God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (55 page)

The trial of Mr Henry Garnet—in true paradoxical style the Government wished to try him as a priest without affording him the courtesy of that title—took place at London’s Guildhall on Friday, 28 March 1606. Garnet arrived there by 9 a.m., brought the short distance from the Tower in a covered coach to keep him ‘safe’. Already the crowds were gathering, packing the entranceway to catch a glimpse of him. They saw a balding, bespectacled, somewhat overweight fifty-year-old, whose face bore the signs of long-term illness and recent hardship. But no one was very interested in Garnet the man—it was what he represented that mattered. The commissioners arrived soon afterwards and took their place on the bench—the three Howard earls, Nottingham, Suffolk and Northampton, Lord Somerset, Robert Cecil, Sir John Popham, Sir Thomas Fleming, Sir Christopher Yelverton and London’s Lord Mayor, representing the King: England’s most powerful.
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James, himself, was there
‘incognito’
, so the Venetian ambassador reported, as were most of his courtiers, squeezed in tightly to catch the proceedings. Two days earlier William Waad had complained to Cecil about the difficulty of getting a seat: ‘there is a place provided in the Guildhall for the prisoner, but none for me’, he wrote plaintively. Now he took his specially allotted position next to Garnet, before the courtroom. At about ninethirty the show trial began.
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‘Henry Garnet, of the profession of the Jesuits, otherwise Walley, otherwise Darcy, otherwise Roberts, otherwise Farmer, otherwise Philips, (for by all those names he called himself) stood indicted of the most barbarous and damnable treasons’: the arraignment began in thunderous fashion. And so it continued, throughout that long March day. First the charges against him were read out: that on 9 June, the date Catesby had consulted him about the killing of innocents, he, Tesimond, and Catesby had all three conspired to murder the King and destroy the commonwealth. Garnet pleaded not guilty and Sir Edward Coke began the case for the prosecution.
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‘[S]ince the Jesuits set foot in this land,’ Coke informed the court, ‘there never passed four years without a most pestilent and pernicious treason.’ Conspiracy after conspiracy was dusted down and hung about Garnet’s neck. Then Coke moved on to the Gunpowder Plot: ‘because I speak of several treasons, for distinction and separation of this from the other[s], I will name it the Jesuits’ Treason’, he told the jury helpfully. Of course, with no proofs to support the assertion that Garnet was author of the plot, Coke was forced to rely on judicial interpretation of the evidence to make his case. So Garnet’s letter to Aquaviva ‘for the staying of all commotions of the Catholics’ was written, claimed Coke, solely ‘to lull us asleep for security’. His conference with Catesby and Tresham about ‘the strength of the Catholics in England’—as hero of the hour Lord Mounteagle’s name was omitted here—was to promote rebellion, not prevent it. And the pilgrimage to St Winifred’s Well ‘was but a jargon, to have better opportunity, by colour thereof, to confer’. From manipulation he turned to character assassination. Of Garnet’s many aliases he observed, ‘I have not commonly known…a true man, that has so many false appellations’. Garnet’s orange juice letters—carefully provided by his solicitous gaoler—were shown to the court as evidence of his cunning. Garnet, said Coke, was ‘a doctor of five DD’s, as dissimulation, deposing of princes, disposing of kingdoms, daunting and deterring of subjects, and destruction’.

The subject of equivocation—dissimulation, in Coke’s terminology—had dominated Robert Southwell’s trial. It decimated Henry Garnet’s. The Jesuits, explained Coke, ‘equivocate, and so cannot that way be tried or judged according to their words’, and over the course of the day the prosecution would shred the credibility of Garnet’s words. State witnesses appeared, swearing to having eavesdropped on conversations between Garnet and Oldcorne in the Tower; then evidence was produced revealing Garnet had denied, in interrogation, that such conversations had ever taken place. More damaging still was the dramatic flourishing of Francis Tresham’s deathbed statement. It had been Tresham who had accused Garnet of complicity in the Spanish Treason, then retracted his evidence as he lay dying, saying he had only implicated the Jesuit to avoid torture (he died in the Tower on 23 December, of an inflammation of the urinary tract). Now his statement was read out, in all its fatal ambiguity. ‘[T]o give your Lordship a proof [that Garnet was not involved],’ Tresham had sworn, ‘I had not seen him in sixteen years before.’ The meaning was unclear: had Tresham meant ‘before’ 1602, the date of the Spanish Treason (the subject to which he was referring), or ‘before’ 1605, the date of the plot? The first was true, the second false, as independent statements from Anne Vaux and Garnet, himself, confirmed. But for the prosecution there was no lack of clarity: even as Tresham breathed his last, Coke exclaimed, he had lied—instructed how to do so by pernicious Jesuit teachings. By the time the prosecution moved on to the crucial subject of Garnet’s knowledge of the plot, his every utterance had been cast in doubt.
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The questions and comments about Garnet’s response to Tesimond’s confession came in waves. Robert Cecil asked why Garnet had not informed Claudio Aquaviva of the plot. The Earl of Northampton wondered why Garnet was unable to mention the confession before his arrest, but was able to discuss it now. Cecil returned to his notes to enquire about the process of confession, contrition, and absolution, to convince the court that Tesimond’s confession was invalid and therefore needed ‘no secrecy’. Then he switched tack, asking why Garnet had never thought to disclose the plot using the general knowledge of it he had received from Catesby; he also asked why Garnet had refused to listen every time Catesby had offered to tell him about the plot.

There was no lawyer to speak for Garnet: he stood in the dock alone, without notes and without access to the various examinations read out as evidence against him.
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His word had been discredited by the prosecution’s repeated attacks on equivocation. His defence—that ‘he was bound to keep the secrets of Confession’—was a Catholic defence in a Protestant court, a court thoughtfully reminded all day of the Pope’s alleged power to depose princes (a subject guaranteed to provoke waves of anti-Catholic sentiment). Moreover, in the crucible of public opinion he had already been tested and found wanting. His confession, reported John Gerard, had been ‘censured by many; and even by some of his friends and well-wishers esteemed a weakness in him’. His ‘partisans’ in the Low Countries were claiming he had only cracked ‘after having suffered great torments…but he would retract the same at his arraignment’. London’s gossips had sharpened their pens on him (‘He has been very indulgent to himself,’ noted the inveterate letter writer John Chamberlain, ‘…and daily drunk sack so liberally as if he meant to drown sorrow’). And from the heart of Government Robert Cecil had begun a carefully targeted smear campaign (on 19 March he had written to Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador to Venice, announcing that Garnet had confessed the plot ‘justifiable by divinity’). Witnesses sympathetic to Garnet reported a bear-pit-like atmosphere to the proceedings: ‘he was often of set purpose interrupted’; ‘great laughter’ greeted his defence of the seal of confession; suggestive comments were made about his friendship with Anne Vaux; he was ‘clean wearied out with so long standing at the bar’. Official reporters painted a different picture: ‘[he] made no great answer’; ‘[he] faintly answered’; ‘[he] denied to answer’; ‘[he] began to use some speeches [not recorded] that he was not consenting to the Powder-Treason’, but could give no proofs.
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He did his best. He invoked the common law principle that no man should be forced to incriminate himself, to justify his use of equivocation. He insisted that, to him, Tesimond’s confession was valid and that therefore he was bound to secrecy. He explained that he had been given permission to break the seal of confession if ever the plot were discovered. He laid out his obligation under canon law to ‘labour to divert’ the plot, which, he said, he had tried to do. He described again Catesby’s many promises to him and, again, how he had been ‘loath’ to hear more about the plot from him. But these answers were of interest only in human terms, not in the superhuman contest between good and evil being fought about him by his defenders and detractors. And his most human moment of all, when the tension of the last months’ conflict of loyalties burst from him ‘passionately’ (in the wording of the official court reporter), went unrecorded by his Catholic sympathizers: ‘I would to God’, he exclaimed, ‘I had never known of the Powder-Treason.’

It took the jury only fifteen minutes to reach their verdict of guilty as charged. London’s correspondents agreed. The letter writer John Chamberlain (though not present at the trial) thought it satisfactorily proven that Garnet ‘had had his finger in every treason’ since his return to England. The Venetian ambassador (who was present) railed against equivocation, concluding that Garnet had ‘caused great outcry against the Roman religion’; he too believed Garnet guilty. Yet the Government hesitated. Indeed, for the next month it was as though Garnet had never been tried at all as his interrogators pushed for a greater admission of his crimes. Trickery was its chosen weapon: at the beginning of April Garnet was told that Tesimond had been captured—and had testified to telling him of the plot
out
of confession. There followed a series of agonized letters from Garnet. His defenders have questioned the authenticity of some of them, but all contain material similarities. Again and again he repeated himself: ‘that knowledge I had by [Tesimond] I took it as in confession’. Again and again he wrote of his abhorrence of the plot: ‘[it was] altogether unlawful and most horrible’; ‘I never allowed it [and] I sought to hinder it more than men can imagine, as the pope will tell.’ To Anne Vaux (this letter is extant and uncontested) he explained how the conspirators ‘used my name freely’ to win support for their cause, a comment repeated in the letter to his Jesuit brethren (extant, but contested). Then came the Government’s breakthrough. Its beginnings can be traced in his letter to Tesimond (extant, uncontested): ‘I wrote yesterday…[to testify] that indeed I might have revealed a general knowledge had of Mr Catesby out of confession’. Its progress can be traced through his letter to the Council (not extant, contested): ‘I acknowledge that I was bound to reveal all knowledge that I had of this plot…out of sacrament of confession.’ Finally, in the letters to Tesimond, the Council and the Jesuits, came Garnet’s explanation for his silence: it ‘proceeded from hope of prevention by the Pope’, he wrote, and ‘for that I would not betray my friend’.
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‘Greater love hath no man than this,’ Christ had said near death, ‘that [he] lay down his life for his friends.’ Catesby had been Garnet’s friend, his provider, his companion in that secret, underground, and alienated society that was English Catholicism. For Catesby Henry Garnet had laid down life and reputation—and not just his own reputation, but that of everything he held most dear. In those last anguished weeks as he, himself, neared death, it seemed the doubts about his actions crowded in upon him—worse than any torture he might have suffered at the Government’s hands.
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On Wednesday, 30 April carpenters began constructing a scaffold in the churchyard outside St Paul’s Cathedral. It was higher than usual so that the expected crowds might have a good view, and around it jostled several spectator stands. On Saturday, 3 May these stands were full of people come to see a Jesuit die. Back in February the Venetian ambassador had been confident Garnet would ‘not be executed in public’: ‘he is a man of moving eloquence…and they are afraid [of] his constancy and the power of his speech’, he explained. Now he took his allotted place among the onlookers, content to see a ‘partner in that villainy…being extinguished’.
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Garnet was drawn on a hurdle the short distance from the Tower, ‘his hands together…his eyes shut’. At St Paul’s he opened his eyes to look around. ‘All [the] windows were full,’ it was reported, ‘yea, the tops of houses full of people.’ Eighteen years earlier he, himself, had stood discreetly among a similar crowd at St Paul’s watching Queen Elizabeth celebrate the Armada’s defeat; now he and his Jesuits had been denounced as ‘purveyors and forerunners’ of that Armada and he was the one being watched. Watched and harangued, for even at this hour of his death there was to be no let up. The deans of St Paul’s and Winchester pressed him to acknowledge the errors of his Catholic faith and recant; the Recorder of London, Sir Henry Montague, representing the King, pressed him to confess his treason and acknowledge himself ‘justly condemned’. Witnesses to the scene, both Protestant and partisan, reported ‘that his voice was low’, his strength gone, but, just as before, both parties disagreed on the content of his replies. The Venetian ambassador described ‘the fury of the mob’ at his mention of the word ‘pope’; sympathizers observed that the crowd was ‘much moved…by his protestations of innocence’. ‘It is looked he will equivocate at the gallows’, one correspondent had written gleefully the day before (and sure enough the old charge of lying was levelled against him), ‘but he will be hanged without equivocation.’
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He had seen so many men die—standing as near to the scaffold as he might to whisper the last rites over them. ‘Should it come to pass that we have to suffer for His sake and attain high honour in this way,’ he had written to Aquaviva, ‘…we hope God will turn everything to our greater good, making us more like Him whom it must be our aim to resemble.’ But to Robert Persons he had mentioned the gnawing doubt that he was ‘unfit for the combat’. The official records of his execution described his palpable ‘fear of death’; Catholic records described his ‘undaunted countenance’. But in the end Henry Garnet died as he had lived, as an English Catholic, praying for his King, country and God, no matter the conflict existing between them. And on that everyone could agree.
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