God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (34 page)

Gerard, himself, only noted, ‘I did not feel the least bit sorry for myself. Quite the contrary. I became very happy—so good is God to the least of his servants.’ With each new misery he endured, he was moving a step nearer martyrdom.
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Three or four days into his imprisonment, Gerard was led out once again for interrogation. This time he faced more practised adversaries than the Royal Commissioners: Richard Young, Chief Magistrate for Middlesex, and Richard Topcliffe. Young, so prominent in the search for Southwell and in the recent arrest of Mrs Wiseman, began with a question about the places where Gerard had lived since his return to England and about the Catholics he knew. Gerard refused to answer. Now Topcliffe entered the fray; sixty-two-year-old priest-hunter faced twenty-nine-year-old priest. The scene, as reported afterwards by Gerard, was a bravura display of bluster by the older man, bravado by the younger: ‘Topcliffe looked up at me and glared. “You know who I am? I am Topcliffe. No doubt you have often heard people talk about me?” He said this to scare me. And to heighten the effect he slapped his sword on the table close to his hand as though he intended to use it, if occasion arose. But his acting was lost on me. I was not in the least frightened.’ Hereafter, wrote Gerard, ‘I was deliberately rude to him.’ The meeting ended with Topcliffe laying out the charges against Gerard.
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In a paper addressed to the Privy Council Topcliffe wrote: ‘The examinee was sent to England by the Pope and by the Jesuit, Persons, on a political mission to pervert the Queen’s loyal subjects and to seduce them from the Queen’s allegiance.’ Then Gerard was allowed to write his defence: ‘I am forbidden to meddle in State affairs and I have never done and never will. My endeavour has been to bring back souls to the knowledge and love of their Creator, to make them live in due obedience to God’s laws and man’s, and I hold this last to be a matter of conscience.’ The lines had been drawn for the conflict ahead.
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Gerard spent three months in the Poultry Counter. During this time Nicholas Owen and Gerard’s servant Richard Fulwood (captured during the raid on Golden Lane) were pumped for information. Again, there are no official records of these examinations, nor is it clear where Nicholas Owen was being held, but Fulwood was now a prisoner in that former royal residence, turned notorious house of correction, the Bridewell.
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The Bridewell, sprawled between the eastern end of Fleet Street and the Thames, was unique among London’s lock-ups. In 1553 Edward VI had given the palace to the City as an experimental workhouse for vagrants, to be run according to theories of poor relief coming from the Continent. Inmates were to be taught new skills such as weaving and spinning, and subjected to violent punishment so as to prevent them falling ‘into that filthy puddle of idleness which [is] the mother…[of] all mischief’. With regular floggings, it was felt, the vagabond, drunkard and prostitute could learn again to ‘walk in that fresh field of exercise which is the guider and begetter of all wealth, virtue and honesty’. So infamous had the prison become in its short life span that soon prisoners were being sent to the Bridewell simply to force confessions from them. Fulwood’s internment there revealed the extent to which the Government was eager to proceed swiftly against Gerard, an eagerness that would explain why—according to the Jesuit—both Owen and Fulwood were now tortured. ‘For three hours on end (I think)’, wrote Gerard, they ‘were hung up with their arms pinned in irons rings and their bodies suspended in the air.’ Neither man revealed a single name—either of the places Gerard had stayed in, or of the people who had assisted him.
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John Frank, though, was busy revealing everything he knew. From Gerard’s betrayer came the information that Fulwood was Gerard’s servant and had written to him from prison. About Gerard, Frank knew that he was a Jesuit who went by the aliases Tanfield and Staunton, that he was instrumental in smuggling Catholics over to the Continent (namely Jane and Bridget Wiseman, William Wiseman’s sisters) and that he had been present at Broadoaks during the search that April. Against the Wisemans, Frank offered still more damaging testimony. For the first time the Council now learned the full details of the North End raid on the Widow Wiseman’s house: that the priest, Father Brewster, had been hidden in the chimney during the search and then spirited away to Broadoaks by one of William Wiseman’s servants. William Wiseman, himself, was frequently seen by Frank in Gerard’s company, notably at Frank’s own London house. As for Nicholas Owen, he had been at Broadoaks over Christmas 1592, he was known as Little John and he wore a cloak belonging to Wiseman. This cloak was of ‘sad green cloth with sleeves,’ added Frank, ‘caped with tawny velvet and little gold strips’. It was on such detail that the balance of a man’s life might hang: at Gerard’s next interrogation he was asked to try on a suit of clothes discovered at Broadoaks and said (correctly) to be his. A positive identification would have been sufficient to indict William Wiseman with harbouring. Gerard vehemently disowned the suit.
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Though Frank had placed Nicholas Owen at Broadoaks a year and a half before his arrest, and though Owen was clearly familiar with Gerard, neither amounted to a capital offence. Under torture Owen had revealed nothing incriminatory. Probably he had come across as a minor player on the mission: part carpenter, part servant, in no ways vital to the infrastructure of Catholic resistance. Certainly, no one was yet aware of his status. Had Frank known that the Broadoaks hides were Owen-built he would have said so, among the welter of other detail he provided. Consequently, Owen was bound over in prison until, at an unspecified date, bail was purchased on his behalf. If the Government had no use for him, then the Catholic families of England assuredly did. Therefore, wrote Gerard, some ‘gentlemen…paid down a sum of money and had him released’. Owen returned to Henry Garnet’s service. Gerard returned to the interrogation room.
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By the summer of 1594 it was clear his inquisitors were making little headway. In Gerard’s words, ‘only my priesthood could be proved against me’. Now his friends stepped in to try to improve the conditions in which he was being held. They ‘achieved this’, wrote Gerard, ‘by bribing no less person than [Richard] Young himself’. On 6 July Gerard was led out from the Poultry Counter, over London Bridge to the teeming streets and narrow lanes of Southwark, to the Clink prison on Clink Street, tucked in between the Bishop of Winchester’s palace and a row of former brothels. ‘I looked on this change to the Clink as a translation from Purgatory to Paradise,’ Gerard recorded.
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Sixteenth century prisons—the Bridewell excepted—were places of detention not reform, packed with a rich cross-section of society, some post-trial, some pre-trial, some unlikely ever to see trial; all too many prisoners succumbed to disease in the cramped conditions. And sixteenth century prisons were more cramped than most. Enclosure—the practice, popular during the first half of the century, whereby estate owners consolidated large stretches of open field for extensive agricultural use—had chased the poor from the land and into vagrancy. The dissolution of the monasteries had chased a host of monks, clerks and charity-seekers out to join them. And one solution to this growing problem was to clap them all in prison. Later they were joined there by all those whom the extravagance of Gloriana’s golden age had driven into mounting debt and all those whose religious beliefs had placed them in opposition to the Established Church. Vagabonds, debtors and Catholics now made up the majority of the prison population.
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The Clink, Gerard’s new home, was a Catholic hothouse. After just a few months, he wrote, ‘we had, by God’s grace, everything so arranged that I was able to perform there all the tasks of a Jesuit priest, and provided only I could have stayed on in this prison, I should never have wanted to have my liberty again’. Through a hole in his cell wall, covered over with a picture, Gerard was passed paper, pen and ink, with which to write to Henry Garnet, informing the Superior of all that had taken place during his interrogations. Through this same hole he was also able to make confession and receive the holy sacrament. His solitary confinement was not long lasting. Soon some Catholics in the prison had fashioned a key for his cell door and Gerard was free to roam. From nine o’clock at night, when the prisoners were locked into their cells, until the following morning, when the warders returned to check no one had escaped, Gerard had the run of the gaol, joining all those other Catholic prisoners who had also made keys to their cells. His next step was to win over his gaoler.
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It is helpful to think of an Elizabethan gaoler as something akin to an Elizabethan innkeeper. Both ran a boarding house, both sought a profit, neither received any subsidy from the State: as you passed through the portals of either’s establishment you signed your name in the entry book and reached for your purse. How much you paid, in prison no less than at an inn, depended on what you could afford. Gaols were divided into ‘Sides’, subdivided into wards and further subdivided into individual rooms. Inmates chose their Side according to their social status and their ability to pay: the better the Side, the better the rooms, the more expensive the rates.
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Of course, better was a comparative term: Gerard’s room in the Poultry Counter appears to have been situated on the best Side. Bed and bed linen, a light to see by, meals at the canteen (which ranged from the dire to the digestible, again according to your ability to pay) and a discharge fee at the end of your stay: these were just the basic expenses you might incur in prison; and pocketing all of them was the prison gaoler, one eye on his immediate posting, one eye on his pension. In an Elizabethan prison, money talked. And the head gaoler at the Clink seemed disposed to listen. ‘With bribes and a little coaxing’, wrote Gerard, ‘I induced him not to pry too closely into our doings, and to come to me only when I called him.’
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From his prison cell Gerard now took up where he had been forced to leave off in Essex. Hearing confession was straight-forward pastoral work and soon, wrote Gerard, ‘so many Catholics came to visit me that there were often as many as six or eight people at a time waiting their turn to see me’ in the next door room. Some were fellow prisoners in the Clink; many were from the outside, all quietly taking advantage of the fact that, as Gerard put it, ‘my whereabouts were known and never changed and I could be found without difficulty’.
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Meanwhile, with the gaoler continuing to turn a blind eye on Gerard’s activities, a chapel was created in the cell of a fellow Catholic, from which the Jesuit could conduct divine service and instruct those who were interested in the Society’s
Spiritual Exercises.
By January 1596 Henry Garnet could write to Aquaviva: ‘The work John does in prison is so profitable that it is hardly possible to believe it.’ Crucially, Gerard was now able to take over Robert Southwell’s work as coordinator of the London end of the mission.
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Southwell’s capture had left a gaping hole in the mission’s chain of command. The majority of newly arrived priests were still pouring into London. The Jesuits were still responsible for dispatching them to safe houses in the shires. Henry Garnet, shuttling between the capital and the surrounding countryside, was stretched to breaking point; and the March raids on London’s Catholics suggested that, for the time being at least, the city was too dangerous a place for him, or any priest, to remain in for any length of time. It seemed John Gerard’s incarceration in the Clink was heaven sent. For just as Catholics in search of absolution were guaranteed a meeting with the Jesuit, so too were newly landed missionaries, all of them profiting from the unparalleled freedom with which visitors, for a fee, could come and go in prison. The ‘majority of priests coming from the seminaries over here’, he noted, ‘were instructed to get in touch with me, so that I could introduce them to their Superior and give them other help they might need’.
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Next, Gerard solved the problem of what to do with these newly arrived missionaries while a safe house was being made ready for them. Through an unnamed third party he ‘rented a house with a garden of its own in a suitable [but unspecified] district’ of London. There he sent all those priests who called on him, ‘until, with the help of my friends, I was able to get them…clothing and other things they needed, or find them a residence’. He put in charge of running this house a widow, Anne Line, who for some time had been living as a guest of the Wisemans. Line had already tasted persecution on account of her faith: her Protestant father had disinherited her, her Catholic husband had died in exile. She was the perfect choice to serve the mission now: as practical as she was willing ‘to die for Christ’. For Gerard, she was ‘able to manage the finances, do all the housekeeping, look after the guests, and deal with the inquiries of strangers’; moreover, she was ‘very discreet’. With a priest permanently stationed with her—to undertake the personal calls that Gerard, himself, was unable to make—and with Gerard overseeing the entire operation safely from his prison cell, Line’s boarding house effectively secured the London end of the mission for Henry Garnet. New priests now had a fixed first contact, as well as fixed lodgings and a fixed source of necessary supplies; and no Jesuit need risk his liberty to provide them.
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In late December 1594 Gerard was led out from the Clink, back across the Thames to the City, to face his sternest test yet, at London’s Guildhall before a panel of commissioners led by Richard Topcliffe.
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