murder.34
But the Jesuits as a whole remained severely tarnished by these accusations. In their absence, Holt and the unknown Archer were considered guilty as charged. This purportedly Catholic-led, Irish-backed mishmash of a plot, for which Patrick Cullen would eventually hang, might have seemed farcical in so many of its details, but it confirmed the government’s suspicion that the Society was growing ever more inimical to English interests.* For if, as had been claimed, its members were prepared to promote Elizabeth’s assassination in order to save English Catholicism, then the Bloody Question had just been provided with an equally, and unequivocally, bloody answer. So why then was John Gerard, a known Jesuit, allowed to remain so long unpunished?35
One cannot escape the conclusion that this was a regime that still actively did not want to kill. Campion and Southwell had both had distinct and inspirational voices that had needed silencing, and quickly. Walpole, however unwittingly, had been linked to the Cullen conspiracy. But William Weston was now entering his tenth year of captivity, despite being the one-time head of the mission. And, significantly, since Southwell’s death, not a single Catholic had been executed in London. If this was a reaction to the outcry at his execution, then one legacy of those Tyburn scenes seems to have been to make the Government loth to proceed indiscriminately against Gerard now. So although Richard Topcliffe might write to Robert Cecil that the Jesuit was ‘very desperate and dangerous’, clearly, in the absence of any pressing reason to proceed against Gerard, the Council was prepared to play a waiting game.* Meanwhile, they kept him in prison and under surveillance.36
Clues about how long Gerard was watched in the Clink, and by which of his fellow prisoners, are few. The only fact that is clear is that the informer was a Catholic missionary, for on 2 October 1596 the Secretary to the Privy Council, Sir William Waad, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, revealing the latest information to come from his ‘priest in the Clink’. The priest had told Waad ‘of a very tall handsome man…come from beyond the seas, apparelled all in black, a black satin doublet, velvet gascons, a long cloak with buttons. He was thrice in one week at the Clink, but being warned by Garnet, cometh no more’. Clearly Waad meant Gerard here, rather than Garnet, because in his next sentence he advised removing Garnet to a more secure prison (impossible with Garnet still at liberty) on the grounds that ‘he giveth advertisement [information] beyond the seas’. But this confusion aside, both Waad and Robert Cecil were now aware that their prisoner was receiving visitors and communiqués from the Continent. It took until spring the following year, some six and a half months later, for the Government to act on the knowledge.37
Now Gerard takes up the story. For some time he had known that a fellow priest in the Clink ‘was a little unsteady and seemed rather too anxious to be free again’. Gerard had therefore been ‘careful not to confide in him’.† However, at the beginning of April 1597 this unsteady missionary (who evidently had not yet been set free) went to the authorities to inform against Gerard. ‘He said he had been standing next to me’, recorded Gerard, ‘when I handed a packet of letters from Rome and Brussels to Father Garnet’s servant “Little John” [Nicholas Owen]…and that I was in the habit of receiving letters from priests abroad addressed both to me and my Superior’. Gerard, himself, neither confirms nor denies these accusations, but given his other activities in the Clink it seems highly likely he had taken on the role of sorting-office for the mission, and highly unlikely he had done so in front of a man he mistrusted. Nonetheless, the accusation provided sufficient excuse for the Government to turn against him. On the night of 11 April 1597 John Gerard was unceremoniously removed to the Tower of London.38
He was taken to a ‘tall tower, three storeys high with lock-ups in each storey’. This was the Salt Tower, standing at the south eastern corner of the Inner Ward, the first circle of the palace’s defensive battlements. He was assigned a room one floor up. Next morning he was able to examine this new cell. One window had been blocked up, reducing what light there was to a trickle, but on either side of its stone surrounds Gerard could make out the names, in chalk, of all the orders of the angels. Above the window were the names of the cherubim and seraphim, above them the names of Mary and Jesus and, at the very top, God’s name, written in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Close by, chiselled into the wall, was the name of the author of this private oratory: Henry Walpole.39
Gerard remained in this cell just a single day, drawing comfort from ‘a place sanctified by this great and holy martyr’. The following day he was moved upstairs to the second floor, to another cell which was ‘large and, by prison standards, fairly comfortable’.* His warder now offered to fetch him a bed, if his friends could provide him with one, and Gerard directed him to the Clink, from where he returned shortly, with a mattress, a coat and fresh linen, and the promise of a retainer from the Clink Catholics if he treated Gerard well.40
Next day Gerard was led out for interrogation. Waiting for him were Si
r Richard Berkeley, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney General, Sir Thomas Fleming, the Solicitor-General, Sir Francis Bacon, then still at the start of his legal career, and Sir William Waad, representing the Privy Council. The examination began. And this time there is an official transcript.
The first question was whether or not Gerard had received any letters from beyond the seas. He admitted he had. Now his inquisitors began firing questions at him: whose letters were they, where were they going to, who had delivered them, what did they contain? Only once did Gerard seem rattled, confessing at first that he had burnt the letters, before admitting that, in truth, he had forwarded them on. But for the rest of the session he refused to name the senders, conveyors, or intended recipients of the letters. As to their contents, he had only read two or three of them and they had dealt solely with matters concerning the maintenance of scholars overseas; these he had sent on to parties more concerned than himself with financial affairs. Again and again, his examiners were forced to report that ‘he refuseth to disclose’ names. Towards the end of the examination Gerard was permitted to set down the reasons for this obstinacy. The writing is small and neat, each letter printed separately, very different from the extravagantly cursive secretary script surrounding it. ‘I refuse not for any disloyal mind I protest as I look to be saved, but for that I take these things not to have concerned any matter of state with which I would not have dealt, nor any other but matters of devotion as before.’ Questioned about why he had written the above in a feigned hand, he replied ‘that he would bring no man to trouble and for that he will not acknowledge his own hand’. Two matters remained. First, why had he recently attempted to escape from prison (a fact of which Gerard, himself, makes no previous mention)? He had done so in order to have the ‘more opportunity to save more souls’. Last, and with the only name they had at their disposal, his interrogators asked him about Henry Garnet. Were the letters for Garnet? Where was Garnet? Gerard refused to answer. Now his examiners produced the Privy Council’s torture warrant. ‘I do not think’, Robert Persons had written confidently, and incorrectly, in 1584, ‘that they will be so ready again to torture the priests they seize; so that those of us who are now sent will run much less danger of suffering than those who went before.’ He continued: ‘This is a great point, because truly to be hanged is child’s play in comparison with being tortured.’41