In the many interviews that followed, Garnet might once have been tortured. In April he would refer to the threat of torture ‘the second time’. There were rumours that he had been denied food and sleep. Anne said he was ‘certainly’ tortured; Salisbury insisted he was treated as tenderly ‘as a nurse-child’. Luisa de Carvajal, who was no supporter of English officials, reported from London on 2 April that they had been ‘soft’ on Garnet. At the time she believed his trial statement that he had been treated ‘with all courtesy’. In May, however, she was less sure, reporting that Garnet ‘said that he had only been tortured for a brief while and that he had been well treated in the prison’. Later in the same letter, she wrote that ‘they tried his patience in an extraordinary way, not by torturing his body, but by torturing his mind and understanding with false allegations, deliberate confusion and subtle fantasy’.12 The Catholic poet and playwright Ben Jonson had a line in Volpone (1606) that has been seen as a waggish reference to the twin rumours of Garnet’s torture and drunkenness: ‘I have heard / The rack hath cured the gout’ – neither apologists nor detractors would happily have granted both.13
Even when confronted with the minutes of the ‘interlocutions’, Garnet continued to evade his examiners. When challenged about ‘the great …’, he claimed he had meant ‘the great house of Mr Mainy’ in Essex, ‘for Erith,’ he admitted a month later, ‘was not yet spoken of till Mrs Anne named it’. Garnet withheld information to protect people, places, his Society, his Church and himself. ‘What should I have done?’ he asked. ‘Why should I not use all lawful liberty?’14
On 8 March, he finally admitted that he had had foreknowledge of the Gunpowder Plot. He had heard about it in general terms in June 1605, when Catesby had propounded the matter of the killing of innocents, and he had heard about it in particular when Tesimond had confessed the details in July. Garnet said he had tried to stop it by all lawful means. He had charged Tesimond to hinder the plot. He had urged Catesby to desist from any action. He had stressed the Pope’s prohibition against stirs. He had begged Rome for a further ban that would threaten excommunication on all plotters (Paul V had not obliged, thinking the general ban would suffice). He had sent Sir Edmund Baynham to the Pope (‘to inform generally’) and he had secured a promise from Catesby that he would do nothing until his return. He had also prayed. ‘Other means of hindrance I could not devise as I would have desired’, because he had been bound to silence by the seal of the confessional. He said his penitent had only permitted him to divulge what he knew ‘if ever I should come in question, the thing being laid to my charge’. So he had eventually confessed, believing Tesimond to be safely overseas. ‘If I had not thought so,’ he later wrote, ‘I must have called my wits together to have made another formal tale, but the case standing as it did, it was necessary.’15
Questions remained. Had Garnet really not known about the messages that Catesby and others had handed Baynham before his departure for Rome? ‘In all sincerity, I know not.’ Why delate the plot of the appellant priest Watson in 1603, but not that of his friend Catesby in 1605? Fidelity to the seal of the confessional and, he would eventually admit, ‘hope of prevention by the Pope and loathness to betray my friends’. But had Tesimond’s revelation really been a confession? Garnet admitted that it had been given while walking, not kneeling, but that he had taken it as a proper confession. ‘If it had been any less degree of secrecy,’ he protested, ‘I had written of it to Rome.’16
Rome, not Westminster. Garnet’s allegiance to Rome is, I think, the most compelling argument for his relative innocence – and impotence – in the affair of the powder plot. His fear of disobeying not only his Jesuit superiors, but also the Pope to whom he had professed his solemn fourth vow of obedience, makes it unlikely that he would have gone rogue to support Catesby. He ‘detested’ the plot and condemned the ‘devil’s knights’ who devised it.17 He was only too happy to adhere to the papal prohibition against stirs. The seal of the confessional was a double-edged sword though. On the one hand, it gave Garnet deniability and excused him from betraying a friend to the enemy. On the other, it disabled him from giving Rome a full briefing and obtaining a specific directive in the case.
Garnet would apologise for not having disclosed his general knowledge of the plot, for not having done more to reveal what he had learned out of confession. He was probably guilty of wilful naïvety at Thames Street and a retreat into ‘numb officialdom’ thereafter.18 He was certainly guilty, according to common law, of misprision of treason; that is, the knowledge, but non-disclosure, of a treasonable act. ‘In respect of my superior’s commandment,’ he wrote, ‘I kept myself aloof in all such matters.’ He ‘cut off all occasions’ of discoursing with Catesby about the plot ‘to save myself harmless both with the State here and with my superiors at Rome’.19 Perhaps he should have assumed more responsibility and taken the blinkers off, as Anne seems to have urged on the pilgrimage – ‘For God’s sake talk to Mr Catesby!’ He must dearly have wished that his General had accepted his resignation all those years earlier. ‘I would to God I had never known of the Powder Treason,’ he would exclaim at his trial.20
Henry Garnet lived and worked and died for the Church of Rome and it was to the Pope that he answered, not the King of England. He was always going to choose God, as he understood Him, over Caesar, and men like Coke, the Attorney General, were never going to understand that choice. At the last resort, Henry Garnet would have sat on his hands on 5 November 1605 and awaited instruction.
*
‘I pray you, prove whether these spectacles do fit your sight.’ Anne continued to write to Garnet after his confession. Here, in an undated orange-juice missive, the news lies amidst less momentous chatter about a lost letter:
On Saturday at supper the attorney said that when you were in examining you feigned yourself sick to go to your chamber and coming thither you seem to take some marmalade, which even then was sent you, and burned a letter which your keeper seeing did tell, and you being examined said that it was a letter that a friend had sent you and fearing that there might be anything of danger to the party, you burned it; and that you had acknowledged that you know of the powder action but not a practiser in it. The paper sent you with the box was concerning myself. If this come safe to you, I will write and so will more friends, who would be glad to have direction from you.
Who should supply you room for myself? I am forced to seek new friends, my old are most careless of me. I beseech you, for God sake, advise me what course to take. So long as I may hear from you [illegible] not out of London. My hope is that you will continue your care of me and commend to some that will for your sake help me. To live without you is not life but death. Now I see my loss. I am and ever will be yours and so I humbly beseech you to account me. O that I might see you.
Yours.21
This letter, which has been modernised for the sake of clarity, was poorly spelled and hardly punctuated. The original can be seen in Plate 36. Like the rest of their clandestine correspondence, it was intercepted, read, ‘finely counterfeited’ (since orange juice, once heated, is indelible) and filed. The copy was delivered to its recipient without suspicion.fn4 22
‘Concerning the disposing of yourself,’ Garnet advised Anne, ‘I give you leave to go over’ to the nuns in Flanders. ‘If you like to stay here, then I exempt you till a superior be appointed whom you may acquaint, but,’ he added, ‘tell him that you made your vow of yourself & then told me & that I limited certain conditions, as that you are not bound under sin except you be commanded in virtute obedientiae. We may accept no vows, but men may make them as they list & we after give directions accordingly.’ Even now, with the prospect of a trial and horrible death before him, Garnet was worried about infringing Jesuit regulations. This letter is also undated, but it relates a dream that Oldcorne alias Hall seems to have had on 7 and 8 March, in which he and Garnet were given ‘two fair tabernacles or seats’ by the Jesuit General.23
‘Mr Hall his dream ha
d been a great comfort,’ Anne replied, ‘if at the foot of the throne there had been a place for me; God and you know my unworthiness.’ Having been tied to Garnet for the past twenty years, Anne was now unmoored. Receiving his letter had been ‘the greatest comfort that I have in this world’, she wrote, but it was also the source of her ‘greatest grief’, since ‘it seemeth you leave me’. Parts of this letter are illegible, but the writer’s need for spiritual guidance is clear: ‘How may I use my vow of poverty and what is your will absolutely for my going or staying?’ Anne beseeched her ‘good father’ to help her with his prayers and, ‘thus in most dutiful manner’, she signed off:
Yours and not my
own A.V.
She enclosed Garnet’s doublet and hose. The keeper had demanded ten pounds. ‘If you will,’ she added, ‘I will send.’24 In practical matters, Anne was as competent as ever; spiritually, like her letter, she was in disarray.
Their correspondence revealed nothing substantial in relation to the plot, but Anne’s devotion to Garnet was cruelly mocked. The prurient of Jacobean London worked the well-worn seam of hot holy ladies and randy priests. Even the Earl of Salisbury joined in. A letter from Anne apparently signed ‘your loving sister A.G.’ elicited the comment: ‘What, you are married to Mrs Vaux: she calleth herself Garnet. What! Senex fornicarius! [dirty old man!]’
In all probability, the ‘G’ was a ‘V’fn5 and even if it wasn’t, there was nothing odd in Anne pretending to be Garnet’s sister as she had done many times before. According to Garnet, Salisbury was embarrassed by the jibe and apologised at their next session, saying with a chummy arm on the priest’s shoulders that he had spoken ‘in jest’. The other examiners had apparently agreed that Garnet was ‘held for exemplar in those matters’.25
The Jesuit superior had long been accused of ‘face’ for carrying a gentlewoman up and down the country, but to his last breath he protested that Anne was a true virgin. John Gerard railed against the animalis instincts of worldly men, who ‘measure others by their own desires’. He placed Anne in the tradition of ‘so many good Marys’ who had followed Christ and his Apostles in the first days of the Church. Anne’s devotion, he wrote, was as a mark of ‘true charity’ not ‘fond affection’, a thing of beauty not censure. He was of course partisan, but surely right in this instance. ‘What greater comfort can there be in this world,’ Garnet had written to his sister Margaret upon her entry to a convent in 1593, ‘than wholly to be severed from the love of the world, and to love Him only who is better than the whole world.’ To Margaret again, he had written in the summer of 1605: ‘Love faithfully and constantly Him, which must be your perpetual lover.’ Anne, admittedly, was not ‘a religious’, that is to say, she did not forsake the world to enter a convent, but she privately vowed chastity and her lifestyle was deemed so pure that the priest John Wilson would make her the dedicatee of The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons.26
Anne and Garnet’s intimacy can be overstated. When, in 1594, the two Jesuits, Robert Southwell and Henry Walpole, were both incarcerated, Garnet found himself ‘destitute of companions’, explaining that ‘although I have very many friends, I cannot confide in them with the same freedom as I can Ours’.27 It was, however, the Jesuits who set up a discreet enquiry into all the gossip surrounding Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot. Griffith Floyd claimed to have been sent from the Jesuit College of Brunsberg ‘to understand the truth whether Garnet were privy to that treason any other way than in confession’ and ‘to remove as far as he might any hard opinion which might be held against some of the Jesuits for that action’. Among other things, Floyd was specifically charged by ‘old Father Abercromby’ to discover if there had been ‘such familiarity’ between Garnet and Anne as had been reported. ‘Upon inquiry,’ he said, ‘he found too much.’ Floyd was an unreliable witness – he was shunned by the Jesuits in London, imprisoned by the Jesuits on the Continent and offered his services to His Majesty’s government – but even the act of his dispatch ‘at the motion of [Robert] Persons, but by the commandment of Aquaviva the General’, is telling.28
The relationship between the Jesuit superior and his spinster hostess might not have been entirely appropriate after all then, but not in the sense usually implied. According to the instructions with which Campion and Persons inaugurated the Jesuit mission in England in 1580, familiar conversation with women (and boys) was to be avoided. The Jesuit-authored Exercise of a Christian Life (1579) advised priests ‘never to be in their company alone’. It was one of the best – and least extreme – remedies against lasciviousness.fn6 Conversations were to take place in open spaces or in the presence of chaperones. Penitents were warned against becoming ‘too indiscreetly addicted’ to ‘their chosen confessors’. The Treasure of Vowed Chastity gave the same advice with the unquestionable logic that ‘if there were no conference in private, there would hardly any dishonesty be ever committed’.29
‘Syneisactism’ – the practice of men and women working together chastely for God – had been common among the primitive Christians, but was viewed with suspicion by their heirs.30 Anne’s active charity – and that of Eleanor, who was usually omitted from the gossip, but nearly always lived with her sister – enabled Garnet and his brethren to survive in the mission field. One can easily imagine situations in twenty years of close cooperation in which they might have had private conversation. One can also extrapolate from Anne’s letters that, as a penitent, she was ‘too indiscreetly addicted’ to her ‘ghostly Father’. To Garnet’s nervous superiors in Rome, for whom even the idea of unenclosed nuns was radical, this would have been ‘too much’ familiarity.
*
Sometime before 11 March 1606, Anne went to the Tower of London to glimpse Garnet at his cell window. It had been carefully arranged through the mother of Garnet’s keeper. ‘You may see me, but not talk,’ Garnet had written on 3 March.31 Anne kept the appointment, but something was wrong. She knew the signs. Men were waiting. She walked away. They followed. ‘Perceiving herself to be dogged’, she made for Newgate prison, which was full of Catholics. It was a sensible strategy that put no one in jeopardy. She passed St Paul’s and entered Newgate, ‘but when they saw she intended to go no further, they presently stayed her’. It was ‘with some rough usage’, Gerard wrote, that she was carried back to the Tower.32
According to Luisa de Carvajal, the Spanish lady whom Garnet had invited to England in April, Anne was ‘alone’ in the Tower ‘without a servant’ and not allowed to speak to anyone ‘except the jailers and judge’.33 She was questioned on 11 March. Asked first about White Webbs, she said she kept the house ‘at her own charge’ with help from ‘such as did sojourn with her’. Catesby, Thomas Wintour, Tresham ‘and others’ had visited ‘divers times’, but she could not remember ‘the particular times and the particular names of all that came’. Since leaving the house at Bartholomewtide, ‘she hath passed the greatest part of her time with divers of her friends in the country’. After the search of ‘Mrs Habington’s house at Hindlip’ – always good to keep the master of the house out of it – she had travelled to London with her hostess and stayed the night in Fetter Lane. She had not stayed more than two or three nights in one place, ‘but where those places are she will make no other answer than that it is needless’.
Anne refused to disclose the whereabouts of her servants, nor would she name anyone on the pilgrimage beyond Lady Digby. ‘She will not say that Walley was there,’ her examiners noted. She would not say much at all, they realised. She ‘knew nothing of any prayer that was said’ at Coughton and ‘she understood nothing from the women at St Winifred’s Well what should be done in the beginning of the Parliament for the good of the Catholics’. She did, however, admit that the ‘fine horses’ at the stables of Wintour and Grant had made her fretful. She had implored Garnet to talk to Catesby and ‘hinder anything that possibly he might’. She had reasoned that ‘if they should attempt any foolish thing, it would redound to his discredit’. Anne told her
examiners that Garnet had reassured her that the horses were for the war in Flanders and that Catesby had shown her his letter of recommendation.
The notes of this session are endorsed: ‘The examination of Anne Vaux the maid.’34 A few days earlier, Garnet had confessed that ‘some wives’ on the pilgrimage had asked Anne ‘where we would be till the brunt were past, that is till the beginning of the Parliament’. It was this conversation, he claimed, that had made him realise that ‘all was resolved’.35 Now confronted with Anne’s denial, he said that he must have been mistaken. ‘I thought the gentlewomen past all examinations,’ he lamented privately, and Anne ‘so free from danger’ that it would have been safe to name her. He had hoped that she ‘would have kept herself out of their fingers’. He did not, however, think she was ‘taken for me, but for White Webbs’, and he was sure that ‘all will turn to the best for she shall save all her goods’.36
Garnet’s confidence in Anne was not misplaced. According to the Narrative of Tesimond, she bore her imprisonment with ‘admirable steadfastness and a courage truly virile’.37 Luisa de Carvajal thought that Anne had triumphed against her examiners. The Spaniard’s letter to her friend in Brussels, Magdalena de San Jerónimo, is so engaging, and so rarely cited, that it deserves a lengthy quotation. It is, however, very much the pro-Jesuit account:
God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Page 40
