God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
Page 42
The questions and comments about Garnet’s response to Tesimond’s confession came in waves. Robert Cecil asked why Garnet had not informed Claudio Aquaviva of the plot. The Earl of Northampton wondered why Garnet was unable to mention the confession before his arrest, but was able to discuss it now. Cecil returned to his notes to enquire about the process of confession, contrition, and absolution, to convince the court that Tesimond’s confession was invalid and therefore needed ‘no secrecy’. Then he switched tack, asking why Garnet had never thought to disclose the plot using the general knowledge of it he had received from Catesby; he also asked why Garnet had refused to listen every time Catesby had offered to tell him about the plot.
There was no lawyer to speak for Garnet: he stood in the dock alone, without notes and without access to the various examinations read out as evidence against him.* His word had been discredited by the prosecution’s repeated attacks on equivocation. His defence—that ‘he was bound to keep the secrets of Confession’—was a Catholic defence in a Protestant court, a court thoughtfully reminded all day of the Pope’s alleged power to depose princes (a subject guaranteed to provoke waves of anti-Catholic sentiment). Moreover, in the crucible of public opinion he had already been tested and found wanting. His confession, reported John Gerard, had been ‘censured by many; and even by some of his friends and well-wishers esteemed a weakness in him’. His ‘partisans’ in the Low Countries were claiming he had only cracked ‘after having suffered great torments…but he would retract the same at his arraignment’. London’s gossips had sharpened their pens on him (‘He has been very indulgent to himself,’ noted the inveterate letter writer John Chamberlain, ‘…and daily drunk sack so liberally as if he meant to drown sorrow’). And from the heart of Government Robert Cecil had begun a carefully targeted smear campaign (on 19 March he had written to Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador to Venice, announcing that Garnet had confessed the plot ‘justifiable by divinity’). Witnesses sympathetic to Garnet reported a bear-pit-like atmosphere to the proceedings: ‘he was often of set purpose interrupted’; ‘great laughter’ greeted his defence of the seal of confession; suggestive comments were made about his friendship with Anne Vaux; he was ‘clean wearied out with so long standing at the bar’. Official reporters painted a different picture: ‘[he] made no great answer’; ‘[he] faintly answered’; ‘[he] denied to answer’; ‘[he] began to use some speeches [not recorded] that he was not consenting to the Powder-Treason’, but could give no proofs.79
He did his best. He invoked the common law principle that no man should be forced to incriminate himself, to justify his use of equivocation. He insisted that, to him, Tesimond’s confession was valid and that therefore he was bound to secrecy. He explained that he had been given permission to break the seal of confession if ever the plot were discovered. He laid out his obligation under canon law to ‘labour to divert’ the plot, which, he said, he had tried to do. He described again Catesby’s many promises to him and, again, how he had been ‘loath’ to hear more about the plot from him. But these answers were of interest only in human terms, not in the superhuman contest between good and evil being fought about him by his defenders and detractors. And his most human moment of all, when the tension of the last months’ conflict of loyalties burst from him ‘passionately’ (in the wording of the official court reporter), went unrecorded by his Catholic sympathizers: ‘I would to God’, he exclaimed, ‘I had never known of the Powder-Treason.’
It took the jury only fifteen minutes to reach their verdict of guilty as charged. London’s correspondents agreed. The letter writer John Chamberlain (though not present at the trial) thought it satisfactorily proven that Garnet ‘had had his finger in every treason’ since his return to England. The Venetian ambassador (who was present) railed against equivocation, concluding that Garnet had ‘caused great outcry against the Roman religion’; he too believed Garnet guilty. Yet the Government hesitated. Indeed, for the next month it was as though Garnet had never been tried at all as his interrogators pushed for a greater admission of his crimes. Trickery was its chosen weapon: at the beginning of April Garnet was told that Tesimond had been captured—and had testified to telling him of the plot out of confession. There followed a series of agonized letters from Garnet. His defenders have questioned the authenticity of some of them, but all contain material similarities. Again and again he repeated himself: ‘that knowledge I had by [Tesimond] I took it as in confession’. Again and again he wrote of his abhorrence of the plot: ‘[it was] altogether unlawful and most horrible’; ‘I never allowed it [and] I sought to hinder it more than men can imagine, as the pope will tell.’ To Anne Vaux (this letter is extant and uncontested) he explained how the conspirators ‘used my name freely’ to win support for their cause, a comment repeated in the letter to his Jesuit brethren (extant, but contested). Then came the Government’s breakthrough. Its beginnings can be traced in his letter to Tesimond (extant, uncontested): ‘I wrote yesterday…[to testify] that indeed I might have revealed a general knowledge had of Mr Catesby out of confession’. Its progress can be traced through his letter to the Council (not extant, contested): ‘I acknowledge that I was bound to reveal all knowledge that I had of this plot…out of sacrament of confession.’ Finally, in the letters to Tesimond, the Council and the Jesuits, came Garnet’s explanation for his silence: it ‘proceeded from hope of prevention by the Pope’, he wrote, and ‘for that I would not betray my friend’.80
‘Greater love hath no man than this,’ Christ had said near death, ‘that [he] lay down his life for his friends.’ Catesby had been Garnet’s friend, his provider, his companion in that secret, underground, and alienated society that was English Catholicism. For Catesby Henry Garnet had laid down life and reputation—and not just his own reputation, but that of everything he held most dear. In those last anguished weeks as he, himself, neared death, it seemed the doubts about his actions crowded in upon him—worse than any torture he might have suffered at the Government’s hands.81
On Wednesday, 30 April carpenters began constructing a scaffold in the churchyard outside St Paul’s Cathedral. It was higher than usual so that the expected crowds might have a good view, and around it jostled several spectator stands. On Saturday, 3 May these stands were full of people come to see a Jesuit die. Back in February the Venetian ambassador had been confident Garnet would ‘not be executed in public’: ‘he is a man of moving eloquence…and they are afraid [of] his constancy and the power of his speech’, he explained. Now he took his allotted place among the onlookers, content to see a ‘partner in that villainy…being extinguished’.82
Garnet was drawn on a hurdle the short distance from the Tower, ‘his hands together…his eyes shut’. At St Paul’s he opened his eyes to look around. ‘All [the] windows were full,’ it was reported, ‘yea, the tops of houses full of people.’ Eighteen years earlier he, himself, had stood discreetly among a similar crowd at St Paul’s watching Queen Elizabeth celebrate the Armada’s defeat; now he and his Jesuits had been denounced as ‘purveyors and forerunners’ of that Armada and he was the one being watched. Watched and harangued, for even at this hour of his death there was to be no let up. The deans of St Paul’s and Winchester pressed him to acknowledge the errors of his Catholic faith and recant; the Recorder of London, Sir Henry Montague, representing the King, pressed him to confess his treason and acknowledge himself ‘justly condemned’. Witnesses to the scene, both Protestant and partisan, reported ‘that his voice was low’, his strength gone, but, just as before, both parties disagreed on the content of his replies. The Venetian ambassador described ‘the fury of the mob’ at his mention of the word ‘pope’; sympathizers observed that the crowd was ‘much moved…by his protestations of innocence’. ‘It is looked he will equivocate at the gallows’, one correspondent had written gleefully the day before (and sure enough the old charge of lying was levelled against him), ‘but he will be hanged without equivocation.’83
He had seen so many men die—s
tanding as near to the scaffold as he might to whisper the last rites over them. ‘Should it come to pass that we have to suffer for His sake and attain high honour in this way,’ he had written to Aquaviva, ‘…we hope God will turn everything to our greater good, making us more like Him whom it must be our aim to resemble.’ But to Robert Persons he had mentioned the gnawing doubt that he was ‘unfit for the combat’. The official records of his execution described his palpable ‘fear of death’; Catholic records described his ‘undaunted countenance’. But in the end Henry Garnet died as he had lived, as an English Catholic, praying for his King, country and God, no matter the conflict existing between them. And on that everyone could agree.84
He hung for fifteen minutes, the same time it had taken the jury to convict him. Government witnesses reported that he was not cut down until he was dead, on James’s orders; Catholics reported a somewhat different scene: the crowd, they said, had surged forward, pulling him by the legs, ‘to put him out of his pain, and that he might not be cut down alive’. And the Spanish ambassador recalled, ‘When they cut out his heart, which they show to the people with the head, where it is the custom for everyone to shout loudly “God save the King”, there was not a sound to be heard.’ His ‘limbs were divided into four parts, and placed together with the head in a basket, in order that they might be exhibited according to law in some conspicuous place, [and] the crowd began to disperse’. In time his head was set upon London Bridge. His clothes were taken by the Spanish ambassador as a relic. Later in the year his belongings were disposed of by Thomas Wilson, Cecil’s secretary, who rode out to White Webbs to see ‘the chief things conveyed away’; ‘the remnant of small value’, he reported, ‘was quickly bought up by the neighbours’. Wilson then continued on to Hertfordshire to holiday with his brother, closing his uncommonly chatty letter to Cecil with the pious observation that White Webbs was ‘next neighbour to Theobalds [Cecil’s country house], and unfit it should be again a nest for such bad birds as it was before’.85
The same day that Garnet was executed John Gerard left England for the Continent and safety. It was, he explained, ‘a time for lying quiet, not for working’. He placed his friends in the care of his Jesuit brothers, tidied his affairs—by now the chief burden on his conscience, Elizabeth Vaux, was released from custody—and, with typical aplomb, arranged passage out of England in the company of the Spanish envoy sent to congratulate James on his narrow escape from the Gunpowder Plot. The plan almost failed, as he recalled afterwards: ‘When I arrived by arrangement at the port from which I was to pass out of England with certain high officials, they took fright and said they could not stand by their promise.’ Then ‘suddenly they changed their mind. The ambassador came personally to fetch me and helped me himself to dress in the livery of his attendants so that I could pass for one of them and escape’. Of this change of mind, Gerard wrote, ‘I have no doubt that I owed it to Father Garnet’s prayers.’86
From England Gerard went to the Jesuit school at St Omer, where for a time he remained, too ill to travel. It was not until high summer that he was able to leave for Rome and a long awaited meeting with the man who had sent him to England all those years before, Claudio Aquaviva. He never returned home again. His exile took him from the Italianate splendour of St Peter’s Basilica, burial place of the popes (where for three years he served as a Penitentiary), to the Low Countries (to train Jesuit novices for the English mission), to Spain, and then back again to Rome (as Confessor to the English College), worlds far removed from the hunting and hawking fields of his native Lancashire.* Some time in the spring of 1609 he was ordered by his Superiors to write a private account of his time on the mission, probably to inspire the novices in his charge; he was also asked to write a second, public account, dealing specifically with the Gunpowder Plot and his part in those calamitous events. He died in Rome on 27 July 1637, a few months short of his seventy-third birthday.87
One question remains. Throughout his Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot Gerard insisted, under oath, that he was not the priest who had said mass for the plotters at the house off London’s Strand. In his Autobiography he expanded upon this, writing of the house: ‘I might have stayed there without the slightest risk or suspicion for a very long time, had it not been for some friends who made very indiscreet use of [it] while I was out of London.’ Perhaps this was equivocation, but it would have been to little purpose: both Guy Fawkes and Thomas Wintour, the two plotters who named him as the officiating priest, had sworn he knew nothing of their plans, so Gerard was in no danger of incriminating himself. Perhaps Fawkes and Wintour were mistaken in their identification: it is not clear either of them had ever met Gerard (both had spent many years serving as soldiers overseas); also, two other priests are known to have used the house as a base. Was it that Catesby had instructed them to meet at ‘Gerard’s house’ and that therefore they simply assumed the priest in front of them was Gerard? Was Gerard condemned on assumption alone?88
If there can be no satisfactory conclusion to Gerard’s story, no definitive proof of his involvement in, or innocence of, the Gunpowder Plot, then there exists one last document in the case to cast doubt upon everything else that might be thought definitive: upon every comment made by every Government eyewitness, upon every signature on every examination, upon every supposed handwritten statement of fact.
Towards the end of 1606 a man called Arthur Gregory wrote to Robert Cecil, telling a sad tale of poverty and desperation. He took the opportunity to remind Cecil of his past employment for ‘King and Country’. It was not the only letter of this sort Cecil received that year: the informant George Southwicke, who had spent most of February searching for John Gerard in East Anglia, would also write in, complaining of similar poverty and begging some form of recompense for his efforts.* Such was the habitual lot of the disaffected drifters used by the Government as intelligencers. But Gregory’s letter was somewhat different from the norm. Instead of regaling Cecil with all the lurid information he might provide the State at some future date (if only his debts were paid and his release from prison secured), Gregory wrote of the services he had already provided, ‘the secret services…[that] none but myself has done before’. One of these services was ‘discovering the secret writing being in blank, to abuse a most cunning villain in his own subtlety, [and] leaving the same in blank again. Wherein, though there be difficulty, their answers show they have no suspicion’. If this ‘secret writing’ was Garnet’s, contained in his many orange juice letters from the Tower (and these are the only ‘blank’ letters recorded leaving the Tower at this time), then Gregory’s next ‘service’ becomes even more suggestive: it was, he reminded Cecil, ‘to write in another man’s hand’. And as an example of his skills at forgery he appended a postscript. ‘Mr Lieutenant [Waad]’, wrote Gregory, ‘expects something to be written in the blank leaf of a Latin Bible which is pasted in already for the purpose. I will attend to it and whatsoever else comes.’ A Latin Bible was a Catholic Bible. What Waad meant to do with his doctored copy is not known.89
* * *
* On 8 February 1601 Essex attempted to lead a band of about two hundred swordsmen through the City of London to overthrow his enemies on Elizabeth’s Council, chiefly Sir Robert Cecil. Among his followers were several young Catholics, hoping to secure religious freedom for themselves. The coup was a failure.
* This St Clement’s Lane house was one of a series of London houses used by Gerard since his time in prison. ‘It was a convenient and very suitable place,’ he wrote, ‘with private entrances front and back, and I had some very good hiding-places constructed in it.’ Of London’s fashionable Strand he wrote, ‘Most of my friends lived in that street, and I could visit them more easily, and they me.’
* Anne Vaux would later give an example of one of these sermons. ‘She remembereth he would use these words, “Good gentlemen, be quiet, God will do all for the best, we must get it by prayer at God’s hands, in whose hands are the hearts of Princes.”’
* This was popular slang for a miraculous or unlikely event. The Duke of Norfolk used the phrase in 1536 after the execution of his niece, Anne Boleyn, writing to Thomas Cromwell: ‘A bruit doth run that I should be in the Tower of London. When I shall deserve to be there Tottenham shall turn French.’