Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot

‘IWOULD TO GOD THAT I had never heard of the Powder Treason,’ Father Garnet cried ‘very passionately’ eight months later.¹ But from late July 1605 he had heard of it. The question was, under what circumstances, and with what obligations to those whom the conspiracy threatened? The revelation from Father Tesimond to Garnet provided one of the most anguishing aspects of the whole episode. Certainly Father Garnet’s secret knowledge was enough to make the rest of his life a torment, first of uncertainty, later of horrified certainty. When he first heard the news, however, it represented the nightmare scenario, which he had so long dreaded, come true – or threatening to come true.

Father Tesimond makes it quite clear in his Narrative that Catesby had for some time been expressing his impatience with Father Garnet’s lukewarmness and ‘excessive patience’. The previous summer, they had all been together, the two priests and Catesby, sitting over a meal when Father Garnet took the opportunity to speak a few ‘grave words’ on the subject of the Pope. It was his ‘express order’ that the English Catholics should live in peace and leave the reconversion of their country to Providence. But Catesby refused to accept the message in silence. Instead, as they got up from the table, he referred pointedly to those who had grown weary of putting up with persecution. People were saying openly that such doctrines of non-resistance took away from the Catholics their spirit and energy, leaving them ‘flaccid and poor-spirited’. Making it clear that he was speaking for others as well as himself, Catesby said that the English Catholics were now in a worse situation than slaves, despised by their enemies as ‘God’s lunatics’.²

Perhaps all of this could have been dismissed, or at least tolerated, as the outpourings of an active, frustrated, but fundamentally sound son of the Church. But Catesby’s final defiant remarks could hardly be construed in this light. Whatever the Pope’s words, said Catesby, people were asking whether any authority on earth could take away from them the right given ‘by nature’ to defend their own lives from the violence of others. It was a point of view, of course, with which Garnet profoundly disagreed. He continued to argue with Catesby – when he had the opportunity.

Father Tesimond bears witness that the conspirator began to avoid Garnet’s company after their meeting so as not to receive this ‘prohibition’, which evidently made Catesby uneasy. In early July, Father Garnet, backed up by a letter from Aquaviva, went back to Fremland, where he found Catesby with his cousin Francis Tresham and his cousin by marriage Lord Monteagle. Yet again he preached against them ‘rushing headlong into mischief’. As a result, a compromise was reached by which it was agreed that Sir Edmund Baynham should go to Rome and present the desperate plight of the English Catholics. Father Garnet was under the impression that he had managed to avert disaster.³

In late July – shortly before the Feast of St James, on 25 July – Father Garnet discovered that he had failed. He had learnt of the existence of a plan which was ‘a most horrible thing, the like of which was never heard of’. He had failed to prevent the inception of the conspiracy. Whether he could or would prevent the implementation of this plan remained to be seen.⁴

Everything Catesby told Father Tesimond was under the seal of the confessional. It was afterwards strongly maintained by both Father Garnet and Father Tesimond that Tesimond also consulted his spiritual adviser (and his Superior) under the same seal. But what he had to say was likely to be long drawn out, as well as distressing in its content. In a fit of kindness, Father Garnet suggested that instead of kneeling, as would have been customary, Father Tesimond should continue his own confession as they walked together in the garden. It was one of those small gestures which seemed unimportant at the time but was to have terrible unforeseen consequences.

Catholic rules concerning confession were perfectly clear. Under canon law, all information received under the seal was privileged: that is, it could not be divulged under any circumstances (unless, of course, the penitent concerned gave permission). However, this rule would not apply to information received in a more generalised way, nor to a ‘confidence’, provided the seal itself was not invoked. According to Father Garnet, writing to Tesimond afterwards – who never contradicted him – Tesimond was unquestionably making a confession, not imparting a confidence, in spite of the unusual circumstances in which he made it.⁶

It is extremely difficult for the non-Catholic mind – and even perhaps a Catholic one – to grapple with the question of Garnet’s foreknowledge, if it is put in the baldest terms. A priest hears in advance that Parliament is to be blown up, with appalling loss of human life; is he really to say nothing, and allow this horror to proceed?^* The heart of the matter was what action Garnet should have taken thereafter. Catesby and his companions were terrorists – or terrorists by intention; their terrorism had its own internal dynamic by which it was either justified or not. None of that was anything to do with the priests, who neither then nor thereafter ever claimed any justification for the conspiracy and were genuinely appalled by it. Where then did their duty lie?

Perhaps the correct priestly reaction was expressed most clearly by Father Garnet himself: ‘The confessor himself is bound to find all lawful means to hinder and discover the treason.’⁷ Even if Garnet could not use the knowledge specifically gained in the confessional, that did not mean he would have to remain passive and allow events to unfold.

But Garnet did not leave his ‘hindering’ of the treason at that. He also asked the English Catholic emissary to Rome, Sir Edmund Baynham, to emphasise the need for the papal declaration. The government later delivered a two-pronged attack on the Baynham mission.⁹ It was made out that Garnet had deliberately despatched Sir Edmund too late to produce any effective restraint. A picturesque sporting analogy was used: Garnet was like a thief going to steal partridges with the aid of a dog, who takes care that his animal (Baynham) does not go too near the birds too soon, before the net is fully over them, ‘for fear the game should be sprung and the purpose defeated’. By contrast, it was also suggested that Baynham had been sent in order to justify the plot in advance, an absolutely contradictory thesis.

The real truth about Baynham seems to have been somewhat different. He was a wild young man, who had been imprisoned around the time of the Essex Rising for some outspoken speeches against the King of Scots. He had then had some peripheral involvement in the Bye Plot. But he was a master of languages, with the unusual accomplishment of being able to pass as a Frenchman or an Italian, and his mission across the whole of Europe – remembering the perils of travel at this period – would therefore attract less attention.¹⁰

In the course of the next fourteen weeks, Father Henry Garnet allowed himself to be lulled into a sense of false security. Everything was in abeyance until the results of the Baynham mission were known. The nightmare scenario was not going to take place. But in the popular imagination, forever after, Father Garnet’s activities at this point were as presented in a well-known rhyme, Mischeefes Mysterie … The Powder Plot:

There was a deceptive placidity about English life in the high summer of 1605. This outward normalcy existed at many different levels. The King busied himself with his hunting. He was quite convinced that the prolonged violent exercise (away from London) was essential to the royal health. Since this was in fact ‘the health and welfare of us all’, as he had pointed out to his Council in January, he asked his Councillors to take charge of the burden of affairs’ and see that he was neither interrupted nor troubled with too much business.¹³ It was an insouciant request which meant, of course, that his Councillors, led by Salisbury, now had the freedom to decide what was or was not sufficiently important to trouble their master. And there was another kind of freedom. His absence from the centre of affairs gave them freedom to plot and plan without royal interference.

The anniversary of the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600 against King James, so miraculously foiled, was once again celebrated with a solemn thanksgiving on Tuesday 5 August. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Bancroft (formerly Bishop of London), seized the opportunity to preach an extremely anti-Papist sermon at St Paul’s Cross in the course of which he quoted the King. So resolute, he said, was King James to sustain the Protestant religion that he was quite prepared to pour out the last drop of blood in his body.¹⁴ Obviously, there was no perceived contradiction between this kind of bold statement and the fact that King James, on his sporting tour, continued to stay with prominent Papists, as and when convenient. James even spent the night at Harrowden Hall, where he was entertained not only by Eliza Vaux, but also by that aspiring bridegroom, the young Lord Vaux, whose match to the lovely Elizabeth Howard was still hanging fire for religious reasons.

The King for his part enjoyed a Latin entertainment by Matthew Gwinn, entitled Tres Sybillae. Two aspects of it gave him special pleasure. First, the sybils’ prophecies made flattering allusions to his Scottish ancestry: his royal descent in a line of kings from a certain Banquo was praised while a certain Macbeth was described in contrast as having no descendants. Secondly, the Gwinn play was short. William Shakespeare, in Oxford at this time, had the opportunity to take note of both things in the development of his own play on the historical theme of Macbeth. At the Bodleian Library, King James observed genially: ‘Were I not a King, I would be a University-man.’¹⁶ Immediately after this, however, despite the lure of academe, King James went back to his hunting again.

At another, much less public level, Papist life also continued, revolving, so far as was possible, with the year’s religious cycle, just as it had done in happier times gone by. The Feast of St Bartholomew on 24 August found Father Garnet at White Webbs, near Enfield, with the Catholics to whom he was closest – Anne Vaux, her sister Eleanor Brooksby, her nephew William Brooksby and his wife Dorothy. The decision was reached to take a great pilgrimage through the midlands to the shrine of St Winifred, at Holywell on the north coast of Wales.

Convinced that ‘as far as we can ascertain, the Catholics live quietly at peace’ – at least until the return of the Baynham mission – Father Garnet announced his intention to depart for the pilgrimage, accompanied by his loyal supporters, on 28 August.¹⁷ On 30 August, the day that King James left behind the cheers of Oxford, these pilgrims also set forth. It was a journey which took them across the whole recusant arc from Enfield in the east, just north of London, via John Grant’s house at Norbrook near Stratford, Huddington Court near Worcester, a tavern at Shrewsbury and finally into Wales itself.

Afterwards Sir Edward Coke made great play with the fact that this pilgrimage was a cover-up for more serious matters. ‘By colour thereof’, Father Garnet intended to call a conference of the conspirators.¹⁸ In fact, if the pilgrimage had a specific individual purpose, it is more likely to have been the cure of Anne Vaux, who, now in her forties, was persistently troubled with some kind of female disorder. Apart from that, the recusants in England had plenty to pray for, given the deepening severity of their persecution. As for Father Garnet himself, he may have wished to keep an eye on his restive midland flock along the way, but he would scarcely have ventured as far as remote Holywell if he had had any idea that the dreaded ‘private endeavour’ continued to develop for all his prohibitions. In retrospect, the pilgrimage to St Winifred’s shrine appears as an elegy for a certain kind of old Catholic England, where spiritual people, however sorely tried, really did live ‘quietly at peace’.

Around thirty people made the pilgrimage, and then, as ever, there were the servants. Eliza Vaux joined her relations, bringing with her two priests, habitués at Harrowden, Father Gerard and Father John Percy. The latter, like Gerard, had been captured and tortured (in Bridewell prison), but like Gerard had also managed to escape. Father Tesimond came and the lay brother who attended him, Ralph Ashley. Then there was a young pair, Sir Everard Digby and his wife Mary, who came from Gayhurst in Buckinghamshire. They brought with them their secret chaplain, the Jesuit Father Edward Oldcorne.

This son of a Yorkshire bricklayer (with a devout mother who had been imprisoned for her faith) had been educated at St Peter’s, York, like Guy Fawkes, the Wright brothers, and also Father Tesimond. In school terms, however, Father Oldcorne was more of an age with his fellow priest: Tesimond and Oldcome were in their early forties, while the conspirators were on average five years younger. Father Oldcorne had studied medicine before he went abroad; but he had become so strict a punisher of his own health through penances such as scourging that he had, according to Father Gerard, developed cancer of the tongue. Since he was a talented preacher, this constituted a special penance in itself. But Father Oldcorne had been cured by a visit to the shrine of St Winifred four years earlier. His own participation in the pilgrimage was in the nature of a thanksgiving.

Little John found his vocation in his work as combined architect, mason and carpenter of innumerable hiding-places.^† His various constructions have been described by his biographer Margaret Waugh as ‘wordless prayers’.²⁰ He probably worked for Father Edmund Campion in the 1580s, and was certainly imprisoned for championing him in 1585. In 1586, however, he joined Father Garnet and henceforth accorded him his complete devotion.

In 1599 Little John suffered an accident which crippled him, giving him a further handicap beyond his small stature. A packhorse fell on top of him, severely damaging his leg: ‘ill-setting’ of the bone did the rest. But when it came to working in the cramped conditions needed to construct a hideaway – a chimney, a drain – Little John’s tiny size was a positive asset. He nearly always worked alone, praying silently as he toiled away, in the covering darkness of the night hours. This solitude was Little John’s deliberate choice. He wanted no one else to share the danger at the time - nor the threat of interrogation, including torture, afterwards. Since Little John was among those who had been tortured in a London prison in 1594 (hung up for three hours on end ‘with their arms pinioned in iron rings’ and their bodies distended), he knew exactly the risk that he was taking.²¹

Owen did his chosen work ‘free of charge’; if any money was forced upon him, he gave it to his brothers. It was essential that each hiding-place should be different, lest the uncovering of one should lead to the uncovering of many others. Working in the great thickness of Tudor masonry – a problem in itself – Little John had nevertheless to make a solid construction of his own, lest the tapping of the searchers be met with a hollow sound. (It was dangerous to use the space provided by chimneys because fires might be lit by the searchers.) Over the years Little John developed certain trademarks. He passed feeding or communicating tubes into the hiding-places for the longer sojourns of the priests, and he worked out a trick by which an outer hiding-place concealed an inner one in order to delude the searchers into going away when they found the outer hiding-place empty.^‡ As the pilgrims wended their way across England to Holywell in North Wales, Owen took the opportunity of their various stopovers to render new hiding-places, and renovate the old ones yet more securely.²³

The cult of St Winifred grew during the middle ages, when pilgrimages to St Winifred’s Well became increasingly popular. In 1415 a statute ordered the feast-days of St Winifred to be officially celebrated throughout England along with those of St George and St David. Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, had an especial devotion to the saint, and to Holywell itself. She was responsible for the first printed life of St Winifred (by William Caxton) and was a substantial benefactress of the Holywell chapel and surroundings. Winifred was one of those saints, beloved by ordinary people, who was demoted in 1536 as a result of the Reformation; her feast-day was no longer to be regarded as a holiday. Nevertheless St Winifred’s Well and its pilgrimages – a very long way from Parliament – continued to flourish regardless of governmental prohibitions and inclement weather. Father Gerard described how the mass of the people crossing the stream on 3 November once had to break the ice on the water. He himself prayed, immersed in the waters, for fifteen minutes; yet he took no cold afterwards, in spite of leaving on his dripping shirt under his other clothes.²⁵

The ladies of this 1605 pilgrimage made the last part of the journey, as was customary, barefoot. The priest whom they found in charge was a remarkable man in his own right. John Bennett, who had trained at Douai, had arrived in Holywell nearly thirty years before. He had been imprisoned in 1582 for three years, and banished thereafter (the actual sentence was death but it was presumably commuted due to local feeling in his favour). In spite of his banishment, however, Father Bennett managed to get back to Holywell in 1587, operating there under a series of aliases for the rest of his life. In total, he served the chapel for nearly fifty years. Once again, the loyalty of the Welsh people to the pastor they loved must have protected him.^§²⁶

The death of Sir Thomas at this precise moment had a profound effect on the development of the Powder Treason as it introduced Francis Tresham into the equation in quite a different light. Theoretically, the thirty-seven-year-old Francis was now a man of substance, with properties (and responsibilities, including his widowed mother, unmarried sisters and financially reckless brother Lewis). Unfortunately, Sir Thomas, the Catholic Moses, once colossally rich, had left enormous debts. These debts – including those where Francis had been bound up with him in a bond – provided a further cause for bitterness for his son.²⁸ Francis Tresham was now in the position of a man who has long awaited his inheritance, and at the last minute finds that the overflowing cup is poisoned. Furthermore, the Tresham family entail of 1584 meant that Francis was only a life tenant of a greater part of the estate, which at the time seemed yet another disaster.

Nevertheless Francis Tresham’s new affluence – at least he had access to horses and could borrow money – meant that he could not be altogether ignored by the Plotters as a potential supporter. Besides, Robin Catesby had been accustomed to dominating his wayward cousin since their shared boyhood and he had a blithe confidence in the unchanging nature of their relationship.

Leaving Rushton in mourning Father Garnet and Anne Vaux went on to Gayhurst, the seat of their fellow pilgrim, the glamorous Sir Everard Digby. Here was a young man whom everyone adored and everyone trusted. He was only twenty-four, but had already been married to his heiress wife Mary Mulshaw (who brought with her Gayhurst) for nearly ten years. Theirs was an ideally happy match: she was ‘the best wife to me that ever man enjoyed’, he would say later, while he himself was by common repute ‘the goodliest man in the whole court’.³⁰ His handsome face, athletic figure and height – he was over six foot tall – had indeed caught the eye of the King when he knighted Digby on 23 April 1603. Everard Digby was not politically ambitious – why should he be? He was wealthy, beloved by his wife and, being passionately interested in every kind of field sport, had quite enough to occupy his time. He had his horses (he was an expert horseman), his gun-dogs and his falcons. He was also a Catholic convert, whose life had come to be defined by his recusancy, but at this point it was the kind of religion of which Father Garnet would have approved: acquiescing in the status quo, trusting in God to bring about the conversion of England in His own good time.

At hospitable and easy-going Gayhurst, Anne Vaux came to Father Garnet and expressed her extreme disquiet about what she had noted in the course of their recent journey. The suspicions of this shrewd and observant woman, whose life had been lived centrally in the recusant world for over twenty years, had been aroused by what she had seen. She was disturbed that there were so many fine horses being collected in the various stables of her cousins and relations. Anne Vaux, much perturbed, told Father Garnet that she ‘feared these wild heads had something in hand’. She begged him, for God’s sake, to talk to Robin Catesby.³²

A little later Father Garnet felt able to reassure her. There was nothing to concern her unduly. Her cousin Robin was actually aiming to obtain a military commission under the Archduke Albert in Flanders, which in the wake of the Anglo-Spanish peace was no longer an illegal venture. Catesby even showed Anne Vaux a letter of recommendation for this enterprise written for him by Father Garnet – a document, we may believe, that Father Garnet must have penned with exquisite if unspoken relief, believing that this was the shape things were now taking. But of course this relief was quite unjustified. The risk of the destruction of the King and Royal Family, which on the other side encompassed not only the conspirators themselves, but their relatives, the Catholic community as a whole and above all their fugitive pastors, was as great as ever.

Although there is some conflict of evidence about when Guido Fawkes returned from the continent, slipping back into his personality of John Johnson, he was certainly in London again by late August, as the King went back to his hunting and the pilgrims set forth for St Winifred’s Well. At this point Fawkes and Wintour discovered that the gunpowder in the so-called cellar, which had been there for some time, had ‘decayed’ – that is, the elements had separated. So the conspirators transported more gunpowder and more firewood, as a cover and to conceal it. During the summer also John Grant seems to have installed a quantity of weaponry at Norbrook, including muskets and powder.

^* The consequences of the seal of the confessional, where a priest must not divulge what he has learnt even to save an innocent person/people, have always been seen as having great dramatic potential; of the various works in which it has been put to use, the most notable is the film I Confess (1953), with Montgomery Clift as a priest who hears the confession of a murderer and is subsequently himself accused of the crime; he cannot clear himself by breaking the seal of the confessional.

^† They are literally innumerable; Owen was a genius at his work and it is likely that some of his hiding-places still remain uncharted today (discoveries were made both in the late nineteenth century and in the twentieth). It is remarkable that Father Richard Blount, who spent forty years in England (and for twenty-one years was Superior of the Jesuits) had some hiding-places whose whereabouts are still unknown (Morris, Troubles, 1st, p. 192).

^‡ These trademarks help to establish which of the surviving hiding-places in England are the work of Nicholas Owen. In addition to those named above, holes at Sawston Hall, near Cambridge (the home of the recusant Huddlestone family), Baddesley Clinton and Huddington Court are generally rated as his work; Owen was also most probably responsible for the surviving hiding-places at Coughton and Coldham Hall.

^§ In the late nineteenth century, the shrine and St Winifred herself inspired the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As sure as what is more sure, sure as that spring primroses

Shall new-dapple next year, sure as tomorrow morning,

Amongst come-back-again things, things with a revival, things with a recovery,

Thy name …

It is pleasing to report that Hopkins’ prophecy has come true; St Winifred’s shrine, today owned by Cadw (Welsh Heritage), is still a centre of devotion and pilgrimage, maintaining its unbroken record. The shrine is open all the year round, but the ‘Well Season’ is less spartan than it was in Father Gerard’s day, lasting only from Whit Sunday, through the 22 June feast, till the end of September. There are grateful inscriptions in the chapel such as ‘TW’ for ‘Thanks Winifred’. A pilgrimage on the part of James II and his second (Catholic) wife Mary of Modena in August 1686 was believed – for better or for worse – to be responsible for the birth of their son James Edward, known to history as the ‘Old Pretender’, after fifteen childless years of marriage. (Hopkins, p. 165; Br Stephan de Kerdrel, O.P.M., Franciscan Friary, Pantasaph, and Fr D. B. Lordan, St Winefride’s, Holywell, to the author; David, passim.)

IX

There Is a Risk …