God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  Sir Henry Bromley had the house surrounded with a ‘seemly troop’ of a hundred men. The Catholics played for time, ‘sending to the gates, as the custom is, to know the cause of their coming and to keep them in talk with messages to and fro’. Bromley was wise to the tactic and ‘caused the gates with great violence and force of men to be broken down’. He carried detailed instructions from London: ‘You must take care to draw down the wainscot’ in the east part of the parlour, where ‘it is conceived there is some vault’. The lower floors ‘must be tried with a broach’ and the wainscoting pierced with a gimlet. ‘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.’ Special attention was to be paid to chimneys and loft spaces, particularly any ‘double loft’ or seemingly inaccessible garret, ‘for these be ordinary places of hovering’.

  Armed with their tools, Bromely’s men tried every room, but although they found a suspiciously large number of warm beds, ‘parcels of apparel’ and scholarly books, no ‘hovering’ was discerned. When Thomas Habington returned home that night, he vowed to ‘die at his gate’ if any priest could be found ‘in his house or in that shire’. According to one manuscript account, ‘this liberal or rather rash speech could not cause the search so slightly to be given over.’

  Nicholas Owen and Ralph Ashley must already have been hungry; they had a single apple between them. The priests were better off. They had a store of marmalade and sweet meats and could receive warm broths and caudles (a medicinal mulled wine) through a reed in the masonry linked to Mary Habington’s room. They had ‘means to do servitii piccoli [urinate]’, but they could not light a fire on these ‘wet winter nights’, since they were hiding in a chimney. Nor had there been time to take out incumbent books and altar furniture. It was a tight squeeze. ‘We continually sat,’ Garnet recalled, ‘save that sometimes we could half stretch ourselves, the place being not high enough.’ It was painful and ‘both our legs, especially mine, were much swollen’. Despite this, ‘we were very merry & content within’ and heard each other’s general confessions.

  On Monday and Tuesday Hindlip retained its secrets. Thomas Habington continued to bluster. His wife refused to leave. Anne is not specifically mentioned, though if she behaved according to past and future form, she was probably more virago than virgo. ‘I did never hear so impudent liars as I find here,’ Bromely groused, ‘all recusants and all resolved to confess nothing, what danger soever they incur.’ He despaired of finding ‘any man or any thing’, but on the third day, Wednesday, his men started to pull up the floorboards and ‘at last’ he could return good news: ‘popish trash hid under boards in three or four several places.’

  Owen and Ashley, their solitary apple long gone, struggled through that cold January night. They were behind the wainscot panelling in the Gallery, a room ‘foursquare going round about the house’. They could hear the patrol. The following morning, Thursday, when the footsteps were at their faintest, they slipped out ‘so secretly and stilly, and shut the place again so finely that they were not one whit heard’. They made for the door, but it was shut, and the patrol returned, and they were taken. They refused to give up the hide and only after the wainscot was systematically stripped, and the walls smashed about a bit, were ‘two cunning and very artificial conveyances’ discovered in the wall, ‘so ingeniously framed, and with such art, as it cost much labour ere they could be found’. Scant consolation for Nicholas Owen to witness admiration for his work.

  Bromley redoubled the search. ‘I have yet persuasion,’ he informed Salisbury ‘very late’ that night, ‘that there is one or two more in the house, wherefore I have resolved to continue the guard yet a day or two.’ According to Luisa de Carvajal, who probably heard it from Anne, Bromley’s men drilled ‘lines of holes in the floors’ and made such a mess of the walls that ‘they feared that, despite the house being so sturdy and large, it might fall down about their ears’. More hides were uncovered, nearly all containing ‘books, massing stuff and popish trumpery’. Habington continued to lie with impressive front, but he had no good answer when the deeds to his house were plucked out of a hide.

  ‘Every day’ the two priests heard men ‘most curious over us’. Garnet believed that the search was ‘not for me, but for Mr Hall’ – Oldcorne’s alias – and also for Gerard, but ‘of me never no expectation’. There was evidently a lot of intelligence about. On Sunday, 26 January, a man who had sheltered Robert Wintour in Worcestershirefn2 claimed from the county jail that Oldcorne was still at Hindlip. He also insinuated that the Jesuit had commended the plot. The search continued.

  ‘After we had been in the hole 7 days & 7 nights & some odd hours, every man may well think we were well wearied & indeed,’ Garnet recalled, ‘so it was.’ But the greatest nuisance was not fatigue, or cold, or even cramp, but the lack of a close stool. An eyewitness, possibly the pursuivant who discovered them on Monday morning, wrote that ‘those customs of nature which of necessity must be done, and in so long a time of continuance was exceedingly offensive to the men themselves’ did ‘much annoy them that made entrance in upon them’. Garnet and Oldcorne ‘confessed that they had not been able to hold out one whole day longer, but either they must have yielded or perished in the place’. In the end, wrote Luisa, ‘they opened up the walls in such a way that it was impossible not to find the hiding place’.

  ‘When we came forth,’ Garnet later informed Anne,

  we appeared like 2 ghosts, yet I the strongest though my weakness lasted longest. The fellow that found us ran away for fear, thinking we would have shot a pistol at him, but there came needless company to assist him & we bade them be quiet & we would come forth. So they helped us out very charitably.

  Their ‘chimney conveyance’ astonished the searchers, who had been expecting boarded-up corners. It was ‘strangely formed’ with an entrance ‘curiously covered over with brick, mortared and made fast to planks of wood, and coloured black like the other parts’. Again, Owen’s ‘skill and industry’ were admired. In all, eleven hides were found, the most recorded in any house.

  Garnet and Oldcorne were seized on 27 January 1606. One hundred and twenty miles away, at the plotters’ trial in Westminster Hall, lawyers fulminated against ‘Jesuits not then taken’. It took a few days for Garnet’s identity to be confirmed and the news to filter through, but finally the prosecution had its leading man. The last act of ‘that heavy and woeful tragedy, which is commonly called the Powder-Treason’, could begin.18

  fn1 The thanksgiving prayer remained in the Church of England service book until 1859. From around the 1670s, it became popular to burn effigies of the Pope, sometimes with live cats trapped inside to mimic the wailing Whore of Babylon. William of Orange’s landing at Torbay on 5 November 1688 reinforced the providential nature of the date. By the eighteenth century, effigies of Guy Fawkes had become common and today, with Bonfire Night continuing largely as a secular tradition, he has morphed into a more generic scarecrow-type figure. In Lewes, East Sussex, however, where the sectarian origins of ‘the Fifth’ are not ignored, images of any public figure, or thing, are considered fair kindling for the fire. In 2012 representations of Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul V were joined by those of Lance Armstrong, Angela Merkel, Mitt Romney, Geri Halliwell, the Olympics and the Queen.

  The cellars at Westminster are ritually searched with lanterns before the Opening of Parliament. In 1812 the Yeomen of the Guard, coming to the vault of a wine-merchant, sensibly sampled the contents of the pipes ‘to ascertain that they did not contain gunpowder’.

  (Cressy, Champion and Jay, in Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night (2005); thisissussex.co.uk, 6 November 2012)

  fn2 Wintour had fled Holbeach just before the siege that saw his younger brother taken and Catesby and others killed. He was a fugitive for two months, enduring ‘hard bedding and diet’ until his capture at Hagley on 9 January. Humphrey Littleton, the owner of Hagley, then turned info
rmant. (BL Harl. MS 360, ff. 102–8; Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot, pp. 213, 216)

  25

  That Woman

  Anne followed Garnet to London and spent her first night with Mary Habington in Fetter Lane. Thereafter she lived like a fugitive, staying no more than two or three nights in one place. Few were willing to put her up, ‘even with money’. She was forty-three, her health was frail and it was February.1

  On Valentine’s Day, Garnet was transferred from the Gatehouse in Westminster to the altogether more foreboding Tower of London. By the bestowal of a gold coin, ‘a cup of sack’fn1 and some flattering words, he arranged for his new keeper to send messages to his nephew, Thomas, a priest in the Gatehouse. The first was written on a strip of paper enfolding a pair of glasses:

  I pray you let these spectacles be set in leather & with a leather case, or let the fold be fitter for the nose.

  Yours for ever, H.G.

  There was no other visible writing, but when held to a flame, new words, secretly etched in orange juice, appeared on the page. Garnet mentioned an earlier letter ‘sent with biscuit bread’, which he had been forced to burn without reading. ‘I have acknowledged that I went from Sir Everard’s to Coughton,’ he wrote, and that when Bates had come from the rebel camp with news of the plot’s discovery, Garnet had told him: ‘I am sorry they have without advice of friends adventured in so wicked an action. Let them desist.’

  I must needs acknowledge my being with the 2 sisters & that at White Webbs, as is true, for they are so jealous of White Webbs that I can no way else satisfy.

  My names I all confess but that last.

  Appoint some place near where this bearer may meet some trusty friend.

  Where is Mrs Anne?2

  On 23 February, hearing that Anne was in town, Garnet told Oldcorne in the adjacent cell that he had written ‘a note that my keeper may repair to her near hand’, so that she ‘will let us hear from all our friends’.3 Three days later, he sent an item to the Gatehouse ‘to be new lined’. The covering note acknowledged receipt of ‘the linen you sent’ and requested socks and a black nightcap. ‘The spectacles will not serve me,’ he added, ‘I only want spectacles to see afar off, for to read I need not.’ (This provided the opportunity for more innocuous wrapping paper.) He would also need money, ‘for we have not yet paid our fees’.

  The invisible ink contained Latin instructions for the Jesuits, including the appointment of a provisional leader. Garnet continued in English with his own news:

  They say I am obstinate & indeed they have nothing against me but presumptions.

  I have indeed acknowledged Wintour’s journey into Spain, but so that I cannot have hurt thereby. I acknowledged I was at White Webs, but one or 2 nights this twelve month.

  The house is none of mine, though this day they will have me to be Mr Measy & brought Jamesfn2 to my face, who said nothing.

  Neither have I confessed any particular but of Mrs Perkins [Anne] & the meeting of Catesby & Wintour in Q. Eliz.’s time. Yet they know all the persons & so I wish all be wary till their malice be wrought on me.

  The letter was meant for Anne. A superscription in juice to ‘my very loving sister’, urged caution:

  More hereafter: do not endanger yourself, but if you have any to bring you to me, by the Cradle [Tower] you may.4

  It had been a month since Garnet was taken. Anne was desperate to receive his blessing and look for signs of his treatment. She was his conduit to the world, but ‘your last letter,’ he complained on 3 March, ‘I could not read, your pen did not cast ink.’ He had received the handkerchiefs, though, and the socks and the Bible. He hoped that Anne had paid his prison fees and could acquire beds ‘for James, John, and Harry, who all have been often tortured’.5

  The following day, he was more insistent: ‘For God’s sake provide bedding for these 3,’ he wrote, ‘your own necessities always regarded.’6 If ‘John’ was Nicholas ‘Little John’ Owen, the request came too late. The carpenter had been found dead in his cell two days earlier, his bowels having ‘gushed out’. His last examination had been just hours before his death and since the torture of ‘the inferior sort’ of prisoner had been authorised by special warrant, there is a strong suspicion that Owen, who may have had a hernia, was racked to death. The government was quick to put out its version: Owen ‘killed himself in the Tower in the night, ripping up his own belly with a knife without a point.’ Oswald Tesimond reacted incredulously: ‘Does William Waad [the Lieutenant of the Tower] seriously expect us to believe that even after many days’ torture, a man like Owen would abandon his hope of salvation by inflicting death on himself – and such a death?’ The Venetian ambassador thought public opinion cleaved to the Catholic version. However he died, Owen took the secrets of his extraordinary priest-holes to the grave.7

  If their friend’s death made Anne even more afraid for Garnet, then his letter of 4 March, if safely received, must have come as sweet relief. Garnet had not yet been tortured. Indeed, considering the time and (alleged) crime, he was being treated rather well. This letter is much longer and more fluent than previous missives, which had not required context or elaboration. Headed ‘for Mrs Anne or one of ours first’, it aimed to put the record straight ‘lest evil reports or untrue may do myself or others injury’.8

  Garnet insisted that he had been ‘exceedingly well used’ by Sir Henry Bromley in Worcestershire. Before being taken to London, he had stayed at his captor’s house, dined at his table and even celebrated Candlemas with the family. There had been ‘a great dinner’ and wine to toast the King. Garnet had ‘pledged the health, yet with favour as they said, in a reasonable glass’. He had ridden to London on the best horse, at the King’s charge, but had been ‘much distempered’ and could not eat anything on his first night at the Gatehouse. Thereafter, he had only managed ‘bread, an apple & some wine according to my purse’. At the Tower:

  I have a very fine chamber, but was very sick the 2 first nights with ill lodging. I am allowed every meal a good draught of excellent claret wine & I am liberal with myself & neighbours for good respects, to allow also of my own purse some sack; & this is the greatest charge I shall be at hereafter, for now fire will shortly be unnecessary if I live so long, whereof I am very uncertain & as careless.

  One ‘evil report’, apparently already doing the rounds, was that Garnet was a drunkard. To Oldcorne he confessed his fear that, in his weakened state, he might have hurt himself with ‘too much abstinence and some excess of drink’. This does not sound like the admission of an inebriate, rather of someone who knew that he had drunk ‘extraordinarily’. John Gerard’s subsequent allegation that Garnet’s food or drink had been spiked is not helpful in this context; nor is the declaration of a nineteenth-century Jesuit historian that ‘the Son of God Himself was charged with being a drunkard’.9

  However much Garnet appreciated his wine at this time – and it was just before Lent – he was sharp enough in examination to match some of the best minds in the country. To Salisbury, who treated him ‘with all courtesy’, Garnet defended the supremacy of the Pope ‘plainly yet modestly & with great moderation’. To the question, ‘May the Pope command anything unlawful for obedience?’, Garnet had replied, ‘No thing that is unlawful may be lawful for obedience.’

  There had been odd moments of ‘pleasant discourse’. Lord Chief Justice Popham had recognised the prisoner from the early 1570s when the then-teenaged Garnet had been a trainee publisher with thoughts of the law. The Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, was ‘very courteous’. William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, was ‘very kind in usage & familiarity’, but ‘most violent’ on the subject of religion. Once, when Garnet was asked about a christening he had performed at White Webbs – that of William and Dorothy Brooksby’s daughter – Waad had insinuated that he was also ‘there at the begetting’. Coke and Popham had agreed with Garnet that ‘such calumniations were unfit’.

  Garnet warned Anne that she was known to them. They had named Eleanor t
oo ‘and say they will have her.’ There was ‘a muttering’ about a sermon. ‘I fear mine at Coughton,’ he wrote. He thought that ‘Corpus Christi lodging’ was still safe. ‘They said they could believe me in nothing.’

  ‘Why then, said I, you must bring witnesses.’

  They had threatened torture and Garnet ‘often’ feared it, but ‘in truth,’ he informed Anne, ‘I thank God I am & have been intrepidus & herein I marvel at myself, having had such great apprehensions before.’

  When Garnet wrote this letter on Shrove Tuesday, he was unaware of Owen’s death. He had no idea how Father Strange was faring either. The Tower was large enough to keep the prisoners segregated and Garnet’s gaoler was not as helpful as he pretended, for while he soaked up Garnet’s libations and compliments, he assiduously passed everything on – the letters, and the words, even those spoken in confession to Oldcorne in the adjacent cell.

  The placement of the two Jesuits had been no happy accident. In the hope that they might incriminate themselves and others, they were put next to each other and shown ‘a cranny in the top of a door’ through which they could confer. They spoke in ‘a low, whispering manner’. Cocks crowed, hens cackled and Oldcorne’s husky, cancer-raddled voice was difficult to catch. Two hidden eavesdroppers craned their necks and noted everything down.10

  The two priests were briefing each other, Garnet in particular telling Oldcorne what was, and was not, safe to mention. Thus, on 23 February: ‘I think it not convenient to deny that we were at White Webbs; they do so much insist upon that place.’ Two days later, Garnet said, ‘I hope they have got no knowledge of the great …’ The rest of the sentence was not heard. In the same session, he cited the prayers and Latin verses that he had ‘indeed’ used on All Saints Day at Coughton.fn3 The letters that he had sent into Spain ‘were of no other matter, but to have pensions’. Garnet also said something ‘of a gentlewoman, that if he were charged with her, he would excuse her conversing with him’. On 27 February, he said he had been questioned about a nobleman, ‘but I answered it well enough I think’. He had been ‘pressed again with Coughton, which I most feared’. And so it went on, Garnet ‘well persuaded that I shall wind myself out of this matter’, his examiners equally convinced that there was more to learn.11