The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  At this point, someone standing in the crowd near by shouted out: ‘But Mr Garnet, were you not married to Mrs Anne Vaux?’ The accusation stung Garnet, in a way nothing else could.

  The priest turned to the people, and answered: ‘That honourable gentlewoman hath [suffered] great wrong by such false reports. For it is suspected and said that I should be married to her, and worse. But I protest the contrary… she is a virtuous good gentlewoman and, therefore, to impute any such thing into her cannot proceed but of malice.’ Having delivered himself of this broadside, Garnet was at last allowed to pray – at the foot of the ladder he would shortly mount.8

  He himself assisted in the stripping off of his clothes down to his shirt; this was very long and Garnet had had the sides sewn up almost to the bottom in the interests of modesty ‘that the wind might not blow it up’. One more Protestant minister did come forward, but Garnet refused to listen to him, or even acknowledge his presence. On the ladder itself, he paused and made the sign of the Cross, desiring all good Catholics present to pray for him. However one member of the crowd had evidently been assured that there would be a dramatic last-minute conversion to Protestantism (a government-inspired rumour). This disappointed person shouted out: ‘Mr Garnet, it is expected you should recant.’

  ‘God forbid,’ he replied. ‘I never had any such meaning, but ever meant to die a true and perfect Catholic.’

  This aroused a protest from Dr Overal, the Dean of St Paul’s: ‘But Mr Garnet, we are all Catholics.’ But this the Jesuit would not have, as for him there was only one Catholic Roman Church, and that was under the Pope.9

  Henry Garnet was now ready. He prayed for the welfare of the King and the Royal Family. Then he made the sign of the Cross. His last prayers were in Latin, the language of the ‘one’ Church into which he had been born and in whose service he had spent his life. They included ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit’, uttered several times, and ‘Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of mercy, protect us from the enemy, and receive us at the hour of our death.’ This was the last prayer he said before he was told that the hangman was ready. The priest crossed his arms over his breast – it had not been thought necessary to bind his arms – and ‘so was cast off the ladder’.

  Then an odd thing happened. Many of the spectators had deliberately made their way to St Paul’s in order to see a spectacle which included drawing and quartering performed upon a living body. But the mood of the fickle crowd suddenly changed. A great number of those present – they cannot all have been Catholics – surged forward. With a loud cry of ‘hold, hold’, they stopped the hangman cutting down the body while Garnet was still alive. Others pulled on the priest’s legs, something which was traditionally done by relatives in order to ensure a speedy death. This favour was not something the crowd had chosen to perform for the conspirators in January, even though these had been ‘men of good sort’, popular and much esteemed. As a result Father Garnet was ‘perfectly dead’ when he was finally cut down and taken to the block.10

  Even the traditional words ‘Behold the heart of a traitor’ received no applause. Nor did anyone cry out, ‘God save the King’ as was customary. Instead, there was an uneasy murmuring among the spectators.

  *

  That same day, 3 May, Father John Gerard, who had himself been named in the January proclamation, managed at last to get away from England to the continent and safety. He believed he owed his preservation to the intercession of the martyred Father Garnet. Gerard planned to make the crucial Channel crossing among the attendants of two envoys, Baron Hoboken and the Marquis de Germain. Hoboken represented the Archdukes and had been summoned to hear complaints concerning Hugh Owen and Father Baldwin in Flanders. The Marquis had, ironically enough, come from Spain to congratulate King James on surviving the Gunpowder Plot. However, these ‘high officials’ took fright at having such an incriminating presence in their midst. But at the last moment, as Gerard believed, ‘Father Garnet was received into heaven and did not forget me.’ The officials changed their minds, and the Marquis de Germain came in person to help Gerard into the livery which would enable him to pass as one of his entourage. ‘In my own mind,’ Gerard wrote, ‘I have no doubt that I owed this [reversal of decision] to Father Garnet’s prayers.’11

  Father John Gerard lived on for over thirty years after the death of his friend and colleague; he died in Rome in his early seventies. Like Father Tesimond, also named in the proclamation, who had escaped a few months earlier in that cargo of dead pigs, Father Gerard lived to write a full Narrative of the events of the Powder Treason, many of which he had experienced first hand, while meticulous researches among survivors filled in the gaps. In 1609 when he was at the Jesuit seminary in Louvain, he wrote an Autobiography, which gave an account of his missionary life in England. It has been suggested by his editor and translator (both books were written in Latin) Father Philip Caraman that Gerard in conversation with the novices must have frequently told ‘anecdotes of hunted priests, of torture and everyday heroism of his friends among the English laity’. Someone then suggested to the General of the Jesuits that all this would make an inspiring if distressing record.12

  Anne Vaux also lived for another thirty years, despite the ill-health and bad eyesight which had dogged her throughout her life. She was released from the Tower in August 1606, about the same time as her servant James Johnson was let go (although the intention with Johnson seems to have been to let him act as a decoy to lead the authorities to recusant safe houses). Shortly after her release, a priest mentioned that Anne Vaux was ‘much discontented’ that she had not been allowed to die with Garnet. He added discreetly on the subject of her work and health: ‘I believe the customers [the priests] and she will live together, but I fear not long.’ His forecast was however incorrect, for Anne Vaux proved to be one of those dedicated people in whom a strong vocation prevails over a weak physique.13

  At first, with her sister Eleanor Brooksby, Anne remained in London, presumably to fulfil Father Garnet’s last instructions to lie low until matters had quieted down (although Anne did suffer another spell in prison for recusancy in 1608). The sisters then moved to Leicestershire, where they continued to harbour and protect priests, their names appearing together on recusant rolls from time to time until Eleanor’s death in 1626. Anne’s toil over decades was acknowledged by at least two dedications in works by eminent Jesuits, translated into English, one of which, by Leonard Lessius, printed in St Omer in 1621, had the appropriate title of The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons…14 She never gave up her work for the ‘customers’. In 1635, the year of her death at the age of seventy-three, her name was reported to the Privy Council for harbouring a Jesuit school for the education of young English Catholic gentlemen at her mansion, Stanley Grange, near Derby.

  It was Anne Vaux, in the early stages of her grief at the death of Father Garnet, who was responsible for nurturing the story of a miraculous straw-husk bearing his martyred image. She was, wrote one who knew her, ‘sometimes too ardent in divine things’ – although the priests she protected over so many years would not have agreed.15

  The story of the straw-husk began with the usual desperate search for holy mementoes among those Catholics covertly present, after the death of Father Garnet. One of these was a young man called John Wilkinson who had been asked by a fellow recusant, Mrs Griffin, a tailor’s wife, to procure her some kind of relic. Wilkinson was therefore standing right by the hangman as he deposited Garnet’s severed head in the usual straw-lined basket. All of a sudden an empty husk of corn stained with the priest’s blood ‘did leap… in a strange manner’ into his hand. Wilkinson gave the husk to Mrs Griffin, who put it in a crystal reliquary.16

  There were two versions as to when the bloodstain revealed itself to bear ‘the proportion, features and countenance of a pale, wan dead man’s face’ perfectly resembling Father Garnet, with his eyes closed, beard bespotted with blood and a bloody circle round his neck. Father Gerard heard tha
t the image had been perceived by Mrs Griffin with a mixture of fear and joy, after three or four days. Another story linked the husk to the equally miraculous whiteness of Father Garnet’s features, visible once his head was hoist on its pole by London Bridge. Although these heads were customarily parboiled (which made them black), Father Garnet’s pallor was so remarkable as to cause general wonder. It also attracted a crowd of spectators, to the extent that after six weeks the government had to order the face to be turned upwards away from the inspection of the curious. According to this second (anonymous) account it was at this point that the likeness appeared in the corn-husk.

  The husk in its reliquary was a natural focus of devotion among the faithful – including Anne Vaux who was shown it in the course of the autumn – and curiosity among the rest. As a counterpoint to the comfort the husk gave to the bereaved Catholics, it caused the English government and its representatives abroad considerable irritation. Sir Thomas Edmondes complained about a reproduction of the image being circulated in Brussels, and the Archduke Albert managed to have a book on the subject of the straw-husk suppressed. Sir Charles Cornwallis, however, had less success with Philip III in Spain. He did not manage to get pictures of ‘Henry Garnet, an English man martyred in London’ censored, even though they were specifically designed to show up the King of England as a tyrant.17

  Zuñiga, the Spanish Ambassador in London, was in fact among those who inspected the straw-husk. He did so, as he told Philip III, ‘from curiosity’ after hearing about the husk from several sources, although he denied that he had paid for the privilege, being ‘never such an enemy to my money as to give it for straws’.18 In actual fact, the husk was probably concealed at the Spanish Embassy for a while, before being smuggled abroad. There it found a place among the relics in the possession of the Society of Jesus, before disappearing in the general turmoil of the French Revolution.

  Like her sister-in-law Anne, Eliza Vaux of Harrowden maintained her fidelity to the recusant cause for the rest of her life. She was released from her house arrest in London in April 1606 after a series of protests at her condition, made with characteristic vigour. Free to live at Harrowden once more, she continued to harbour priests, Father Percy taking the place of Father Gerard as her chaplain. In 1611, however, she was arrested once again and Harrowden was ransacked, owing to a rumour (untrue) that Father Gerard had returned to England. The next year Eliza Vaux was indicted at the Old Bailey for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment in Newgate. In July 1613, she was released on grounds of ill-health; she died about twelve years later without ever deserting the Faith which she had proudly chosen, and admirably served.19

  Eliza had done her best for the family of six children which had been her responsibility following the early death of her husband. The eldest, Mary, had married Sir George Symeon of Brightwell Baldwin in Oxfordshire in 1604; the youngest, Catherine, became the second wife of George Lord Abergavenny ten years later. The middle daughter, Joyce, became a nun in the recently founded Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, dying in 1667, outlived all the family. After the suppression of the order by the Pope, ‘Mother Joyce’ spent her declining years at Eye in Suffolk, living with her brother Henry.20 Neither of Eliza’s younger sons, Henry and William, married. It was the marital career of Eliza’s eldest son Edward Lord Vaux which provided a strange, one might even say romantic, footnote, to the events of November 1605.

  Edward’s projected marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard had been blighted by the discovery of the Powder Treason, and soon after Elizabeth had been married off to Lord Knollys, later the Earl of Banbury, forty years her senior. For a quarter of a century Edward himself did not marry. Then in 1632, he finally married his erstwhile sweetheart, Elizabeth Countess of Banbury, six weeks after the death of her aged husband.

  Their love had evidently not been in abeyance all that length of time for Elizabeth, who bore no children to Lord Banbury for many years, gave birth to two sons in 1628 and 1630 respectively. These boys were widely supposed to be the offspring of Lord Vaux rather than Lord Banbury (who was by then over eighty). It was a view which Edward Vaux’s testament only encouraged. Being theoretically without issue, he left Harrowden to his wife Elizabeth on his death, in remainder to her elder son, Nicholas, second Earl of Banbury. Unfortunately – if not altogether surprisingly – Nicholas’ inheritance of the Banbury earldom was itself the subject of a long lawsuit, which, after Nicholas’ death, his own son and heir Charles continued with zest.* The result was that Harrowden itself had to be sold in 1694, to meet the legal costs.21

  So the house in which Edmund Campion and John Gerard had been hidden was replaced by the present structure by the new owner Thomas Watson-Wentworth in the early eighteenth century. It is surely legitimate to regard Edward Vaux and Elizabeth Howard as indirect victims of the Powder Treason, since, given their enduring passion for each other, they must surely have enjoyed a long and happy marriage had they been allowed to wed in November 1605.

  The mothers, wives and children of the conspirators were not coated with social ignominy, but they were, according to custom where traitors’ families were concerned, pursued with financial vengeance. Guy Fawkes of course left no descendants to suffer, no widow and no children. He died as he had lived since the distant days of his Yorkshire childhood, a soldier of fortune to outsiders, but to himself a latterday crusader, whose strongest allegiance was to the Church in whose honour he planned to wield his sword.

  Robert Catesby’s mother Anne – deprived of a farewell as her son lurked in the fields by Ashby St Ledgers – was left trying to rescue something from the wreckage. She concentrated on holding on to her own marriage settlement from Sir William Catesby, for the benefit of her grandson, also named Robert. Lady Catesby was successful, as the settlement was not finally disturbed, despite the best efforts of the crown. But the younger Robert left no descendants, and, for better or worse, the direct Catesby line from the notorious conspirator died out.*22

  Lady Catesby’s sister, Muriel Lady Tresham, who had similarly mothered a traitor in Francis Tresham – or at any rate one whom the government treated as such – faced the same problem of trying to salvage the Tresham estate. Unlike Lady Catesby, Lady Tresham still had three unmarried daughters needing portions (eight of her eleven children had survived infancy, which was an astonishingly high proportion for the late sixteenth century). Then there was the need to maintain Francis’ widow Anne and her small children. Although, as has been noted, the entail upon male heirs saved the Tresham estate from the worst effects of the attainder – Francis Tresham had no son – all Lady Tresham’s gallant efforts were vitiated by the financial irresponsibility of Francis’ brother Sir Lewis Tresham (he acquired a baronetcy in 1611). In the shadow of the ‘Catholic Moses’, as Sir Thomas Tresham had been known, his sons had grown up reckless and selfish, inheriting their father’s extravagance but not his moral strength, nor his grandeur. Already in difficulties before he inherited in 1605, Sir Lewis managed to complete the ruin of the family, and with the death of his son William in 1643 the Tresham baronetcy came to an end.23

  Eliza Tresham, daughter of Francis, married Sir George Heneage of Lincolnshire. But her sister Lucy Tresham carried out her father’s ‘earnest desire’, expressed on his deathbed, that one of his girls should become a nun. Taking the name of Mother Winifred – an allusion, no doubt, to St Winifred of Holywell, to whom recusants had so much devotion – Lucy Tresham lived her life out in St Monica’s at Louvain, a new-founded convent in the Low Countries.24 While in one sense she was far away from the tumults of English Catholicism, in another sense she was only one among many women in these convents who had connections to the Gunpowder Plot.

  There were already twenty-two English nuns, Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Ursula’s, Louvain, in 1606, the year in which its offshoot St Monica’s was founded. Father Garnet’s sisters, Margaret and Helen, who had been professed at St Ursula’s in the late 1590s, w
ere among the first to move to St Monica’s. Alongside them, Lucy Tresham found herself enjoying what Father Garnet had called ‘that most secure and quiet haven of a religious life’, in a letter to his sister Margaret.25 Dorothea Rookwood, half-sister of Ambrose, was also there, and Mary Wintour, daughter of Robert and Gertrude, was professed in 1617.

  One cannot help speculating about whether the subject of the Powder Treason was ever discussed in the convent refectory and, if so, in what terms. One can at least be sure that the most fervent prayers for the dead were offered on 3 May, the anniversary of Father Garnet’s death. There were further connections and, one may assume, further prayers for the dead. Mary Ward, founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was the niece of the Wright brothers, Jack and Christopher; Joyce Vaux and Susanna Rookwood, a further half-sister of Ambrose, were two of her earliest and closest associates.

  The continued courageous and devout adherence to Catholicism was one thing that the families of the conspirators had in common after the event. Another daughter of Robert and Gertrude Wintour, Helena, was noted for her splendid gifts to the Jesuits,* while a son, Sir John Wintour, was ‘a noted Papist’ in the English Civil War. It is not absolutely clear whether Kenelm and John Digby, the sons of Sir Everard, were raised as Catholics after his death, since sources vary. But certainly the dazzling Sir Kenelm Digby – writer, diplomat, naval commander, lover and finally husband of Venetia Stanley – would describe himself in a memoir as a Catholic by the time he reached twenty, when he was living in Spain. It is likely that his devout mother had ensured a kind of covert Catholic instruction and influence all along, even if forbidden by law to bring up her sons in her own religion.26

  Even the six children of Lord Monteagle, who had professed his new Anglican loyalties to King James, followed the religion of their pious Tresham mother, who remained a recusant. His eldest son Henry Lord Morley (the title which Monteagle inherited from his father in 1618) was a Catholic peer in the reign of Charles I. Monteagle was not at first disposed to grant the request of his eldest daughter Frances Parker, who was physically handicapped, to become a nun. But he finally surrendered, ‘in respect that she was crooked, and therefore not fit for the world’. He gave her a handsome dowry of a thousand pounds.27