God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (51 page)

In June Garnet was in London, in a rented room on Thames Street, a claustrophobic thoroughfare stretching westwards from the Tower, in line with the river and overrun with tradesmen. There, on 9 June, Robert Catesby visited him, asking him the following question: whether, ‘in case it were lawful to kill a person or persons, it were necessary to regard the innocents which were present lest they also should perish’? For months Catesby had been telling friends he was raising a regiment for Flanders—thereby explaining his new interest in horses and armaments. Garnet’s reply to him was couched in military terms. ‘I answered’, wrote Garnet, ‘that in all just wars it is practised and held lawful to beat down houses and walls and castles, notwithstanding innocents were in danger’, so long as ‘the gain…of the victory’ outweighed the number of innocents killed.
*
Afterwards, Garnet testified that he ‘never imagined’ it more than ‘an idle question’ on Catesby’s part. Until, that is, Catesby made ‘solemn protestation that he would never be known to have asked me any such question so long as he lived’.
²⁰

If Garnet is to be believed, then up to this point he had had no reason to suppose Catesby was pursuing his ‘stirring’. The previous autumn Thomas Wintour had come to him, promising that he and Catesby had stopped ‘intermeddling in…tumults’. In May 1605 Robert Persons informed Spain that there had been ‘difficulties’ in England, but the crisis had been ‘dampened’. Catesby’s question suggested this was not so. Days later Garnet sought Catesby out to challenge him. He found him in the company of his cousin Francis Tresham and his cousin by marriage, Lord Mounteagle, and once more he reiterated Vatican instructions that Catholics ‘be quiet’. He also quizzed the men. Did they think they were able to muster sufficient forces to rise up against James? Mounteagle answered ‘if ever they were, they were able now’ because James was ‘so odious to all’. This was a conditional answer, not a definitive one, replied Garnet: did they have sufficient forces? Their answer was no. Then why, asked Garnet, did they blame the Jesuits for preventing Catholics helping themselves, when they were obviously incapable of helping themselves? ‘So’, Garnet testified later, ‘I concluded that I would write to the Pope that neither by strength nor stratagems we could be relieved, but with patience and intercessions of Princes.’
²¹

The result of this meeting, and of a subsequent one between Garnet and Catesby alone, was that the latter agreed to inform the Vatican ‘how things stood here’. This was a hard-won compromise. Garnet had tried to get Catesby to tell the Pope of his plans; Catesby had refused ‘for fear of discovery’. Both men had trodden delicately around the details: each time they met, wrote Garnet, ‘Catesby offered to tell me his plot’; each time, he added, ‘I refused to know, considering the prohibition I had [from Aquaviva, to keep the Jesuits clear of political unrest]’. They did agree on a messenger to deliver Catesby’s news and Catesby ‘promised…he would do nothing before the Pope was informed’. Now Garnet issued another
laissez passer
, this time to Sir Edward Baynham, introducing him to the papal nuncio in Flanders.
²²

By midsummer Garnet was homeless: ‘betrayed in both our places of abode’, as he described it in a letter written on 24 June, and ‘forced to wander up and down until we get a fit place’. Spies were closing in on him: White Webbs was under suspicion, so was a house newly leased by him at Erith on the banks of the Thames near Dartford. His enforced wanderings took him to Fremland in Essex, home of the Catholic Sir John Tyrrel, where he spent the Feast of Corpus Christi with ‘great solemnity and music’. Here, too, the spies were watching him. A month later he was back at Fremland, where, ‘a little before St James’ tide [25 July]’, Father Oswald Tesimond ‘revealed to him…[the] conspiracy of blowing up of the Parliament House with powder’.
²³

The baldness of the statement gave no taste of the agonized discussion that, according to Garnet, had preceded this revelation. Tesimond, wrote Garnet, had come to him perturbed: ‘it was’, he said, ‘about some device of Mr Catesby’, but Catesby had ‘bound [him] to silence’. Garnet admitted he knew Catesby was up to something. The two men ‘walked long together’, deciding whether Tesimond should tell and Garnet should listen. Garnet concluded that if Tesimond had ‘heard the matter out of confession’, then he might safely break his silence since Catesby himself was happy Garnet knew of the device. Tesimond concluded that he would do so, but only in confession. Then, ‘because it was too tedious to relate so long a discourse in confession kneeling’, Tesimond asked if he might make his confession ‘walking’. Garnet agreed.
²⁴

English Catholics had become accustomed to a conflict of loyalty. But Henry Garnet’s conflict had just been made untenable. As an Englishman, subject to common law, he was bound to disclose the plot to the Government. As a Catholic priest, subject to canon law, he was bound to inviolable secrecy; he had learned of the plot
sub sigillo confessionis
(under the seal of confession): to reveal it would be sin and sacrilege both.

On 24 July, hours after this meeting, Garnet wrote to Aquaviva. Two versions of this letter exist. The first is in the Public Record Office, in a hand not Garnet’s own and with no explanation of how it came to be there.
*
In this version Garnet warned of the dangers of a Catholic uprising. ‘There were some’, he wrote, ‘who dared to ask…whether the Pope could prohibit their defending their lives.’ He hinted at the tensions between himself and Catesby: ‘some friends complain that we put an obstacle in the way of their plans’. He explained he had persuaded these friends ‘to send someone [Baynham] to the Holy Father…at least to gain time, that by delay some fitting remedy may be applied’. And here the letter ends, with an ‘&c’, indicating something missing. Version two exists only in Jesuit accounts of the period. It continues where version one leaves off, with Garnet adding a second warning of an even ‘worse’ threat: ‘the danger is lest secretly some treason or violence is shown to the King’. He offered his judgement: that the new Pope, Paul V (Clement had died in March), must indicate what was ‘to be done’ and, publicly, must ‘forbid any force of arms…under censures’. He ended with a call for speed: ‘as all things are daily becoming worse, we should beseech His Holiness soon to give a necessary remedy for these great dangers’.
²⁵

Garnet’s original letter is no longer extant. Of the two existing versions—State Paper transcript of uncertain provenance and Jesuit apologia—one has deliberately been tampered with. ‘There is one thing that makes us very anxious,’ reads the first version; ‘two things make us very anxious’, reads the second. Both letters warn of trouble, both contain a degree of ambiguity, room for that warning to be misinterpreted; but one, in its very generality, suggests tacit ambivalence and one, in its call for urgent action, conveys alarm. Which message had Garnet sent?

High summer 1605: King James left London for the country. In early August there were flash floods in the capital, ‘such as the like had not been seen in the memory of man’. The ‘channels and water courses rose so high,’ recorded John Stow, ‘that many cellars by them were over-flowed’. In late August Thomas Wintour and Guy Fawkes found that the gunpowder they had hidden in a cellar beneath the Lords’ debating chamber had ‘decayed’.
*
More gunpowder was brought in, ready for the first sitting of the new session of Parliament on Tuesday, 5 November.
²⁶

While Londoners mopped out their houses, James continued his summer tour, spending a night at Harrowden Hall as a guest of Elizabeth Vaux. On 27 August he entered Oxford on a State visit. Thirty-nine years ago almost to the day his predecessor had ridden down these same streets, heard similar speeches of welcome, smelt the fresh paint on the casements, posts, and pumps as he did now, and greeted the cheering ranks of students. Queen Elizabeth’s visit had been a calculated charm offensive, James’s showed how times had changed: under the steady, almost thirty-year helm of Oxford’s Professor of Divinity the university had become the Protestant seminary the Government had hoped for, grooming mildly Calvinistic students for the national Church. There were pockets of covert papistry, pockets of a more defiant Puritanism, but for the time being Church and State combined happily in the quadrangles of Oxford—which was fortunate, for this was a messy, charmless visit. The nightly plays alternately shocked and bored the royal party; James fell asleep during one and had to be persuaded to stay through a second; he was late to the disputations, then interrupted them with argument. On Friday, 30 August, as he rode out of town, he ‘seemed not to see’ the verses ‘set upon the [college] walls’, celebrating his stay.
²⁷

That same day another party took to the road: Henry Garnet, Anne Vaux and a handful of friends and servants, including Nicholas Owen, set out for Wales and the shrine at St Winifred’s Well. ‘I hope in this journey (which I undertake…both for health and want of a house) I shall have occasion of much good,’ Garnet wrote to Robert Persons two days before. With his letter to Aquaviva on its way, with the expectation that any day now the Pope would respond, and with the promise exacted from Catesby not to attempt anything meanwhile, had Garnet relaxed his guard? Or was he being less than honest with his old Jesuit colleague? ‘[F]or anything we can see,’ he told Persons, ‘Catholics are quiet, and likely to continue their old patience.’
²⁸

The journey west took Garnet from safe house to safe house. In Warwickshire he stayed at Norbrook, near Stratford-upon-Avon, belonging to John Grant, husband of Dorothy Wintour; from there he moved on to Huddington as a guest of Robert Wintour. Both Grant and Robert Wintour were now in the thick of the plot. The party grew in number; Elizabeth Vaux, John Gerard, Edward Oldcorne, and Oswald Tesimond, and three friends of Gerard’s, Elizabeth, wife of Ambrose Rookwood, and Sir Everard and Lady Digby: all seized the chance to make this pilgrimage. The return journey took them to the Treshams at Rushton Hall and from there Garnet, still homeless, rode on to Gayhurst, Digby’s house in Buckinghamshire, arriving towards the end of September. Rookwood, Tresham, and Digby: each new name bound the Jesuits closer to the plot; on 29 September Catesby approached Rookwood to join him, on 14 October he approached his cousin Francis Tresham and in late October he approached Everard Digby.
*
The strength of the Jesuit mission lay in its ability to build a network of secret enclaves across the country protected by ties of consanguinity and by a shared vulnerability to exposure. This strength was now going to be its undoing: safe houses these no longer were.
²⁹

On 4 October Garnet wrote again to Robert Persons. The persecution, he explained, had become ‘more severe’ and rumour was that James ‘had hitherto stroked Papists, but now [would] strike’. He still believed that ‘the best sort of Catholics [would] bear all their losses with patience’, but he offered Persons a dark warning: ‘how these tyrannical proceedings…may drive particular men to desperate attempts, that I cannot answer for’. Throughout their pilgrimage Anne Vaux had been struck by the quantity of horses stabled with her cousins, telling Garnet she ‘feared these wild heads had something in hand’. But in the absence of any public response from the Vatican, Garnet seems to have retreated into numb officialdom: his orders from Aquaviva were to avoid meddling in anything that did not directly concern his apostolate, so this is what he did. He later explained: ‘I…cut off all occasions (after I knew the project) of any discoursing with [Catesby] of it, thereby to save myself harm both with the State here, and with my Superiors at Rome.’ With his pilgrimage over his ambition now was to get back to the capital: ‘we are to go within few days nearer London’, he told Persons.
³⁰

Garnet never made it to London. In late October Anne Vaux came to him ‘choked with sorrow’. She told him she feared ‘disorder’, because ‘some of the gentlewomen [probably some of the conspirators’ wives] had demanded of her where they should bestow themselves until the burst was past in the beginning of Parliament’. ‘Whereupon’, testified Garnet afterwards, ‘I gathered that all was resolved.’ If this statement is true, then Garnet now did an extraordinary thing: instead of removing himself from danger he took himself right to the hub of it. He accepted Everard Digby’s offer to join him at Coughton Court in Warwickshire; and he did so knowing that Digby was drawn into the plot and suspecting that the plotters wanted him with them ‘for their own projects’.
³¹

It was a small party that set out to Coughton on Tuesday, 29 October, just Lady Digby, Garnet, and Tesimond, Anne Vaux and her sister, and Nicholas Owen. Sir Everard Digby was to ride over from Gayhurst a few days later, for a ‘hunting party’ (the purpose of which was to kidnap Princess Elizabeth, James’s daughter, from her nearby lodgings, ready to proclaim her Queen the moment her father had been killed).
*
Catesby too, wrote Garnet, had promised to come to Coughton. Had he kept this promise, Garnet intended to enter ‘into the matter with [him], and perhaps might have hindered all’. It was a desperate hope. More realistic was the next sentence in Garnet’s statement: ‘Other means of hindrance I could not devise, as I would have desired.’ On Wednesday, 6 November Robert Catesby’s servant Thomas Bates rode into Coughton, bringing news of Guy Fawkes’ arrest and of the plot’s discovery. As Garnet read a letter from Catesby and Digby, which excused their rashness but begged him to help them raise a party against the King, Bates heard him turn to Tesimond and say ‘we [are] all utterly undone’.
³²