The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  The power of the Pope to excommunicate the sovereign of a country, thus releasing his (or her) subjects from obedience, was the area of Garnet’s weakness, as it had always been for Catholics because of the possible conflict of loyalties. Garnet argued valiantly enough, pointing to the fact that James had never been excommunicated. When he found the King ‘fully settled’ into his English kingdom, Garnet had burnt the briefs from the Pope calling for a Catholic successor to Elizabeth, and had constantly denied that these briefs legitimised any violent enterprise. Salisbury however pursued the point: if the King were to be excommunicated, were his Catholic subjects still bound to continue in their obedience? Garnet ‘denied to answer’, the most prudent thing he could do.

  Coke now dismissed all Garnet’s protests that he had tried hard to dissuade Catesby, and denounced equivocation yet again as ‘open and broad lying and forswearing’. He also made little of the so-called seal of the confessional. The dismissal of this pretext – as the government considered it – was the other main theme of the trial. Under canon law, said Coke, Garnet could perfectly well have disclosed the matter communicated to him by Tesimond since it was ‘a future thing to be done, not then already executed’. Others joined in the fray. The Earl of Northampton, who had a reputation as a public speaker, vented his talent to the full in a series of sonorous phrases. From Garnet’s point of view, the most unfair of these was the Latin tag, quod non prohibet cum potest, jubet: what a man does not forbid when he can, he orders. Garnet asserted yet again that he had forbidden the treason.

  But then this, like the earlier trial of the conspirators, was a showpiece. The odds had been weighted against Garnet from the beginning. Although treason as such – the charge on the indictment – was certainly never proved against him, misprision of treason was another matter. It was after all not likely that an English court would recognise the heavy burden that the seal of the confessional placed upon a Catholic priest (it was not part of common law).*

  The matter was not dismissed without debate. Salisbury, by a characteristic sleight of hand, denied that there was such a thing as the seal of the confessional, and proceeded to demonstrate that Tesimond’s observations had not been made under these privileged circumstances anyway. The ingenious mind of the great man, grappling with the net in which he intended to trap his adversary, can be traced in Salisbury’s own handwritten comments on the subject in the state papers.28 Examining Garnet, he pointed to the three necessary component parts of a Catholic confession. ‘Satisfaction’ had to follow contrition and confession, and without full repentance there could be no satisfaction. Since Catesby had not promised Tesimond to hold back from ‘this evil act’ he had not made a full repentance; the original confession was invalid, and Tesimond (and later Garnet) released from the seal.

  Salisbury then made the quite different point that Garnet could have disclosed the conspiracy out of his ‘general knowledge’ of Catesby, following that conversation about the death of the innocents which was not privileged. Garnet’s only answer to this was that he had not understood the significance of the conversation at the time. All along the King himself with his theological bent showed a keen interest in this topic. He had taken the opportunity to interview Garnet personally on the subject before the trial, and it was probably James who framed the questions subsequently put to him in court.29 The key question was ‘whether a priest is bound to reveal a treason dangerous to King and State if discovered unto him in confession, the party signifying his resolution to persist’. To this Garnet’s answer was: ‘The party cannot be absolved unless he come to submit himself; but the confessor is bound to find all lawful means to hinder and discover the treason.’ This of course Garnet strongly maintained he had done. But the truth was that in the crucible of the Gunpowder Plot the responsibilities of a subject and of a priest were irreconcilable.

  After all the sound and fury, the jury of wealthy London citizens took only fifteen minutes to deliver their verdict. Mr Henry Garnet, chief of the Jesuits, was found guilty of treason for conspiring to bring about the destruction of the King and government by the Powder Treason. The prisoner was asked, according to the law, whether there was any reason why judgement should not be passed. Garnet merely referred himself to the mercy of the King and God Almighty. The judgement, duly pronounced, was that he was to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

  It had been a foul, wet spring while Father Garnet and his fellow prisoners languished in the Tower of London. The day after his trial, a westerly gale of hurricane intensity swept over England and on across the North Sea, destroying churches in the Low Countries. There had been nothing like it since 1570 – the year of the Pope’s Bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth, which had done so much to imperil the Jesuits in England.30

  Dudley Carleton told John Chamberlain that Garnet had the air of being greatly surprised when finally told he was going to die: ‘he shifts, falters and equivocates’. But, Carleton added gleefully, he will be ‘hanged without equivocation’.31 There is no other evidence of Garnet’s faltering from what was surely an inevitable fate given the verdict of the trial. Carleton’s comment merely symbolises the absolute obsession with the subject of equivocation in the minds of the public which followed upon the trial of Henry Garnet.

  It did in fact take some weeks for Garnet to be hanged, with or without equivocation. Father Oldcorne, John Wintour, Humphrey Littleton and Ralph Ashley were put to death in the usual manner at Redhill, near Worcester, on 7 April, Father Oldcorne calling upon the name of St Winifred at the last. John Wintour, luckier than his two step-brothers, whose bodies were put up for public display, was allowed to be buried back at Huddington. There his body still lies in the Chancel ‘under playne stones’, along with that of his widowed sister-in-law Gertrude. Perhaps in the end the government heeded his plea that he had joined the conspirators at Dunchurch out of ‘ignorance and not malice’. Humphrey Littleton met his death saying that it was deserved ‘for his treason to God’ in betraying the whereabouts of the two priests. Stephen Littleton and Henry Morgan were executed at Stafford.32

  It was, however, the middle of Lent, Easter being very late in 1606 (Easter Sunday was not until 20 April, almost at the end of the possible cycle). This was not thought a suitable season for the great public festivity which the execution of the chief Jesuit would constitute in London. But the day eventually chosen – 1 May – seemed likely, on further consideration, to produce altogether too much festivity, not necessarily of the desired sort. Father Garnet reacted angrily to the unseemly news. ‘What, will they make a May game of me?’ he exclaimed. It was true that May Day was a celebratory date of great antiquity, reaching back to the pagan fire festival of Beltane, which marked the start of the summer. On this day, it was the custom for ordinary people to go into the country and gather green boughs in order to spend the day ‘in triumph and pastime’.33 Perhaps this did not strike quite the right note and a roistering crowd could never be absolutely trusted to do the right thing. So the Council chose 3 May, unaware that in the Catholic Church this was the Feast of the Invention (or Finding – from invenire, the Latin word for discovery) of the Holy Cross by the British Princess Helena. It was a feast to which Father Garnet had a particular devotion.

  Despite Garnet’s condemnation, the interrogations did not cease, nor did the concentration on the subject of equivocation. The day after the trial, Garnet made a new statement by which he hoped to clear up the Tresham affair. ‘In cases of true and manifest treason a man is bound voluntarily to utter the very truth and in no way to equivocate’, unless he knew about the treason by way of confession. In this case he was bound to seek all lawful ways to uncover the treason so long as the seal of the confessional was not broken. A few days later he wrote a letter to the King, protesting that he had been ‘ever of the opinion’ that it was unlawful to attempt any violence against the King’s Majesty and the state, ‘after he was once received by the realm’. When the government informed Garnet – a quite unequivocal lie – that
they had captured Tesimond, Garnet took the opportunity to write his fellow priest a long letter apologising for the information he felt he must give away concerning Tesimond’s walking confession.34

  This letter, which was of course read – although Garnet was unaware of the fact – is the fullest account of what actually happened on that summer’s day in the garden ‘at the house in Essex’ the previous year. Garnet maintained strongly to his fellow priest that everything had been told to him in confession, including as they walked ‘because it was too tedious [painful] to hear all kneeling’. As for the Powder Treason, ‘we both conspired to hinder it… I never approved it, nor, as I think, you’.

  Although Waad in the Tower continued to insist that this so-called confession had in fact been nothing of the sort, the Jesuit never gave up. ‘I took it as confession,’ he said on one occasion, ‘even if wrongly.’ It would of course have suited the government’s book to have eliminated this tiresome matter of Garnet’s priestly oath of silence and to have concentrated on his treachery, pure and simple. This they never managed to do. The most Garnet ever conceded – somewhat dazed, and with the possibility at least of renewed torture – was this: ‘If it [the news of the conspiracy] were not in confession, he conceived it to be delivered in confession.’ There the irreconcilable matter rested.

  Garnet’s last letter to Anne Vaux was dated 21 April. He had already taken his leave of her and concerned himself with the various alternatives for her future in an earlier letter. This final missive was full of anguish, beginning: ‘It pleaseth God daily to multiply my crosses.’ Garnet hoped that God would grant him patience and perseverance to the end, as he related the various disasters which had occurred – first, his capture ‘in a friend’s house’, then the confessions of the priests to each other and their secret conferences overheard at the Tower. After that, Tesimond had been captured (this was of course not true). Lastly, ‘the slander of us both’ – Garnet and Anne Vaux – had been spread abroad: this was all too true. Garnet concluded with a few lines in Latin which referred to the sufferings of Job. He signed himself: ‘Yours in eternum, as I hope, HG.’ Beneath the signature, he appended a rough drawing, a cross and the letters ‘IHS’ – the first three letters of the holy name of Jesus in Greek.35

  * The Catholic Church has recognised Nicholas Owen as a martyr; he was canonised in 1970.

  * Letters from Father Garnet to Anne Vaux which include passages originally written in orange juice are still in the Public Record Office; they can, therefore, never have reached their intended destination in this form (S.P. 14/216).

  * Sir Edward Coke in his Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, concerning High Treason… merely wrote that Garnet challenged Burrell ‘peremptorily, and it was allowed unto him by the resolution of all the judges’ (p. 27).

  * Under English law today, Father Garnet would still be obliged to disclose the information he had received in the confessional from Father Tesimond, relevant to Catesby’s conspiracy. Under Section 18 of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989, it is an offence, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, not to disclose information concerning an intended terrorist action. This applies to priests (as well as, for that matter, doctors and psychiatrists). Only lawyers can claim privilege in not revealing information received from their clients. (Halsbury’s Statutes of England and Wales, 4th edn, 1994 reissue, 12, pp. 1339–40.)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Farewells

  Farewell, good friend Tom, this day I will save thee a labour to provide my dinner.

  FATHER HENRY GARNET

  3 May 1606

  Father Henry Garnet said his farewells in the Tower very early on the morning of Saturday 3 May. King James was no longer in London. The royal interest in the theological arguments aroused by Henry Garnet’s trial had waned in favour of the other great kingly passion, the chase. James had left for Newmarket in Suffolk on the Friday, hunting his way happily northwards. Sir William Waad was left in charge of delivering his prisoner, as he had been in charge of delivering the conspirators in January.

  The Jesuit, who had by now spent nearly three months as a prisoner in the Tower, said a courteous goodbye to those who had served him. To one of the cooks who called out, ‘Farewell, good sir,’ he attempted a mild jest: ‘Farewell, good friend Tom, this day I will save thee a labour to provide my dinner.’ Even his captors were visibly moved. Lady Waad, well aware of what lay ahead, told him that she would pray for him, adding: ‘God be with you and comfort you, good Mr Garnet…’1

  At the last moment, as Garnet, wearing a black cloak over his clothes and a hat, was being strapped to the hurdle which would take him to his death, there was a commotion in the courtyard. A woman rushed forward. It was Anne Vaux.

  It was in fact an administrative mistake that she should have been let out of her prison for this harrowing moment. Waad had given instructions that Mistress Vaux should be permitted to watch the priest’s departure at a window. But her keeper allowed Anne right out into the courtyard itself, where the wicker hurdle lay with its burden. Anne was however dragged away before she could exchange one last word with her mentor, or even utter a prayer over the man who for twenty years had been the centre of her world.2

  Evidently the patriotic protests of Sir Arthur Gorges, who thought the site of St Paul’s Churchyard holy to the memory of Queen Elizabeth, had been disregarded, for this was the place chosen for the execution. The hurdle was drawn by three horses all the way from the Tower. Father Garnet lay on it with his hands held together and his eyes closed; he had the air of ‘a man in deep contemplation’.3 An enormous crowd awaited him at St Paul’s. A scaffold had been erected on the west side for the prisoner, and there were wooden stands set up for spectators. The surrounding windows were also packed with onlookers.

  Not all of them, of course, were hostile. At least one priest was present in disguise, hoping to perform the last rites on Father Garnet’s moribund body, as Garnet in the past had done for others. This priest spent twelve pence for a seat on the stand and, as a result, he was able to supply Father Gerard later with numerous details for his Narrative.4

  A Protestant account described Father Garnet as looking guilty and fearful at the prospect of his final ordeal, but in fact his main problem, once he had left the hurdle, was to secure any kind of repose in which to prepare himself for death.5 The Sheriff of London was present, as were Sir Henry Montague, the Recorder of London, the Dean of Winchester, Dr George Abbot, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Dr John Overal. In their different ways, all these gentlemen were determined to secure the last-minute repentance and even the conversion of this notorious Jesuit. It might be thought that someone who had already endured so much for the sake of his Church was unlikely to desert it at the end: but even in the last weeks in the Tower Garnet had been subjected to various doctrinal debates – in all of which of course he remained firm in favour of the Catholic Faith.

  The Jesuit dealt quite easily with the request, made by the Recorder in the name of the King, to reveal any further treasons of which he had secret knowledge. He had, said Garnet, nothing more to say on that subject. But when the divines set about arguing with him about the superior merits of Protestantism, the priest ‘cut them off quickly’, asking them not to trouble themselves – or him: ‘he came prepared and was resolved’. Garnet then desired some place apart where he could pray.6

  This was not to be. Montague stated his orders were that Garnet should acknowledge himself justly condemned, and then seek the King’s forgiveness. Garnet replied that he had committed no treason or offence against the King. They could condemn him for nothing except for keeping the secrets of the confessional: this was the only way in which he had had ‘knowledge of that Powder Treason’. However, Garnet added, if he had indeed offended the King or the state, he asked for forgiveness with all his heart.

  These last words encouraged the Recorder to believe he had secured the vital admission he wanted. He called out to the
crowd to pay attention: the Jesuit had just asked for the King’s forgiveness for the Powder Treason. But Garnet refused to accept this and he repeated that he was not guilty. The same open disagreement then took place on the controversial subject of Catesby, and Tesimond’s confession to Garnet. Once again the priest refused to be browbeaten into giving way.

  ‘You do but equivocate,’ exclaimed Sir Henry Montague, ‘and if you deny it, after your death we will publish your own hand [writing], that the world may see your false dealing.’

  ‘This is not the time to talk of equivocation,’ answered Garnet. ‘Neither do I equivocate. But in troth,’ he went on and then reiterated it: ‘in troth, you shall not find my hand otherwise than I have said.’ This solemn declaration, made twice over, impressed the spectators. The Recorder’s own reputation was not enhanced when Garnet demanded to inspect the famous document in his own writing. Montague had to reply, somewhat foolishly, that he had left it at home.7

  When Garnet was asked – according to custom – whether he had anything further to say, he apologised for his own weakness, including his failing voice. But he did call attention to the appropriate date on which he was to die: ‘Upon this day is recorded the Invention [Finding] of the Cross of Christ, and upon this day I thank God I have found my cross…’ Although Garnet continued to deny his own guilt, he did take the opportunity to express once more his horror at the fact that Catholics had planned such an enterprise. In the future, he directed all Catholics to remain ‘quiet’, possessing their souls in peace: ‘And God will not be forgetful of them.’