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

by Hogge, Alice

  Conventional wisdom might have dictated that the plotters’ trial and execution be delayed until such time as they and the wanted Jesuits could be made to confront each other, conventional wisdom and a desire to see justice done fairly. But this Government was being driven by neither: when Parliament met that month to consider how best to respond to the plot, attempts were made to convict Garnet, Gerard and Tesimond of treason even before they had been arrested. This was a Government driven by its emotions and, in some quarters, by the cold political realization that there was capital to be made from a narrowly averted catastrophe. When James addressed the new session of Parliament his opening speech gave indication of how fairness had given way to fear. Not all Catholics were guilty, he reminded MPs, yet ‘no other sect…[not] Turk, Jew, nor Pagan, no, not even those of Calcutta, who adore the Devil, did ever maintain…that it was lawful, or rather meritorious as the Romish Catholics call it, to murder Princes’. Robert Cecil, writing the day of the January proclamation, saw no irony in detailing his dislike of the Jesuits, then giving his reader the good news that those same Jesuits were ‘discovered…to be persuaders and actors’ in the plot. James’s Government was not unduly savage—over the course of this period several Jesuits would fall into its hands: all were questioned, some were tortured, few were killed—but it was capable of political expediency and it did want revenge.63

  Henry Garnet’s progress towards London was a slow, painful affair—Bromley would describe the priest to Cecil as ‘a weak and wearisome traveller’—but for all that, it was surprisingly cheerful. In a secret letter to Anne Vaux, written at the beginning of March, Garnet told of the journey and of the events surrounding it. ‘We were very merry and content within [our hide],’ he wrote, ‘and heard the searchers every day most curious above us, which made me indeed think the place would be found.’* His capture, he said, had been by chance—the searchers had not known he was at Hindlip; neither, he wrote, had he known about the proclamation for his arrest: ‘if I had…I would have come forth, and offered myself to Mr Habington…to have been his prisoner’. He described the respect with which Sir Henry Bromley had treated him: ‘we…were exceedingly well used, and dined and supped with him and his every day’. His health had suffered much during his eight days’ hiding, and at Westminster’s Gatehouse prison, where first he was lodged, he ‘was much distempered…and could not eat anything, but went supperless to bed’; the Tower, to which he was moved on 14 February, was ‘far better’. ‘I am allowed every meal a good draught of excellent claret wine,’ he wrote, ‘and I am liberal with myself and neighbours for good respects.’ Of his life, he was ‘careless’. For Garnet, who, in Rome, had been called the ‘poor sheep’ on account of his shyness, who had never been destined to lead the Jesuit mission and who had sought to resign the position believing himself unsuited to it, his mission was over. His ordeal was just beginning.* 64

  On 13 February, the day before his transfer to the Tower, Garnet was led the short distance from the Gatehouse to Whitehall to meet the Privy Council. The streets, he noted, were packed with ‘a great multitude’, all come to stare at him; the Councillors found him no less of a curiosity and throughout this first examination they treated him with an elaborate ‘courtesy’. He was kept there for four hours. During that time he acknowledged receipt of Catesby’s letter at Coughton, but denied any intention to inform Edward Baynham of the plot’s success: this was the sum total of Bates’s evidence against him. He further denied any knowledge of the Spanish Treason. The bulk of the questions, he wrote to Anne Vaux, ‘were about the authority of the Pope’, the issue at the heart of the Bloody Question. ‘“You see, Mr Garnet,”’ Garnet quoted Robert Cecil as saying, ‘“we deal not with you in matters of religion, or of your priesthood…but in this high point in which you must satisfy the King, that he may know what to trust unto.”’ Subsidiary to this line of enquiry was a long debate about lying. On the table in front of the Council was a manuscript copy of a treatise on equivocation, found in Francis Tresham’s rooms and annotated by Garnet. In fact, though the Government was unaware of it, the treatise was Garnet’s own work, originally written in 1598. Its handwritten title, A Treatise against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation…published in defence of Innocency, gave some clue as to Garnet’s discomfiture with the subject; not, though, to the extent to which he was already putting his theories into practice. At the end of this first session, ill and exhausted though he was, Garnet felt he had acquitted himself well: ‘I am sure I have hurt nobody,’ he informed Anne Vaux.65

  For the following few days his captors’ courtesy and his own cheerfulness continued. In his letter to Vaux he recounted ‘a pleasant discourse’ between himself and Sir Edward Coke; he described the ‘kind’ usage shown him by Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, and the sudden moment when Sir John Popham had recognized him as a fellow trainee printer from their youth. He did not describe, and perhaps should have, the kindness of his gaoler, who had placed him and Oldcorne in adjoining cells, telling them they might communicate with each other (by means of a small hatch) and offering to smuggle out letters for them. But there were moments of anguish: he told of his realization that his friend Catesby ‘had fained…things for to induce others’; he revealed his confusion at the charges made against Tesimond by Bates, and his certainty that Tesimond was innocent of them; he spoke of his anxieties. ‘I thank God I am and have been intrepidus,’ he wrote, ‘[but] I often fear torture.’ He was right to.

  On 19 February the Privy Council instructed Waad to commit ‘the inferior sort’ of prisoners ‘to the manacles’. Among the first to the wall was Nicholas Owen. Owen had been in prison before; he had been tortured before. His preliminary examination, taken on 26 February, showed practised restraint. He denied knowing Garnet or Oldcorne. He had met Ralph Ashley in a pub, he said. He had only arrived at Hindlip two days before the search and he refused to say where he had come from.66

  On 1 March he was examined again. Now he admitted to being Garnet’s servant. He admitted to being with Garnet at Coughton, at Hindlip and at White Webbs. He gave detailed information about life at Hindlip—about the room in which they had stayed, about the fires he had lit each day for Garnet, about their eating arrangements. He said nothing incriminatory. At 5 p.m. on the afternoon of the same day the Tower bell rang, calling an end to visiting hours, and a Somerset gentleman, James Fitzjames, said goodbye to a friend and left the prison, taking with him the breaking news that Owen had just been tortured to death. (Later he passed the news on to another friend. Later still both men would come up before the Star Chamber charged with ‘treasonable speech’.)67

  The official report told a very different story from Fitzjames. On 2 March—somehow twenty-four hours had been lost in the process—Sir William Waad’s evening meal was interrupted by Owen’s gaoler, running in to say that his prisoner was dying. Waad had gathered up his dinner guests and they had all hurried off to Owen’s cell, in time to hear him confess to killing himself rather than face more torture. The gaoler filled in the picture. Earlier Owen had complained of feeling unwell and the gaoler had fetched him a knife to cut his meat; he had also complained that his soup was cold and had asked the gaoler to warm it for him next door. The gaoler had agreed, but as soon as his back was turned Owen had ripped himself open with the knife; Waad and his witnesses could see for themselves the two deep tears in the dead man’s abdomen.68

  It was not too long before this official report was being questioned. On 13 March the Venetian ambassador reported home in careful cipher: ‘Public opinion holds that [Owen] died of the tortures inflicted on him, which were so severe that they deprived him not only of his strength, but of the power to move any part of his body.’ Owen’s friends, meanwhile, were incredulous. How had Owen got hold of a knife? asked John Gerard; ‘knives are not allowed…[except] those such as are broad at the point, and will only cut towards the midst. And if one be sore tortured…he is not able to handle that knife neither for many days’. More
over, added Gerard, Owen had a hernia, ‘taken with excessive pains in his former labours; and a man in that case is so unable to abide torments, that the civil law does forbid to torture any man that is broken’. Every Catholic agreed it was inconceivable that Owen could have committed so mortal a sin as to take his own life.69

  Both John Gerard and Oswald Tesimond reported Owen’s death and their anger burns fresh off the page even at this distance. ‘They tormented him with hideous cruelty,’ wrote Tesimond, and ‘the result of all this brutal, indeed bestial, torture was that, in the course of it, Owen’s belly burst open, his bowels gushed out, and in a short while he died.’ Gerard noted that his interrogators had ‘girded his belly with a plate of iron to keep in his bowels, but the extremity of pain (which is most, in that kind of torment, about the breast and belly) did force out his guts, and so the iron did serve but to cut and wound his body, which, perhaps, did afterwards put them in mind to give it out that he had ripped his belly with a knife’. Tesimond fired off this question: ‘Does William Waad 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?’70

  It seems certain the suicide story was a fiction concocted by a Government deeply embarrassed to find itself with a corpse in its custody. In which case the clue to Owen’s treatment lies in the comments reported (by Catholics) at his capture, comments indicating his identity as a hide-builder had been betrayed. ‘Is he taken that knows all the secret places?’ one Councillor was said to have asked. ‘I am very glad of that. We will have a trick for him.’ Robert Cecil’s rumoured response was stronger still: ‘No dealing now with a lenient hand. We will try and get from him by coaxing, if he is willing to contract for his life, an excellent booty of priests. If he will not confess he shall be pressed by exquisite torture, and we will wring the secret from him by the severity of his torments.’ For those few grim days of February 1606, as the Government tried to break the Jesuit mission, the fate of almost every English Catholic lay in Owen’s hands. In life he had saved them, in death he would too: not a single name escaped him.71

  On 26 February, as Nicholas Owen was being taken to the torture room for the first time, Henry Garnet was writing a secret letter in orange juice ink to his friends outside, arranging Jesuit affairs until such time as Aquaviva could appoint his successor. He seemed confident, explaining, ‘they have nothing against me but presumptions’. On 3 March he wrote again; still he was confident: ‘I see no advantage they have against me for the powder action.’ That same day Robert Cecil wrote to Sir Henry Brouncker in Ireland, assuring him ‘that ere many days he should hear that Father Garnet…was laid open for a principal conspirator’ in the plot. Five days later, on 8 March, Garnet testified to knowing about the plot in advance.72

  What had happened in those few days? Garnet’s supporters said torture: John Gerard reported rumours that Garnet had been confused and ‘so drowsy, as not able to hold up his head’ in interrogation, suggesting deliberate sleep deprivation and possible drugging. He also believed that Garnet had been manacled; Garnet, himself, would refer to his ‘next torture’ in a subsequent letter, a form of phrase suggesting a previous torture. It is also possible that, having learned of Owen’s death, Garnet wanted to prevent others—Oldcorne, Ashley, the White Webbs servants—from suffering the same fate. Whatever the reason he now broke silence—and the effect was dramatic.73

  ‘You may confidently affirm that [Garnet] is guilty,’ wrote Robert Cecil to the English ambassador in the Low Countries that same day. Next day he wrote to the Earl of Mar with the same news and the observation that Garnet’s life was of no ‘value’. The ‘important thing’, he noted, ‘is to demonstrate the iniquity of Catholics, and to prove to all the world that it is not for religion, but for their treasonable teaching and practices that they should be exterminated’. His private notes revealed how he proposed to do this.74

  Garnet had testified that he had learned about the plot in confession and was therefore unable to reveal his information; for a Protestant, Cecil showed a fine grasp of the principles of confession. ‘In penance’, he wrote in a series of aides-mémoires to himself, ‘the first act is confessio, contritio, satisfactio, which order not being observed it is no penance’. Neither was it true penance if ‘the penitent does not assure reformation and desist from the evil act’. By this line of reasoning the process of confession by which Garnet had heard of the plot was technically invalid; and this being the case, it could be argued, as Cecil did now, that Garnet had concealed and ‘abetted’ the plot. His notes concluded with a fine rhetorical flourish: ‘We are now therefore not to arraign Garnet the Jesuit…but to unmask and arraign that misnamed presumptuous Society of Our Saviour Jesus.’ This was what the Government had been seeking since William Allen’s seminarians first began arriving home in the 1570s: the chance to prove that the Catholic Church sanctioned murder and that England’s forbidden priests were secret agents of assassination; and as ideal, as image-laden a chance it could not have hoped for. ‘We may now defend that the priests’ hands are full of bloody sacrifices’, wrote Cecil triumphantly, ‘[and] we prove not their treasons by wit and inference, but by confession.’ For there, argued Cecil, in that strange, shadowed, sacred whisper between confessor and confessant, he had found death, the drop of poison in the ear that said killing was no sin.75

  The trial of Mr Henry Garnet—in true paradoxical style the Government wished to try him as a priest without affording him the courtesy of that title—took place at London’s Guildhall on Friday, 28 March 1606. Garnet arrived there by 9 a.m., brought the short distance from the Tower in a covered coach to keep him ‘safe’. Already the crowds were gathering, packing the entranceway to catch a glimpse of him. They saw a balding, bespectacled, somewhat overweight fifty-year-old, whose face bore the signs of long-term illness and recent hardship. But no one was very interested in Garnet the man—it was what he represented that mattered. The commissioners arrived soon afterwards and took their place on the bench—the three Howard earls, Nottingham, Suffolk and Northampton, Lord Somerset, Robert Cecil, Sir John Popham, Sir Thomas Fleming, Sir Christopher Yelverton and London’s Lord Mayor, representing the King: England’s most powerful.* James, himself, was there ‘incognito’, so the Venetian ambassador reported, as were most of his courtiers, squeezed in tightly to catch the proceedings. Two days earlier William Waad had complained to Cecil about the difficulty of getting a seat: ‘there is a place provided in the Guildhall for the prisoner, but none for me’, he wrote plaintively. Now he took his specially allotted position next to Garnet, before the courtroom. At about ninethirty the show trial began.76

  ‘Henry Garnet, of the profession of the Jesuits, otherwise Walley, otherwise Darcy, otherwise Roberts, otherwise Farmer, otherwise Philips, (for by all those names he called himself) stood indicted of the most barbarous and damnable treasons’: the arraignment began in thunderous fashion. And so it continued, throughout that long March day. First the charges against him were read out: that on 9 June, the date Catesby had consulted him about the killing of innocents, he, Tesimond, and Catesby had all three conspired to murder the King and destroy the commonwealth. Garnet pleaded not guilty and Sir Edward Coke began the case for the prosecution.77

  ‘[S]ince the Jesuits set foot in this land,’ Coke informed the court, ‘there never passed four years without a most pestilent and pernicious treason.’ Conspiracy after conspiracy was dusted down and hung about Garnet’s neck. Then Coke moved on to the Gunpowder Plot: ‘because I speak of several treasons, for distinction and separation of this from the other[s], I will name it the Jesuits’ Treason’, he told the jury helpfully. Of course, with no proofs to support the assertion that Garnet was author of the plot, Coke was forced to rely on judicial interpretation of the evidence to make his case. So Garnet’s letter to Aquaviva ‘for the staying of all commotions of the Catholics’ was written, claimed Coke, solely ‘to lull us asleep for se
curity’. His conference with Catesby and Tresham about ‘the strength of the Catholics in England’—as hero of the hour Lord Mounteagle’s name was omitted here—was to promote rebellion, not prevent it. And the pilgrimage to St Winifred’s Well ‘was but a jargon, to have better opportunity, by colour thereof, to confer’. From manipulation he turned to character assassination. Of Garnet’s many aliases he observed, ‘I have not commonly known…a true man, that has so many false appellations’. Garnet’s orange juice letters—carefully provided by his solicitous gaoler—were shown to the court as evidence of his cunning. Garnet, said Coke, was ‘a doctor of five DD’s, as dissimulation, deposing of princes, disposing of kingdoms, daunting and deterring of subjects, and destruction’.

  The subject of equivocation—dissimulation, in Coke’s terminology—had dominated Robert Southwell’s trial. It decimated Henry Garnet’s. The Jesuits, explained Coke, ‘equivocate, and so cannot that way be tried or judged according to their words’, and over the course of the day the prosecution would shred the credibility of Garnet’s words. State witnesses appeared, swearing to having eavesdropped on conversations between Garnet and Oldcorne in the Tower; then evidence was produced revealing Garnet had denied, in interrogation, that such conversations had ever taken place. More damaging still was the dramatic flourishing of Francis Tresham’s deathbed statement. It had been Tresham who had accused Garnet of complicity in the Spanish Treason, then retracted his evidence as he lay dying, saying he had only implicated the Jesuit to avoid torture (he died in the Tower on 23 December, of an inflammation of the urinary tract). Now his statement was read out, in all its fatal ambiguity. ‘[T]o give your Lordship a proof [that Garnet was not involved],’ Tresham had sworn, ‘I had not seen him in sixteen years before.’ The meaning was unclear: had Tresham meant ‘before’ 1602, the date of the Spanish Treason (the subject to which he was referring), or ‘before’ 1605, the date of the plot? The first was true, the second false, as independent statements from Anne Vaux and Garnet, himself, confirmed. But for the prosecution there was no lack of clarity: even as Tresham breathed his last, Coke exclaimed, he had lied—instructed how to do so by pernicious Jesuit teachings. By the time the prosecution moved on to the crucial subject of Garnet’s knowledge of the plot, his every utterance had been cast in doubt.78