God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (21 page)

Henry Garnet was uniquely placed to recognize this. From his own experiences of life underground he knew well what chimeras a climate of fear and suspicion could breed in the mind. As a new arrival in the summer of 1586 he had been interviewed by the daughter of the house at which he had stopped for directions. Her manner began to cause him concern and soon he was convinced she believed him to be a priest. ‘So cleverly and cunningly were [her] questions put that I might have been in a court of law,’ he wrote. It took him some while to realize the child was simply curious. But, as head of the Jesuit mission—and thus de facto head of the entire network of priests across England—to Garnet had fallen the duty of caring for the missionaries’ welfare. It was to him that both seminary and Society men turned for assistance, advice and accommodation and on him that they unburdened their anxieties. If William Allen and Robert Persons were charged with selecting suitable priests for England, then Garnet was charged with keeping them that way: obedient to the mission’s aims, responsible to the families who sheltered them and, above all, self-possessed. ‘A wart on the face is observed instantly,’ Garnet noted cryptically, adding that ‘by endurance of hardship layCatholics become sharp-sighted both in observing and in assessing the actions of priests’. If the missionaries were to expect those same lay Catholics to risk their lives and livelihoods by breaking the law, then their own behaviour had to be without fault, both procedurally and psychologically. It was this realization that had caused Garnet to react so strongly to John Gerard’s unauthorized activities immediately after his landing; now it saw him adopting the role of father confessor to every man on the mission.
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The case of Thomas Lister revealed just how difficult this task could be. Lister was a Lancashire man and widely considered a brilliant scholar. In 1589, aged thirty, he returned to England from Rome and was quickly posted to Worcester, to Hindlip Hall three miles from the city, to serve as Edward Oldcorne’s assistant there. Oldcorne was opening up the west of England for the mission in precisely the same way as Gerard was the east. In 1590 Garnet received Lister into the Society of Jesus, but soon the new Jesuit was complaining of health problems, in particular of neuralgia. In 1594 he was recalled from Hindlip to join Garnet in London. It seemed Lister had developed claustrophobia and now found it impossible to enter any of the hiding places with which Nicholas Owen had equipped Hindlip. He had become a liability to the family sheltering him and it is testimony to Garnet’s courage that he kept Lister with him for two years, at risk to his own life, while attempting to find a solution to the problem. Lister, meanwhile, wrote bitterly to Claudio Aquaviva begging him for help and complaining that Garnet was unsympathetic. Garnet noted ‘we hope for better things from him in the future’.
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In autumn 1596 Garnet found transport to take Lister out of England and he wrote to Aquaviva informing him, ‘I have sent to Flanders Thomas who for a long time earnestly asked to be sent into voluntary exile.’ But in February the following year Garnet was once again writing to Aquaviva about Lister, this time with uncharacteristic anger.

‘The Thomas about whom I wrote I sent away to Flanders. But just outside the very walls of Antwerp he had such a compulsive desire to return home, that I have him with me here again…I am deeply distressed that his departure came to nothing. He has had no regard for the interests of the mission: both in my judgement and in his own it was essential that he should go…I am tortured in mind over him, uncertain and hesitant how I should deal with him, for the source of his disease is not so much weakness of character as a disturbed mind and lack of responsibility’.

It took many more months for Garnet to persuade Lister to leave England and seek help on the Continent and then, it seems, only on condition the priest could return again when his health was improved. By 1602 Lister had rejoined the mission and Garnet was noting that ‘Thomas…is almost completely cured of his complaint’. But with the spectre of discovery and arrest stalking every priest at every turn, it was unlikely Lister, and all those others for whom the pressure of their situation brought with it nightmares and neurosis, could ever fully be free from disturbances of mind. Little wonder, given the nature of the death awaiting them.
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You must go to the place from whence you came, there to remain until ye shall be drawn through the open City of London upon a hurdle to the place of execution, and there be hanged and let down alive, and your privy parts cut off, and your entrails taken out and burnt in your sight; then your head to be cut off and your body divided into four parts, to be disposed of at her Majesty’s pleasure. And God have mercy on your soul.
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Such was the sentence for all those found guilty of high treason.

Hanging, drawing and quartering was first introduced in 1241, specifically, it was said, for the pirate William Maurice. By the end of that century David, last prince regnant of Wales, had been executed in similar fashion by the conquering King Edward I of England and the punishment was officially recognized as the lawful penalty for treason against the monarch and the State. It would remain so until 1870, when it was struck from the statute books.
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The term
drawing
referred both to the means of transport to the scaffold—the prisoner was laid on a hurdle tied to a horse’s tail and drawn through the streets—and to the process of disembowelment. The body of the still-living victim—having been castrated to signify the accused was unfit ‘to leave any generation after him’—was now sliced open and the stomach, entrails and heart slowly drawn out. The prisoner’s severed head, ‘which had imagined the mischief’, was held aloft to the watching crowds with the traditional cry ‘Behold, the head of a traitor! So die all traitors!’ From thence it was taken to Newgate prison, to a room called Jack Ketch’s kitchen, and parboiled in a mixture of salt water and cumin seed. Then it was hoisted above the battlements of London Bridge on one of a number of long, jagged poles adorning the southern gate, as a deterrent to other traitors. The salt water and cumin seed were, themselves, a deterrent to scavenging seagulls.
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But, in the case of the Catholic missionaries, the sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering having once been passed, the guilty priest was offered a reprieve: if he recanted his faith he would live. Even Edmund Campion, convicted of plotting to kill the Queen, was afforded this chance to save himself. And here was the chief flaw in the English Government’s campaign against the mission, a flaw of which both sides were aware and yet which increasing numbers were happy to ignore in the face of the more convenient myth being peddled by the Crown, that a good Catholic was a bad Englishman. For if the Government seriously believed the missionaries to be traitors, then clearly it was illogical to release them on the grounds that they now conformed to the State religion. And if such conformity was sufficient to save a priest’s life, then the Government’s insistence that no one in England suffered for his faith, but only for endangering national security, rang resoundingly hollow. And, perhaps, in this last ditch attempt by the Government to avoid making martyrs there was tacit acknowledgement of this. But for those priests now faced with the choice between living in the sin of heresy or dying in the agony of live evisceration, ahead of them lay the bitterest of struggles.
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Indeed, every step towards the scaffold was designed to make the struggle bitterer still. If the clinical brutality of the death sentence’s wording was not in itself enough to awake the survival instinct, then what followed surely was. The summons usually came in the still grey hours of early morning. At first light, Tower prisoners were led from their cells to Coldharbour, an open space near Tower Green. There, they were bound two to a hurdle and the cavalcade would set off at a slow walk; any faster and the victims’ heads would be dashed to pieces on the cobbles.
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At the place of execution a cart would be made ready beneath the gallows. The first man was lifted onto the back of the cart and a noose was placed about his neck. Then the horses were whipped up and the cart would lurch away. Those waiting their turn to be hanged watched what happened next, as the following description, from a contemporary account of the executions of Robert Johnson and John Shorte, revealed. Johnson ‘being brought from the hurdle, was commanded to look upon Mr Shorte who was hanging, and then immediately cut down. And so being [helped] into the cart, was commanded again to look back towards Mr Shorte who was then in quartering’. All the while the priests were exhorted to recant. Over the years many of them would.
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In September 1588 John Owen, Nicholas’s brother, would renounce his faith at the Chichester assizes, agreeing to take the Oath of Supremacy and any other oaths of the judges’ devising. Court official Thomas Bowyer promptly set about creating a new formula and soon Owen was swearing to make known to the authorities ‘all such parties and practices as shall any way tend to the endangering’ of Elizabeth’s life; in other words, all details of the mission. Owen was then placed in the custody of the Bishop of Chichester.
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The following day, 1 October 1588, another of the priests with whom Owen had been convicted, Francis Edwards, would also recant upon the scaffold. What agony of conscience this cost them both is unknown, but the case of Catholic layman John Thomas suggested few men took the decision easily. Thomas was sentenced to death at the Winchester assizes of March 1592. Immediately, he recanted his faith, but, as Henry Garnet described to Aquaviva, ‘After his return to prison, [Thomas] sent a message to inform the judges…that he regretted his cowardice and determined henceforth to do nothing unbecoming a Catholic.’ Learning of some thieves, convicted at the same assizes, who were due to be executed, Thomas presented himself to the sheriff at the gallows, explaining he was condemned and requesting to be killed in their company. ‘“Since you are so keen to be hanged”, said the sheriff, “assure yourself that I should be delighted to oblige you if your name were on my list. But since it is not here, go away.”’ Thomas was finally executed at the autumn assizes.
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It is hard to say just how many men recanted during the course of the mission, or what happened to them all afterwards, but every time news trickled down of a priest renouncing his faith a cold shiver of apprehension ran through the Catholic community. In 1586 the seminarian Anthony Tyrrell, a close associate of the then Jesuit Superior William Weston, was captured and imprisoned. Terrified of the torture to come, Tyrrell promptly sold his services to the Government and from his cell in Southwark’s Clink prison, crammed full of Catholics, he worked hard to discover the whereabouts of Garnet and Southwell for his interrogators. In 1592 James Younger—having already inadvertently compromised the location of Garnet’s base at Finsbury Fields by blundering there in daylight hours, seeking advice—was arrested and sent to the Counter prison. There he, too, broke down in terror. In a series of letters to Lord Keeper Puckering, Younger repeatedly offered to turn Queen’s evidence, naming vast numbers of priests then in England and assuring Puckering he could quickly learn where each one was stationed if he were set free. Just as repeatedly, he also craved pardon for the errors of a young man led astray through bad counsel. By June the following year he had been released from prison, but to his dismay he now found himself shunned by fellow Catholics. Bitterly he wrote to Puckering asking if he might leave London for the north of England where his treachery might not be suspected. From there his trail goes cold, until, in March 1594, the priest Robert Barwise revealed under interrogation that Younger was now back at Douai, teaching at the English College there.
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Like Anthony Tyrrell before him—who, when called upon to read his recantation in public, retracted his statement—James Younger appeared to have regretted his activities as a Government spy and returned to the Catholic Church. In neither case was this regret lasting. In time Anthony Tyrrell would re-recant and become a minister in the Church of England, while James Younger would join the growing anti-Jesuit faction at Douai, prepared to betray priests of the Society to the English Government in return for greater freedoms of its own. Their stories provided ample proof that the Catholic mission was only as strong as its weakest member.
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But if the selection of priests possessed of the right balance of piety and practicality to serve the mission’s aims was an imperfect science, then there were other measures more exact that could be adopted to secure operations. The information is fragmentary, as typifies any secret organization. Indeed, as in the case of Nicholas Owen’s hides, it was often only the unsuccessful methods that were discovered; those that were successful are seldom mentioned in the letters, State papers and spies’ reports that document the period. Nonetheless, from the few facts that are available it is possible to piece together an outline sketch of the underground network in place across England.

It had been identified early on that returning missionaries were at their most vulnerable during the voyage home and in the period immediately after landing. In transit there were too many factors outside their control that could go wrong, namely the weather and the unpredictable intentions of their crew and fellow passengers. On arrival, until they could be placed in a secure house, they were prey to every suspicious watch, inquisitive villager or opportunistic informer in the neighbourhood; it was also during their first few hours ashore that priests were most likely to make mistakes, through fear, through ignorance of local conditions, through sheer bad luck. So, in the four years he spent in Rouen immediately after his flight from England, Robert Persons had supervised the development of a number of safe routes home for missionaries. Rouen was ‘a most convenient town’, he noted, ‘on account of its nearness to the sea, so that there some can make trips to the coast to arrange for boats to convey people across’. Assisting him was Ralph Emerson, Campion’s servant from their time together in England, and in August 1584 Persons wrote, ‘Ralph…has done wonders by contriving two new ways of crossing over.’ It is possible these were the two routes used by William Weston in September 1584 and by Garnet and Southwell two years later. Weston sailed from Dieppe to a point just south of Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast in a privately chartered boat. He was accompanied, on Persons’ instructions, by Henry Hubert, ‘an English gentleman who was staying [in Rouen] and [had] properties on the English coast’; Hubert’s job was to escort Weston ashore and guide him to his own house, before returning to France. Garnet and Southwell sailed from Calais to the coast of Kent, about a mile east of Folkestone, again in a privately chartered vessel and with an escort, a Flemish lay brother, to see them onto dry land. It was these two rules—secure a private boat and a guide—that Walpole, in his haste to reach England, had flouted with such devastating consequences. Indeed, Walpole’s storm-racked journey and his few hours on land became a textbook case of precisely what not to do as a returning missionary. In the wake of his capture every effort would be made to ensure that new arrivals did not fall into the same trap.
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