God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (57 page)

The notes of this session are endorsed: ‘The examination of Anne Vaux the maid.’
³⁴
A few days earlier, Garnet had confessed that ‘some wives’ on the pilgrimage had asked Anne ‘where we would be till the brunt were past, that is till the beginning of the Parliament’. It was this conversation, he claimed, that had made him realise that ‘all was resolved’.
³⁵
Now confronted with Anne’s denial, he said that he must have been mistaken. ‘I thought the gentlewomen past all examinations,’ he lamented privately, and Anne ‘so free from danger’ that it would have been safe to name her. He had hoped that she ‘would have kept herself out of their fingers’. He did not, however, think she was ‘taken for me, but for White Webbs’, and he was sure that ‘all will turn to the best for she shall save all her goods’.
³⁶

Garnet’s confidence in Anne was not misplaced. According to the
Narrative
of Tesimond, she bore her imprisonment with ‘admirable steadfastness and a courage truly virile’.
³⁷
Luisa de Carvajal thought that Anne had triumphed against her examiners. The Spaniard’s letter to her friend in Brussels, Magdalena de San Jerónimo, is so engaging, and so rarely cited, that it deserves a lengthy quotation. It is, however, very much the pro-Jesuit account:

Mistress Anne Vaux was quite entertaining with them when they took her confession. (They have the habit of saying that all Catholic women are ladies of ill repute, so I have heard, because they have priests and Fathers living in their homes, because, aside from their malice and hate against the faith, they are ill able to judge others in this matter.) And they said that Mistress Anne has lived in sin with Master Farmer, who is Father Garnet, and they said as much to her and she, even though she was imprisoned there in the Tower, laughed loudly two or three times (for she is really quite funny and very lively) and she said,

‘You come to me with this child’s play and impertinence? A sign that you have nothing of importance with which to charge me.’

And she laughed bravely at them, making a great joke of their behaviour in that business.

They asked her whether she had known about the Gunpowder Plot. She said, of course she had known, for since she was a woman, how could anything possibly happen in England without her being told of it? They asked her if Master Farmer knew about it. She said that since he was the greatest traitor in the world [
mayor traidor del mundo
], he hadn’t missed getting involved in that treason; and that she was in great debt to them because she hadn’t been able to find a single place in all of London to stay, even with money, and they had given her room and board for nothing.

To more weighty questions, she responded very sensibly and she pays no attention whatsoever to them, and so she has them amazed and they are saying,

‘We absolutely do not know what to do with that woman!’
³⁸

The day after her examination, Anne, perhaps mindful that sarcasm was not the wisest form of defence, made a statement:

I am most sore to hear that Father Garnet should be any ways privy to this most wicked action as himself ever called it, for that he made to me many great protestations to the contrary diverse times since.

Anne Vaux.
³⁹

Twelve days later, on 24 March, Anne was questioned again, almost entirely about Francis Tresham. On his deathbed in the Tower, Tresham had tried to exonerate Garnet from the 1602 ‘Spanish treason’ by claiming that he had ‘not seen him in sixteen years before’. His amanuensis, William Vavasour, wrote that Tresham had meant ‘at that time’, nor ‘in fifteen or sixteen years before’.
⁴⁰
Either way, Tresham had lied. He had seen Garnet at that time and the previous year, around the time of the Essex rebellion (February 1601). Garnet confessed as much in the Tower on 22 and 23 March, adding that
Tresham, Catesby and Wintour had ‘dealt with me about the sending into Spain’.
⁴¹

In her second examination, Anne divulged several other occasions when her ‘cousin germane removed’ had come to see her and Garnet. There had been the two or three visits by Tresham to White Webbs after the accession of the King, ‘sometimes in the company of Mr Catesby’. There had been an afternoon chat with Garnet at a house in Wandsworth in the first year of James’s reign. There had been a dinner at Erith ‘between Easter and Whitsuntide last’, when ‘Catesby came hither likewise’. Tresham had also visited ‘another house they had’ in the summer and ‘had some conference with Mr Garnet, where likewise he exhorted him to all patience’.

Anne must have wondered why her examiners were so particularly interested in her late cousin. She insisted that Garnet ‘always’ gave Tresham good advice ‘and persuaded him to rest contented’. Her statement was shown to Garnet, who wrote on it: ‘I do acknowledge these meetings & repair of Mr Tresham to be true.’ Anne subsequently remembered paying her respects at Rushton Hall just after the death of Sir Thomas Tresham in September 1605. ‘I also do well remember this above now, which I did not think of before,’ wrote Garnet, who had claimed two days earlier that the last meeting with Tresham had been ‘at Fremlands about July’.
⁴²

Anne had also given up Erith, the house that Garnet had lied to protect, but nothing else was revelatory. Garnet himself had already admitted that Catesby was ‘seldom long from us, for the great affection he bore the gentlewoman with whom I lived’.
⁴³
Anne’s kinship ties were unspectacular. The whole point of her second examination, as Coke freely admitted to Salisbury, was ‘the damnable execration of Tresham’.
⁴⁴
At Garnet’s trial four days later, Tresham’s declaration that he had not seen Garnet ‘in fifteen or sixteen years before’ 1602 was twisted to appear to suggest that he had not seen Garnet in sixteen years before 1605. ‘Yet Garnet,’ Coke announced with a flourish,

and Mrs Anne Vaux (though otherwise a very obstinate woman) confessed that Tresham within these three years had been several times at their houses at White Webbs and Mrs Vaux confessed that he had been twice there this very last year, and had received very good counsel from him.

So ‘what,’ Coke asked, ‘shall we think of this man?’
⁴⁵

Garnet floundered: ‘It may be, my Lord, he meant to equivocate.’ This spurred Coke in his denunciation of the Jesuits’ deceitful doctrine, which was ‘a kind of unchastity’ as it perverted the marriage of heart and tongue. Tresham’s death with a lie on his lips had proved that he and Garnet were ‘stained with their own works and went a whoring with their own inventions’. Coke knew that Garnet had ‘seen and allowed’ the treatise of equivocation that he had discovered in December ‘in a chamber in the Inner Temple wherein Sir Thomas Tresham used to lie’.
⁴⁶
One wonders what the prosecutor would have made of the knowledge that Garnet had actually written it. Even so, he declared the Jesuit superior a ‘doctor of dissimulation’, as well as of ‘deposing of princes, disposing of kingdoms, daunting and deterring of subjects, and destruction’. According to the indictment, Garnet was the author of a plot ‘so inhuman, so barbarous, so damnable, so detestable as the like was never read nor heard of, or ever entered into the heart of the most wicked man to imagine’.

The plump clergyman with a bald patch and spectacles (if Anne ever found him a suitable pair) did not look much like an arch-villain (nor, for that matter, a Lothario), but, as Salisbury had briefed before the trial, it was ‘the cause, not the person’ that mattered. The ‘poor seduced priest’, who had surrendered his Englishman’s heart and cleaved to ‘an unnatural and unjust supremacy’, symbolised the corruption of Rome. Indeed, he had become ‘the little Pope of this kingdom’. His life had no intrinsic value,

but seeing the law of nature and of nations teacheth all kings to prevent destruction practised under the mantle of religion, it is expedient to make it manifest to the world how far these men’s doctrinal practice toucheth into the bowels of treason. Further and so forever after stop the mouths of their calumniation that preach and print our laws to be executed for difference in point of conscience.
⁴⁷

It was the point that Salisbury’s father, Lord Burghley, had made in
The Execution of Justice
after the death of Edmund Campion.

The prosecution had Garnet conspiring against the State since his return to England in 1586, ‘which very act was a treason’. Garnet had more than justified the need for the 1585 statute against seminary
priests. The Gunpowder Plot was a manifestation of the evil that lurked under the cloak of religion, just as the Armada had been, and the Babington Plot, the Northern rising and the 1570 bull of excommunication against Queen Elizabeth (issued when Garnet was just fourteen). ‘Before the bull of Impious Pius Quintus,’ Coke announced, ‘there were no recusants in England … but thereupon presently they refused to assemble in our churches.’ Recusancy was grounded upon a ‘disloyal cause’; it was ‘a very dangerous and disloyal thing’. Garnet may have been the man at the bar, but his faith, his Society and his ‘Jesuited Catholic’ followers were all on trial.

Salisbury insisted that the court was impartial and that Garnet could draw on his own testimony and that of his friends for defence. ‘This gentlewoman,’ he added, ‘that seems to speak for you in her confessions, I think would sacrifice herself for you to do you good, and you likewise for her.’ Salisbury may have been right, but Anne’s statement was only cited to expose Tresham’s falsehood.

The trial at the Guildhall on Friday, 28 March 1606, lasted all day, from nine thirty in the morning to around six in the evening. The charge was that Garnet had conspired with Catesby and Tesimond on 9 June 1605 to kill the King and his heir, to stir sedition and slaughter throughout the kingdom, to subvert ‘the true religion of God’ and to overthrow the whole state of the commonwealth. It took the jury less than fifteen minutes to find him guilty. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

^fn1
Sack (or sherry) was a sweet fortified wine famously appreciated by Falstaff: ‘If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.’ (
2 Henry IV
, Act 4, Scene 2)

^fn2
‘James Johnson’
vere
John Grissold, Anne Vaux’s servant and caretaker at White Webbs. Later that day he deposed that, ‘having now seen Garnet the Jesuit’, he had ‘many times seen him with his mistress at her house at White Webbs and that he was called by the name of Mese when he came first and was said to be his mistress’s kinsman.’ (PRO SP 14/216/189)

^fn3
This was Garnet’s All Saints sermon on the text: ‘Take away the perfidious people from the land of believers.’ Garnet did not deny having given it, but he insisted that his prayers were ‘against ill laws to be made’ and not, as was alleged, to commend ‘the business of the Parliament House’. (HMC Salisbury, 18, p. 109)

^fn4
The forger may have been one Arthur Gregory, who would petition Salisbury for work towards the end of the year. He reminded him of his past ‘secret services’ in ‘discovering the secret writing being in blank, to abuse a most cunning villain in his own subtlety, leaving the same in blank again. Wherein, though there be difficulty, their answers show they have no suspicion.’ Gregory was keen ‘to write in another man’s hand’ again. (Hogge,
God’s Secret Agents
, pp. 377–8)

^fn5
The letter in question has not survived, so one cannot be sure, but elsewhere Anne’s capital V could easily have been mistaken for a G. For example, PRO SP 14/216/201 below:

Other contemporary hands also had strange Vs. In the examination of William Handy, for example, it looked like a ‘b’ (PRO SP 14/216/121). A portrait of William, third Lord Vaux (Plate 4), that was part of the contents of Grimshaw Hall sold by Christie’s in March 2000, was catalogued as ‘Lo. Gauge’ after a misread inscription (Sale 8689, Lot 286). Incidentally, Grimshaw Hall in Warwickshire is less than five miles from Baddesley Clinton.