God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (56 page)

He hung for fifteen minutes, the same time it had taken the jury to convict him. Government witnesses reported that he was not cut down until he was dead, on James’s orders; Catholics reported a somewhat different scene: the crowd, they said, had surged forward, pulling him by the legs, ‘to put him out of his pain, and that he might not be cut down alive’. And the Spanish ambassador recalled, ‘When they cut out his heart, which they show to the people with the head, where it is the custom for everyone to shout loudly “God save the King”, there was not a sound to be heard.’ His ‘limbs were divided into four parts, and placed together with the head in a basket, in order that they might be exhibited according to law in some conspicuous place, [and] the crowd began to disperse’. In time his head was set upon London Bridge. His clothes were taken by the Spanish ambassador as a relic. Later in the year his belongings were disposed of by Thomas Wilson, Cecil’s secretary, who rode out to White Webbs to see ‘the chief things conveyed away’; ‘the remnant of small value’, he reported, ‘was quickly bought up by the neighbours’. Wilson then continued on to Hertfordshire to holiday with his brother, closing his uncommonly chatty letter to Cecil with the pious observation that White Webbs was ‘next neighbour to Theobalds [Cecil’s country house], and unfit it should be again a nest for such bad birds as it was before’.
⁸⁵

The same day that Garnet was executed John Gerard left England for the Continent and safety. It was, he explained, ‘a time for lying quiet, not for working’. He placed his friends in the care of his Jesuit brothers, tidied his affairs—by now the chief burden on his conscience, Elizabeth Vaux, was released from custody—and, with typical aplomb, arranged passage out of England in the company of the Spanish envoy sent to congratulate James on his narrow escape from the Gunpowder Plot. The plan almost failed, as he recalled afterwards: ‘When I arrived by arrangement at the port from which I was to pass out of England with certain high officials, they took fright and said they could not stand by their promise.’ Then ‘suddenly they changed their mind. The ambassador came personally to fetch me and helped me himself to dress in the livery of his attendants so that I could pass for one of them and escape’. Of this change of mind, Gerard wrote, ‘I have no doubt that I owed it to Father Garnet’s prayers.’
⁸⁶

From England Gerard went to the Jesuit school at St Omer, where for a time he remained, too ill to travel. It was not until high summer that he was able to leave for Rome and a long awaited meeting with the man who had sent him to England all those years before, Claudio Aquaviva. He never returned home again. His exile took him from the Italianate splendour of St Peter’s Basilica, burial place of the popes (where for three years he served as a Penitentiary), to the Low Countries (to train Jesuit novices for the English mission), to Spain, and then back again to Rome (as Confessor to the English College), worlds far removed from the hunting and hawking fields of his native Lancashire.
*
Some time in the spring of 1609 he was ordered by his Superiors to write a private account of his time on the mission, probably to inspire the novices in his charge; he was also asked to write a second, public account, dealing specifically with the Gunpowder Plot and his part in those calamitous events. He died in Rome on 27 July 1637, a few months short of his seventy-third birthday.
⁸⁷

One question remains. Throughout his
Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot
Gerard insisted, under oath, that he was not the priest who had said mass for the plotters at the house off London’s Strand. In his
Autobiography
he expanded upon this, writing of the house: ‘I might have stayed there without the slightest risk or suspicion for a very long time, had it not been for some friends who made very indiscreet use of [it] while I was out of London.’ Perhaps this was equivocation, but it would have been to little purpose: both Guy Fawkes and Thomas Wintour, the two plotters who named him as the officiating priest, had sworn he knew nothing of their plans, so Gerard was in no danger of incriminating himself. Perhaps Fawkes and Wintour were mistaken in their identification: it is not clear either of them had ever met Gerard (both had spent many years serving as soldiers overseas); also, two other priests are known to have used the house as a base. Was it that Catesby had instructed them to meet at ‘Gerard’s house’ and that therefore they simply assumed the priest in front of them was Gerard? Was Gerard condemned on assumption alone?
⁸⁸

If there can be no satisfactory conclusion to Gerard’s story, no definitive proof of his involvement in, or innocence of, the Gunpowder Plot, then there exists one last document in the case to cast doubt upon everything else that might be thought definitive: upon every comment made by every Government eyewitness, upon every signature on every examination, upon every supposed handwritten statement of fact.

Towards the end of 1606 a man called Arthur Gregory wrote to Robert Cecil, telling a sad tale of poverty and desperation. He took the opportunity to remind Cecil of his past employment for ‘King and Country’. It was not the only letter of this sort Cecil received that year: the informant George Southwicke, who had spent most of February searching for John Gerard in East Anglia, would also write in, complaining of similar poverty and begging some form of recompense for his efforts.
*
Such was the habitual lot of the disaffected drifters used by the Government as intelligencers. But Gregory’s letter was somewhat different from the norm. Instead of regaling Cecil with all the lurid information he might provide the State at some future date (if only his debts were paid and his release from prison secured), Gregory wrote of the services he had already provided, ‘the secret services…[that] none but myself has done before’. One of these services was ‘discovering the secret writing being in blank, to abuse a most cunning villain in his own subtlety, [and] leaving the same in blank again. Wherein, though there be difficulty, their answers show they have no suspicion’. If this ‘secret writing’ was Garnet’s, contained in his many orange juice letters from the Tower (and these are the only ‘blank’ letters recorded leaving the Tower at this time), then Gregory’s next ‘service’ becomes even more suggestive: it was, he reminded Cecil, ‘to write in another man’s hand’. And as an example of his skills at forgery he appended a postscript. ‘Mr Lieutenant [Waad]’, wrote Gregory, ‘expects something to be written in the blank leaf of a Latin Bible which is pasted in already for the purpose. I will attend to it and whatsoever else comes.’ A Latin Bible was a Catholic Bible. What Waad meant to do with his doctored copy is not known.
⁸⁹

*
On 8 February 1601 Essex attempted to lead a band of about two hundred swordsmen through the City of London to overthrow his enemies on Elizabeth’s Council, chiefly Sir Robert Cecil. Among his followers were several young Catholics, hoping to secure religious freedom for themselves. The coup was a failure.

*
This St Clement’s Lane house was one of a series of London houses used by Gerard since his time in prison. ‘It was a convenient and very suitable place,’ he wrote, ‘with private entrances front and back, and I had some very good hiding-places constructed in it.’ Of London’s fashionable Strand he wrote, ‘Most of my friends lived in that street, and I could visit them more easily, and they me.’

*
Anne Vaux would later give an example of one of these sermons. ‘She remembereth he would use these words, “Good gentlemen, be quiet, God will do all for the best, we must get it by prayer at God’s hands, in whose hands are the hearts of Princes.”’

*
Cecil’s views on Catholicism could vary according to whom he was speaking: he was a consummate statesman with many political enemies. But if his words are viewed in conjunction with his actions, then, just as with his father Sir William Cecil, a pattern is discernible. Broadly, both men recognized English Catholics had split loyalty; both saw this as a potential threat to State security; both sought to neutralize this threat, devising oaths outlining where Catholic loyalty lay; both realized needless persecution did more harm than good; both shared a dislike of bloodshed. Within these parameters, the Cecils behaved with consistency, and with a surprising moderation. That posterity has judged them harshly seems less a case of just deserts and more a reflection of the distaste in which they were held by their less successful, largely aristocratic, often crypto-Catholic contemporaries. Robert Cecil was created Earl of Salisbury in May 1605.

*
This was popular slang for a miraculous or unlikely event. The Duke of Norfolk used the phrase in 1536 after the execution of his niece, Anne Boleyn, writing to Thomas Cromwell: ‘A bruit doth run that I should be in the Tower of London. When I shall deserve to be there Tottenham shall turn French.’

*
This was the standard theological argument to excuse collateral damage in warfare, based on Aquinas’ doctrine of double effect.

*
It is unclear who made this copy. It is written out on the same piece of paper as a letter, in the same hand, to Garnet from Aquaviva; the one is listed as an ‘Example’ of Aquaviva’s correspondence, the other as Garnet’s ‘Response’. The copy of Aquaviva’s letter was originally (wrongly) dated ‘1606’; this has been scored out and 1605, the correct date, inserted in its place. This would suggest that both copies were made
after
1605. It should be noted that Garnet was scrupulous about destroying his correspondence.

*
The plotters had accessed this space by the simple expedient of leasing the house next door to Parliament, the cellar of which lay directly below the House of Lords.

*
There exists an undated letter from Digby to Robert Cecil among the State Papers. It is worth quoting as an example of Catholic ill-feeling towards James’s Government: ‘If your Lordship and the State think it fit to deal severely with the Catholics, within brief there will be massacres, rebellions, and desperate attempts against the King and State. For it is a general received reason amongst Catholics, that there is not that expecting and suffering course now to be run that was in the Queen’s time, who was the last of her line, and last in expectance to run violent courses against Catholics; for then it was hoped that the King that now is, would have been at least free from persecuting, as his promise was before his coming into this realm, and as divers his promises have been since his coming. All these promises every man sees broken.’

*
The plotters seem to have presumed that James’s sons Henry and Charles would go with their father to Parliament, though Thomas Percy was deputed to snatch Charles, in the case of his not going.

*
It is not known who wrote the Mounteagle letter, but everyone involved in the plot, from the Jesuits to Mounteagle to Cecil himself, have been suggested as its author. Nor is it clear why it was written. The two most plausible explanations are 1) that the author wished to sabotage the plot, while giving the plotters the chance to save themselves (Mounteagle’s servant was connected to the plotters and promptly revealed the existence of the letter to Catesby) and 2) that the letter was a device, fabricated either by Mounteagle alone, in an effort to further his own ambitions, or by the Government and Mounteagle together, to give substance to otherwise unsubstantiated intelligence about the plot and allow the Government to act. The text was as follows: ‘My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament; for God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. And think not slightly of this advertisement, but retire yourself into your [county] where you may expect the event in safety. For though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament; and yet they shall not see who hurts them. This counsel is not to be condemned because it may do you good and can do you no harm; for the danger is passed as soon as you have burnt the letter. And I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it, to whose holy protection I commend you.’

*
Zúñiga’s predecessor Juan de Tassis was summoned home in June 1605. He died early in 1607 and was buried in the chapel of the Augustinian Convent, Valladolid. He would always be blamed for his failure to achieve religious freedom for English Catholics, but only after he had left England for good did the new Pope, Paul V, instruct that no obstacle was to be put in the way of Philip III’s efforts to buy toleration.

*
Anthony Greenway was born in Buckinghamshire
c.
1575 and educated at Eton and Oxford. He was converted to Catholicism by ‘reading’, so he said, and served for a time as a soldier in the Catholic regiment in Flanders, travelling back and forth between London and Belgium, conveying refugees and information as he went. In January 1606 he enrolled to train for the priesthood in Rome; later he became a Jesuit.

*
Garnet was frank about conditions in hiding. Had they had ‘a close-stool [chamber pot]’, he wrote, they ‘could have hidden a quarter of a year. For all that my friends will wonder at, especially in me, that neither of us went to the stool all the while, though we had means to do
servitii piccoli
[urinate]’. His captors were equally frank: ‘Now in regard the place was so close, those customs of nature which of necessity must be done, and in so long time of continuance, was exceedingly offensive to the men themselves, and did much annoy them that made entrance upon them.’ The hide had been provisioned for the search: ‘Marmalade and other sweetmeats were found there lying by them, but their better maintenance had been by a quill or reed through a little hole in the chimney that backed another chimney into the gentlewoman’s chamber, and by that passage…broths and other warm drinks had been conveyed in to them.’ In light of this, and of the warning they received, it is surprising that Owen and Ashley’s hide was not similarly provisioned and that Garnet’s hide was not clear of the ‘books and furniture’ cluttering it, so that he could stretch out his legs.