God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (39 page)

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Carved into the wall of this second storey cell is a heart pierced by an arrow, symbol of one of the five wounds of Christ, and what look like the initials JG.

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There seems to have been no one single torture-chamber in the Tower and frequently prisoners were tortured in their cells, but Gerard’s account does suggest he was taken to the White Tower. There is rumoured to have been an underground passage between the Lieutenant’s lodgings, where his initial examination took place, and the White Tower vaults, and from Gerard’s description of the attendants’ torches it is possible he used this passage now.

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On 7 May Garnet wrote to Aquaviva, ‘The inquisitors say that [Gerard] is very obstinate, as they cannot draw the least word out of his mouth, except that in torment he cries “Jesus”.’

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Pre-1215, most criminal cases were tried by ordeal, the ultimate judge being God, himself. The person who floated during the water ordeal was guilty; the person whose hand remained infection-free after a hot iron had been applied to it was innocent, and so on. In 1215, though, the fourth Lateran Council (Pope Innocent III’s ecumenical conference) banned the ordeals and countries had to find other methods of trial. In England the jury system was already in use in exceptional circumstances, namely when the accused wished to avoid the ordeals, and this system was now adopted for all cases. In mainland Europe the system chosen was that of the Roman-canon law of proof, which laid down strict criteria for conviction: to return a guilty verdict the court needed two eye witness reports or the accused’s own confession; circumstantial evidence was not permitted. However, by a complicated system of grading (a point for one eye witness report, a point for substantial circumstantial evidence, etc.), if the accused was felt to have half-proof against him, and was therefore highly likely to be guilty, he could legally be tortured to see if any further proof could be obtained. The practice was strictly controlled: the accused could not be asked leading questions and all information had to be verified, the aim being to extract evidence that no innocent person could know. The use of judicial torture was finally abolished in the eighteenth century.

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Gerard’s account of this correspondence gives careful advice on the merits of orange juice and lemon juice as invisible inks. The advantages of the latter are that it can be read just as well with water as with heat, and that if the paper is once dried out, the writing disappears again. Orange juice writing can only be read with heat and once the heat has brought it out, it stays out. The advantage of this is that the recipient of an orange juice letter can always tell if his message has been intercepted and read.

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Early in William Weston’s imprisonment friends had offered to buy his liberty in return for his exile. Weston had begged Southwell to dissuade them on the grounds that ‘it was a despicable method of liberation’ and Garnet had banned the escapade. He explained to Aquaviva, ‘Since he [Weston] has, as it were, gained an eminent and illustrious position for himself, he is exposed to the observation of all and it would look shameful for the shepherd to fly from his flock at such a time as this.’

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Old London Bridge had nineteen small arches spanning the river, severely restricting the flow of water and making the current there dangerously strong. An old proverb stated that the bridge was for wise men to go over and for fools to go under.

Ten

‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England,
how they ever mislike the government and have
their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.’

Queen Elizabeth I

London, 28 April 1603

L
EADING THE WAY
was the Knight Marshal’s man. Behind him walked two hundred and forty poor women, in lines of four, the servants of the country’s assorted knights, esquires, and gentlemen, all in rank, two porters, four trumpeters, the Rose Pursuivant at Arms, two Sergeant at Arms, the first of the royal standard-bearers and two equerries leading a riderless horse. This was just the beginning. Now came the members of the royal household: the messengers of the chamber, the children of the wood yard, the scullery, the scalding house, and larder, the grooms from the stables, the wheat porters, the men from the counting house. Behind them came the noblemen’s servants, the grooms of the chamber, four more trumpeters, the Bluemantle Pursuivant, another Sergeant at Arms, a second royal standard, a second riderless horse. On and on they came: more members of the royal household, the children and gentlemen of the Chapel Royal, the clerks of the Council, the aldermen of London, two standard-bearers carrying the banners of Wales and of Ireland. Then came the office-holders: the Lord Mayor of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Lord Chief Justice, the Principal Secretary of State. Then the noblemen and clergy in order of precedence. Among them walked Tobie Matthew, Bishop of Durham. Thirty-seven years ago, as a young Oxford student, he had witnessed a royal procession similarly designed to strike awe into the hearts of the spectators in the streets; now he was taking part in one. Behind him came four more Sergeant at Arms, a standard bearer carrying the great embroidered Banner of England, the Norroy King at Arms, the Clarenceaux King at Arms, the Gentlemen-Ushers with their white rods. And behind them came the funeral carriage, drawn by four horses ‘trapped in black velvet’.
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She had made so many royal progresses in her lifetime, covering almost a third of her kingdom in a deliberate and unprecedented attempt to reach as many of her subjects as possible. This last journey was all too short, from the Palace of Whitehall to Westminster Abbey, just a few hundred metres. On top of the lead coffin was a picture of her, crowned and in her Parliamentary robes; overhanging it was a canopy borne by four noblemen and surrounding them walked the Gentlemen Pensioners, their axes lowered to the ground. And now came the women of the court: the gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, the noblewomen in order of precedence, the maids of honour of the Privy Chamber. Behind them, bringing up the rear, came the Captain of the Guard. The guardsmen followed five abreast, their halberds also lowered.

Down Whitehall the procession moved in muffled silence, watched by the gathering crowds, and on into Westminster Abbey. Then the great doors swung shut behind it and Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith—the old Plantagenet claims mingled with the new Henrician honour—passed from view to her final resting place. It was the end of a dynasty.

But if this funeral pomp were fitting tribute to the woman who had ruled England for almost half a century, then it was the forty-eight hours or so after her death during which her body was left unattended that more closely matched the mood of the closing years of her reign. Forty-eight hours in which the dead Queen had lain at Richmond virtually forgotten, her corpse covered over with a cloth in ‘very ill’ fashion, as her ministers and followers scurried to pay court to the new King. This was the reality of a monarch’s demise. The Queen is dead! Long live the King! As power shifted from Elizabeth of England to James of Scotland no one could afford to be left behind in the stampede for new favours and new appointments—least of all England’s Catholics.
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To Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth had been ‘the best marriage in her parish, and brought a kingdom with her for a dowry’. To a German diplomat, writing soon after her succession, Elizabeth was ‘of an age where she should in reason, and as is woman’s way, be eager to marry and be provided for’; for her ‘to remain a maid and never marry [was] inconceivable’. But Elizabeth had done the inconceivable and never married.
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They had all pressed her to. Parliament had tried to make its granting of payments contingent on her finding a husband. Elizabeth responded by scribbling on the preamble to a finance bill the furious note: ‘I know no reason why any of my private answers to the realm should serve for prologue to a subsidies book.’ Her ministers and courtiers had pressed her to, even the Earl of Leicester, causing her to round on him, saying, ‘she had thought if all the world abandoned her he would not have done so’. To which, gossiped the Spanish ambassador, Leicester ‘answered that he would die at her feet, and she said that that had nothing to do with the matter’. Where Elizabeth and marriage were concerned, emotions, on all sides, ran deep. And understandably so: on the issue of Elizabeth’s marriage rode the more important issue of the succession; and in the absence of any natural-born heirs of her own, it was by no means clear who should wear the crown after her. This being the case, Elizabeth’s death threatened to catapult England into a mad scramble of competing claimants, loyalties and factions—something everyone currently enjoying the privileges of power and the comforts of comparative State stability viewed with alarm. If Elizabeth refused to marry then she must, at least, be forced to name her heir, preferably one on whom all the aforementioned could agree. So as her reign progressed and the prospect of her ever marrying and giving birth faded into the distance, all those who once had pressed her to take a husband now began to press her, even more stridently, to designate her successor. Except that Elizabeth had learned at a very early age the perils of having a clearly designated successor.
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While her sister reigned, she, herself, had been talisman to every malcontent in the kingdom: to everyone who hated Mary for her religion, for her marriage. It had almost cost her her life. And only she knew how innocent she had been of provoking their designs. An heir was a magnet for treason. In January 1568 Philip of Spain had his eldest son Don Carlos arrested for plotting against him; Carlos starved himself to death in custody. Closer to home, in Scotland, Elizabeth had watched her cousin Mary Stuart deposed in favour of her infant son. With her claim to her own throne more tentative than that of her sister, her cousin, or Philip to theirs, Elizabeth had had every reason never to discuss the succession. Not that this stopped anyone else from doing so.

Mary Stuart had always been the obvious choice for heir presumptive, as Elizabeth’s closest blood relative and granddaughter of Henry VIII’s eldest sister, Margaret. Her execution had opened up the field. So much so, in fact, that one commentator would write in 1600, ‘this crown is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it’. The front runner was still Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, but the same legal considerations that had cast a shadow over Mary’s hopes also applied to him. As a foreigner he was forbidden from inheriting property in England and this might be said to extend to the Crown. Moreover, Henry VIII had excluded his eldest sister’s family from the succession under the terms of his will. This left a number of English heirs for consideration, but though any or all of them might be good for an each-way bet, none looked like staying the distance, chiefly because none was much favoured by anyone in England. ‘Either in their worth are they contemptible, or not liked for their sexes,’ remarked one nobleman acidly, if accurately.
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There was Lady Arbella Stuart, like James a great-grandchild of Margaret Tudor, so barred by Henry’s will, but unlike James raised in England. Sadly for Arbella, that meant being raised by her maternal grandmother, the formidable Bess of Hardwick. Bess’s rapid advancement through English society had been a triumph of tenacity over tact; she seemed to have inculcated similar talents in Arbella. In 1587 Elizabeth had invited the twelve-year-old girl to Court; watching her elbow aside the other women of the royal household to claim a place in the front row of a procession, she had swiftly sent her home again. Nonetheless, Arbella remained a sufficiently sure candidate for the French ambassador to hint that Elizabeth was about to overturn her father’s will and name the girl as her heir.
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Next, there were the descendants of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, through her marriage to the Duke of Suffolk. These were an even sorrier prospect than Arbella. True, there were among them a number of male heirs, notably Edward and Thomas Seymour from the senior branch of the family, but they were both technically bastards, their mother (Mary’s eldest daughter) having contracted a secret and (it was widely thought) invalid marriage to their father, the Earl of Hertford. In 1595 the earl had had the temerity to seek legal advice about the possibility of validating the marriage and was promptly arrested. This proved sufficient warning for him never to dabble in the succession again: when in 1602 he received a secret communiqué from Arbella suggesting she marry his eldest grandson and strengthen their joint claims to the throne he immediately told the Council. This really only left the extravagantly named Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, heir to the Earl of Derby, for consideration. Ferdinando was descended from the junior branch of the Suffolk line. Through his father he was a powerful landowner in his own right. In fact the only obvious problem with Ferdinando was that he, himself, showed no interest in the Crown.
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Others, though, were interested on his behalf.

There had been whisperings throughout much of the early 1590s, scraps of information filtering back to the Council concerning Ferdinando. In June 1592 a Government agent reported dealings between him and William Allen. That same summer the priest-turned-informer James Younger wrote repeated warnings from prison of an invasion attempt on England to be led by the infamous Sir William Stanley (soon to become even more infamous for the Cullen conspiracy). Stanley’s army, reported Younger, would land ‘upon that part [of the coast] nearest to Ireland’, where Ferdinando and his father would come to its aid.
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And Henry Walpole, under interrogation in the Tower, completed the picture. Before leaving for England, said Walpole, he had been asked by Stanley ‘to deal with some priest that might get access to [Ferdinando]…to induce him to the Catholic religion’. The priest that Stanley recommended for the job was John Gerard.
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