God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  Having taken an oath of secrecy and then, in a separate room, heard Mass and received communion, Percy and the others came to discover Catesby’s ‘sure way’. Wright and Wintour already knew the bare bones, having been entrusted with the secret earlier in the year. It was quite simple: they would ‘blow up the Parliament house with gunpowder’, for ‘in that place have they done us all the mischief and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment’. Wintour had been hesitant, but Catesby had persuaded him that ‘the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy’. The priest who administered the Mass at that May meeting in the Strand was Eliza Vaux’s chaplain, John Gerard, S.J. He had, apparently, not been privy to the earlier conversation in the other room.6

  Thus was the Gunpowder Plot hatched and reared. It evolved over time and adapted to circumstance. Percy had originally subleased a building next to the House of Lords from Henry Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton (the Warwickshire manor that Anne and Eleanor may have used as a safe house). They had planned to drive a shaft through the foundations, but when the lease for a ground-floor vault directly beneath the House of Lords came up, it seemed like divine providence. The gunpowder was initially stored at Catesby’s lodging in Lambeth – a sixth man, Robert Keyes, was recruited to guard it – but it was subsequently ferried over to Westminster in order ‘to have all our danger in one place’.

  It was only confirmed in the autumn of 1604 that King James would be opening Parliament. The plotters assumed that his elder son, Prince Henry, would join him, but they were not sure about four-year-old Charles, so loose plans were made to capture him if necessary. Princess Elizabeth, who was nine and living at Combe Abbey near Coventry, would be proclaimed Queen. A rebel force gathered under the guise of a hunting party would take her to London and she would rule under the protectorate of an unspecified (or, at least, never disclosed) nobleman. Armour and weapons were stockpiled, and horses stabled, at key Midlands strongholds. Peers who were Catholic, or ‘Catholicly affected’, might be saved from the blow, but Catesby was vague about this when pressed and apparently held the ‘atheist’ Lords in such low regard that he thought ‘dead bodies would be better for the commonwealth than they’.

  Proclamations were drafted in order to lure disaffected Englishmen into the rebellion. Religion would be downplayed and they would march under the banner of ‘Liberty and Freedom from all manner of Slavery’. They would protest against wardships and monopolies and the union with the parasitic Scot. With the extinction of the political, spiritual and judicial elite and the paralysis of local government, ‘all the Catholics and discontented persons would take their parts and proclaim the Lady Elizabeth’.7 That was the plan.

  Parliament was adjourned on 7 July 1604 to reconvene in February. There was a further prorogation over Christmas due to plague. On 28 July 1605 ‘some dregs of the late contagion’ lingered, so the date was pushed back again. The new and final date for the State Opening of Parliament was Tuesday, 5 November 1605.8

  The delays were expensive and Catesby struggled to finance everything himself.9 An August meeting in 1605 gave him the go-ahead to recruit a few men with deep pockets and fine horses. Their circle had already widened. Catesby’s retainer, Thomas Bates (who had once taken ‘a man child’ to Anne and Eleanor’s house in Warwickshire), had figured out what was going on and was formally entrusted with the secret towards the close of 1604. He was followed by John Wright’s brother Christopher, Thomas Wintour’s brother Robert, and John Grant of Norbrook in Warwickshire. Grant was married to the Wintours’ sister, Dorothy. At the end of January 1605, he had received the following letter from Tom Wintour:

  If I may with my sister’s good leave, let me entreat you, brother, to come over Saturday next to us at Chastelton. I can assure you of kind welcome and your acquaintance with my cousin Catesby will nothing repent you. I could wish Doll here, but our life is monastical, without women.10

  Since Thomas had also asked John to ‘bring with you my Ragion di Stato’ (Reason of State) – a Jesuit work on the ethics of statecraft – it is clear that this was no ordinary weekend retreat.

  Kinship ties were evident in the gunpowder ring, as they were in the wider recusant community. The Midlands connection was another strong bind. Most of the conspirators were gentlemen in their early thirties and the majority had wild pasts. They were frustrated men of action, ‘swordsmen’ the priests called them, and ‘they had not the patience and longanimity to expect the Providence of God’.11 Each had his own reasons for becoming what would today be termed a terrorist, but as Gerard’s convert, Sir Everard Digby, warned Cecil:

  If your Lordship and the State think it fit to run another course and deal severely with Catholics, give me leave to tell you what I fear will happen, which in brief will be massacres, rebellions and desperate attempts against the King and State. For it is a general received reason amongst Catholics that there is not that expecting and suffering course now to be run that was in the Queen’s time, who was the last of her line and last in expectance to run violent courses against Catholics.12

  ‘Handsome’, ‘virile’, ‘affable and courteous’, Digby was one of the last men to join the plot.13 He was recruited in October 1605, late enough to have become thoroughly disillusioned with James I. Another in the outer ring was the dandyish, horse-mad Ambrose Rookwood, sworn in on 29 September 1605. He was from Suffolk, but had spent much of the year in the Midlands. Fifteen days later, on 14 October 1605, Francis Tresham took the oath of secrecy.

  The Vauxes knew many of the plotters, some very well indeed, but they did not qualify for recruitment on several grounds: income (not enough), blood (too blue), age (Eliza’s children were too young) and zeal (Ambrose was a bored and violent swordsman, but far too worldly for the ‘monastical’ plotters). Eleanor’s son, William Brooksby alias Mr Jennings, might have been involved peripherally. The man with ‘a bald head and a reddish beard’ was known to officials, but though he would probably see Catesby at White Webbs just a few days before the scheduled blow, he would not be named or pursued as a plotter.14 No one thought to ask the women, not even those toughened viragos Anne, Eleanor and Eliza. Which is not to say that they did not know what was going on.

  21

  Quips and Quiddities

  While the gunpowder lay heavy in its vault and Catesby planned his final phase of recruitment, a royal hunting party blasted through the Midlands and the Vaux sisters prepared for a pilgrimage. With hindsight, the build-up to the November Parliament was a strange time. Not for everyone, of course: John Chamberlain had nothing to report in April beyond the tedious cycle of ‘matches, marriages, christening, creations, knightings and suchlike, as if this world would last ever’.1 But for those looking for signs, they could be found. An eclipse of the moon on 19 September, and of the sun a fortnight later, seemed to ‘portend no good’.2 Sick and sleepless Thomas Stanney, the Jesuit who had stayed with Garnet and the sisters in 1591, would stab a man after hallucinating phantom pursuivants and a town ‘all in armour betwixt Catholics and heretics’.3

  It seemed vaguely absurd that the King should stay at Harrowden Hall in August 1605, considering men who wanted to blow his heels to the sky would visit a few weeks later, but on the 12th of the month the royal hunting party rode in, and, after a night of Vaux hospitality, followed the horn and heralds out again. Earlier in the month the king had been at Lord Mordaunt’s house in Drayton, where the plotter Robert Keyes had married the governess and where another plotter, Thomas Wintour, and soon-to-be-recruited Ambrose Rookwood had called the day before. The lord of the manor had reputedly wanted to murder his royal guest ‘by way of a mask’, but a priest had ‘willed forbearance at that time because, said he, there is a course in hand that will cut up the very root & remove all impediments whatsoever can be alleged to hinder the cause’ – a variation, perhaps, on Tottenham turning French.4

  Eliza Vaux would soon try and recall that letter, the one, it will be remembered, that she had written over Easter to her fri
end, Agnes Wenman: Pray, for Tottenham may turn French. Agnes’s mother-in-law, Lady Tasborough, had intercepted it and broken the seal (it was apparently only lightly waxed). She had read treason in the letter and had shown it to her son, ‘saying it was a foolish letter and that Mrs Vaux was a foolish woman to write so’ to his wife. Either just before or just after the King’s visit to Harrowden, Eliza had met up with pregnant Agnes at her daughter Mary’s house in Oxfordshire and had had a good bitch about meddling mothers-in-law.5

  A few weeks later, on 31 August 1605, another cryptic letter was penned:

  Jack, certain friends of mine will be with you on Monday night or Tuesday at the uttermost. I pray you void your house of Morgan and his she-mate or other company whatsoever they be, for all your house will scarce lodge the company. The jerkin man is come, but your robe of durance as yet not finished …6

  Presumably John Grant knew how to interpret Thomas Wintour’s last line. Was he having a buff jerkin made up in anticipation of imminent fighting? This is quite possible, since Catesby was using the war in Flanders as a front for his martial preparations and some of the equipment was being stockpiled at Grant’s house.7 But might Wintour also have been recalling a line from a play about rebellion written by Grant’s near-neighbour from Stratford-upon-Avon?

  ‘Is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?’ Hal asks Falstaff.

  ‘How now, how now, mad wag? What, in thy quips and thy quiddities?’

  What indeed.fn1

  One party visiting John Grant at Norbrook in the early autumn of 1605 was a group of pilgrims travelling to the holy shrine of St Winifred on the north coast of Wales. The patroness of virgins, St Winifred and her well of healing waters had survived the Reformation and attracted hundreds of visitors every year, ‘especially,’ noted the hostile John Gee, ‘those of the feminine and softer sex’. The Jesuits actively promoted the cult and Edward Oldcorne, S.J., would pray to St Winifred on the scaffold in 1606 believing that she had cured him of cancer. The proof of the miraculous waters for John Gerard, in an age when beer was safer to drink than water, was that after taking several gulps from the well on an empty stomach, ‘nothing happened to me’. Victory in war was another reason to make a pilgrimage. Writing for a catechism in the 1590s, Garnet explained that the saints and their shrines could be invoked for ‘particular assistance in some special causes’. He also noted that the strangely sweet moss of St Winifred’s Well contained ‘a singular remedy against fire’.8

  Much would be made of the Jesuit superior’s pilgrimage to the well in September 1605 and an itinerary that was seemingly dusted in gunpowder. Garnet always claimed to have travelled for reasons of health – his own and perhaps Anne’s too – and because he had been between houses. He had visited the shrine three years earlier, around the time that he had begun to lose control of his body. He had feared the palsy. He would rather ‘shake at Tyburn than in his chamber’. He ‘marvelled that he had lived so long’. His survival can be attributed, in part, to Anne and Eleanor, who ‘have such care of him that he is able to endure such pains as his office requireth’. Those pains were increasingly mental as well as physical. Garnet suffered from depression and it was getting worse.9

  At least he was eating well. He was ‘full faced’ and ‘fat of body’. His hairline was receding as quickly as his waistline was expanding and his beard was ‘grizzled’. He turned fifty in 1605 and looked older. ‘He is always in hiding or in flight,’ the Spanish envoy observed in March. But the music and the Masses continued and the feast days were celebrated with as much ceremony as was safe.10

  On 22 April 1605, Garnet had received a visitor from Spain: Luisa de Carvajal, a fiery Spanish noblewoman on a self-appointed mission to save England’s souls. She had arrived at Garnet’s invitation and with his aid. ‘Delicate, sick, physically weak’ and unable to speak the language, she did not blend in well with Jacobean England and her letters were soon peppered with complaints. ‘It is an unbearable country,’ she would write in September 1606, ‘and has certainly not fallen short of the expectation I had of suffering a great purgatory here.’ She carped at the weather (‘very damp and overcast’), the bread (‘so heavy’), the vegetables (‘almost tasteless’), the people (‘no regard for propriety’) and, above all, London, which was noisy, smelly, dirty, diseased and ‘incredibly expensive’. ‘This land,’ she would conclude towards the end of 1607, ‘is full to the brim with the bile of dragons.’ She was an extraordinary witness to the time and place, but not the kind of person one would want around – far less invite to stay – if one was planning an act of terror.11

  Although the evidence is not entirely conclusive, Luisa probably stayed with Garnet and the sisters for her first six weeks in England.12 After a humiliating experience at Dover customs, when her ‘instruments of penance’ were laughed at and confiscated, she arrived at ‘the desired location as to a pleasant paradise amid dense woods full of wild beasts’. She was bedridden for a fortnight, but nevertheless ‘delighted’ by the ‘numerous’ Masses, the ‘beautifully decorated’ chapel, the ‘lovely garden’ and, above all, the music: ‘diverse, finely tuned voices and instruments’ and after-dinner motets that were ‘spiritual and moving’. (It was around the same time that a visiting Frenchman found Garnet ‘in company with several Jesuits and gentlemen who were playing music, among them Mr William Byrd’.13)

  Luisa’s paradise could not endure: ‘Because of a warning that the house had been discovered, everyone scattered and fled, some across the fields, others by the river, and, dressing quickly, I had to rush away in the coach with the ladies to London.’14 Garnet’s account of their Corpus Christi celebrations points to the same episode: the feast day (30 May) was kept ‘with great solemnity and music’ and on the day of the octave (6 June) they ‘made a solemn procession about a great garden, the house being watched, which we knew not till the next day when we departed twenty-five in the sight of all in several parties, leaving half a dozen servants behind’.15

  If not the house from which they had fled, the manor in Erith on the Thames Estuary was also attracting attention. Local gossip that summer was of ‘great resort’ there,

  by persons unknown as well as by five or six coaches upon a Sabbath day, coming in at a back gate newly made on the back side of the house, as by sundry persons resorting thither by water who commonly returned from thence daily in the afternoon or evening of the same day.

  The neighbours knew that the house was ‘well stored with wood, seacoal and charcoals’ and that it was ‘usually’ kept by ‘a man and two women with a maid’. Garnet and the sisters also still had White Webbs in Enfield Chase – the Jesuits had a meeting there in November 1604 – but over the summer they feared it was ‘discovered’ and ‘durst not remain there past one night or two’. The house of a Mr Mainy at Fremland in Essex was available to them until Michaelmas, 1605 (though ‘pernicious’ in late summer), and Anne also had a place in Wandsworth. When visiting London, Garnet made use of a chamber in Thames Street ‘at the house of one Bennet, a costermonger hard by Queenhithe’.16 Thames Street’s location by the river, its length (almost wall to wall), and its numerous taverns (because tide-dependent merchants and travellers arrived and departed at strange times) made it a natural choice for anyone wishing to preserve his anonymity. It was here, on Sunday, 9 June 1605, two days after his flight to London, that Garnet received a visit from Robert Catesby. The younger man posited a hypothetical question, ‘a case,’ Garnet recalled, ‘of killing innocents’:

  Mr Catesby asked me whether, in case it were lawful to kill a person or persons, it were necessary to regard the innocents which were present lest they also should perish withal.

  This, Garnet realised with hindsight, was ‘the first breach afar off’ of the Gunpowder Plot. He replied:

  In all just wars it is practised and held lawful to beat down houses and walls and castles, notwithstanding innocents were in danger, so that such battery were necessary for the obtaining of the victory and tha
t the multitude of innocents, or the harm which might ensue by their death, were not such that it did countervail the gain and commodity of the victory.

  Catesby made a ‘solemn protestation that he would never be known to have asked [Garnet] any such question so long as he lived’. Only then, Garnet later claimed, did he begin to worry. ‘In truth, I never imagined anything of the King’s Majesty, nor of any particular, and thought it at the first but, as it were, an idle question.’17

  Could Garnet really have been so naïve? In fairness, this was just the kind of issue in which a soldier on his way to Flanders – as Catesby claimed to be – might naturally engage a priest. Garnet’s reply was grounded in a military context and upon the theology of Thomas Aquinas (which is still used to excuse collateral damage). He gave a logical answer to a question that he determinedly took to be hypothetical. But he knew Catesby very well. He knew that he was an angry, restless soul, who at least since the summer of 1604 had been agitating ‘for the Catholic cause against the King and the State’. He knew that Catesby had found ‘an invincible argument’ in the papal breves on the succession, the breves that Garnet himself had shown him. Catesby had argued then that a mandate to keep the King out surely also applied to putting him out. Garnet had disagreed, had ‘reproved’ Catesby and reminded him of the Pope’s ban on stirs; Catesby had ‘promised to surcease’.18

  That had been a year before their Thames Street conversation, but Catesby had not been quelled. According to the Narrative of his confessor, Tesimond, the next twelve months had seen a gradual build-up of tension between the priest and the gentleman, with Garnet urging peace and patience and Catesby asking ‘if there was any authority on earth that could take away from them the right given by nature to defend their own lives from the violence of others’. Catesby had resented Garnet’s ‘lukewarmness’ and accused him of preaching a draining doctrine that made England’s Catholics ‘flaccid and poor-spirited’. He began to avoid Garnet and his injunctions. The Jesuit superior wondered at Catesby’s aloofness and soon learned that ‘apart from the military preparations which he was making for his passage to Flanders, he was having frequent dealings, and that very secretly, with those special friends of his’. If Tesimond is to be credited – and his aim was to exculpate, not undermine, his superior – Garnet saw in Catesby all the signs of ‘a man preoccupied with grandiose and far-reaching schemes’. He knew perfectly well that ‘something was brewing’ and, on 8 May 1605, had expressed his fear that ‘a stage of desperation’ had been reached.19