God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  they told me that I was in the company of Father Walley [Garnet], Father Greenway [Tesimond], and Father Gerard at Mrs Vaux’s, I told them that I had been in their companies, but not there or anywhere else with others but myself.26

  Digby also managed to release verses to his ‘dearest’ wife and two sons:

  I grieve not to look back into my former state,

  Though different that were from present case;

  I moan not future haps, though forced death with hate

  Of all the world were blustered in my face

  But Oh I grieve to think that ever I

  Have been a means of others misery.

  When on my Little Babes I think, as I do oft,

  I cannot choose but then let fall some tears:

  Me-thinks I hear the little Prattler, with words soft,

  Ask, Where is Father that did promise Pears,

  And other Knacks, which I did never see,

  Nor Father neither, since he promised me.

  ’Tis true, my Babe, thou never saw’st thy Father since,

  nor art thou ever like to see again:

  That stopping Father into mischief which will pinch

  The tender Bud, and give thee cause to plain

  His hard disaster; that must punish thee,

  Who art from guilt as any Creature free.

  But Oh! when she that bare thee, Babe, comes to my mind,

  Then do I stand as drunk with bitterest woe,

  To think that she, whose worth were such to all, should find

  Such usage hard, and I to cause the blow,

  Of her such sufferance, that doth pierce my heart,

  And gives full grief to every other part.27

  Eliza’s butler, Richard Richardson, also managed to smuggle secret briefings out of his cell. As Anne, Lady Markham, informed Salisbury:

  I hear Ric. the butler is close in the Gatehouse, yet your lordship knows that prisons are places of such corruption as money will help letters to their friends to tell what they have been examined of, so they will guess shrewdly how to shift.

  Lady Markham, a friend and neighbour of Eliza, was helping Salisbury with his enquiries. Her husband had been involved in the Bye Plot of 1603 and it was in the hope of terminating his banishment that she offered ‘to deliver the person of Gerard … into the hands of the State’. She informed Salisbury in January that ‘if the watch had continued but two days longer, Mr Gerard had been pined out at Harrowden’. But January was too late; Gerard was long gone. The ‘wandering’ Jesuit had been hard to track in Northamptonshire. As Lady Markham had protested:

  I fear this most vile and hateful plot hath taken deep and dangerous root, because I meet with many that will as easily be persuaded there was no gunpowder laid as that [that] holy good man was an actor in the plot; and surely the generality did ever so much admire him that they were happy or blessed in hearing him, and their roof sanctified by his appearance in their house.28

  This was not the predominant view in the capital. ‘Priests and Jesuits’ lurked in the ‘synagogue of satan’, concocting theories of resistance against kings: they were the ones responsible for the Gunpowder Plot, thought Alderman Sir John Swynnerton:

  Yea, yea, it is a babe of their own begetting every inch of it: And though they search each corner of their wit to shift it off and father it upon others, yet shall it always be reputed theirs. They shall ever be enforced to keep it and bear it upon their backs as a notorious badge of their fornication and a durable monument of their shame.29

  Swynnerton laid his prejudices – as well as his heart – bare in his Christian Love-Letter of 1606, a bizarre attempt to persuade a girl ‘with mild and charitable phrase’ to forsake her ‘Romish religion’ and marry him. The Earl of Salisbury, to whom it was dedicated, dismissed it as a ‘toy’. One doubts that Mistress Katherine T. of Gloucestershire was won over by her suitor’s assertion that her soul was benighted in ‘Egyptian darkness’, or the winsome: ‘You lie slabbering in these corrupted puddles of man’s erroneous inventions, yet never the more cleansed.’30

  For Swynnerton, who also made a dig at ‘your extraordinary unsanctified Saint Winifred’s’ Well, the Gunpowder Plot was reason enough for his darling to forsake the Church of Rome:

  I wonder what construction the favourers of your profession make of the accident. I know how they carry it outwardly, but what their inward man thinketh of it, in approbation or detestation of the plot, and touching the discovery, there’s the point.31

  It was, no doubt, a point that he put directly to Eliza, for Alderman Swynnerton was her London keeper. Five months before she came to reside with him at Aldermanbury, he had been involved in a mercantile dispute that saw his brother-in-law accuse him of ‘many inhumane disgraces’ and the Earl of Salisbury rate him for ‘contempt and extreme proceedings’.32 Eliza, however, was ‘well respected’ in Swynnerton’s house, though ‘not allowed any one servant of my son’s to have access unto me to stead me in my needful occasions, all mine own men being committed to several prisons’. She entreated Salisbury for ‘some enlargement’. On the subject of Gerard the priest:

  If your Lordship do hold me here out of an opinion to draw from me the discovery of that party which your Lordship is persuaded had so deep a finger in that most horrible treason, which none living hath a greater detestation of than myself, I do here protest unto your Lordship that it is not in the compass of my power to do it, but I pray heartily unto sweet Jesus that He in his Justice will deliver him into your Lordship’s hands, if he be guilty, which I have very strong & forcible reasons to make doubt of, but that it becometh me not to contradict your Lordship’s better judgement.33

  Perfectly demure, perfectly deferential, perfectly uncooperative, Eliza Vaux was released from Swynnerton’s custody on the condition that she remain in the city.34 But London was expensive and unhealthy and it was on both those grounds that she pressed Salisbury for leave to return to the country. On 17 April 1606, she was still waiting and wondering: ‘I find both my suit & myself so wholly neglected that I cannot but marvel what hath made so great a change in your Lordship from whom I found such honourable usage before.’35

  There was one reason why Salisbury might have been disobliged to assist Eliza. Despite the ‘great charges’ of the capital, she was finding the funds to help her priest. ‘I was in London,’ Gerard recalled, having slipped past the shire watch, through the city gates and into a safe townhouse:

  And as soon as she was released from custody, quite oblivious of herself, she wanted to look after me. Every day she sent me news by letter. She got all I needed for my house and when she heard that I wanted to go abroad for a time, she insisted that I should spare no expense that was necessary to ensure my safety. She would gladly pay for it even if it cost five thousand florins. And in fact she gave me a thousand florins for the journey.

  On Saturday, 3 May 1606, John Gerard fled England in the retinue of the Spanish envoy sent to congratulate James I on his deliverance from the plot. As with all Gerard’s adventures, it was a tense affair. Having arranged to meet the fugitive at the port, the Spanish diplomats ‘took fright and said they could not stand by their promise’. Time was running out, the ship was set to sail, the officials were standing firm. ‘Suddenly they changed their mind. The envoy 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.’36 It was not a time for working in England, Gerard concluded. There would be several false sightings over the years, but he would never return to his country, or the house that had kept him safe.

  fn1 The qualifying comments in parentheses are Gerard’s, the tutor improving his student’s work perhaps.

  fn2 The formerly friendly councillor is traditionally thought to have been the Earl of Northampton, but was more probably the Earl of Salisbury, whom Eliza would entreat on 17 April 1606 to renew his ‘honourable usage’ towards her, ‘as when I was last at the Council Table it pleased your Lordship in pa
rticular out of your noble disposition to show that care both of my health & estate as I could not think how to yield sufficient thanks’. (CP, 116, f. 22)

  fn3 Lady Lovell, her two girls and Eliza’s daughter Joyce would leave England in June 1606. Lovell claimed to need treatment at the Spa in Belgium for breast cancer, but ‘devotion of the soul’ soon made her ‘neglect the health of her body’. She changed her name to Mary, thought about joining various convents and eventually founded a house of English Carmelites at Antwerp. Joyce Vaux briefly joined her aunt’s order before deciding upon Mary Ward’s institute of unenclosed teaching nuns. She would, however, end her days quietly in Suffolk with her brother Henry. (CP, 119, ff. 30–3; BL Add. MS 11402, f. 112r; HMC Downshire, vol. 2, pp. 12, 71, 158; vol. 6, p. 71; C. M Seguin, ‘Lovel, Mary’, ODNB; Orchard, Till God Will, p. 92; Vaux Petitions, p. 19. Also Redworth, Letters of Luisa de Carvajal, II, p. 172 for many rich Catholics ‘using poor health as a pretext’ to escape England.)

  24

  Two Ghosts

  Miserable desolation! No king, no queen, no prince, no issue male, no councillors of state, no nobility, no bishops, no judges! O barbarous and more than Scythian or Thracian cruelty! No mantle of holiness can cover it, no pretence of religion can excuse it, no shadow of good intention can extenuate it. God and heaven condemn it, man and earth detest it, the offenders themselves were ashamed of it; wicked people exclaim against it, and the souls of all true Christian subjects abhor it.1

  Sir Edward Coke had had almost three months to polish his speech. The King and Queen were apparently in private attendance. One MP complained in the Commons that his standing-room entry fee (10 shillings) was more than ‘many of the baser sort’ had paid. The trial of the eight surviving plotters at Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606 was a moment of national catharsis. Four days earlier, Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton (an old Vaux acquaintance) had been well supported in his motion to make 5 November a day of public thanksgiving.fn1 When Sir Everard Digby, dressed in his ‘tuff taffatie gown and a suit of black satin’, bowed out of the courtroom, he begged the lords for forgiveness. ‘God forgive you’ was the response, ‘and we do.’2 He was not, however, permitted to die by the axe. The eight men fell at the scaffold on the last two days of January.

  But Robert Catesby could not be forgiven, or punished. Some satisfaction might have been derived from the exhumation of his corpse. People could go to Westminster and look at his impaled head, but they could not see him in the dock or witness his emasculation or smell his boiling flesh. While Guy Fawkes bore the brunt of popular odium (the fall guy), the mastermind had died on his own terms. Investigators had wondered, though, if Catesby’s persuasive charm could really have worked without the endorsement of his religious and social superiors. They were sure that ‘arch-traitors’ were still at large. Even as the condemned plotters were led out of court, there was a sense of questions unanswered, secrets withheld and sins awaiting expiation.

  In his speech Coke said of the Jesuits that they did not watch ‘and pray’, but watched ‘to prey’. It was this eminent lawyer’s sincere belief that the Gunpowder Plot was the spawn of the Society of Jesus. Henry Garnet, Oswald Tesimond, John Gerard ‘and other Jesuits’ had, according to Coke, provided the ‘traitorous advice and counsel’ upon which every detail of the plot – from the mine to the Midlands rising – was decided.3

  Twelve days earlier, on 15 January 1606, a warrant had been issued in the King’s name for the arrests of Gerard, Garnet and Tesimond – in that order. Detailed descriptions of the three were displayed, like wanted posters, throughout the parishes and markets of England. Their harbourers were to be dealt with severely, ‘without hope of mercy or forgiveness’, and were esteemed ‘no less pernicious’ to the King and commonwealth ‘than those that have been actors and concealers of the main treason itself’. Tesimond – ‘of mean stature, somewhat gross, his hair black, his beard bushy and brown’ – was spotted in London. As soon as he and his captor shifted from busy street to quiet back-alley, he took to his heels and was gone before the hue and cry was raised. He eventually made it out of England with a boatload of dead pigs.4

  Of the three accused Jesuits, he had probably been in the deepest. He was Catesby’s and Wintour’s confessor and had revealed the plot to Garnet. Catesby’s man, Bates, had implicated him, telling his examiners that the Jesuit had urged secrecy ‘because it was for a good cause’. Bates also confessed to the juncture of plotters and priests at Harrowden Hall in mid-October and to the messages exchanged between himself (on behalf of Catesby and Digby) and Garnet and Tesimond at Coughton on 6 November. He said that after delivering the news of the plot’s discovery, he and Tesimond had left Coughton to see Catesby and the rebels at Huddington. Bates was subsequently ‘heartily sorry’ for his confession, but did not retract it.5

  Against John Gerard, the most damning piece of evidence was Fawkes’s testimony that he had given Communion to the first five plotters at their fateful May meeting in the Strand in 1604. None of the plotters suggested – and Gerard vehemently denied – that he had been admitted to the burning secret.

  Henry Garnet appeared to have been everywhere and known everyone. That ‘nest for such bad birds’, White Webbs, had been his and Anne’s before Catesby and his friends had come to roost. Investigators knew about the journey to St Winifred’s Well and Garnet’s prayers at Coughton. They knew about the earlier ‘Spanish treason’, and Garnet’s 1602 letter recommending Wintour to the Madrid-based Jesuit, Joseph Creswell (the same Creswell who, in 1588, had served as chaplain to Parma’s troops and penned the proclamation that would have been distributed in England in the event of a successful Armada6). They knew about Garnet’s dispatching of Sir Edmund Baynham to Rome (Baynham, a notorious roisterer, who had briefly been imprisoned for ‘some desperate speeches’ against James and was now labelled by Coke ‘a fit messenger for the devil’7). They knew about the papal breves on the succession, Robert Persons’ pro-Spanish tract on the same subject and the latest Jesuit resistance theories that expounded the ‘lawful and meritorious’ case for the killing of ‘heretic’ rulers. They argued that the Gunpowder Plot had arisen ‘out of the dead ashes of former treasons’ and – a clinching observation here – Coke noted that ‘gunpowder was the invention of a friar, one of the Romish rabble’.8

  Thus: Tesimond had encouraged the plot, Gerard had sanctified it and Garnet had worked all the angles, domestic and foreign. If Bates had been the only plotter to make a direct accusation, if, indeed, the others had wilfully refused to acknowledge Jesuit involvement in the plot, ‘what torture soever’ was threatened, it was surely because they had been told it was a mortal sin to betray a priest. Rumour had it that Francis Tresham received a warning in his cell ‘that if he accused this Garnet it was impossible for him to be saved’.9 And so it was that this bloody band of elusive gentleman-priests, who wore hair shirts under their ‘feathers and fashions’,10 who hunted in public and scourged themselves in private, who thirsted for murder and marched towards martyrdom, and taught Catholics how to lie – so it was that Anne and Eleanor and Eliza Vaux’s friends and ‘ghostly fathers’ were depainted as the true villains of the piece.

  Henry Garnet, meanwhile, who was terrified of torture, and Edward Oldcorne, who practised extreme self-mortification, were sitting in a hole knowing they could not hold out for much longer.11 The Jesuit superior had been ‘changing burrows’. On 4 December, he had joined Oldcorne at Hindlip, the grand mansion of the Worcestershire recusant, Thomas Habington. ‘So large and fair a house that it might be seen over great part of the country’, Hindlip’s finest features were embedded in its masonry. It was a gamble to go there: a house in gunpowder country, known to officials, with a Jesuit-in-residence. But despite many searches, Hindlip had never given up her priests.12 It may have felt sanctified, untouchable, at the very least it was familiar. Eleanor and the children seem to have gone elsewhere; their trail runs cold, though the presence of a French prayer book, inscribed ‘Bar
onne Brooksby’, in the library of neighbouring Harvington Hall (a place equipped with Owen-built hides), suggests that perhaps they did not stray far.13

  Anne stayed with Garnet and the ever-faithful Owen. The carpenter, a Jesuit lay brother since around 1600, was about fifty now and lame (a ‘resty’ horse had fallen on him a few years earlier).14 A month before their arrival, Hindlip had been turned upside down, not by pursuivants, but a baby – Mary Habington had given birth to a boy, William, a future poet, on 4 November 1605.

  Garnet retired to a ‘lower chamber descending from the dining room’ and waited for ‘the heat of this persecution’ to pass.15 He wrote to the Privy Council disavowing the plot and any Jesuit involvement. He stressed the importance of his order’s fourth vow of ‘holy obedience’ to the Pope. There had been an ‘express prohibition of all unquietness’ and Garnet had ‘inculcated’ it, he wrote, ‘upon every occasion of speech’. He had also sought a further ban ‘under censures of all violence towards his Majesty’. ‘I will infer,’ he continued, ‘that it is no way probable, in never so prejudicated a judgement, that the authors of this conspiracy durst acquaint me or any of mine with their purposes.’16 I will infer … no way probable – neat words that prevented an outright lie. If the government’s detraction of Garnet is a caricature, so is the saint of his apologists.

  On the afternoon of Saturday, 18 January 1606, a recusant friend of the Habingtons tipped them off to an imminent raid. Only Mary Habington was home, her husband having ridden to Shropshire to execute a will. On Sunday the search was confirmed for ‘one day in that week’.17 At the break of the following day, Anne Vaux heard the dreaded noises. She knew the drill. Garnet and Oldcorne were helped into position. Owen, whose ‘crooked’ leg was an obvious tell, ducked into another hide with Oldcorne’s servant, Ralph. Pictures, papers, books and vestments, rosaries, relics, chalices and other ‘church stuff’ were stashed ‘in the most safe secret places they had’.