The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (18 page)

Then Digby made a public petition that since the crime was his and not his family’s, the punishment should be limited to him. He wanted his wife to have her jointure, his son the entailed lands, and his sisters the portions which were in his hands. He thought too of his creditors and sought permission for one of his servants to attend him to make provision for their claims. Finally, after asking pardon of the king and lords he entreated to be beheaded – the manner of a gentleman – ‘that his death might satisfy them for his trespass’. Coke’s response to this was as heavy and gloomy as the light in the hall at the end of a January day. He repudiated each point with sarcastic contempt and when Digby intervened to say that he had confessed he deserved the vilest death and yet ‘some moderation of justice’, Coke retorted sardonically that he was asking for exactly what once he had buoyantly set aside. The king showed great moderation and mercy in that for so towering a crime no new torture had been devised or inflicted. A little more in like vein and then Coke gave way to one of the commissioners, the Earl of Northampton, the learned pedant and crypto-Catholic who could bore for England.

The main thrust of his inevitably long and wordy speech was made to refute the charge against James of having broken promises to Catholics.
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Northampton denied that James ever encouraged them to expect any favour, thus contradicting reports of Father Watson’s celebrated interview with James years before in Scotland. He made too a strong point of Thomas Percy having asserted that the king had promised toleration to the Catholics – in which case why did Percy think it so worthwhile to employ Fawkes and others to plot against James in Spain? When Salisbury followed his colleague he began by acknowledging his connection by marriage with Digby, before dealing with the prisoner’s plea concerning broken promises to Catholics. It imputed, of course, bad faith to James and Digby may have forfeited his beheading by simply raising the point. A proper and dignified servant of his sovereign, Salisbury rejected the charge, and when he too had finished Philips asked for the judgment of the court upon the verdict of the jury against the seven and Digby. Each man was then asked if he had anything to say as to why the sentence of death should not be pronounced against him. Thomas Winter asked for mercy for his brother Robert, who simply begged for it. Ambrose Rookwood sought rather haltingly to play down his part, being ‘only persuaded and drawn in by Catesby, whom he had . . . esteemed dearer than anything else in the world’. Finally, Lord Chief Justice Popham described and defended the laws made by Elizabeth against ‘priests, recusants, and receivers and harbourers of priests’ and then he pronounced the usual sentence for high treason upon all eight men. Digby bowed towards the commissioners and said: ‘If I may but hear any of your Lordships say you forgive me, I shall go more cheerfully to the gallows.’ Their response was ‘God forgive you, and we do.’ By the light of flaming torches the prisoners were escorted back to the barge and thence to the Tower which they entered through Traitor’s Gate. They had two days to live and meditate on their fate.
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In his last days Digby’s resolve did not unravel. He never expressed anything until the very last but a rigid belief in what he repeatedly called ‘the cause’, although many priests and fellow Catholics had rehearsed both privately and publicly the condemnations made in the wake of the Bye plot. ‘Oh, how full of joy should I die, if I could do anything for the cause which I love more than my life.’
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Even writing to his sons he could not warn them to smother such transcendent yet costly feelings if their faith was under threat. Given the extent to which Catesby had manipulated and concealed details, Digby’s lack of reproach or resentment seems extraordinary, but then what was important to him was the resolution he had made at the start. His sin, he declared, was not against God but the state – ‘I do not think there were three worth saving that would have been lost.’ Evidently most people then and now did not and do not share this implacability and rightly find such a baleful attitude as evil as the serious injustices that prompted such a point of view. Certainly the revenge of the government was not going to be stalled this time by calculated royal mercy as it had been with the Main plotters. This time the monarchy had been undermined and its sacred dignity besmirched; it needed a restorative effort and ‘The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.’ Such an intention could of course be undermined because in Jacobean England the frailties of the executioner and his victim might lead to an unseemly tussle between solemnity and absurdity. Indeed, there is a suspicion that the expectation of macabre farce was what continued to draw crowds, although familiarity with the grisly ritual does not seem to have reduced interest.

Digby, Robert Winter, John Grant and Thomas Bates were lashed to wattled hurdles at the Tower to be dragged lying on their backs the mile to the scaffold in St Paul’s churchyard.
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Since this was 29 January 1606, it was a cold and grubby group that was jeered at contemptuously and coarsely by curious onlookers in city streets lined with guards of householders. At the place Digby found the composure to conform to tradition by making a last speech. Now he asked forgiveness of all ‘and if he had known it first to have been so foul a treason he would not have concealed it to have gained a world’. He then asked the crowd to witness that he died penitent and sorrowful. Denied the attendance of a Catholic priest, Digby rejected attentions from a Protestant clergyman.
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He fell to prayers ‘often bowing his head to the ground’ before standing and saluting according to their rank all those who were near. This he managed with such an air of imperturbability ‘that he appeared to be entirely fearless of death’. Then he was stripped of all garments save his shirt and he went slowly up the ladder murmuring ‘O Jesus, Jesus, save me and keep me.’ It seems to have been the particular unkindness of the executioner that as soon as Digby was parted from the ladder the rope was cut and he fell gashing his forehead. Perhaps he was providentially stunned before the worst. If he had been left on the noose he would not have died from strangulation because a taut rope at the end of a properly gauged drop snaps a ligament in the neck. It is this fracture which allows a boney projection to enter the base of the brain and cause death. This spontaneous event was denied Digby who was still conscious when he was hauled to the block to be castrated, disembowelled and quartered. He died (to quote
Macbeth,
I. iv. 8–11):

As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he ow’d,

As ’twere a careless trifle

His life, as he believed, closed and opened simultaneously. The next day, which saw the distant capture of Father Garnet after so many years, Thomas Winter, Robert Keyes, Guy Fawkes (on the brink of physical collapse) and Ambrose Rookwood were delivered in a similar fashion from the Tower. But this time the executions were at a different venue – Old Palace Yard, Westminster – opposite the building that had been marked for destruction. Moving there the procession passed by a house in the Strand in which Rookwood’s wife Elizabeth had secured quarters. When they got very near, Rookwood, who had been praying continuously with closed eyes now opened them to see her waiting at an open window. It is said he raised himself up from the hurdle and called to her to pray for him. She replied ‘I will! I will! And do you offer yourself with good heart to God and your Creator! I yield you to Him with as full an assurance that you will be accepted of Him as when He gave you to me.’
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Their son was actually knighted by James at the end of the reign.

Given the additional distance of Old Palace Yard from the Tower, and the lugubrious progress to it, the unhappy quartet could not summon much energy for a crowd-pleasing performance. Kneeling and often bowing their heads to the ground they prayed, but kept their voices low. Not much more than the phrase ‘O Jesu, Jesu, save me and keep me’ repeated continuously while on the ladder was heard. Of the four it seems to have been Keyes who retained a lingering hint of truculence. With the execution of the key plotters there was now an extended pause in the arterial wallowing. During this time Garnet, Oldcorne, Nicholas Owen and Ralph Selby were brought to the Tower, arriving on 4 February, after two days in the Gatehouse.

Garnet’s first examination of many (John Gerard, SJ said twenty-three (1897)) was the following day and he maintained his cautious resistance to the questions even when the possibility of subjecting him to the rack was flourished. His reply was a steady
‘Minute ista pueris’
– ‘Threats are only for boys.’ Yet he would have learnt, because no one would have protected him from the knowledge, that Owen was marked down for torture; the warrants authorizing it were issued that month, and when he died it would have been obvious to suppose that he had succumbed to state violence, not as the government claimed, of a self-inflicted knife wound. Garnet denied having sent Baynham to the Pope and also the notion that he had encouraged Catholics to pray for the success of the ‘Catholic Cause’.
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When he admitted anything – such as the grand and obvious excursion to St Winifred’s Well – it was only stuff of limited interest, and realizing the interrogations had stalled, the investigators needed to glean more without risking an immediate martyrdom. They began with the classic friendly warder option whereby a correspondence with several Catholics, including Anne Vaux, was begun, and secret notes appended in lemon juice. But the letters to her were written instead in orange juice which does not fade on heating. So to cover these specials the government needed a brilliant forger and they selected Arthur Gregory who later wrote for his reward to Salisbury, since he had been robbed of his accumulated possessions by looters during the surge of the plague in March/April of 1606. All the letters proved so guarded in their contents that nothing new emerged. Still, the warder, as if warming to his prisoners and growing more willing to serve them, allowed a door between the cells of Oldcorne and Garnet to remain unlocked, and so the men could now meet and talk. It was these conversations that were noted down for the Secretary and Northampton by Lockerson and Forsett, hidden in secret recesses. But even the most conscientious eavesdropper could not hear every word and random noises in the Tower made accuracy difficult.

Five of these brotherly chats were allowed, and for a man in such a parlous situation, Garnet showed some resilience of spirit. He was irked when an occasional snigger was the response to a pointed quip about his predicament, and he even managed to find fault with some of the questions put to him. He does, however, seem to have had a rueful respect for Coke who slid from compassion to aggression in the time-honoured fashion of interrogators through the ages. Garnet had spent some eighteen years in hiding, subduing his own recurrent fears of discovery and those of the people who gave him sanctuary. He was about fifty and had been under great strain during his long period as superior, and to some extent his attitudes had been shaped from Rome by the remote but dominating personality of Father Persons; Garnet had been ‘strengthened’ or hampered according to the view taken of that priest’s activity. On 5 and 6 March the lord commissioners questioned Oldcorne and Garnet who at first denied having talked about the best mode of conducting their defence. Without pressure it must be unlikely that even when told that their conversations had been secretly recorded Oldcorne would have admitted with sudden candour on the second day just what exchanges he had had with his superior. Did the torturers show him what they had prepared if he remained uncommunicative, judging him the most vulnerable?

Whatever the case, Oldcorne’s release of information provided the leverage for a concentrated effort to draw out Garnet and he was unable to sustain his defence. Now he admitted meeting Fawkes a year before, and writing on his behalf to Father Baldwin in the Spanish Netherlands. There were the talks as well with Catesby, now admitted, and on 9 March he wrote a declaration that he had ‘dealt very reservedly with your Lordships in the case of the later powder action’. Garnet then rehearsed what he had become familiar with from colleagues – broadly speaking the known story of the plot – embellished with grace notes about his own unease as the thing developed. He had written frequently to Rome to solicit support against such wild efforts but none had been forthcoming. This is not surprising because of course Persons was at hand there. The false idea that he had moderated and adjusted his aspirations has been widely touted recently. In this view Persons had set aside activism for more emollient proceedings with James, but a further review of the evidence shows how wide of the mark this is.
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In fact, the plot was perfectly consistent with the long-held views of the stubborn zealot. Resistance and activism had survived in the writings of Persons and were paralleled in the plot. As Garnet now revealed, the intention of the plotters had threatened many not party to it. Of the ambiguous position of Monteagle, Garnet remained uncertain but he did trail some past conversations with him to suggest anti-royal feelings and clandestine disloyalty. James was not going to allow this an airing in court and so it was suppressed.

Another examination taken by Popham, Coke, Waad and possibly Forsett, strove to pin down the Jesuit on when exactly he had had knowledge of the conspiracy. Before Easter 1605? No, late in the summer from Greenway and then directly from Catesby. It was Garnet’s proposal that the Pope should be sounded and he had agreed with the choice of Baynham, having no alternative candidate. The question remained as to whether this bluff envoy was specifically briefed about the plot. Nor is it totally clear what Garnet expected of the Pope – a ban on such a violent enterprise, or something more non-commital with a hint of approval? My view is that Garnet expected Persons to have worked the papacy to an acceptance of the inevitability of violence, although Clement VIII had become increasingly irritated by the constant swirl of controversy about the English Jesuit Persons. He and Catesby were twins in the focus of their fury which was fanaticism. No doubt a vibrant component in the former’s mind was the deeply buried notion of revenge on the country that had forced him into exile. As it was, Garnet’s lurch into the confessional mode continued for several days, with emerging details that engaged the commissioners. Even in his unenviable position Garnet may still have hoped to avoid a charge of treason, with the substitution of the lesser misprision of treason. Then on 15 March Popham drafted a lengthy list of proofs against him which was subsequently read and annotated by Salisbury, and likely used for the trial.