God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (32 page)

Clearly, though, it would now have been safest for Gerard to change base again. That he did not suggests either that he and Wiseman were happy the search was a one-off and would not be repeated, or that, for all his abundant confidence, Gerard recognized few families in the area would be ready to welcome him as a permanent addition to their household. Instead, Gerard summoned Nicholas Owen to Essex. Within days of the Nicholls’ raid, Owen was at Broadoaks strengthening the house’s internal fortifications.
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The following year, 1593, appears to have passed without incident. No doubt the family paid the requisite fines for hearing Catholic mass, currently one hundred marks apiece (Robert Jackson would have been liable for a two hundred marks fine for saying mass); no doubt Gerard continued his work in Essex; there is evidence of neither. The focus of most Catholics would have been on the proceedings in Parliament that spring and on the fear of increased penalties against them. When those penalties failed to materialize (barring the new facility for fining householders and the restriction on Catholic travel), there can have been little sense of relief. Yes, for the first time Parliament had acted as a check on the Government, stifling harsher measures against Catholics. Yes, there seemed to be a growing sense among some Englishmen that enough was enough; that year Henry Garnet reported Lord Grey as saying, ‘I was under the impression that our purpose hitherto was merely to keep the Papists humbled and in subjection so that they should cause no trouble. We have sucked them dry and reduced them to extreme poverty. Now we strive to harass them yet further. It is plain to me that we are persecuting religion.’
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Yet few can have believed for an instant that their troubles were at an end. For the Wisemans, their troubles were just beginning.
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On Boxing Day 1593 pursuivants unexpectedly raided the North End house of the Widow Wiseman, William’s mother. Mass was in preparation when the raid took place. The priest, a man named Brewster, was successfully spirited away up a chimney to hide, but evidence of his activities lay all around and magistrate Richard Young, informing Lord Keeper Puckering of the event, advised bringing Mrs Wiseman in for examination. North End he described as the chief place of resort ‘for all these wicked persons’. When, some time the following year and after an unexplained pause, Mrs Wiseman was suddenly carried up to London and imprisoned in the Gatehouse gaol for receiving seminary priests, it might have appeared that this was something more than an ordinary case of bad luck.
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And still things got worse. On the evening of Friday 15 March 1594 Richard Topcliffe, apparently acting on his own authority, organized a raid of all known or suspected Catholic houses in London. ‘The uproar was such that Hannibal himself might have been at the gates or the Spanish fleet in the river Thames,’ wrote Garnet to Aquaviva in the months following. Local magistrates were called in to assist the priest-hunter and overnight the city’s churches were drafted into use as holding pens to contain all those arrested in the raids.
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That same evening Gerard was visiting Garnet at the latter’s new base in an undisclosed location some ‘four or five miles from London’. He had been scheduled to continue on to London that night, to a house at the upper end of Golden Lane (running between Old Street and the Barbican) rented just recently for his own and friends’ use. The house had been let from a neighbour, a Mr Tute, and the name on the lease was that of William Wiseman. But now Garnet begged Gerard not to go there. It was the second time the Jesuit Superior had had a premonition of danger. Gerard had experienced the first occasion for himself at Baddesley Clinton; accordingly, he remained with Garnet that night. ‘Early next morning’, he recorded afterwards, ‘rumours reached us that papists had been seized in the house.’ Garnet later wrote to Robert Persons that ‘there [should have] been there Long John with the little beard [Gerard]…if I had not more importunately stayed him than ever before’. Those arrested during the raid on Golden Lane included Gerard’s servant, Richard Fulwood, and the Wallis brothers, servants to William Wiseman, one of whom was vocal in his admiration for the Jesuits and declared himself glad to be arrested so that now he might suffer persecution for his faith.
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They were taken away for interrogation. Under a barrage of questioning all of them were able to keep hidden from the authorities Gerard’s connection with the house, but William Wiseman’s own association was clearly documented and he was called to London.
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On 19 March 1594 Wiseman appeared before the Attorney General, Edward Coke, to assist in the inquiry into Golden Lane. He strongly denied that the house was a resort for priests and though he did admit that he had stood guarantor for a third party who was renting the property, he refused ‘for charity’s sake’ to give that party’s name. He was led off to the Counter prison in nearby Wood Street where he was placed in solitary confinement. Only his servant John Frank was permitted contact with him, and back at Broadoaks the family waited anxiously for Frank to bring news. Towards the end of the month Frank left London for Essex with a letter containing reassurances from Wiseman and precise details of the questions he had been asked and the answers he had given, necessary if the family’s stories were to be consistent. Meanwhile, Gerard had returned to Wimbish to offer what comfort he could and vitally, now that the Wisemans were facing investigation, ‘to get everything [at the house] hidden neatly away’. Thus it was that on 1 April 1594, Easter Monday, he was at Broadoaks when the pursuivants raided.
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It was first light and Gerard was preparing mass when he was halted by the sound of horses approaching. Within moments the house had been surrounded. Escape was now impossible. The servants barred the doors while Gerard stripped the altar, concealing his books and papers in one of the many caches with which the house had been provisioned. Then he began making his way downstairs from the attic chapel to one of Nicholas Owen’s new hides near the dining room, stocked with basic supplies for just such an event. But here Mrs Wiseman intervened, drawing Gerard back towards a second Owen-built hide leading off the chapel. Speed was now of the essence and the Jesuit did not resist, crawling into this new hiding place with the altar furnishings crammed in around him. At the last moment Mrs Wiseman handed him a jar of quince jelly she happened to have with her and the hide was closed over Gerard’s head.
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Downstairs the pursuivants fanned out across the house. Mrs Wiseman and her two daughters were locked away in her chamber, the family’s Catholic servants were segregated in different parts of the building, and the search began. Candles were shone into dark corners. Long rods were brought out to measure walls, checking where the internal and external dimensions did not tally; any section that could not be accounted for was demolished. Panelling and floorboards were sounded for hollow spots then swiftly smashed through. This took two days.

By late Wednesday the justices leading the raid were ready to admit defeat. A detachment of pursuivants was left behind to escort Mrs Wiseman, her two children and the Catholic servants to London the next morning. The non-Catholic servants, of whom there was a handful, were detailed to watch the house; among their number was John Frank. That evening Mrs Wiseman got a message to Frank that as soon as the house was empty he was to call to Gerard from the room beneath the chapel, telling him the search was over (such was the secrecy of Broadoaks’ hides that even now she was unwilling to divulge their precise location). This message Frank now conveyed to the pursuivants.

On Thursday, 4 April the justices returned to Broadoaks and the search resumed. Mrs Wiseman’s instructions to Frank suggested the existence of a hiding place positioned somewhere within the interior masonry of the first floor in the north wing. That day the corresponding rooms were measured and sounded even more carefully as the pursuivants closed in on their prey. That night a watch was set. Two men now guarded the attic chapel, stopping off Gerard’s only way out of the house. As darkness fell so, too, did the temperature and the men decided to light a fire laid ready in the attic grate. From his hide beneath the fireplace, accessed by lifting a small section of floor under the grate, Gerard listened as the thin layer of bricks constituting the false hearth came loose with a rattle. Immediately above him the wooden floorboards, on which the bricks rested, began to smoulder and shift. He heard one of the guards comment on this peculiarity, but neither seemed inclined to pursue it further, putting off their investigation until the following day.

By Friday, 5 April Gerard’s capture seemed a formality. All night the fire had burnt over him, the embers raining down on his head. Now, from where he crouched, he could look up through the charred remnants of the hide into the attic room beyond, just as clearly as anyone approaching the fireplace could look down on him. Yet no one looked. At first light his guards were called from their post to the rooms below, which now became the focus of even greater scrutiny as, systematically, the pursuivants began to strip the plaster from the walls. During this process they discovered the hiding place Gerard had initially intended using, before Mrs Wiseman dissuaded him; inside, untouched, lay his store of provisions. Meanwhile, the stripping of the plaster continued. By late afternoon the room beneath the chapel was entirely denuded, bar a small section of wall immediately surrounding the fireplace. Here a large and finely carved chimney-piece impeded the pursuivants’ progress; this, plus the growing belief that Gerard had somehow managed to escape during the night, was enough to halt the proceedings. Immediately behind the chimney-piece lay Gerard’s hide.

On the evening of Friday, 5 April the search was officially called off.
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Mrs Wiseman and her daughters were released, along with the Catholic servants, and, once the pursuivants had finally departed the house, John Gerard was lifted bodily from the hide in which he had crouched for the last four days. All this time he had eaten nothing but the quince jelly thrust upon him by his hostess as the raid began. In an extraordinary gesture of solidarity—part desire to share his suffering, part means of ascertaining how long he could survive without food—Mrs Wiseman had starved herself for the same period. ‘When I came out,’ wrote Gerard afterwards, ‘I found her face so changed that she looked a different person; and had it not been for her voice and her dress I doubt whether I would have recognised her.’ But any relief at the near miraculous nature of their escape was misplaced. No one yet suspected John Frank to be an informer.
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As soon as he was rested enough to travel, Gerard left Broadoaks, lying low at a nearby friend’s house for a fortnight to recuperate properly. Then he headed for London. William Wiseman was still being held prisoner in the Wood Street Counter and the Jesuit was keen to see if there was anything he could do for him, but with London’s Catholics in disarray following Topcliffe’s raids it was imperative Gerard first find a safe place of refuge. Nicholas Owen was drafted in to help him in this search; meanwhile, Gerard shifted precariously between the Strand house of Anne, Countess of Arundel and a house belonging to the Wisemans somewhere in Holborn. It was there, at around ten o’clock on the evening of 23 April, that John Frank arrived with a letter from Mrs Wiseman, which he said required Gerard’s urgent attention. And it was there just two hours later that the pursuivants arrived, hammering on the door to wake Gerard and Owen, both asleep in the upstairs chamber.
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This time there was no way out: the chamber had only one exit; the house did not have a hiding place (Owen had just sufficient time to burn Mrs Wiseman’s letter before armed men burst into the room). And this time there could be no pretence as to his real identity: Gerard recognized one of the pursuivants, probably from his time in the Marshalsea prison ten years before.
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Gerard and Owen were ordered to get dressed. Their room was searched for incriminating evidence. Then both men were led away under escort.
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Before long he would write of his travels, ‘I had so many friends on my route and so close to one another that I hardly ever had to put up at a tavern in a journey of a hundred and fifty miles.’ On the assumption that he rode an average distance of about twenty to thirty miles a day (avoiding main roads), this would give some indication of Catholic density at the time.

*
Matins was traditionally a midnight office that might also be recited at daybreak. Within the Church of England the term now refers specifically to Morning Prayer.

*
In 1583 Whitgift published his Twenty-Four Articles, the fiercest challenge to Puritanism yet, reinforcing episcopal authority and declaring that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to the word of God: both were the antithesis of Puritan belief. Although unpopular with Privy Councillors, many of whom had Puritan leanings, Whitgift acted with the complete support of Elizabeth.

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As late as 1569 the vicar of Ashford in Kent declared that those children who died before baptism were the ‘firebrands of Hell’.

*
The churching of women after childbirth (referred to here by Garnet as childing) was a medieval practice continued after the Reformation by the Anglican Church. The ceremony was one of thanksgiving for a safe deliverance and represented society’s recognition of the woman as a mother. However, the ritual was ringed with superstitious beliefs (frequently enforced by the more orthodox Anglican clergy), in particular that the unchurched woman was unclean and should not leave her house until she had been purified.