God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England
Page 41
Mistress Anne Vaux was quite entertaining with them when they took her confession. (They have the habit of saying that all Catholic women are ladies of ill repute, so I have heard, because they have priests and Fathers living in their homes, because, aside from their malice and hate against the faith, they are ill able to judge others in this matter.) And they said that Mistress Anne has lived in sin with Master Farmer, who is Father Garnet, and they said as much to her and she, even though she was imprisoned there in the Tower, laughed loudly two or three times (for she is really quite funny and very lively) and she said,
‘You come to me with this child’s play and impertinence? A sign that you have nothing of importance with which to charge me.’
And she laughed bravely at them, making a great joke of their behaviour in that business.
They asked her whether she had known about the Gunpowder Plot. She said, of course she had known, for since she was a woman, how could anything possibly happen in England without her being told of it? They asked her if Master Farmer knew about it. She said that since he was the greatest traitor in the world [mayor traidor del mundo], he hadn’t missed getting involved in that treason; and that she was in great debt to them because she hadn’t been able to find a single place in all of London to stay, even with money, and they had given her room and board for nothing.
To more weighty questions, she responded very sensibly and she pays no attention whatsoever to them, and so she has them amazed and they are saying,
‘We absolutely do not know what to do with that woman!’38
The day after her examination, Anne, perhaps mindful that sarcasm was not the wisest form of defence, made a statement:
I am most sore to hear that Father Garnet should be any ways privy to this most wicked action as himself ever called it, for that he made to me many great protestations to the contrary diverse times since.
Anne Vaux.39
Twelve days later, on 24 March, Anne was questioned again, almost entirely about Francis Tresham. On his deathbed in the Tower, Tresham had tried to exonerate Garnet from the 1602 ‘Spanish treason’ by claiming that he had ‘not seen him in sixteen years before’. His amanuensis, William Vavasour, wrote that Tresham had meant ‘at that time’, nor ‘in fifteen or sixteen years before’.40 Either way, Tresham had lied. He had seen Garnet at that time and the previous year, around the time of the Essex rebellion (February 1601). Garnet confessed as much in the Tower on 22 and 23 March, adding that Tresham, Catesby and Wintour had ‘dealt with me about the sending into Spain’.41
In her second examination, Anne divulged several other occasions when her ‘cousin germane removed’ had come to see her and Garnet. There had been the two or three visits by Tresham to White Webbs after the accession of the King, ‘sometimes in the company of Mr Catesby’. There had been an afternoon chat with Garnet at a house in Wandsworth in the first year of James’s reign. There had been a dinner at Erith ‘between Easter and Whitsuntide last’, when ‘Catesby came hither likewise’. Tresham had also visited ‘another house they had’ in the summer and ‘had some conference with Mr Garnet, where likewise he exhorted him to all patience’.
Anne must have wondered why her examiners were so particularly interested in her late cousin. She insisted that Garnet ‘always’ gave Tresham good advice ‘and persuaded him to rest contented’. Her statement was shown to Garnet, who wrote on it: ‘I do acknowledge these meetings & repair of Mr Tresham to be true.’ Anne subsequently remembered paying her respects at Rushton Hall just after the death of Sir Thomas Tresham in September 1605. ‘I also do well remember this above now, which I did not think of before,’ wrote Garnet, who had claimed two days earlier that the last meeting with Tresham had been ‘at Fremlands about July’.42
Anne had also given up Erith, the house that Garnet had lied to protect, but nothing else was revelatory. Garnet himself had already admitted that Catesby was ‘seldom long from us, for the great affection he bore the gentlewoman with whom I lived’.43 Anne’s kinship ties were unspectacular. The whole point of her second examination, as Coke freely admitted to Salisbury, was ‘the damnable execration of Tresham’.44 At Garnet’s trial four days later, Tresham’s declaration that he had not seen Garnet ‘in fifteen or sixteen years before’ 1602 was twisted to appear to suggest that he had not seen Garnet in sixteen years before 1605. ‘Yet Garnet,’ Coke announced with a flourish,
and Mrs Anne Vaux (though otherwise a very obstinate woman) confessed that Tresham within these three years had been several times at their houses at White Webbs and Mrs Vaux confessed that he had been twice there this very last year, and had received very good counsel from him.
So ‘what,’ Coke asked, ‘shall we think of this man?’45
Garnet floundered: ‘It may be, my Lord, he meant to equivocate.’ This spurred Coke in his denunciation of the Jesuits’ deceitful doctrine, which was ‘a kind of unchastity’ as it perverted the marriage of heart and tongue. Tresham’s death with a lie on his lips had proved that he and Garnet were ‘stained with their own works and went a whoring with their own inventions’. Coke knew that Garnet had ‘seen and allowed’ the treatise of equivocation that he had discovered in December ‘in a chamber in the Inner Temple wherein Sir Thomas Tresham used to lie’.46 One wonders what the prosecutor would have made of the knowledge that Garnet had actually written it. Even so, he declared the Jesuit superior a ‘doctor of dissimulation’, as well as of ‘deposing of princes, disposing of kingdoms, daunting and deterring of subjects, and destruction’. According to the indictment, Garnet was the author of a plot ‘so inhuman, so barbarous, so damnable, so detestable as the like was never read nor heard of, or ever entered into the heart of the most wicked man to imagine’.
The plump clergyman with a bald patch and spectacles (if Anne ever found him a suitable pair) did not look much like an arch-villain (nor, for that matter, a Lothario), but, as Salisbury had briefed before the trial, it was ‘the cause, not the person’ that mattered. The ‘poor seduced priest’, who had surrendered his Englishman’s heart and cleaved to ‘an unnatural and unjust supremacy’, symbolised the corruption of Rome. Indeed, he had become ‘the little Pope of this kingdom’. His life had no intrinsic value,
but seeing the law of nature and of nations teacheth all kings to prevent destruction practised under the mantle of religion, it is expedient to make it manifest to the world how far these men’s doctrinal practice toucheth into the bowels of treason. Further and so forever after stop the mouths of their calumniation that preach and print our laws to be executed for difference in point of conscience.47
It was the point that Salisbury’s father, Lord Burghley, had made in The Execution of Justice after the death of Edmund Campion.
The prosecution had Garnet conspiring against the State since his return to England in 1586, ‘which very act was a treason’. Garnet had more than justified the need for the 1585 statute against seminary priests. The Gunpowder Plot was a manifestation of the evil that lurked under the cloak of religion, just as the Armada had been, and the Babington Plot, the Northern rising and the 1570 bull of excommunication against Queen Elizabeth (issued when Garnet was just fourteen). ‘Before the bull of Impious Pius Quintus,’ Coke announced, ‘there were no recusants in England … but thereupon presently they refused to assemble in our churches.’ Recusancy was grounded upon a ‘disloyal cause’; it was ‘a very dangerous and disloyal thing’. Garnet may have been the man at the bar, but his faith, his Society and his ‘Jesuited Catholic’ followers were all on trial.
Salisbury insisted that the court was impartial and that Garnet could draw on his own testimony and that of his friends for defence. ‘This gentlewoman,’ he added, ‘that seems to speak for you in her confessions, I think would sacrifice herself for you to do you good, and you likewise for her.’ Salisbury may have been right, but Anne’s statement was only cited to expose Tresham’s falsehood.
The trial at the Guildhall on Friday, 28 March 1606, lasted all day, from
nine thirty in the morning to around six in the evening. The charge was that Garnet had conspired with Catesby and Tesimond on 9 June 1605 to kill the King and his heir, to stir sedition and slaughter throughout the kingdom, to subvert ‘the true religion of God’ and to overthrow the whole state of the commonwealth. It took the jury less than fifteen minutes to find him guilty. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
fn1 Sack (or sherry) was a sweet fortified wine famously appreciated by Falstaff: ‘If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.’ (2 Henry IV, Act 4, Scene 2)
fn2 ‘James Johnson’ vere John Grissold, Anne Vaux’s servant and caretaker at White Webbs. Later that day he deposed that, ‘having now seen Garnet the Jesuit’, he had ‘many times seen him with his mistress at her house at White Webbs and that he was called by the name of Mese when he came first and was said to be his mistress’s kinsman.’ (PRO SP 14/216/189)
fn3 This was Garnet’s All Saints sermon on the text: ‘Take away the perfidious people from the land of believers.’ Garnet did not deny having given it, but he insisted that his prayers were ‘against ill laws to be made’ and not, as was alleged, to commend ‘the business of the Parliament House’. (HMC Salisbury, 18, p. 109)
fn4 The forger may have been one Arthur Gregory, who would petition Salisbury for work towards the end of the year. He reminded him of his past ‘secret services’ in ‘discovering the secret writing being in blank, to abuse a most cunning villain in his own subtlety, leaving the same in blank again. Wherein, though there be difficulty, their answers show they have no suspicion.’ Gregory was keen ‘to write in another man’s hand’ again. (Hogge, God’s Secret Agents, pp. 377–8)
fn5 The letter in question has not survived, so one cannot be sure, but elsewhere Anne’s capital V could easily have been mistaken for a G. For example, PRO SP 14/216/201 below:
Other contemporary hands also had strange Vs. In the examination of William Handy, for example, it looked like a ‘b’ (PRO SP 14/216/121). A portrait of William, third Lord Vaux (Plate 4), that was part of the contents of Grimshaw Hall sold by Christie’s in March 2000, was catalogued as ‘Lo. Gauge’ after a misread inscription (Sale 8689, Lot 286). Incidentally, Grimshaw Hall in Warwickshire is less than five miles from Baddesley Clinton.
fn6 Another was self-mortification: ‘This remedy did Saint Benet use, feeling some fire in his flesh through the thinking of a woman; who, stripping off his clothes, rolled himself stark naked upon thorns and weltered so long there till his body became all of a goare [sic] blood, and so vanquished his temptation.’
The Exercise also recommended thoughts of death and cited a priest who had opened the coffin of a woman he had fancied and, finding the corpse ‘rotten and stinking very filthily’, dipped his handkerchief in the ‘carrionly filth’. Thereafter, ‘when either this or any other woman came to his mind, he presently took this cloth, and all to be-smothered his face withal, saying “Glut thy self, thou luxurious wretch, glut thyself with this filthy saviour of stinking flesh”, and by this means was rid of this temptation.’ (Loarte, Exercise, sigs 108–9)
26
Yours Forever
‘I never allowed it,’ Garnet protested to Anne a week after his trial, ‘I sought to hinder it more than men can imagine, as the Pope will tell. It was not my part (as I thought) to disclose it.’ Garnet had heard that five hundred Catholics had turned Protestant in the wake of the trial. Many were ‘scandalized’ by his acquaintance with the plot, ‘but who,’ he asked, ‘can hinder but he must know things sometimes which he would not?’ Other co-religionists deemed Garnet a coward for having given up too much information.1 He begged them to consider what they would have done if they had been examined upwards of twenty-three times ‘upon so many evidences’. He had hurt nobody, he informed his ‘very loving & most dear sister’ Anne, and ‘howsoever I shall die a thief, yet you may assure yourself your innocency is such that I doubt not but if you die by reason of your imprisonment, you shall die a martyr’.
Garnet was concerned about Anne’s health – her ‘weakness’ – and he hoped that if she did survive prison and escape abroad, she would not cloister herself in a convent. He also advised that St Omer was not as ‘wholesome’ as Brussels, but he thought it ‘absolutely the best’ if Anne could stay in England and ‘enjoy the use of sacraments in such sort as heretofore’. He wished that she and Eleanor could live ‘as before, in a house of common repair of the Society or where the superior of the mission shall ordinarily remain’. Again, he reminded Anne of the Rules: ‘you must know that none of the Society can accept a vow of obedience of any, but any one may vow as he will & then one of the Society may direct accordingly.’ She could ‘do the like’ with her vow of poverty, ‘but this I would have you know, that all that which is out for annuities I always meant to be yours, hoping that after your death you will leave what you can well spare to the mission’.
Garnet entrusted Anne with his instructions for the Jesuits: Richard Blount was to look after missionary business – the collections, distributions and communications – while three priests were authorised to take Jesuit confessions and the vow renewals ‘until a superior be made’. Garnet wanted his debts honoured, even the £4 2s that he owed, ‘though not in rigour’, to Thomas Wintour. This should be paid to the late plotter’s sister. ‘As for the goods at your house’, he was confident that anything on show would be left alone. ‘I gave order that the books should be taken away, neither was there any place fit to hide them, but if they or anything else be found in holes, you must challenge them as yours as indeed they are. Otherwise let all things lie that are hidden.’
Garnet wrote his final two sentences in Latin:
Tempus est ut incipiat judicium a domo Dei.
Vale mihi semper dilectissima in Xto et ora pro me.2
The first was a scriptural quotation:
The time is come that judgment should begin at the house of God.
(1 Peter 4:17)
The second was his farewell to Anne:
Goodbye my ever dearest in Christ and pray for me.
It was not, in fact, Garnet’s last letter to Anne. Nor is it likely that she read it. The Lieutenant of the Tower forwarded it to Salisbury the following day recommending that it remain secret. He also proposed that ‘if good search be made at the house at Erith, his books will be found there’.3
The last letter came on 21 April, Easter Monday (Plate 37). In the interim, Garnet had been examined several more times and had been told many things: that he might be spared death; that Tesimond had been captured and had disclaimed their walking confession; that Richard Fulwood and another servant had been taken with a letter and a cipher; that Edward Oldcorne was dead. Only the last statement was true. The Jesuit was executed on 7 April at Red Hill, near Worcester, alongside his servant, Ralph, who had hidden in the hole at Hindlip with Nicholas Owen. ‘It pleaseth God daily to multiply my crosses,’ Garnet lamented to Anne, ‘I beseech Him give me patience & perseverance usque in finem.’ He catalogued his hellish year:
I was after a week’s hiding taken in a friend’s house. Here, our confessions & secret conferences were heard & my letters taken by some indiscretion abroad. Then the taking of yourself. After, my arraignment. Then the taking of Mr Greenwell [Tesimond]. Then the slander of us both abroad. Then the ransacking anew of Erith & the other house. Then the execution of Mr Hall [Oldcorne] & now, last of all, the apprehension of Richard & Robert with a cipher, I know not of whose, laid to my charge & that which was a singular oversight, a letter written in cipher together with the cipher, which letter may bring many into question. Sufferentiam Job audistis et finem Domini vidistis, quoniam misericors Dominus est et miserator.
Sit nomen Domini benedictum. 21 April.
Yours in aeternumfn1
as I hope, H.G.4
There was almost half a page left, so Garnet, perhaps mindful that forged words could be added, f
illed it with an oversized Jesuit seal: the monogram IHS surmounted by a cross and encircled by the sun. Below, three nails pierce a heart with words from the psalm (72:26): ‘Deus cordis mei: et pars mea Deus in aeternum – God of my heart and God that is my portion forever.’
*
Henry Garnet was executed in St Paul’s churchyard on Saturday, 3 May 1606. Easter week had been deemed too holy and May Day, the traditional day of misrule, too riotous. ‘Will you make a May game of me?’ he had asked. The 3rd of May – the feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross – seemed more apposite to him. It also suited John Gerard, who quietly sailed away from England, assisted, he claimed, by Garnet’s ascending spirit.5
‘Dressed in a poor black habit and clothes reaching down to his feet’, Garnet was taken from his cell and led through the courtyard towards the hurdle and horses that would take him along Cheapside to St Paul’s. According to some Catholic reports, Anne rushed down from her cell to see him. Before either could speak, the Lieutenant of the Tower, who had only given permission for Anne to watch from her window, ‘fell into a great rage, reviling the keeper with many oaths’. The man protested that he was only following orders, which sent the Lieutenant into a ‘greater passion’. He demanded that Anne be taken away, ‘which was suddenly done, the gentlewoman seeming much amazed at her so unexpected bringing down & so hasty returning’.6
At the scaffold, beyond the ‘great fire prepared for the burning of his bowels’, Garnet’s supporters saw the face of a saint-in-the-making. According to a manuscript account that was preserved for years by friends of the Vauxes in Northamptonshire, he appeared ‘very modest and grave, yet cheerful & somewhat smiling’. Luisa de Carvajal wrote of his ‘peaceful and composed demeanour’.7 Conversely, Garnet’s critics saw a nervous, shifty man casting about for a last-minute reprieve.8 Many dwelt on his association with equivocation. Although ‘he will equivocate at the gallows’, Dudley Carleton quipped, ‘he will be hanged without equivocation’.9