The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  Of the many prisons in the capital, one of them, the Clink, in Southwark near the present Blackfriars, was always full of Catholics: it has been described as a recusant ‘propaganda cell for the whole capital’. Certainly Father Gerard had heard numerous confessions from his co-religionists when he was held there. Newgate, the chief criminal prison, also contained a ‘great store of priests and other Catholics’, to whom people of all sorts had ‘continual access’.18

  As for the Gatehouse, in January 1606 one of Salisbury’s informants, Anne Lady Markham, complained about the sheer corruption of the place. Recusants were able to bribe their jailers to pass letters to their friends ‘to tell what they have been examined of’; then they got back vital information which enabled them to guess ‘shrewdly’ how to answer.19 Unfortunately the comparatively free conditions at the Gatehouse could also be used by the government for its own purposes. Unwittingly, Garnet’s nephew, Father Thomas, was to be part of the entrapment which followed.

  Another innocent agent was Anne Vaux, who with Thomas Habington’s sister Dorothy (a convinced Protestant who had been converted into a fervent Catholic) had followed the Jesuits up to London, at a discreet distance. The two women lodged in Dorothy Habington’s house in Fetter Lane, just off Fleet Street. They came into a London in which the main topic of discussion in official circles was religion and its consequences: this was emphasised by the House of Commons debate, a few days earlier, on the vexed subject of Protestant husbands having to pay the fines of their recusant wives. At the Plotters’ trial, Sir Edward Coke had dealt with the matter tartly when Digby raised it, declaring that a recusant wife, one way or another, was always the husband’s fault and he must pay up. But Sir Everard Digby’s feelings were more in tune with the spirit of the times than those of the dismissive Coke. Members felt uneasy about the measure, and it was agreed that it should be ‘further considered on’.20

  The next day, 5 February, everyone felt much happier discussing the ‘Armour and Munitions’ to be seized from recusants, and their elimination from the army. Much virulent anti-Catholic talk followed. The Papists were divided into three, of which the first group, ‘old, rooted, rotten’, were unlikely to be reclaimed at this stage, but fortunately they were more superstitious than seditious. The second group, the converts (described as the ‘Novelists’), were the greatest danger. As for the third, ‘the future tense of the Papists’ – its youth – this was a group which must be nipped in the bud, with great care taken that recusants should not get away with their own marriages and christenings, as opposed to those of the state. By the end of the month, the incoming Venetian Ambassador was struck by the universality of the discussion: ‘here they attend to nothing else but great preparations for the annihilation of the Catholic religion’.21

  This harsh talk from the male world did not mean that two recusant gentlewomen, both unmarried, could not manage to live at liberty in London. The social rule by which women were not persecuted to the hilt (as Martha Bates had been allowed her traitor husband’s money for her relief) still obtained. So long as Anne Vaux remained quietly in Fetter Lane, living in the recusant world which was by definition discreet, she was unlikely to get into trouble. But of course for many years Anne Vaux had planned her life not so much to stay out of trouble as to help and protect Father Garnet. And that continued to be her motive in coming to London. She wanted news of him. She also wanted, if possible, to communicate with him directly.

  Father Garnet’s first examination in front of the Privy Council took place on 13 February.22 His journey from the Gatehouse prison to Whitehall did not pass unremarked. Father Garnet told Anne Vaux later that among other comments from the crowd he heard one man say derisively to another: ‘There goes a young Pope.’ The Council, however, treated him with outward respect. They addressed the Jesuit throughout as ‘Mr Garnet’ (they did not recognise his priesthood, but at the same time did not treat him with the contempt which would have been accorded a common criminal) and took off their hats when they spoke to him. These Councillors were the familiar band of Popham, Coke, Sir William Waad and Lords Worcester, Northampton and Nottingham, with Salisbury as their leader.

  There was, however, one unpleasant indication of how the Council might promote derision in its own style. At some point in an early interview Salisbury leant forward and twitted the Jesuit about his relationship with ‘Mistress Vaux’ since Salisbury had intercepted a letter from her to the priest signed ‘Your loving sister, A G’.

  ‘What, are you married to Mrs Vaux! She calls herself Garnet. What, you old lecher [senex fornicarius]!’ At the next interview, according to Garnet’s account in a letter to Anne, Salisbury pretended to put the matter to rights. He put his arm around Garnet’s shoulders and told him that he had spoken ‘in jest’. The rest of the Councillors hastened to assure Garnet that they knew he led an exemplary life in that respect.23

  If it was a jest, it was a strange one to make at that time and in that place to a middle-aged priest about his relationship with a Catholic spinster in her forties. But it was not a jest. On the contrary, it was part of a deliberate campaign to blacken the reputation of Father Garnet, so that the somewhat flimsy evidence which connected him to the Plot (of which he was supposed to be the leading conspirator) could be enhanced with hints of his personal depravity.

  The charge was, inevitably, not an unfamiliar one in relation to celibate Catholic priests working clandestinely in England. Their very dependency on the women’s domestic world, the false relationships to which they had to pretend for security’s sake, meant that it was easy to spread such a smear. Father John Gerard had been charged with the same scandal concerning Lady Mary Percy, unmarried daughter of a previous Earl of Northumberland, who had founded the first English convent abroad since the Reformation. The accusation was made by Richard Topcliffe when Gerard was held in the Tower.

  ‘It was you who stayed with the Earl of Northumberland’s daughter,’ said Topcliffe. ‘No doubt you lay in bed together.’ Even though Gerard knew Topcliffe was speaking ‘without what even he considered the slightest evidence’, the priest shook with anger at his indecency.24

  Anne Vaux was not the only woman linked to Father Garnet (even though, according to the Councillors, his exemplary life was supposed to be well known). Dorothy Brooksby, from the prominent recusant family of Wiseman, was a young woman married to Anne Vaux’s nephew William. Her two baby girls formed part of the extended household over which the Vaux sisters presided, and which included Father Garnet. At a later examination Coke taxed Garnet with attending a Catholic christening at White Webbs, and Sir William Waad went further, saying ‘gibingly’ that the priest was surely present at the baby’s begetting also. Garnet protested against the unseemly insult as being not fit for ‘this place of justice’, at which Coke compounded it by suggesting that Mrs Brooksby’s baby, being a priest’s child, had ‘a shaven crown’.25

  This kind of crude badinage, however amusing for Coke and Waad, however distasteful to Father Garnet, was in a different class from the derogatory slant given to Garnet’s twenty-year partnership – for that is the appropriate word to use – with Anne Vaux. For years, those who wished to denigrate the Jesuits had accused Garnet of effrontery – ‘face’ – in carrying a gentlewoman up and down the country with him.26

  That partnership had indeed been at the very centre of recusant life. One of Digby’s servants, examined about Father Garnet after his master’s capture, unconsciously suggested a parallel between Anne and the Biblical Ruth: ‘Mrs Anne Vaux doth usually go with him [Garnet] whithersoever he goeth.’27 Of course in one sense the relationship was paternal: Garnet was Anne Vaux’s ‘ghostly father’, her spiritual director, and she was his penitent, his ‘daughter in Christ’. Nevertheless it was a true partnership because without Anne Vaux’s continuous, energetic, thoughtful loyalty Father Garnet could never have carried out his ministry in England for so many years without capture. But it was certainly not a partnership in any physical sense. Ra
ther, it was a spiritual union, of the type experienced by saints in the Catholic Church such as St Francis and St Clare or the two founders of the Benedictine Order, St Benedict and another St Scholastica.

  Unfortunately, as Father Gerard wrote later in this context: ‘The sensual man perceiveth not these things which are of the spirit of God [Animalis Homo non percepit ea quae Dei sunt].’ Garnet’s enemies, in seizing on an apparent weakness, were measuring others by ‘their own desires, not feeling any spark of that heat which moved so many Maries to follow Christ and his Apostles’. (Father Garnet himself, in bygone years, had sometimes in his thoughts likened Eleanor Brooksby and Anne Vaux, the widow and the virgin, to the two women ‘who used to lodge our Lord’.)28

  Of course no one who actually knew Anne Vaux credited the story. Her ‘sober and modest behaviour’ would impress even the government’s interrogators. Anne Vaux was so manifestly that type of good woman, the backbone of many faiths, not only the Catholic one, who would ‘willingly bestow her life’ labouring to do God service.

  She had never shown the slightest interest in getting married and her earliest struggles to obtain control of her fortune from Sir Thomas Tresham had been with the intention of using it to help the priesthood. Here was one who would surely have acted as a powerful abbess or reverend mother in pre-Reformation days. Many of Anne Vaux’s similarly pious contemporaries had indeed fled the country to join the religious orders set up for expatriate Catholic women on the continent. Anne Vaux, encouraged by Father Garnet, discovered a different vocation: she was to be a practical and courageous Martha in England, rather than a contemplative Mary in a convent in Flanders.

  Strangely enough, given the government’s indictment of Garnet at the head of the list of conspirators, his early examinations contained very few allegations about the Plot itself. The smear concerning Anne Vaux might be unpleasant, but it was not proof of treason. In general, Garnet’s admissions to the Council concerned those things of which he at least did not feel ashamed: that he had been at Coughton on 1 November, and that he had received Catesby’s explanatory letter of 6 November. But he steadfastly denied any complicity in the Plot itself; nor did he reveal any names of conspirators.

  What did take place at Garnet’s interview while he was still in the Gatehouse was a prolonged questioning on matters of theology, including the doctrine of equivocation. Salisbury told Garnet this was ‘the high point’ on which he had to satisfy the King, in order to prove that he could be trusted as a loyal subject; in other words, that his was not the heart of a traitor. The discussion was given a special emphasis by the fact that the manuscript of a treatise on equivocation was lying displayed on the Council Table.29

  At this moment the Jesuit, convinced that the examination was about details of the Powder Treason on which he could clear himself, was unaware how much weight was going to be attached to this subject. Nor indeed could he have foretold how the malevolent image of an equivocating Jesuit, fostered by Coke, would seize hold of the popular imagination.

  The treatise had been among the ‘heretical, treasonable and damnable books’ belonging to Francis Tresham to which Coke had alluded at the trial of the Plotters. Coke had referred then to the ‘equivocating’ – swearing to things they knew to be false – by the conspirators: this, he said, had been encouraged and justified by the Jesuits.30 But Father Garnet of course had no idea of the course of the trial: the only men who might have warned him – the defendants – were already dead by the time he reached London.

  Since the book was to assume an enormous importance in the government’s eyes, its discovery by Coke was either a lucky chance or a tribute to his sharp intelligence. It had happened like this: at the beginning of the previous December, Coke, who lodged in the Inner Temple, had the idea of searching a particular chamber there which Sir Thomas had obtained for the use of his two younger sons, Lewis and William, and where Sir Thomas himself sometimes stayed. Coke was rewarded. Two versions of the same book were found, one quarto and a folio copy of it in what turned out to be the handwriting of Francis’ servant William Vavasour. What Coke did not realise, for some reason, was that Garnet had written the treatise himself. Coke imagined that he had merely made corrections. It was a strange oversight, given that the quarto was actually marked ‘Newly overseen by the Authour and published for the defence of Innocency and for the Institution of Ignorants’.* But Garnet was asked only ‘where and when he did peruse and correct’ the treatise, and so was able – for what it was worth – to preserve his anonymity.31

  The quarto version had originally been entitled A Treatise of Equivocation, but that title had in fact been crossed out, as Garnet pointed out to Salisbury. The title A Treatise against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation had been substituted (although the earlier title could still be made out). To Garnet, the alteration was an important one of clarification. Indeed, between the nature of Garnet’s correction and the government’s continued use of the original title lay the whole matter of the dispute between them. To Father Garnet, equivocation was a precise doctrine which had nothing to do with lying, a practice he roundly condemned. To the government, on the contrary, equivocation was not only lying but hypocrisy, since it wrapped a mantle of holiness round the lies.

  What Coke had found, and now laid before the Councillors, had in fact been written by the Jesuit a few years earlier. The inception of the treatise was due to a general disquiet on the subject of equivocation following the trial of Father Robert Southwell in 1595. This trial probably introduced knowledge of the doctrine into England, both among officials and among the public.

  It is true that there were passages in the works of the Fathers of the Church which referred to the lawfulness of dissimulating under certain specific conditions. Furthermore, in late-sixteenth-century Europe numerous subjects, who differed from their rulers in religion, faced the problem of what has been described as ‘secret adherence’, which inevitably entailed a good deal of dissimulation along the way. It might well be impossible to profess one’s true religion in public without vicious penalties or even massacre – this applied to crypto-Protestants in Catholic countries as much as to crypto-Catholics in Protestant countries. This kind of secret adherence was given the name Nicodemism by Calvin, after the Pharisee Nicodemus, a believer in Christ who out of fear visited Him only by night. It was a form of behaviour which received tacit acceptance.32

  Equivocation as a particular method of procedure was, however, a novelty.* It was this procedure, rather than the mere fact of concealment, which seems to have caused general disquiet as a result of the Southwell trial. This disquiet, it must be emphasised, was shared by Catholics as well as by those Father Garnet called heretics; among the former, the ‘strange’ practice was ‘much wondered at’.33

  At Southwell’s trial, Anne Bellamy, a Catholic woman who was the exception to the honourable record of her sex during this period, had testified that the priest had taught her to deny the truth in answer to the question ‘Is there a priest in the house?’ Francis Tresham’s reaction was to have Vavasour make a copy of Garnet’s treatise ‘that we may see what they can say of this matter’. This was exactly the purpose for which Garnet had written the book.34

  Equivocation was essentially a scrupulous way of behaving by Catholics who shrank from telling outright lies. ‘He that sticketh not at lies, never needeth to equivocate’: this observation by the Jesuit Robert Persons is at the heart of the doctrine of equivocation and central to its understanding. Father Garnet put it even more robustly: liars took ‘a readier way to serve their turn, by plain untruths and evident perjuries’.35 In times of danger, a flat lie to protect the truth (such as Thomas Habington’s denial of the priests’ presence at Hindlip) would be most people’s instinct. In the same way, Catholic priests in front of the English authorities might have been expected to deny outright the truths which would have condemned them to death – notably the fact of their own priesthood. But they did not do so. Heroically, they attempted to balance the
needs of their predicament with the prohibition of the Church on outright lying. Yet the lies they so painstakingly avoided, or believed they avoided, were of the nature that conspirators of all types – to say nothing of governments protecting national security – utter without a qualm.

  The underlying principle of equivocation was that the speaker’s words were capable of being taken in two ways, only one of which was true. A typical example, which caused a great deal of Protestant indignation, had occurred in February when a certain Father Ward swore to the Dean of Durham that he was ‘no priest’ – meaning, it transpired, that he was not ‘Apollo’s priest at Delphos’. Secondly, Father Ward swore that he had never been beyond the seas: ‘it’s true, sayeth he, for he was never beyond the Indian seas’. One can see the absurdity of this: at the same time one can admire the earnest conscience which found it necessary to justify such life-saving lies.

  Obviously the authority of the questioner was an all-important point about equivocation, as well as the seriousness of the matter at issue. Father Robert Persons cited the case of a man who denied he was a priest to an unjust questioner, adding the mental reservation that he was not a priest ‘so as I am bound to utter it to you’. As Father John Gerard wrote, the intention was not to deceive ‘but simply to withhold the truth in cases where the questioned party was not bound to reveal it’.*36 Furthermore, it could be argued that certain equivocating answers actually addressed themselves to the real question at issue. For example, the question ostensibly asked might be ‘Are you a traitor?’ A priest might therefore lawfully answer ‘No’ to his interrogator because, despite his priesthood, he knew himself not to be a traitor.

  Father Garnet’s treatise, because it was provoked by the trial of Southwell, took as its starting point the Bellamy question.37 He justified the denial, saying that a Catholic could ‘securely in conscience’ answer ‘No’ when interrogated about the presence of a priest concealed in a house on the ground that he had a ‘secret meaning reserved in his mind’. Similarly the question ‘Did you hear Mass today?’ could be answered negatively because the person interrogated ‘did not hear it at St Paul’s or such like’. Biblical precedents were meticulously cited in the cause of justifying equivocation, including the words of Jesus Christ himself. When Christ told his disciples that ‘the girl is not dead but sleepeth’, before raising Jaira’s daughter from the dead, this was a form of equivocation. So was Christ’s declaration that he did not know when the Day of Judgement was to be: since as God the Son he knew exactly when it was to be.†