God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

by Hogge, Alice

  On 4 December Cecil wrote to James’s Clerk of the Signet, Nicholas Faunt, voicing his frustration. It was, he said, logical to assume the plotters’ spiritual confessors knew of the conspiracy, ‘seeing all men that doubt resort to [a priest]…and all men use confession to obtain absolution’. But ‘most of these conspirators have wilfully forsworn that the priests knew anything in particular and obstinately refuse to be accusers of them, yea what torture ‘soever they be put to’. However, there had been a breakthrough: ‘you may tell his Majesty that if he please to read…what this day we have drawn from a voluntary and penitent examination, the point…shall be so well cleared…as he shall see all fall out to that end whereat his Majesty shoots’. The ‘penitent’ was Catesby’s servant, Thomas Bates.43

  Bates had been privy to the plot. Through Catesby he had been introduced to Father Oswald Tesimond, alias Greenway (Tesimond, like all his fellow priests in hiding, used a false name), and to Tesimond, he testified, he had revealed his troubled conscience. ‘And Greenway, the priest, thereto said that he would take no notice thereof; but that he, the said examinate, should be secret in that which his master had imparted unto him, because it was for a good cause.’44

  Behind the scenes the activity mounted. On 8 December William Waad reported back to Cecil that Tesimond had been a contemporary of Guy Fawkes and Jack Wright at the free school known as Le Horse Fayre, on the outskirts of York. Some time towards the end of the year a royal proclamation was drafted for the arrest of Gerard and Tesimond. Christmas and New Year came and went; in late December the Government received the bill for the ironwork, 23s. 6d., on which Catesby’s and Percy’s severed heads had been mounted; in January the first poems about the plot began to appear. On 13 January Thomas Bates was back in the interrogation room. Now he described bringing Catesby’s letter to Garnet on 6 November, its purpose, he said, ‘to crave [Garnet’s] advice what course they were to take in their proceedings’. He described the panicked conversation between Garnet and Tesimond, Garnet saying they were undone, Tesimond that ‘there was no tarrying’. He described Catesby’s request that Tesimond come to him and he described Tesimond’s answer, ‘that he would not forbear to go unto him, though it were to suffer a thousand deaths, but that it would overthrow the state of the whole society of the Jesuits’. He described taking Tesimond to Catesby at Huddington, where the pair talked for half an hour privately, before Tesimond rode away. Then came his final blow. By now the Government knew of Edward Baynham’s mission to Rome, though its understanding of his purpose there was rather different from Garnet’s; Guy Fawkes, for example, had testified that Baynham was in Rome to inform the Pope of the plot’s success, not ask his counsel—this Catesby had told him. Bates now added a further detail: according to him, Thomas Wintour had said that Baynham was in Rome, waiting only for Garnet’s letters before approaching the Pope with news of their triumph. Wintour himself would contradict this just a few days later, but it was too little, too late. On 15 January the Government decided it had enough information to proceed.45

  James’s proclamation reflected none of the uncertainties that existed. ‘[I]t is now made plain and evident by divers examinations of many of those prisoners that have been the principal conspirators in the barbarous practice…that these three Jesuits under named, John Gerard alias Brooke, Henry Garnet alias Walley alias Darcy alias Farmer, Tesimond alias Greenway, have all three peculiarly been practicers in the same.’ It exhorted his subjects to do their duty and assist in the Jesuits’ capture and it threatened any that concealed them. Then it attached a detailed description of each of the wanted men.46

  Oswald Tesimond learnt of the arrest warrant some forty-eight hours after its pronouncement and straight away headed for London. He travelled ‘by day, and through public streets’ and in ‘almost every parish he found the proclamation posted up in which he was described to the life’ (so he later wrote). ‘Of a reasonable stature,’ read the posters: ‘black hair, a brown beard cut close on the cheeks and left broad on the chin, somewhat long-visaged, lean on the face but of a good red complexion, his nose somewhat long and sharp at the end.’ In London he was recognized and arrested.47

  The arresting officer was unwilling to ask for help from anyone about him, so the two men set off unaccompanied. As they walked Tesimond ‘argued with [his captor], and urged him to be careful’ and so he ‘gradually led him away from the more frequented streets’. As soon as they were clear of the crowds Tesimond took to his heels and ran. He left England soon afterwards, hidden among a cargo of dead pigs bound for Calais. From there he made his way to St Omer, near Calais, then on to Rome. He died in 1635 aged seventy-two, leaving behind him an exculpatory, if patchy, account of the Gunpowder Plot and a series of unanswered questions.48

  The case against Tesimond is confused, not least by the fact that the Government, in combing through old intelligence reports, mistook him for another man called Greenway who was widely regarded as a Catholic agitator.* Catholic witnesses recorded Wintour’s attempt on the scaffold to clear Tesimond of guilt, a detail lacking from the Government-authorized account of his execution. John Gerard recorded a letter from Thomas Bates, hinting at the psychological pressure put on him by his examiners; Bates excused the evidence he had given, explaining, ‘I did it not out of malice but in hope to gain my life.’ But from Father Edward Oldcorne came a further revelation. According to Oldcorne, Tesimond had ridden straight from his 6 November meeting with Catesby to nearby Hindlip Hall, where Oldcorne was based, saying, “‘that he brought them the worst news that ever they heard,” and…“that they were all undone’”. He told them of Catesby’s plot, adding that ‘now they were gathered together some forty horse at Mr Wintour’s house…and told them, “their throats would be cut unless they presently went to join with them’”. When Oldcorne refused, ‘Tesimond said in some heat, “Thus we may see a difference between a [phlegmatic] and a choleric person!” and said that he would go to others…for the same purpose as he came to Hindlip’. There is no information about his activities from this moment until his appearance in London, just prior to his escape.49

  While Tesimond fled, John Gerard engaged in clearing his reputation. Almost immediately after the Harrowden search he had written an open letter addressed to a friend in which he had maintained his innocence. ‘I had many copies of the letter made’, he explained, ‘and had them scattered about the London streets in the early hours of the morning.’ With the publication of James’s proclamation he now took a more direct approach, writing three more letters—to Robert Cecil, to the Duke of Lennox, and to a third unidentified Councillor. Again he insisted upon his innocence: ‘I was not privy to that horrible Plot of destroying the King’s Majesty,’ he wrote, begging ‘that full trial…be made, whether I be guilty therein or not. And’, he added, ‘if so it be proved…then all shame and pain may light upon me’. He asked that the conspirators be questioned again before they were executed and he enclosed a letter to Sir Everard Digby, exhorting his friend to defend him ‘from a most unjust accusation’. ‘And if’, he repeated, ‘this protestation be not sincerely true, without any equivocation, and the words thereof so understood by me, as they sound to others, I neither desire nor expect any favour at God’s hand when I shall stand before His tribunal.’ It was astute of Gerard to mention equivocation: the subject was about to obsess the Government’s interrogation team. But it made little difference to the charges against him—the hunt continued.50

  In the months that followed Gerard was variously reported to have been arrested in Gloucester (masquerading under the name of Valentine Palmer), to be at liberty somewhere in England, to be at liberty somewhere in Italy, to have narrowly escaped from Lord Montague’s house and to have been taken in Warwickshire. All the while, he remained in London, living quietly. The pursuivants were never far away; on 17 April the Lord Mayor led a raid on a house he was using, just as mass was being said. Gerard was not there, but the officiating priest had time only to bundle himself and the alt
ar things into a hiding place before ‘an uproarious mob’ swept through the house. ‘It was so close’, wrote Gerard afterwards, ‘that the Mayor and men with him smelt the smoke of the snuffed out candles.’51

  From the moment Thomas Bates clattered into Coughton on 6 November, bringing Catesby’s letter, Henry Garnet’s trail goes cold. Nothing is known of his movements for the next few weeks, though it seems likely that he continued on at Coughton. Certainly this was where Father Edward Oldcorne wrote to him towards the end of November, hearing that Garnet was there and, as he put it, ‘in some distress’. And on 4 December Garnet travelled the 18 miles to Hindlip Hall, just to the northeast of Worcester, accompanied by Anne Vaux and Nicholas Owen.52

  Hindlip was a new house, begun in the 1570s by the owner Thomas Habington’s father. For sixteen years it had been Oldcorne’s headquarters; in this time he had made it, in John Gerard’s words, ‘like one of our houses in some foreign country—so many Catholics flocked there’. It was set on the highest ground in the neighbourhood with sweeping views in all directions and, with multiple hiding places cut deep into its masonry, it was regarded as one of ‘the safest [houses] that existed, not merely in the county but in the whole of England’—this from Oswald Tesimond’s description. A later description gave a clearer picture still: ‘There is scarcely an apartment that has not secret ways of going in or going out; some have back staircases concealed in the walls; others have places of retreat in their chimneys; some have trap-doors, and all present a picture of gloom, insecurity, and suspicion.’ The Habingtons, added Tesimond, ‘had had good experience of…many searches. [But] not once in all of them had [the pursuivants] ever been able to find a priest’. Garnet was now to test this to the limits.53

  For six weeks he remained quietly at Hindlip, living in a small chamber on the ground floor near to the dining room, attended by Nicholas Owen and joining the Habingtons at meal times. He used this period of calm to write an open letter to the Privy Council, in which, like John Gerard before him, he maintained his innocence. Unlike Gerard, whose letter bristled with indignation, Garnet applied measured reason to his task. He stressed his ‘obedience to his General and to the Pope, even in this particular case’, reminding the Council of the Vatican’s ‘express prohibition of all unquietness’, issued in response to Watson’s plot. The Pope, he said, would stand witness that he himself had secured this prohibition. He emphasized the recent lengths to which he had gone to secure a further ‘prohibition under censures of all violence towards his Majesty’—here was the reference to his letter to Aquaviva. He challenged the Council to inform him of the charges being made against him, so that he might defend himself; he acknowledged his part in furthering the Spanish peace; he spoke of the damage to ‘our whole Society…if we had been faulty’. And then, picking his words with deliberate care, he denied all knowledge of the plot: given the Pope’s earlier prohibition and the Jesuits’ own vow of ‘holy obedience’, it was, he wrote, ‘in no way probable…that the author of this conspiracy durst acquaint me or mine with their purposes’.54

  In early January, just a few miles to the north of Hindlip, the last remaining suspects in the plot were rounded up by the pursuivants, helped in their task by a drunken poacher and an overly observant cook. Bargaining for his life, one suspect, a minor player in these events, offered to part with the names and hideouts of ‘certain Jesuits and priests which’, he claimed, ‘had been persuaders of him and others to these actions’. The first name on his list was Oldcorne’s.55

  On Saturday, 18 January a neighbour arrived at Hindlip, warning Mrs Habington—Thomas Habington was away on business—that the house was to be searched. The following day, Sunday, he wrote her a note, saying the search was to be ‘one day in that week’ and he ‘prayed her to be careful’. Neither Garnet nor Oldcorne took this opportunity to leave, nor, it seemed, to prepare themselves for what was coming next. At daybreak on Monday, 20 January one hundred armed men surrounded the house, led by the local magistrate, Sir Henry Bromley.56

  Bromley’s instructions, from Robert Cecil’s secretary, were meticulous. First he headed to the dining room. ‘[I]n the east part of that parlour,’ read the instructions, ‘it is conceived there is some vault, which to discover you must take care to draw down the wainscot.’ The ‘lower parts of the house must be tried with a broach [rod], by putting the same into the ground some foot or two, to try whether there may be perceived some timbers, which if there be, there must be some vault underneath it. For the upper rooms, you must observe whether they be more in breadth than the lower rooms, and look in which places the rooms be enlarged…If the walls seem to be thick and covered with wainscot, being tried with a gimlet, if it strike not on the wall, but go through, some suspicion is to be had thereof’.57

  On Monday night Thomas Habington returned home, ‘hoping’, he wrote, that his presence there ‘would dissolve the search’. Bromley showed him a new warrant for Oldcorne’s arrest, signed by Cecil, and the January proclamation for Garnet’s arrest; Habington denied any knowledge of the priests. Bromley was unimpressed—‘I did never hear so impudent liars as I find here,’ he wrote to Cecil; ‘all resolved to confess nothing, what danger ‘soever they incur.’ The search continued. It took until Wednesday for the first of Hindlip’s hides to be uncovered, testimony to Nicholas Owen’s skill; they were found to be full of ‘Popish trash’, but no priests. Early on Thursday morning guards stationed in the house spotted two men stealing away from them down the Long Gallery. When challenged the men admitted that they were ‘no longer able…to conceal themselves: for they confessed that they had but one apple between them’, their only food in the last four days. They refused to give up their names and Bromley wrote hopefully to Cecil, ‘surely one of them, I trust, will prove Greenway [Tesimond], and I think the other be Hall [Oldcorne]’; in fact they were Nicholas Owen and Oldcorne’s servant, Ralph Ashley. Possibly theirs was a bold attempt at escape, possibly they hoped that in giving themselves up they would distract attention from Garnet and Oldcorne—an old ruse that had worked in the past. It did not work now. ‘I have yet presumption that there is one or two more in the house,’ wrote Bromley to Cecil, ‘wherefore I have resolved to continue the guard yet a day or two.’58

  The search now intensified and gradually, with bare force and wrecking tools, Hindlip was made to relinquish its secrets. In all eleven hides were broken open. Thomas Habington denied knowledge of each of them in turn ‘until at length the deeds of his lands being found in one of them’ he was forced to concede defeat. ‘[T]here were found two cunning and very artificial conveyances in the main brick wall,’ read the search report, ‘so ingeniously framed, and with such art, as it cost much labour ere they could be found…Three other secret places contrived by no less skill and industry, were likewise found in and about the chimneys.’ These last had ‘the entrances into them so curiously covered over with brick, mortared and made fast to planks of wood, and coloured black like the other parts of the chimney, that very diligent inquisition might well have passed by without throwing the least suspicion upon [them]’. Closely examined the chimneys were found to have funnels ‘to lend air and light downward’ into the hides below. On Monday, 27 January, in the morning, Garnet and Oldcorne were discovered.59

  They were taken to Worcester, where late on Wednesday night a newly arrested priest was able to give Bromley the information he needed. The January proclamation had been detailed. It described a man ‘of middling stature, full-faced, fat of body, of complexion fair, his forehead high on each side, with a little thin hair coming down upon the middest of the fore part of his head; the hair of his head and beard grizzled. Of age between fifty and threescore. His beard on his cheeks cut close, and his gait upright and comely for a feeble man’. Eight days in hiding had altered Garnet beyond recognition, but now Anthony Sherlock—an Appellant priest, a man whom Garnet had cared for upon his return to England, securing him a safe chaplaincy at Stonor—confirmed Garnet’s identity. Bromley had got his
man. The following day, Thursday, 30 January, he wrote to Cecil with the good news.60

  Much had happened in London between Monday, 27 and Thursday, 30 January. On the twenty-seventh the eight surviving plotters, Thomas and Robert Wintour, Sir Everard Digby, Ambrose Rookwood, Guy Fawkes, John Grant, Thomas Bates, and Robert Keyes, were brought to Westminster Hall for trial. Robert Cecil, in his instructions to the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, spelt out the minefield that was the prosecution’s opening speech. Coke must be sure to mention the Spanish Treason, but without upsetting the Spanish. Neither must he upset James: ‘some men there are’, wrote Cecil, ‘that will give out, and do, that only despair of the King’s courses on the Catholics and his severity’ had driven the plotters on. Coke must make it ‘appear’ that their treason was set in motion ‘before his Majesty’s face was ever seen, or that he had done anything in government’. So the plotters’ arraignment became, in effect, an arraignment of the absent Jesuits: ‘the said Henry Garnet, Oswald Tesimond, John Gerard and other Jesuits did maliciously, falsely and traitorously move and persuade’ the plotters ‘that it was lawful and meritorious to kill’ the King. The Jesuits had conceived the plan to blow up Parliament, the Jesuits had helped the plotters hire a cellar, the Jesuits had provided Guy Fawkes with the very ‘touchwood and match, therewith traitorously to give fire’ to the gunpowder.61

  On 30 January, as Henry Bromley wrote to Cecil informing him of Garnet’s capture, the first four conspirators were executed outside St Paul’s Cathedral; the remaining four were killed the following morning outside Westminster. All eight died as Catholics and Catholic witnesses to their deaths reported that Thomas Wintour, Guy Fawkes, and Everard Digby had each acquitted the Jesuits of any guilt in their conspiracy. A few days later Henry Garnet was called to London for examination.62