God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (27 page)

As for Robert Southwell, Topcliffe summed up the plans for his immediate future in a pungent phrase to Queen Elizabeth. The priest was to be made ‘to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands but as high as he can reach against the wall, (like a trick at Trenchmore [a popular dance of the period])’. It sounded an innocuous fate; only the priest-hunter’s contemptuous comments about the methods used in ‘common prisons’ to make victims talk—they ‘hurteth not’—gave any indication of what was in store for Southwell. Topcliffe referred to a relatively new form of torture, the manacles: iron fetters fixed to the wall from which the victim could be suspended by the wrists for hours at a time. Their invention had been credited to Topcliffe himself. If so, it would explain his confidence in their application: the manacles, he assured Elizabeth, would ‘enforce [Southwell] to tell all’.
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By the end of the first day of torture, though, this confidence had been shaken. Although Southwell had been strung up for several hours, yet still he had refused to answer any question put to him. Topcliffe sent urgently to the Queen, complaining about the Jesuit’s obstinacy. ‘The Queen’, wrote Garnet, receiving his information from an unnamed source at Court, ‘called Topcliffe a fool, and said she would put the matter in the hands of her Council who would soon finish it’. The following day two Clerks of the Council arrived to help Topcliffe with his interrogation. ‘Yet still, they say, “the prisoner remains obstinate”,’ noted Garnet.
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By the end of the second day, it was clear that Topcliffe, even with assistance, was no nearer getting Southwell to confess to anything. The priest was removed next door to the Gatehouse prison, where the torture stepped up a gear. Now, he was left hanging for even longer periods, his legs bent back and his heels strapped up against his thighs. Members of the Council arrived to question him; Sir Robert Cecil came face to face with his cousin in a dank prison cell, its windows boarded up, the only light coming from a small pane of glass in the ceiling. But still Southwell refused to talk. Henry Garnet, desperate to know everything that was happening to his friend—from the conditions in which he was being kept to the comments made about him—reported one Councillor as saying, ‘No wonder [Catholics] trust these Jesuits with their lives, when, from a man ten times tortured, not one word could be twisted that might lead others into danger.’
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Meanwhile, Southwell’s father, Richard Southwell, was attempting to secure his son’s release. Some time in July he petitioned Elizabeth directly. By now Robert was in a wretched state, liceridden, still dressed in the clothes in which he had been arrested, filthy, starved and tortured half to death. Such, anyway, were the reports being circled amongst his friends. His father’s plea rang with indignant fury. ‘That if his son had committed anything for which by the laws he had deserved death, he might suffer death. If not, as he was a gentleman, that her majesty might be pleased to order that he should be treated as such, even though he were a Jesuit. And that as his father, he might be permitted to send him what he needed to sustain life.’ Elizabeth granted the petition.
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On 28 July the Privy Council wrote to the Lieutenant of the Tower of London with the following order: ‘that her Majesty’s pleasure is you shall receive into your custody and charge the person of Robert Southwell, a priest whom Mr Topcliffe shall deliver unto you, to be kept close prisoner so as no person be suffered to have access unto him’. Soon afterwards, with Topcliffe as his escort, Southwell was carried the few miles from the Gatehouse prison to the Tower of London. Here, he disappeared into the stronghold of the Lanthorn Tower, on the corner of the Queen’s Privy Gardens overlooking Tower Wharf, and into a strictly enforced solitary confinement. For the next two and a half years he would remain there, hidden from view. His friends would struggle in vain to receive news of him. His enemies, it seemed, had virtually forgotten him. Denied all contact with the outside world, denied pen and ink to express himself, denied the glory of an inspirational martyrdom, he had simply passed into oblivion.
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But while Southwell’s fate still hung in the balance, Richard Topcliffe, it seemed, was more immediately concerned with covering his own tracks. On 25 July, just days before Southwell’s transfer to the Tower, Anne Bellamy was released from the Gatehouse prison. By now she was about four months pregnant. From Westminster she was taken to Greenwich, ostensibly to be examined by the Council, but in reality to be married off in secret. The man chosen to be her husband was Nicholas Jones.
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From Greenwich, Anne was taken to Somerby in Lincolnshire, Topcliffe’s estate, where, towards Christmas, she gave birth. A month later, on 12 January 1593, Topcliffe wrote to the Bellamys denying all rumours of a hugger-mugger wedding. ‘He very vehemently purgeth her from reports of slander, howsoever slanderous,’ testified Thomas Bellamy later, adding that ‘By a postscript [Topcliffe] writeth, that if any papist Catholic say she is with child, hold them knavish and false.’ The priest-hunter signed his letter ‘Your plain and known friend, Richard Topcliffe’.
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In February Topcliffe again wrote to Anne’s parents, defending her honour. The first news the Bellamys received of their daughter’s condition came from Anne herself. In a letter dated 12 March 1593 Anne informed her mother of her hurried marriage to Jones, ‘alleging many reasons thereof’, wrote her brother, though none that satisfied her family’s suspicions. She also confessed she had been prematurely delivered of a baby and she craved her mother’s pardon.
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The Bellamys’ grief did not end there. The following year Topcliffe contacted Richard Bellamy, requesting he make over his farm at Preston, worth one hundred marks a year, to Nicholas Jones. There was no need to put in writing the veiled threat behind this petition. And when Bellamy refused, retribution was swift to follow: Justice Young was detailed to ride out to Harrow and arrest the family. Richard Bellamy and his wife were taken to the Gatehouse, their two younger daughters were sent to the Clink prison and their two sons were sent to St Katherine’s prison. Once again the family was suffering disproportionate agonies for someone else’s actions.
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Richard Bellamy would remain in the Gatehouse for the next ten years, before departing England for the Low Countries. There, he would die in poverty. Mrs Bellamy’s fate is unknown, though one report mentions she died in the Gatehouse. Audrey and Mary Bellamy, Anne’s sisters, would remain loyal to the Catholic faith and seem to have spent the rest of their lives in and out of prison; Thomas Bellamy and his brother Faith would eventually admit defeat and conform to the Anglican Church. Their Uxendon estate was sold off in 1603. As for Anne Bellamy, she was said to have continued at Somerby under Topcliffe’s protection for the next three years, but from there the trail goes cold. Hers was a wretched outcome. In keeping with the attitudes of the period she was held responsible for her pregnancy and undeserving of sympathy. To her brother her troubles had come about as a direct result of ‘her lewd behaviour’. It mattered little that he remained convinced to the end that Topcliffe had raped her. That rape, no less than her betrayal of Southwell, was accounted her own fault.
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On 18 February 1595, without warning, Robert Southwell was removed from the Tower of London and taken to Newgate prison, set in the city walls (on today’s Newgate Street) and widely considered ‘the most severe of the twelve London gaols’. There, he was led down into ‘a subterranean cell of evil repute’ called Limbo. The name was apt—particularly so, given Southwell’s own limbo-like state for the last two and a half years—for the cell was regarded as a staging post to the scaffold, a waiting room for death. It seemed the Government had overcome its initial reluctance to kill him and was now about to proceed against him with an almost indecent haste. Speculation as to why this should have been was widespread among Southwell’s friends, but the most likely explanation for it lies in the accusation levelled at him at his trial: Southwell would be charged with instructing Catholics in deceit, in teaching them how to lie.
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When Garnet had written to Claudio Aquaviva years earlier, describing the raid on Baddesley Clinton, he had included a telling sentence in his account. It came in reference to a young layman of the Vaux household who, on the pursuivants’ arrival, had taken to his heels for nearby woods. When captured and interrogated later, he had sworn vehemently that he was no priest, an answer the pursuivants were happy to accept, ‘believing at that time that none could deny that he was a priest without committing sin’. This simple statement reflected years of agonizing on the missionaries’ part. The problem was this: as soon as a priest was run to ground the question would be put to him, ‘Are you a priest?’ On his next words hung his own life and that of the owner of the house in which he had been arrested. It might have been easy to make a swift and sure denial. It would also have been sacrilege.
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This was no new dilemma. The matter of the legitimacy of an untruth, if truth and justice were believed to be at odds, had perplexed philosophers and theologians for centuries. St Augustine had seemed to settle the matter definitively by ruling that any lie was intrinsically evil, regardless of circumstances, because it corrupted the essential function of language. But the Reformation had thrown this ruling into uncertainty. Suddenly, as Catholicism and Protestantism slugged it out for supremacy, the question of whether one could lie and deny one’s faith had become a matter of some urgency. Martin Luther, ever the pragmatist, had ruled that an untruth, while always evil, was sometimes permissible. Catholic theologians were not so sure. For help, they looked to the law courts. In response, the theory of equivocation was born.
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According to this theory, if a man were unjustly questioned he might respond ambiguously, choosing words ambiguous in themselves or ambiguous in the context in which they were spoken. What constituted unjust questioning was not so subjective as it might appear (though it would have been unsurprising if the English Government had felt differently), for it was a privilege under common law that no man should be forced to incriminate himself; which action confessing to the priesthood (or to sheltering a priest) undoubtedly was. The use of equivocation was only permitted, though, in legitimate self-defence, not deliberately to mislead, and the user must have in mind a sense in which his words could be held to be true. By this reckoning, a Catholic householder, asked whether he was concealing a priest, might answer
No
, meaning,
No, you have no right to ask me that question.
If these qualifying safeguards seemed somewhat like hair-splitting, they reflected the deep conviction among most Catholics that lying was still irredeemably sinful, no matter the motive.
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For the missionaries, though, the problem was much more than one simply of lying. Henry Garnet described his beliefs to Aquaviva thus: ‘that Judas sinned by betraying Christ, but that Peter sinned also by denying Him’. To deny one’s priesthood was an evil stretching back to the very first days of the faith.
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It is one of the many surprising points of the mission’s history that, in between running for their lives, ministering to England’s Catholics, organizing the building of hiding places and creating an underground nation wide network of priests, the missionaries, themselves, still found time to debate the morality of equivocation. A series of letters between Garnet and Aquaviva reveals just how uncomfortable most priests felt at the prospect of denying their calling.
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As Garnet explained, ‘their reason is that the canons of the apostles contain an instruction that anyone who denies his priesthood through fear is to be degraded; and they are uncertain whether this canon is merely human sanction or whether it asserts a divine principle’. For his part, Garnet was anxious that the use of ‘a thousand ambiguities’ risked diluting what were, to him, incontrovertible truths. Characteristically, Aquaviva ruled in favour of equivocation and Garnet responded obediently, ‘now that we have your theologian’s answer that this is lawful, many for the first time are now acting on this opinion’. Southwell’s promotion of this opinion would be his undoing.
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On 20 February 1595, just two days after Southwell’s transfer from the Tower, a popular hanging took place at Tyburn. ‘Almost all the city went out to see the execution,’ wrote Garnet. At precisely the same time Southwell was taken by road the couple of miles from Newgate to Westminster Hall. In spite of this diversion word had leaked out and the courtroom was packed. Armed halberdiers guided Southwell’s steps to the bar, where, with his hands freed, he ‘put off his hat and made obeisance’ to the men before him: Chief Justice Sir John Popham, Attorney General Sir Edward Coke and Richard Topcliffe. Then the Clerk of the Assizes read out the charges. ‘Robert Southwell…You are indicted…for that you, since the first year of the Queen’s Majesty’s reign that now is, did pass without licence out of her highness’ dominions beyond the seas, and there received order of priesthood from the pretended and usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, and did return, and was found like a vile traitor at one Bellamy’s house, nigh a place called Harrow Hill in Middlesex.’ The court waited expectantly. Then Southwell replied, ‘I confess I am a Catholic priest, and I thank God for it, but no traitor; neither can any law make it treason to be a priest.’
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