God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (55 page)

The cellars at Westminster are ritually searched with lanterns before the Opening of Parliament. In 1812 the Yeomen of the Guard, coming to the vault of a wine-merchant, sensibly sampled the contents of the pipes ‘to ascertain that they did not contain gunpowder’.

(Cressy, Champion and Jay, in
Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night
(2005);
thisissussex.co.uk
, 6 November 2012)

^fn2
Wintour had fled Holbeach just before the siege that saw his younger brother taken and Catesby and others killed. He was a fugitive for two months, enduring ‘hard bedding and diet’ until his capture at Hagley on 9 January. Humphrey Littleton, the owner of Hagley, then turned informant. (BL Harl. MS 360, ff. 102–8; Fraser,
The Gunpowder Plot
, pp. 213, 216)

25

That Woman

Anne followed Garnet to London and spent her first night with Mary Habington in Fetter Lane. Thereafter she lived like a fugitive, staying no more than two or three nights in one place. Few were willing to put her up, ‘even with money’. She was forty-three, her health was frail and it was February.
¹

On Valentine’s Day, Garnet was transferred from the Gatehouse in Westminster to the altogether more foreboding Tower of London. By the bestowal of a gold coin, ‘a cup of sack’
^fn1
and some flattering words, he arranged for his new keeper to send messages to his nephew, Thomas, a priest in the Gatehouse. The first was written on a strip of paper enfolding a pair of glasses:

I pray you let these spectacles be set in leather & with a leather case, or let the fold be fitter for the nose.

Yours for ever, H.G.

There was no other visible writing, but when held to a flame, new words, secretly etched in orange juice, appeared on the page. Garnet mentioned an earlier letter ‘sent with biscuit bread’, which he had been forced to burn without reading. ‘I have acknowledged that I went from Sir Everard’s to Coughton,’ he wrote, and that when Bates had come from the rebel camp with news of the plot’s discovery, Garnet had told him: ‘I am sorry they have without advice of friends adventured in so wicked an action. Let them desist.’

I must needs acknowledge my being with the 2 sisters & that at White Webbs, as is true, for they are so jealous of White Webbs that I can no way else satisfy.

My names I all confess but that last.

Appoint some place near where this bearer may meet some trusty friend.

Where is Mrs Anne?
²

On 23 February, hearing that Anne was in town, Garnet told Oldcorne in the adjacent cell that he had written ‘a note that my keeper may repair to her near hand’, so that she ‘will let us hear from all our friends’.
³
Three days later, he sent an item to the Gatehouse ‘to be new lined’. The covering note acknowledged receipt of ‘the linen you sent’ and requested socks and a black nightcap. ‘The spectacles will not serve me,’ he added, ‘I only want spectacles to see afar off, for to read I need not.’ (This provided the opportunity for more innocuous wrapping paper.) He would also need money, ‘for we have not yet paid our fees’.

The invisible ink contained Latin instructions for the Jesuits, including the appointment of a provisional leader. Garnet continued in English with his own news:

They say I am obstinate & indeed they have nothing against me but presumptions.

I have indeed acknowledged Wintour’s journey into Spain, but so that I cannot have hurt thereby. I acknowledged I was at White Webs, but one or 2 nights this twelve month.

The house is none of mine, though this day they will have me to be Mr Measy & brought James
^fn2
to my face, who said nothing.

Neither have I confessed any particular but of Mrs Perkins [Anne] & the meeting of Catesby & Wintour in Q. Eliz.’s time. Yet they know all the persons & so I wish all be wary till their malice be wrought on me.

The letter was meant for Anne. A superscription in juice to ‘my very loving sister’, urged caution:

More hereafter: do not endanger yourself, but if you have any to bring you to me, by the Cradle [Tower] you may.
⁴

It had been a month since Garnet was taken. Anne was desperate to receive his blessing and look for signs of his treatment. She was his conduit to the world, but ‘your last letter,’ he complained on 3 March, ‘I could not read, your pen did not cast ink.’ He had received the handkerchiefs, though, and the socks and the Bible. He hoped that Anne had paid his prison fees and could acquire beds ‘for James, John, and Harry, who all have been often tortured’.
⁵

The following day, he was more insistent: ‘For God’s sake provide bedding for these 3,’ he wrote, ‘your own necessities always regarded.’
⁶
If ‘John’ was Nicholas ‘Little John’ Owen, the request came too late. The carpenter had been found dead in his cell two days earlier, his bowels having ‘gushed out’. His last examination had been just hours before his death and since the torture of ‘the inferior sort’ of prisoner had been authorised by special warrant, there is a strong suspicion that Owen, who may have had a hernia, was racked to death. The government was quick to put out its version: Owen ‘killed himself in the Tower in the night, ripping up his own belly with a knife without a point.’ Oswald Tesimond reacted incredulously: ‘Does William Waad [the Lieutenant of the Tower] seriously expect us to believe that even after many days’ torture, a man like Owen would abandon his hope of salvation by inflicting death on himself – and such a death?’ The Venetian ambassador thought public opinion cleaved to the Catholic version. However he died, Owen took the secrets of his extraordinary priest-holes to the grave.
⁷

If their friend’s death made Anne even more afraid for Garnet, then his letter of 4 March, if safely received, must have come as sweet relief. Garnet had not yet been tortured. Indeed, considering the time and (alleged) crime, he was being treated rather well. This letter is much longer and more fluent than previous missives, which had not required context or elaboration. Headed ‘for Mrs Anne or one of ours first’, it aimed to put the record straight ‘lest evil reports or untrue may do myself or others injury’.
⁸

Garnet insisted that he had been ‘exceedingly well used’ by Sir Henry Bromley in Worcestershire. Before being taken to London, he had stayed at his captor’s house, dined at his table and even celebrated Candlemas with the family. There had been ‘a great dinner’ and wine to toast the King. Garnet had ‘pledged the health, yet with favour as they said, in a reasonable glass’. He had ridden to London on the best horse, at the King’s charge, but had been ‘much distempered’ and could not eat anything on his first night at the Gatehouse. Thereafter, he had only managed ‘bread, an apple & some wine according to my purse’. At the Tower:

I have a very fine chamber, but was very sick the 2 first nights with ill lodging. I am allowed every meal a good draught of excellent claret wine & I am liberal with myself & neighbours for good respects, to allow also of my own purse some sack; & this is the greatest charge I shall be at hereafter, for now fire will shortly be unnecessary if I live so long, whereof I am very uncertain & as careless.

One ‘evil report’, apparently already doing the rounds, was that Garnet was a drunkard. To Oldcorne he confessed his fear that, in his weakened state, he might have hurt himself with ‘too much abstinence and some excess of drink’. This does not sound like the admission of an inebriate, rather of someone who knew that he had drunk ‘extraordinarily’. John Gerard’s subsequent allegation that Garnet’s food or drink had been spiked is not helpful in this context; nor is the declaration of a nineteenth-century Jesuit historian that ‘the Son of God Himself was charged with being a drunkard’.
⁹

However much Garnet appreciated his wine at this time – and it was just before Lent – he was sharp enough in examination to match some of the best minds in the country. To Salisbury, who treated him ‘with all courtesy’, Garnet defended the supremacy of the Pope ‘plainly yet modestly & with great moderation’. To the question, ‘May the Pope command anything unlawful for obedience?’, Garnet had replied, ‘No thing that is unlawful may be lawful for obedience.’

There had been odd moments of ‘pleasant discourse’. Lord Chief Justice Popham had recognised the prisoner from the early 1570s when the then-teenaged Garnet had been a trainee publisher with thoughts of the law. The Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, was
‘very courteous’. William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, was ‘very kind in usage & familiarity’, but ‘most violent’ on the subject of religion. Once, when Garnet was asked about a christening he had performed at White Webbs – that of William and Dorothy Brooksby’s daughter – Waad had insinuated that he was also ‘there at the begetting’. Coke and Popham had agreed with Garnet that ‘such calumniations were unfit’.

Garnet warned Anne that she was known to them. They had named Eleanor too ‘and say they will have her.’ There was ‘a muttering’ about a sermon. ‘I fear mine at Coughton,’ he wrote. He thought that ‘Corpus Christi lodging’ was still safe. ‘They said they could believe me in nothing.’

‘Why then, said I, you must bring witnesses.’

They had threatened torture and Garnet ‘often’ feared it, but ‘in truth,’ he informed Anne, ‘I thank God I am & have been
intrepidus
& herein I marvel at myself, having had such great apprehensions before.’

When Garnet wrote this letter on Shrove Tuesday, he was unaware of Owen’s death. He had no idea how Father Strange was faring either. The Tower was large enough to keep the prisoners segregated and Garnet’s gaoler was not as helpful as he pretended, for while he soaked up Garnet’s libations and compliments, he assiduously passed everything on – the letters, and the words, even those spoken in confession to Oldcorne in the adjacent cell.

The placement of the two Jesuits had been no happy accident. In the hope that they might incriminate themselves and others, they were put next to each other and shown ‘a cranny in the top of a door’ through which they could confer. They spoke in ‘a low, whispering manner’. Cocks crowed, hens cackled and Oldcorne’s husky, cancer-raddled voice was difficult to catch. Two hidden eavesdroppers craned their necks and noted everything down.
¹⁰

The two priests were briefing each other, Garnet in particular telling Oldcorne what was, and was not, safe to mention. Thus, on 23 February: ‘I think it not convenient to deny that we were at White Webbs; they do so much insist upon that place.’ Two days later, Garnet said, ‘I hope they have got no knowledge of the great …’ The rest of the sentence was not heard. In the same session, he cited the prayers and Latin verses that he had ‘indeed’ used on All Saints Day at
Coughton.
^fn3
The letters that he had sent into Spain ‘were of no other matter, but to have pensions’. Garnet also said something ‘of a gentlewoman, that if he were charged with her, he would excuse her conversing with him’. On 27 February, he said he had been questioned about a nobleman, ‘but I answered it well enough I think’. He had been ‘pressed again with Coughton, which I most feared’. And so it went on, Garnet ‘well persuaded that I shall wind myself out of this matter’, his examiners equally convinced that there was more to learn.
¹¹

In the many interviews that followed, Garnet might once have been tortured. In April he would refer to the threat of torture ‘the second time’. There were rumours that he had been denied food and sleep. Anne said he was ‘certainly’ tortured; Salisbury insisted he was treated as tenderly ‘as a nurse-child’. Luisa de Carvajal, who was no supporter of English officials, reported from London on 2 April that they had been ‘soft’ on Garnet. At the time she believed his trial statement that he had been treated ‘with all courtesy’. In May, however, she was less sure, reporting that Garnet ‘said that he had only been tortured for a brief while and that he had been well treated in the prison’. Later in the same letter, she wrote that ‘they tried his patience in an extraordinary way, not by torturing his body, but by torturing his mind and understanding with false allegations, deliberate confusion and subtle fantasy’.
¹²
The Catholic poet and playwright Ben Jonson had a line in
Volpone
(1606) that has been seen as a waggish reference to the twin rumours of Garnet’s torture and drunkenness: ‘I have heard / The rack hath cured the gout’ – neither apologists nor detractors would happily have granted both.
¹³

Even when confronted with the minutes of the ‘interlocutions’, Garnet continued to evade his examiners. When challenged about ‘the great …’, he claimed he had meant ‘the great house of Mr Mainy’ in Essex, ‘for Erith,’ he admitted a month later, ‘was not yet spoken of till Mrs Anne named it’. Garnet withheld information to protect people, places, his Society, his Church and himself. ‘What should I have done?’ he asked. ‘Why should I not use all lawful liberty?’
¹⁴

On 8 March, he finally admitted that he had had foreknowledge of the Gunpowder Plot. He had heard about it in general terms in June 1605, when Catesby had propounded the matter of the killing of innocents, and he had heard about it in particular when Tesimond had confessed the details in July. Garnet said he had tried to stop it by all lawful means. He had charged Tesimond to hinder the plot. He had urged Catesby to desist from any action. He had stressed the Pope’s prohibition against stirs. He had begged Rome for a further ban that would threaten excommunication on all plotters (Paul V had not obliged, thinking the general ban would suffice). He had sent Sir Edmund Baynham to the Pope (‘to inform generally’) and he had secured a promise from Catesby that he would do nothing until his return. He had also prayed. ‘Other means of hindrance I could not devise as I would have desired’, because he had been bound to silence by the seal of the confessional. He said his penitent had only permitted him to divulge what he knew ‘if ever I should come in question, the thing being laid to my charge’. So he had eventually confessed, believing Tesimond to be safely overseas. ‘If I had not thought so,’ he later wrote, ‘I must have called my wits together to have made another formal tale, but the case standing as it did, it was necessary.’
¹⁵