God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

by Hogge, Alice

  Garnet’s original letter is no longer extant. Of the two existing versions—State Paper transcript of uncertain provenance and Jesuit apologia—one has deliberately been tampered with. ‘There is one thing that makes us very anxious,’ reads the first version; ‘two things make us very anxious’, reads the second. Both letters warn of trouble, both contain a degree of ambiguity, room for that warning to be misinterpreted; but one, in its very generality, suggests tacit ambivalence and one, in its call for urgent action, conveys alarm. Which message had Garnet sent?

  High summer 1605: King James left London for the country. In early August there were flash floods in the capital, ‘such as the like had not been seen in the memory of man’. The ‘channels and water courses rose so high,’ recorded John Stow, ‘that many cellars by them were over-flowed’. In late August Thomas Wintour and Guy Fawkes found that the gunpowder they had hidden in a cellar beneath the Lords’ debating chamber had ‘decayed’.* More gunpowder was brought in, ready for the first sitting of the new session of Parliament on Tuesday, 5 November.26

  While Londoners mopped out their houses, James continued his summer tour, spending a night at Harrowden Hall as a guest of Elizabeth Vaux. On 27 August he entered Oxford on a State visit. Thirty-nine years ago almost to the day his predecessor had ridden down these same streets, heard similar speeches of welcome, smelt the fresh paint on the casements, posts, and pumps as he did now, and greeted the cheering ranks of students. Queen Elizabeth’s visit had been a calculated charm offensive, James’s showed how times had changed: under the steady, almost thirty-year helm of Oxford’s Professor of Divinity the university had become the Protestant seminary the Government had hoped for, grooming mildly Calvinistic students for the national Church. There were pockets of covert papistry, pockets of a more defiant Puritanism, but for the time being Church and State combined happily in the quadrangles of Oxford—which was fortunate, for this was a messy, charmless visit. The nightly plays alternately shocked and bored the royal party; James fell asleep during one and had to be persuaded to stay through a second; he was late to the disputations, then interrupted them with argument. On Friday, 30 August, as he rode out of town, he ‘seemed not to see’ the verses ‘set upon the [college] walls’, celebrating his stay.27

  That same day another party took to the road: Henry Garnet, Anne Vaux and a handful of friends and servants, including Nicholas Owen, set out for Wales and the shrine at St Winifred’s Well. ‘I hope in this journey (which I undertake…both for health and want of a house) I shall have occasion of much good,’ Garnet wrote to Robert Persons two days before. With his letter to Aquaviva on its way, with the expectation that any day now the Pope would respond, and with the promise exacted from Catesby not to attempt anything meanwhile, had Garnet relaxed his guard? Or was he being less than honest with his old Jesuit colleague? ‘[F]or anything we can see,’ he told Persons, ‘Catholics are quiet, and likely to continue their old patience.’28

  The journey west took Garnet from safe house to safe house. In Warwickshire he stayed at Norbrook, near Stratford-upon-Avon, belonging to John Grant, husband of Dorothy Wintour; from there he moved on to Huddington as a guest of Robert Wintour. Both Grant and Robert Wintour were now in the thick of the plot. The party grew in number; Elizabeth Vaux, John Gerard, Edward Oldcorne, and Oswald Tesimond, and three friends of Gerard’s, Elizabeth, wife of Ambrose Rookwood, and Sir Everard and Lady Digby: all seized the chance to make this pilgrimage. The return journey took them to the Treshams at Rushton Hall and from there Garnet, still homeless, rode on to Gayhurst, Digby’s house in Buckinghamshire, arriving towards the end of September. Rookwood, Tresham, and Digby: each new name bound the Jesuits closer to the plot; on 29 September Catesby approached Rookwood to join him, on 14 October he approached his cousin Francis Tresham and in late October he approached Everard Digby.* The strength of the Jesuit mission lay in its ability to build a network of secret enclaves across the country protected by ties of consanguinity and by a shared vulnerability to exposure. This strength was now going to be its undoing: safe houses these no longer were.29

  On 4 October Garnet wrote again to Robert Persons. The persecution, he explained, had become ‘more severe’ and rumour was that James ‘had hitherto stroked Papists, but now [would] strike’. He still believed that ‘the best sort of Catholics [would] bear all their losses with patience’, but he offered Persons a dark warning: ‘how these tyrannical proceedings…may drive particular men to desperate attempts, that I cannot answer for’. Throughout their pilgrimage Anne Vaux had been struck by the quantity of horses stabled with her cousins, telling Garnet she ‘feared these wild heads had something in hand’. But in the absence of any public response from the Vatican, Garnet seems to have retreated into numb officialdom: his orders from Aquaviva were to avoid meddling in anything that did not directly concern his apostolate, so this is what he did. He later explained: ‘I…cut off all occasions (after I knew the project) of any discoursing with [Catesby] of it, thereby to save myself harm both with the State here, and with my Superiors at Rome.’ With his pilgrimage over his ambition now was to get back to the capital: ‘we are to go within few days nearer London’, he told Persons.30

  Garnet never made it to London. In late October Anne Vaux came to him ‘choked with sorrow’. She told him she feared ‘disorder’, because ‘some of the gentlewomen [probably some of the conspirators’ wives] had demanded of her where they should bestow themselves until the burst was past in the beginning of Parliament’. ‘Whereupon’, testified Garnet afterwards, ‘I gathered that all was resolved.’ If this statement is true, then Garnet now did an extraordinary thing: instead of removing himself from danger he took himself right to the hub of it. He accepted Everard Digby’s offer to join him at Coughton Court in Warwickshire; and he did so knowing that Digby was drawn into the plot and suspecting that the plotters wanted him with them ‘for their own projects’.31

  It was a small party that set out to Coughton on Tuesday, 29 October, just Lady Digby, Garnet, and Tesimond, Anne Vaux and her sister, and Nicholas Owen. Sir Everard Digby was to ride over from Gayhurst a few days later, for a ‘hunting party’ (the purpose of which was to kidnap Princess Elizabeth, James’s daughter, from her nearby lodgings, ready to proclaim her Queen the moment her father had been killed).* Catesby too, wrote Garnet, had promised to come to Coughton. Had he kept this promise, Garnet intended to enter ‘into the matter with [him], and perhaps might have hindered all’. It was a desperate hope. More realistic was the next sentence in Garnet’s statement: ‘Other means of hindrance I could not devise, as I would have desired.’ On Wednesday, 6 November Robert Catesby’s servant Thomas Bates rode into Coughton, bringing news of Guy Fawkes’ arrest and of the plot’s discovery. As Garnet read a letter from Catesby and Digby, which excused their rashness but begged him to help them raise a party against the King, Bates heard him turn to Tesimond and say ‘we [are] all utterly undone’.32

  According to a subsequent Government publication, the news of an imminent attack on Parliament was first revealed to it late on Saturday, 26 October. It so happened that Catesby’s cousin by marriage, Lord Mounteagle, was at his Hoxton house that evening, a house in London’s suburbs he seldom visited (this was the same Mounteagle who earlier had exclaimed that the time was ripe to rebel against James because he was ‘so odious to all’). A stranger approached his servant in the street with an anonymous letter.* Mounteagle had trouble deciphering the letter and asked his servant to read it out to him while he ate supper, so that everyone could hear. The letter’s meaning was unclear, so Mounteagle immediately took it to Robert Cecil. Cecil, looking through it, was ‘put in mind of divers advertisements…from beyond the seas…concerning some business the papists were in’, but he and his fellow Councillors, with noticeable sang-froid, decided to wait until the King returned from hunting before informing him. James returned from hunting on Thursday, 31 October. The afternoon of the following day, Friday, 1 November, Cecil showed him the let
ter. James, ‘who was always very fortunate in solving of riddles’, no sooner read the letter but divined the true meaning of it—that there was a plot to blow up Parliament—and ordered that the buildings be searched. A preliminary search, which did not take place until some three days later, on Monday, 4 November, revealed a suspicious quantity of firewood in one of the cellars. A second search, some time late on Monday/early on Tuesday, 5 November, revealed the gunpowder and Guy Fawkes, hiding in the shadows. This is what happened, said the Government.33

  The exact details of the Gunpowder Plot have never been established. Any account of them must pick its way carefully between two extremes. On the one hand there is the version, favoured by the conspiracy theorists, that holds that the plot was a deliberate Government invention, designed to destroy English Catholicism. On the other hand there was the official version released subsequently by James’s Government, some of the less believable details of which have been outlined above.

  This account holds that there was a genuine plot, led by Robert Catesby, to detonate a quantity of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords as Parliament met for its new session, but that the Government-authorized version of events, with all its omissions, elisions, and obfuscations, was a calculated means of making capital from Catesby’s crime. In which case, the nine-day gap between Robert Cecil first reading Mounteagle’s letter and Guy Fawkes’ arrest is crucial to any understanding of the events that followed—because it is inconceivable that Cecil, even assuming he was ignorant of the plot before 26 October, did nothing at all during this period (he, himself, would later admit that the gap had allowed the plot time ‘to ripen’).34

  It is the breaks in the pattern of normality over these few days that attract attention. For example, on 31 October the new Spanish ambassador, Don Pedro de Zúñiga, wrote that he had just received an unexpected message from Robert Cecil, saying that if the Pope could guarantee Catholic loyalty to the State under pain of excommunication, then James would remit the penal laws, allowing Catholics to ‘live as they please’.* Assuming that Zúñiga passed this important piece of news on promptly (and, since his instructions were to do everything to further the cause of religious tolerance for English Catholics, then this is probable), then Cecil’s message to him was written after the discovery of the Mounteagle letter. So what did it mean? It could not mean that Cecil hoped the Pope would step in and save the day—there was no time for this and Cecil was more than capable of stopping a plot himself. It could have been statesman’s bluff, a way of making England’s Government appear reasonable in the face of soon-to-be-uncovered Catholic treachery; but the gains from this last were few. A more intriguing conjecture is this: if Cecil were still looking to neutralize the Catholic threat by finding a tidy legal answer to the Bloody Question, then the plot had given him a powerful new tool, outrage, with which to force the matter through. In which case, as with his previous dealings with the Appellants over an oath of allegiance, there was one group of Catholics that might usefully serve as a scapegoat to help him achieve this end: the Jesuits.35

  While Cecil waited to act, the intelligence reports began rolling in. On 3 November, some thirty-six hours before Guy Fawkes’ capture, the informant John Bird was identifying a possible hideout for Garnet and Gerard, adding, ‘most like it is that they…have been the hatchers and plotters of this damnable stratagem’. Two days later, with Fawkes in custody but refusing to name his accomplices, Attorney General Sir Edward Coke was writing that Thomas Wintour’s connections had been sent for, to be questioned. That same day came Sir John Popham’s comments on Elizabeth Vaux’s letter and his observation that Gerard and Garnet were often at her house, and also a note from the informant George Southwicke, explaining that he had been hunting the plotters for eight days now (since 29 October) and he needed a warrant ‘for their apprehension’. The following day, Wednesday, 6 November, the King ordered that Fawkes be tortured.36

  It took only a short while for the nation to wake up to its recent escape, helped in part by the Government placing all London ‘under arms’ on 5 November. One correspondent, writing on Thursday, 7 November, described how on Tuesday night the church bells had rung ‘and as great [a] store of bonfires [had been lit] as ever I think was seen’. His letter mingled shock with rumour: ‘some five or six Jesuits’, he wrote, had been arrested. Shock and rumour would characterize the public response to the plot, swiftly followed by righteous anger: ‘this most devilish treason’, wrote a second correspondent, this ‘most horrible and detestable treason’, wrote a third, this ‘abominable conspiracy so inhumanly contrived by the devil’, wrote the Scottish Council to James.37

  On 7 November Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, informed Robert Cecil that though Fawkes was still not talking, he had now given a reason for his silence: an unbreakable oath of secrecy sealed by a holy ceremony. Little is unbreakable under torture: two days later Fawkes was ready to confess—but to Cecil alone. His testimony was worth the wait: ‘Gerard, the Jesuit,’ said Fawkes, ‘gave them the sacrament, to confirm their oath of secrecy’. Though Fawkes was insistent Gerard was unaware of the plot, the Jesuit’s name was now passed on to the informant George Southwicke to add to his newly issued arrest warrant. Fawkes had a second piece of information: the plotters had made use of Garnet’s lodgings, White Webbs, as a meeting place. A search of the house was ordered, but the pursuivants were disappointed: they found ‘popish books and relics’ and ‘many trapdoors and passages’, but no papers, no munitions and no Garnet.38

  The search for Gerard, ordered on 10 November, was begun two days later. ‘I have used all possible expedition for my repair to Mrs Vaux, her house at Harrowden,’ wrote the man charged with it, William Tate, ‘whither I came with as much secrecy as could be on Tuesday, the 12th of this instant month, between twelve and one of the clock.’ Gerard takes up the story: ‘They were to search [Harrowden] scrupulously and if they failed to find me, stay on until they were recalled. Day and night guards were set at a distance of three miles round, with orders to arrest any passing stranger.’39

  ‘I was in my hiding-place,’ wrote Gerard. ‘I could sit down all right but there was hardly room to stand. However, I did not go hungry, for every night food was brought to me secretly. And…when the rigour of the search had relaxed slightly, my friends came at night and took me out and warmed me by a fire.’ Tate detailed the ‘unprofitable endeavours’ of the searchers: ‘I examined every corner,’ he explained to Cecil, ‘though there [was] no appearance to give the least suspicion.’ A few days into the search Elizabeth Vaux opened one of Harrowden’s hides for the pursuivants. ‘Her hope’, wrote Gerard, ‘was that they would think that, if a priest was in the house, he would be hiding there, and that they would then call off the search.’ ‘I entered and searched the same,’ wrote Tate, ‘and found it the most secret place that ever I saw, and so contrived that it was without all possibility to be discovered. There I found many Popish books…but no man in it.’ On Saturday, 16 November Tate left Harrowden for London, taking Elizabeth Vaux with him but leaving his servants to continue the search. It was not until 20 November that they finally abandoned the house: ‘they thought I could not possibly have been there all that time without being discovered’, explained Gerard.40

  It must soon have become apparent to the Government how convenient it would be to make this a Jesuit-inspired conspiracy. The same day the plot was revealed to the nation the Council instructed London’s Lord Mayor to quash an ‘evil bruit’ that Spain was behind the attack. Four days later James went to Parliament, to give MPs his account of the plot’s discovery and to clear himself of any responsibility for it: the plotters’ actions could not have been a ‘work of revenge’, said James, because ‘I scarcely ever knew any of them’. James would not be blamed: under his ‘wise temperament’ and his ‘indulgent hand’, the papists, said the Government, had never had it so good. And Spain could not be blamed: the recent peace treaty and subsequent alliance made this diplomatically impossi
ble, no matter the details now emerging about the Spanish Treason. So the plotters became, in the Government’s wording, ‘mad zealots’ and, just as all the dangerous conspiracies of Elizabeth’s reign had been ‘incited…by the Jesuits’, so this action, too, was laid at the Society’s door. A supporting cast of exiled—and reviled—Catholics, notably Hugh Owen and Sir William Stanley, was drafted in to flesh out the conspiracy, but the impetus for the plot, implied the Government, was the Jesuits’. This suited James, for by now his loathing of the order was well documented: ‘Puritan-papists’ was his description of its members.41

  The problem was that as each surviving suspect was examined—some of their number, including Catesby and Percy, had been killed during capture—not one of them implicated the Jesuits in the action. On 12 November Thomas Wintour was brought to the interrogation room for the first time, only to say that ‘they had no priest amongst them’; Francis Tresham, questioned specifically about Gerard and Garnet, declined ‘to say what [had] passed between them’; Elizabeth Vaux denied all knowledge of Gerard. So, with no one giving it the information it wanted the Government was forced to go hunting for itself. Thomas Wilson, Cecil’s secretary, dug up an out-of-date, inaccurate list ‘of the haunts and residence which Jesuits were wont to have…whereof haply there may be some use made at this present’. George Southwicke reported rumours from Norfolk that Gerard had said mass for the plotters. Sir Edward Coke fleshed this out hopefully, scribbling on the margin of Elizabeth Vaux’s confession, ‘Gerard the priest ministered the sacrament to all the traitors, etc., as well for execution as for secrecy’. Meanwhile, Everard Digby’s servants provided evidence about the pilgrimage to St Winifred’s Well and a mass said by Garnet for the Digbys at Coughton.42