The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  Unfortunately there were severe disadvantages to the use of equivocation. A leading Catholic authority on the Gunpowder Plot has gone so far as to describe its use as ‘the best weapon in Coke’s armoury, and, admittedly, the Achilles heel of his opponents’. First of all, the practice gave an impression of insincerity, not to say deviousness, even to the recusants themselves. The Appellant priests, for example, enemies of the Jesuits, ridiculed the practice: ‘in plain English’, this was lying. This was something on which any government skilled in propaganda could easily build. Secondly, almost more damagingly, the doctrine of equivocation could be presented as alien, somehow unEnglish, and thus used to underline the notion of the Jesuits as Roman spies with no allegiance to Britain. Anniversary sermons on 5 November would regularly denounce equivocation in strong language of unequivocal disgust.38 At the trial, Coke, wondering aloud what the ‘blessed’ Protestant martyrs Cranmer and Ridley would have made of such ‘shifts’, argued that they would never have used them to save their lives.39 Thirdly, the doctrine of equivocation could be belittled and mocked.

  Father Garnet, in his treatise, was concerned to stress that the occasions when equivocation could be legitimately used were ‘very limited’; anyone who swore upon his oath to a falsehood ‘in cases wherein he was bound to deal plainly’ committed a sin. But of course in the question as to which cases necessitated plain dealing by Catholic priests, and which did not, lay the crux of the dispute between Garnet and his captors. He might see himself as having a heart loyal to the King, but as a man imprisoned on a most serious charge he needed to convince the King’s mighty Councillors. It was unlikely, however, that Salisbury, Coke and Popham wanted to be convinced.

  On arrival in the Tower the next day, Father Garnet was housed comfortably enough. It took him time to get such items as bedding and coal for his fire, but he described his room as ‘a very fine chamber’. He was allowed claret with his meals, as well as buying some sack out of his purse for himself and his neighbours.* Garnet even declared mildly that the dreaded Sir William Waad was a civil enough governor, except when Waad got on to the subject of religion, which caused him to indulge in ‘violent and impotent [uncontrolled]’ speeches.40

  Father Garnet was lucky – for the time being at least. Others were not so lucky. On 19 February, the Privy Council issued orders which allowed ‘the inferior sort’ of prisoners connected to the Powder Plot to be put to the torture.41 The so-called inferiors included Little John and Ralph Ashley, as well as Father Strange, captured in the autumn, and the serving man from White Webbs, James Johnson. These orders, enlarged three days later, provided for those prisoners already in the Tower to be put to the manacles while other prisoners could be fetched thither for that purpose. The horrors were by no means over.

  * There is a tradition that Robert Wintour’s wife Gertrude had various secret meetings with her husband during the two months he was on the run; but, given the persistent official attention to Huddington as a known recusant centre, one wonders whether either of them would have run the risk – for the future of their children was at stake.

  * He was writing long after the event but with information derived from Francis Bacon, who would have been present at the execution.

  * This is the version given by Father Gerard, who was not present; but it would have been pieced together carefully from the recollections of eye-witnesses: as was always done with the deaths of Catholics at the hands of the state, great trouble was taken to treasure the details of the final scenes.

  * This quarto version is now in the Bodleian Library, with Garnet’s corrections (and Coke’s own marks) clearly visible (Bodleian, Laud MS., misc. 655). The folio copy in Vavasour’s handwriting has disappeared.

  * The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of the word in this doctrinal sense to 1599.

  * The real parallel was with a prisoner’s plea of ‘Not Guilty’, as Father Gerard himself pointed out (Morris, Gerard’s Narrative, p. ccxii).

  † See Mark 13:32, where Christ observes: ‘But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ Matthew 24:36 is virtually identical.

  * No one ever drank water with their meals during this period – which would have been another kind of death sentence – so that it was a question of what kind of alcohol, beer being most common, was served. Private funds were also an essential component of even the most spartan regime in prison.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Jesuits’ Treason

  I will name it the Jesuits’ treason, as belonging to them…

  SIR EDWARD COKE

  March 1606

  In the Tower of London, the torturing of the ‘inferior’ prisoners was pursued without pity. James Johnson was believed to have been racked for four or five days, and on one occasion, according to the official record, for three hours at a time. His crime was to have worked for Father Garnet under the name of ‘Mr Meaze’, at White Webbs. As a result of torture, he identified Garnet as Meaze when confronted with him. Ralph Ashley, suspected of having assisted Little John in his work, was among the other servants who were tortured. Father Garnet asked Anne Vaux to try to get hold of some money belonging to the Society of Jesus, in order to provide beds for the sufferers (the alternative for these broken bodies was the floor of a dungeon and straw).1

  Nor were the priests, including Father Oldcorne, spared. Father Strange, that ‘gentleman-like priest’ who loved tennis and music, was a victim because of his friendship with Catesby, even though Strange had never been involved in the treason. Like Johnson, who was released in August, Father Strange lived out the rest of his life disabled, and ‘totally incapable of any employment’, as a result of his sojourn in the Tower.2

  Most brutal of all was the treatment given to Nicholas Owen, better known to the recusants as Little John. Since he had a hernia caused by the strain of his work, as well as a crippled leg, he should not have been physically tormented in the first place: as Gerard wrote in his Narrative, ‘the civil law doth forbid to torture any man that is broken’. But Little John, unlike many of those interrogated, did have valuable information about the hiding-places he had constructed: if he had talked, all too many priests would have been snared ‘as partridges in a net’. In this good cause, the government was prepared to ignore the dictates of the law and the demands of common humanity. A leading Councillor, on hearing his name, was said to have exclaimed: ‘Is he taken that knows all the secret places? I am very glad of that. We will have a trick for him.’3

  The trick was the prolonged use of the manacles, an exquisitely horrible torture for one in Owen’s ruptured state. He was originally held in the milder prison of the Marshalsea, where it was hoped that other priests would try to contact him, but Little John was ‘too wise to give any advantage’ and spent his time safely and silently at prayer. In the Tower, he was brought to make two confessions on 26 February and 1 March. In the first one, he denied more or less everything – knowing Oldcorne (or Hall), knowing Garnet, under that name or any of his aliases, let alone serving him. He even remained vague about his own aliases: it was reported that ‘he knoweth not whether he is called Little John’.4

  By the time of the second confession, long and ghastly sessions in the manacles produced some results (his physical condition may be judged by the fact that his stomach had to be bound together with an iron plate, and even that was not effective for very long). Little John admitted to attending Father Garnet at White Webbs and elsewhere, that he had been at Coughton during that All Saints visit, and other details of his service and their itinerary. However, all this was known already. Little John never gave up one single detail of the hiding-places he had spent his adult life constructing for the safety of his co-religionists.

  The lay brother died early in the morning of 2 March. He died directly as a result of his ordeal and in horrible, lingering circumstances. By popular standards of the day, this was a stage of cruelty too far. The government acknow
ledged the fact in its own way by putting out a story that Owen had ripped himself open with a knife given to him to eat his meat – while his keeper was conveniently looking elsewhere – rather than face renewed bouts of torture. Yet Owen’s keeper had told a relative who wanted Owen to make a list of his needs that his prisoner’s hands were so useless that he could not even feed himself, let alone write.5

  The story of the suicide was so improbable that neither Owen’s enemies nor his friends, ‘so well acquainted’ with his character over so many years, believed it. Suicide was a mortal sin in the Catholic Church, inviting damnation, and it was unthinkable that a convinced Catholic like Nicholas Owen should have imperilled his immortal soul in this manner. This ‘false slander’ concerning his death was contrasted by Catholics afterwards with Little John’s calm and steadfast demeanour in the Marshalsea, when he certainly knew what lay ahead but showed no fear. Father Gerard called Nicholas Owen’s end a glorious martyrdom.* His jailer’s words were different but equally evocative: he said, ‘the man is dead: he died in our hands’.6

  The emollient handling of Little John’s master, Garnet, did not however cease immediately. With the exception of Sir William Waad’s angry ravings on the subject of Catholicism – which in any case the priest tried to bear patiently – Garnet considered himself well treated. Even his personal jailer (his ‘keeper’) appeared to be full of kindness towards him. One can imagine the Jesuit’s pleasure when this fellow, Carey, confessed that Garnet’s patient conduct had made such an impression upon him that ‘he had even conceived a leaning for the Catholic religion’.7

  As a kindness – which had to be kept, naturally, an absolute secret – Carey volunteered to convey letters from Father Garnet out of the prison. Garnet took the opportunity to write to his nephew Thomas, the priest held in the Gatehouse. Then, as the ultimate favour, Carey placed Father Garnet in a cell in the Tower which had a special hole in it through which he could talk to the prisoner in the next cell. This was Father Hall – in other words the Jesuit Edward Oldcorne.

  Perhaps Father Garnet should have been suspicious about such a helpful arrangement. He did not of course know of the government’s similar behaviour concerning Robert Wintour and Guy Fawkes. Unlike Gerard and Little John, both veteran prisoners, Garnet had never done time in captivity, thanks in large part to the inspired activities of Anne Vaux. Father Garnet, far from being the wily manipulator of government depiction, was, as Father Tesimond would sum him up, ‘a charitable man… ready to believe all things, and to hope all things’.8 He was not a worldly person, and as such did not fear the Greeks bearing gifts.

  As a result, from 23 February, John Locherson and Edward Fawcett, two government observers, were able to overhear a series of conversations ‘in a place which was made for this precise purpose’. (It was Locherson who had spied on Wintour and Fawkes.) The first conversation they reported introduced the name of Anne Vaux. Garnet had just heard that she was in London and was proposing to send her a note via Carey, who had offered to ‘convey anything to her’. It was Anne Vaux, said Garnet, ‘who will let us hear from all our friends’. There was an obvious risk for Anne in contacting her, but Anne – hopefully protected by the known ‘weakness’ of her sex – could play a vital role in passing on the recusant news. She could also supply Father Garnet with those necessaries which were essential to any kind of comfort in prison. Garnet proceeded to talk cheerfully to Oldcorne of his good relationship with Carey, how he had rewarded him financially already and proposed to go on doing so, quite apart from giving him ‘a cup of sack’ and another one for his wife. Garnet recommended Oldcorne to pursue the same course, including ‘somewhat’ for Mrs Carey.9

  The task of the eavesdroppers was from time to time complicated by aspects of daily life in the Tower. For example, a cock crowed and a hen cackled at exactly the same time outside the window of the cell, drowning the priests’ murmurs, and since the names of various peers such as Northampton and Rutland had been mentioned it was feared that vital confidences had been missed. Much of what the government’s men overheard was innocent and touching, rather than damaging, although Father Garnet’s admission to a human failing – that he had drunk too much wine on one occasion – would be held against him later. It emerged second or third hand in a letter by John Chamberlain, who had heard that the Jesuit was drinking sack in his confinement ‘so liberally as if he meant to drown sorrow’. The two priests also took the opportunity to confess to each other (as they had last done at Hindlip).10

  But there were promising passages in the spies’ report. Garnet was concerned to inform Oldcorne about the content of his examinations in front of the Council for the latter’s sake (what had and had not been admitted). He told his colleague that he expected to be interrogated further about certain prayers he had said at the time of the meeting of the last Parliament ‘for the good success of that business’. Garnet added to Oldcorne: ‘which is indeed true’. The underlining of the last phrase in the report was done by Coke, who obviously intended to make out that Garnet had prayed for the success of the Powder Treason. What Garnet had actually prayed for was Catholic relief from persecution, but the phrase was all too easily twisted.11

  Not only were Garnet’s intimate conversations being monitored, but his clandestine correspondence with his nephew Thomas in the Gatehouse and with Anne Vaux was being similarly vetted. It was simple for Carey to take to the governor the letters he had promised to ‘convey’. Some of these were copied and then taken onwards; some may have been altered; some letters may even have been forged altogether. Even those places where Father Garnet used orange juice to write the most secret passages were not safe. Waad was able to heat up the letter and read the contents, having either been forewarned by Carey, or else, as would be maintained later, made suspicious by the excessive size of the paper employed – a lot of it apparently blank – and the insignificant contents of the letters. However, words written in orange juice remain visible once they have been exposed to heat (as opposed to lemon juice, which becomes invisible once more when it is cold). These were some of the letters which were probably held back altogether.*12

  Father Garnet’s correspondence was shaped round a number of domestic articles essential for the daily round of a middle-aged prisoner. To Thomas Garnet, the Jesuit sent his spectacles wrapped in a long piece of paper which was apparently blank. He accompanied them with a note asking for the spectacles to be set in leather – ‘and let the fold be fit for your nose’ – and provided with a leather case. It was Anne Vaux who duly returned the spectacles to him. Her covering letter contained the optimistic phrase: ‘If this come safe to you, I will write and so will more friends who would be glad to have direction.’ She asked for spiritual guidance for herself – Garnet had been her protégé, but also her confessor for over twenty years and she needed a replacement (it is clear from their letters that neither the priest nor the woman was under any illusions about what the inevitable end of his imprisonment would be). She concluded, not with a signature – too dangerous – but with the simple words: ‘O that I might see you.’13

  That, decided the authorities who read the letter, was easily arranged. In the meantime, Father Garnet replied with a series of letters, between 26 February and 1 March, to ‘his loving sister Alice’. In ink he acknowledged her presents of bedding and handkerchiefs, and asked for socks, a black nightcap and a Bible. In orange juice he warned her against the capture of more priests which might compromise the existing prisoners as well as themselves. ‘Take heed no more of our friends come in to danger. It will breed new examinations.’ He gave her practical instructions for the reordering of the Jesuit organisation in England: Father Anthony Hoskins was to be the temporary Superior until a new one was chosen by the proper procedure.

  As to Anne’s obligation to him as her Father Confessor, he released her from it. Garnet implied that he would understand if she now decided to leave for Flanders and the placidly devout life of a convent there, a tranquillity which Ann
e Vaux had certainly earned. Yet if she could manage to stay in England, while somehow still getting to Mass and Communion, ‘I think it absolutely the best.’ In this case, Anne, her sister Eleanor Brooksby, her nephew William (and presumably the young mother Dorothy Brooksby) should lie low for a while.

  At the end of February Father Garnet told Anne Vaux that the Council could find nothing against him ‘but presumptions’. Such presumptions were not enough for a state trial since Parliament itself called for proper proof. Something better, something meatier would have to be established. The likelihood is that Father Garnet himself was put to the torture five days after the death of Little John on 7 March. As a result he made a ‘Declaration’ or confession the next day.14

  It is true that torture can take many forms, and it is not absolutely clear which form was used on Father Garnet, only that, in the words of Father Tesimond, ‘one suspects bad treatment somewhere’. Tesimond (who was by this time on the continent) believed that Garnet had been drugged, which would have been easy to achieve, given the draughts of sack he was imbibing, and which may explain the ease with which he was able to supply himself with wine. Then there was the question of sleep deprivation, an ageless technique of oppression which leaves no physical mark: Garnet was said to be confused, ‘heavy with sleep, so that he could scarcely hold up his head or keep his eyes open’ in front of the Commissioners. By early April, Garnet’s ‘partisans’ in Brussels were spreading the news that he had confessed only after ‘torments’, including starvation and lack of sleep. This caused great annoyance to the English Ambassador there.15