God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (50 page)

Of the four men capable of confirming or denying Garnet’s testimony, the first, Catesby, was dead by the time the so-called ‘Spanish Treason’ came to light. The second, Wintour, made no mention of Garnet being in any way party to his and Catesby’s plans. The third, Catesby’s cousin by marriage, Lord Mounteagle, had, by now, turned King’s evidence and his own part in the conspiracy was carefully being erased from the relevant documents; if ever he was interviewed about the negotiations with Spain such an interview no longer exists. The fourth, Catesby’s cousin Francis Tresham, did point to Garnet’s involvement: ‘he confesses’, his examination read, ‘that Father Garnet…[was] by them drawn to be acquainted with Wintour’s employment into Spain, to give the more credit unto it’. Crucially, he would retract this testimony on his deathbed, saying he had only named Garnet ‘to avoid ill usage’, or torture.
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In his letter to Anne Vaux, Garnet had referred to Catesby and Wintour’s promise only to sue for pensions from Spain; to Tesimond he described the outcome of this promise: ‘After Mr Wintour’s return I perceived he had negotiated other matters and that they intended to get horses.’ So, that day in September 1603 when Catesby came to Garnet, telling him of a possible ‘stirring’, the exchange that followed might, in hindsight, have been cause for alarm. ‘I earnestly desired him’, wrote Garnet, ‘that he and Mr Thomas Wintour would not join with any such tumults…He assured me he would not.’
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It took Catesby five months to break this promise. In February 1604, as England’s Catholics absorbed the several shocks of the Hampton Court Conference and of James’s recent proclamation banning papist priests, Catesby sent for Wintour to join him in London. There, in the company of Jack Wright (known to them for his part in Essex’s uprising), Catesby told Wintour of his proposed scheme to blow up Parliament with gunpowder. At first Wintour hesitated, pointing to ‘the scandal…which the Catholic religion might [thereby] sustain’, but Catesby was persuasive: ‘the nature of the disease’, he told his cousin, ‘required so sharp a remedy’. Wintour was won over. As yet it seemed neither man had lost hope in foreign help, for at this point Wintour was dispatched to the Low Countries to talk to the Constable of Castile and find out what pressure was to be brought to bear on James during the Spanish peace talks. The constable was characteristically circumspect: he spoke ‘good words, but I feared the deeds would not answer’, said Wintour afterwards. While there Wintour also met with Guy Fawkes, newly released from his house arrest: ‘I told him’, said Wintour, ‘that we were upon a resolution to do somewhat in England, if the peace with Spain helped us not.’ Fawkes returned with Wintour to London.
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The fifth member of the core group of plotters joined a few weeks later in early May, his first words a sharp reminder of the part he had already played in souring relations between James and England’s Catholics. Thomas Percy, whose reiteration of James’s talk of tolerance had raised Catholic hopes the previous year, entered Catesby’s Lambeth lodgings with the cry ‘shall we always, Gentlemen, talk, and never do anything?’ In Catesby, Wintour, Wright, and Fawkes he had found men similarly tired of reacting, and ready to act.
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On Sunday, 20 May 1604 the five met again in a private room, one of several above the Duck and Drake, an inn on the east side of St Clement’s Lane, just off London’s Strand. There, prayer book in hand, they took an ‘oath of secrecy’. Then they went ‘into the next room and heard Mass, and received the Blessed Sacrament’. The repercussions of this single event—the conjunction of a regular act of Sunday worship with the planned destruction of the entire English Government—would be felt long after their plot had been discovered. In his opening speech to his first Parliament James, perhaps unconsciously alluding to his own darkest fears, had said of the Catholic clergy in hiding, the ‘point which they observe in continual practice is the…murders of Kings’. In this conflation of paranoia and rumour he had fed the belief that England’s secret priests were all killers-in-waiting. Now, by walking from the oathtaking chamber to the room next door where mass was being said, the plotters had succeeded in fleshing it out further and giving it features: and the features it bore were those of the man in whose rooms they had met, John Gerard.
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It mattered little that the plotters, when questioned later, denied that Gerard had any knowledge of their activities, or that Gerard, himself, could swear under oath that they were mistaken in identifying him as the officiating priest that day.
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With the taking of this oath of secrecy, the Gunpowder Plot proper was set in motion. From that day until Guy Fawkes’s arrest in the early hours of 5 November 1605, it would be the quietly ticking accompaniment to the ongoing business of James’s Council, to the Jesuit mission, to the thousand little ordinary actions of everyday existence up and down the country.

In September 1603 Henry Garnet was confident he had prevented his friends from stirring against the Government—so he would testify. The following midsummer he was given indication that this was not the case. Some time in late June 1604, about a month after the secret oath, ‘Catesby and Wintour, or Mr Catesby alone, came to [Garnet] at White Webbs and told [him] that there was a plot in hand for the Catholic cause against the King and the State’; ‘they entered into no particulars’, Garnet confessed afterwards.
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Catesby appeared to have absorbed Garnet’s earlier warning that unrest was ‘against the Pope’s express commandment’. He now referred Garnet to two breves, one to the clergy, one to the laity, issued by Pope Clement in the run up to Elizabeth’s death and sent secretly to Garnet. The purpose of these breves was to stop England’s Catholics supporting a non-Catholic claimant to Elizabeth’s throne; James’s wooing of the Vatican had ensured they were never put into effect: ‘when I saw the Queen dead,’ wrote Garnet, ‘I burned them.’ But not before he had shown them to Catesby and, perhaps, Wintour too (he would later admit that he ‘had no commission to divulge’ the contents of the breves). It was an instance of carelessness from a tired man, sick with palsy and distracted by the ongoing Appellant controversy, or the sinister act of a politicized priest meddling in State affairs: Garnet’s defenders and detractors were quick to pick their favoured motive. But knowledge of the breves had given Catesby ‘an invincible argument…for his purposes’, wrote Garnet. Catesby reasoned that, ‘it being lawful by force of the said Breves of the Pope to have kept the King out, it was as lawful now to put him out’. ‘I still reproved [him]’, testified Garnet, reminding Catesby of the Pope’s prohibition against violence, ‘and he promised to surcease.’
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There are no surviving letters from Garnet of this period. His actions and attitudes must be pieced together from scattered comments and from various later attempts to exculpate him. That Easter it had been business as usual as he travelled through Lincolnshire; reports filtered back to the Council that he had said mass at Twigmore (at Jack Wright’s house), at Thornham and at Glandford Brigg, near Lincoln. But that summer he was in and out of Somerset House in an effort to secure relief for English Catholics. It seems he was uncharacteristically incautious about discussing these efforts; at the year’s end Juan de Tassis wrote to Philip of Spain that his secret negotiations for tolerance were being hampered: ‘the Jesuits’, he complained, ‘are a little imprudent in not knowing how to keep silent’. From a letter quoted subsequently by John Gerard, but not extant, Garnet appeared increasingly desperate to win concessions for his co-religionists. ‘If the affair of toleration go not well,’ he noted, ‘Catholics will no more be quiet. What shall we do? Jesuits cannot hinder it. Let Pope forbid all Catholics to stir.’ According to Gerard, Garnet wrote this on 29 August, two months after his meeting with Catesby.
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From Father Oswald Tesimond, whose own involvement in the plot was about to become controversial, came evidence that Catesby was sidelining Garnet. Catesby was reported to find Garnet’s ‘lukewarmness displeasing’ and his sermons on longsuffering ‘unpalatable’.
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He ‘began to say openly…that the Jesuits were getting in the way of the good that Catholics could do themselves’. Leaving a supper at which Garnet had repeated his injunction to patience, Catesby was heard to say ‘that some…had grown tired of putting up with ill fortune…They were asking if there was any authority on earth that could take away from them the right by nature to defend their own lives’. From now on, said Tesimond, Catesby began to hold aloof from Garnet. He was not the only one doing so. In March 1605 Tassis reported that he had been approached by two anonymous Englishmen offering money for the relief of Catholic recusants, but insistent that Garnet should not ‘share in the merit of a work which they are doing before the Lord’. Though Tassis would call upon Garnet to substantiate the men’s claims to funds, he also admitted it was far easier to do business with them than with the Jesuit, ‘for he is always in hiding, or in flight’. His comments suggested growing tensions between Garnet and certain of the Catholic laity.
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While the English Catholic community fragmented, amid renewed frustrations that the Spanish peace had failed it, James’s Government was contemplating its next steps. In September 1604 Tassis sent back to Spain the leaked minutes of a private meeting between James and his Councillors to discuss ‘the mitigation of the recusancy laws’. The Earl of Northampton, probably the source of the leak, opened the meeting, repeating James’s position that he did not ‘desire the blood of Catholics’. From this starting point the other Councillors gave their opinions. Sir Robert Cecil advised: ‘I would not counsel your Majesty to use such rigour against Catholics in that they govern themselves moderately and well for they intend nothing against the state of our country.’
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Thomas Egerton, a lapsed Catholic, put the opposing view: ‘the Papists are a dangerous people’. Baron Kinloss followed suit, speaking to James’s anxieties: ‘should your Majesty not wish the laws to be enforced against Papists undoubtedly their increase will be…so great that they will rise up against your Majesty and expel you from this kingdom’. Cecil responded: ‘I have no fear of the rebellion of Catholics for sake of their religion as I have never understood that any people has rebelled for sake of religion but more for politics and matters of state under pretext of religion.’ The Earl of Dorset, James’s treasurer, put the financier’s point of view: ‘It is necessary that there be an increase of either Papists or Puritans. I prefer the increase of the Catholics and not the Puritans for the Papists are a peaceful people and in their increase your Majesty will derive much money.’ With this display of Government at work James wrapped up the meeting. Two months later, on 28 November, he ordered the collection of recusancy fines again.
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Away from the Hampton Court session, Henry Garnet was back at White Webbs. About this same time the Frenchman Charles de Ligny visited him there. He ‘found Garnet in company with several Jesuits and gentlemen, who were playing music: among them Mr William Byrd, who played the organ’. But it was not all music and masses. In November Garnet had written to Aquaviva: ‘The Catholics are havering as before between hope and fear. Some of them seem over impatient, though all the better and graver of them persevere in patience. It would be well if Clement wrote to console them and to restrain the unquiet minds, so that their impatience be not harmful to all.’
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The year 1605, like that of the Armada before it, was hedged with ill omen. The almanac-makers wrote cheerful warnings of dire events to come. The Government, quick to stamp out such prophecies, hauled in the gloomier of doom-mongers for questioning. One, William Morton, talked of ‘great troubles to happen within the kingdom this year’ and of ‘fire and sword in divers parts’. These prognostications, he said, he had had from a man, who had had them from a man, who had ‘had the judgements of 26 ancient writers therein’. That October there would be an eclipse of the sun, the month preceding an eclipse of the moon; William Shakespeare, then working on
King Lear
, gave the Earl of Gloucester the ominous line:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no
Good to us…
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In March that year Elizabeth Vaux wrote to Agnes, Lady Wenman of Thame Park, telling her of the proposed marriage of her young son to the Earl of Suffolk’s daughter. This marriage had been beset by problems, not least because Vaux and her son were known to be Catholic, but now, she told her friend, it looked sure to happen: ‘for ere it were long there should be a remedy or a toleration for religion’. ‘Fast and pray that that may come to pass which we propose,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘which if it do, we shall see Tottenham turned French.’
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The letter was opened by Lady Tasborough, Agnes’s mother-in-law, who promptly showed it to Agnes’s husband (who blamed Elizabeth for corrupting his wife in religion). The pair subsequently lost the letter, but remembered its contents—and passed them on. On 5 November, even as Guy Fawkes was being questioned for the first time, Sir John Popham was informing Robert Cecil that Elizabeth Vaux was privy to the plot: she ‘expected something was about to take place’, he wrote. He also took care to remind Cecil that ‘Gerard and Garnet, the Jesuits, make her house their chief resort’. It was an odd little episode of uncertain meaning (and Elizabeth Vaux pleaded forgetfulness when questioned about it), but its significance was far-reaching.
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By April, in spite of the almanac-writers’ worst predictions and the resultant jittery start to the year, life had settled down to normal. That month one correspondent reported to his friend, with a certain ennui: ‘For news here is none, but only of matches, marriages, christenings, creations, knightings and suchlike, as if this world would last for ever.’
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