Behold the heart of a traitor!’
Traditional cry of the executioner
THE EIGHT CONDEMNED MEN WERE put to death in two batches on consecutive days. On Thursday 30 January, Sir Everard Digby, Robert Wintour and John Grant were fetched from the Tower of London and Thomas Bates was brought from the Gatehouse. The time for executions was around eight o’clock in the morning, dark and bleak at this time of year. The site chosen on the first day was the western end of the churchyard of St Paul’s ‘over and against the Bishop of London’s house’. Not everyone, however, approved of the decision. Sir Arthur Gorges, a poet and a friend of Ralegh, who had sailed with him against the Spaniards, protested to Salisbury against the quartering of ‘these wicked and bloody conspirators’ being carried out in a place of such ‘happy memory’, for it was here that Queen Elizabeth herself had thanked God for her nation’s deliverance from the Armada.1
The custom of conveying certain miscreants to their place of death by dragging them at the horse’s tail, to which the Attorney-General had alluded at the trial, tended to rob the executioner of the material upon which to do his appointed work. The damaging ordeal also robbed the public of the full ceremony, which it much enjoyed. This included speeches from the condemned men as well as those prolonged indignities to still-breathing bodies so graphically described by Sir Edward Coke. Therefore, in the case of important prisoners such as the Powder Plotters, it was government policy to convey them singly, each strapped to a wicker hurdle, used as a kind of sledge.2
This open passage through the crowd had, however, its own dangers. First, there was the possibility – however remote – of rescue. Secondly, in the case of known Catholics, tiresome recusant devotions might interrupt the desired spiritual process of last-minute repentance. Thirdly, there was the question of the wretches’ wives and womenfolk, who had not seen their men for several months, since that dreadful day in early November when the reckless stand at Holbeach had been planned.* Recusants’ wives, or the friends of condemned priests, often tried to say a last goodbye in this manner. Thus armed men were stationed at doorways along the route from seven in the morning: ‘one able and sufficient person with a halberd in his hand’ for every dwelling house in the open street.3
Even so, the women managed to get themselves into the crowds, and at the windows. There is a story of one little Digby boy calling out, ‘Tata, Tata,’ at the moment when his father was being drawn by on his hurdle, his face low down so that, in Coke’s words, he should not pollute the common air. Thomas Bates’ wife Martha was one of those who managed to find a place in the crowd; she was rewarded by finding that her husband was on the leading hurdle, presumably because he had joined the melancholy procession from the other direction, the Gatehouse being in Westminster. Eluding the halberdiers, Martha Bates managed to throw herself on her husband as he lay on his hurdle; she wailed aloud against the wretched fortune which had brought him to this ‘untimely end’.
Bates, practical man to the last, took the opportunity to tell Martha where he had deposited a bag of money (originally entrusted to him by Jack Wright), and he begged his wife to hang on to it for her own relief and that of their children. Afterwards Martha got into trouble with the authorities over this bequest – perhaps they thought Bates’ last instructions had been on some more conspiratorial level. But in the end she was allowed to keep the money.
At St Paul’s, Sir Everard Digby was the first to mount the scaffold. He had spent his last days in the Tower writing letters to ‘my dearest wife’ Mary and then to Kenelm and John.4 He urged the latter pair to support each other as brothers, and avoid the bad examples of Cain and Abel, and Philip of Macedon’s sons (one of whom had murdered the other). Otherwise Everard Digby wrote poetry which expressed his own resignation to his fate – and explains perhaps further the affection in which contemporaries, even religious enemies, held him:
Who’s that which knocks? Oh, stay, my Lord, I come:
I know that call, since first it made me know
Myself, which makes me now with joy to run
Lest he be gone that can my duty show.
Jesu, my Lord, I know thee by the Cross
Thou offer’st me, but not unto my loss.
In spite of Digby’s resolution and his ‘manly aspect’, it was noted that his colour was pale and ‘his eye heavy’. But he was determined to speak out strongly. He declared that he held what he had done to be no offence, according to his own conscience, informed by his own religion, but he acknowledged that he had broken the law. For this, he asked forgiveness of God, of the King and of the whole kingdom. Even at this moment, however, Digby took pains to deny that Father Gerard or the other Jesuits had known anything of the Plot. He then refused to pray with the attendant Protestant preachers and instead took refuge in ‘vain and superstitious crossing’, as one hostile observer noted, and ‘mumbling to himself’ in Latin.5
These private Catholic devotions performed, Digby reverted to the gallant courtier he had always been in public. He said goodbye to all the nobles who had been his friends – it was established procedure that dignitaries should witness state executions – with careful attention to their rank. He spoke to them all, as they said to each other afterwards, in such a cheerful and friendly manner, ‘as he was wont to do when he went from Court or out of the City, to his own house in the country’.6
What followed however was not to be so casual or so pleasant. Digby was hung from the halter for a very short time before being cut down and he was therefore fully conscious when he was subjected to the prescribed penalties. Anthony a Wood had an extraordinary story to tell about what happened next.† ‘When the executioner plucked out his heart and according to the manner held it up saying “Here is the heart of a traitor”, Sir Everard made answer: “Thou liest”.’ Even if such a spirited riposte - any riposte – would have been anatomically possible under the circumstances, the fact that such a story was told is still further proof of the esteem in which Sir Everard Digby was held. As it was, the common people ‘marvelled at his fortitude’ and talked ‘almost of nothing else’.7
Robert Wintour was the second to ascend the scaffold. He said little and was praying quietly to himself as he went to his death. John Grant, coming next, was the only one of the conspirators who actually justified what they had tried to do, and refused to confess to any offence, for it had been ‘no sin against God’. A report by Salisbury to Edmondes in Brussels confirmed this obduracy. It was a defiance which was later embroidered by Protestant propaganda, with Grant claiming that the spiritual merits of the Plot would expiate all the sins he had committed in his life. ‘Abominably blinded’ by the fire at Holbeach, he allowed himself to be led quietly up the ladder to the halter, resistance being impossible. After crossing himself, he went to his death.8
From the point of view of the onlookers, Thomas Bates was a more satisfactory criminal than these men with their crossings and their mumbled Latin prayers. If you could not be valiant – though misguided - like Sir Everard Digby, it was better to be abjectly penitent like Bates. He spoke of being inspired by affection for his master, Catesby, which had caused him to forget his duty ‘to God, his King and Country’. This led Father Gerard to say afterwards that it was ‘no marvel’ that Bates had shown less courage than his companions, since he had acted for human rather than divine love; but Gerard concluded his verdict on a charitable note: ‘It is to be hoped he found mercy at God’s hands.’ In general, Bates seemed deeply sorry for what he had done. He asked forgiveness of God and he also asked forgiveness of the King, and of the whole kingdom, praying humbly for ‘the preservation of them all’.9
The four remaining executions took place in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster the next day, Friday 31 January. Possibly the patriotic reproaches of Sir Arthur Gorges had found echoes on other breasts, but more likely it was intended to put to death the major criminals – Tom Wintour and Guy Fawkes – in the very place which they had planned to demolish in order to hammer home the message of their wickedness. The route from the Tower was in consequence longer. In the course of it, Elizabeth Rookwood managed to watch her husband pass on his hurdle from the window of their lodgings in the Strand. As for Rookwood himself, he asked to be informed when he reached the appointed spot so that he could open his eyes and have one last glimpse of his beautiful wife (otherwise he kept his eyes shut in prayer). When he reached this point Ambrose Rookwood raised himself up as far as he could – he was tied with ropes – and called out: ‘Pray for me, pray for me!’
‘I will, and be of good courage,’ his wife shouted back. ‘Offer thyself wholly to God. I, for my part, do as freely restore thee to God as He gave thee unto me.’‡10
Tom Wintour was the first of these men to mount the scaffold. He was ‘a very pale and dead colour’. The spectators were anxious to hear a speech but Wintour, for all his pallor, riposted firmly that this was ‘no time to discourse: he was come to die’. He too, like Digby, acquitted the Jesuits, including Father Tesimond, of all guilt, and asked for the prayers of all Catholics. Finally, crossing himself, he declared that he died a true Catholic. On the whole, professions of repentance were more likely to secure the hoped-for prolonged hanging which would result in unconsciousness. Although Tom Wintour had seemed ‘after a sort, as it were, sorry for his offence’, either his firm last-minute protestation of his Catholicism or his defence of the Jesuits denied him any relief. He was cut down after only ‘a swing or two with a halter’.11
Ambrose Rookwood came next. He did choose to make a speech. This was a model of repentance, since he first freely confessed his sin in seeking to spill blood, and then asked God to bless the King, the Queen and all the ‘royal progeny’, that they might live long ‘to reign in peace and happiness over this kingdom’. It was true that at the last Rookwood proceeded ‘to spoil all the pottage with one filthy weed’, in the words of an observer – evidently a Protestant – for Rookwood finally besought God to make the King a Catholic. But Rookwood’s earlier sorrowful words seem to have been enough to secure him a long hanging, and he was more or less at his last gasp when he was cut down.12
Robert Keyes determined not to accept his fate passively. ‘With small or no show of repentance’, he went ‘stoutly’ up the ladder. Once at the top, and with his neck in the halter, he did not wait for the hangman’s ‘turn’ but turned himself off, with a violent leap into space. His intention was presumably to die quickly (although Father Gerard glossed this as meaning that Keyes wanted to die at a moment of his own choosing, with his mind set on his prayers, rather than be taken by surprise by the hangman). Unfortunately, the plan did not work. The halter broke, and he was taken, alive, to the quartering block.13
Guy Fawkes, ‘the great devil of all’, was the last to mount the scaffold. He did not make a long speech – he was probably not capable of it, since a contemporary reported his body as being visibly ‘weak with torture and sickness’. He did ask forgiveness of the King and state, but at the same time kept up his ‘crosses and idle ceremonies’. His last ordeal was to mount the ladder. He was scarcely able to do so, and had to be helped up by the hangman. Guido did, however, mount high enough for his neck to be broken with the fall.14 Perhaps it was the physical punishment which he had endured in the months past which spared his consciousness at the end.
As Salisbury pointed out to Edmondes, all eight men had died Catholics. Nothing that had happened had caused them to abandon the religion for which they had sacrificed their liberty and finally their lives.
A few days after these executions, Father Garnet was sent for by the authorities to be brought to London. His treatment remained gracious, especially if one reflects on the recent ordeals of the men who were said to be his co-conspirators. While still at the house of Sir Henry Bromley, Father Garnet had been permitted to celebrate the lovely feast of Candlemas – the last feast of the Christian cycle before the beginning of Lent - together with Sir Henry and his family. A great white wax candle with ‘Jesus’ and ‘Maria’ on the sides, which had been confiscated at Hindlip, was produced. Father Garnet took it in his hands and passed it to Father Oldcorne, saying that he was glad to have carried ‘a holy candle on Candlemas Day’. Then all present drank the King’s health with their heads bared.15 As an episode, it was a conspicuous illustration of the paradox of Catholic loyalty.
Nor was the Jesuit’s dignity sacrificed in any way during the journey. Father Garnet was still very weak after his eight-day ordeal and his swollen legs were causing him pain. Salisbury ordered that he should be given the best horse, and his hospitality en route was paid for by the King (which meant that it was not stinted).
When a Puritan minister accompanying the cortege attempted to involve him in theological debate, Father Garnet immediately saw the dangers in this kind of exercise. Silence might be construed as inability to answer, while too impassioned a defence of the Catholic viewpoint could be held as evidence against him. Garnet consulted Sir Henry Bromley. The result was a discussion, in effect chaired by Sir Henry, in which the Puritan ranted at length without interruption, and Garnet then proceeded to speak ‘briefly and clearly’ as well as displaying remarkable erudition (the Puritans were wont to claim erudition as their special province). Sir Henry Bromley was much impressed and the egregious minister much disappointed.16
In London, Father Garnet was at first lodged in the Gatehouse prison in Westminster. His companion in hiding at Hindlip, Father Oldcorne, was also placed there, although housed in a separate cell. The arrival of the Superior of the Jesuits, with a fellow Jesuit, created a sensation in the Gatehouse prison. A flock of prisoners crowded at the entrance. Garnet cried out in a loud voice to know whether any of them were Catholics. When many replied that they were, Father Garnet responded: ‘God help you all! And myself as well who come to keep you company here for the same cause.’17 Father Garnet’s nephew, Thomas Garnet, also a priest, who operated under an alias, was among the many Catholics currently held at the Gatehouse.
This interest in and response to Father Garnet draws attention to the ambivalent nature of Jacobean prisons as far as recusants were concerned. Prisons could serve as hotbeds of Catholicism, as well as centres for persecution. Paradoxically, it was often easier for recusants to attend a clandestine Mass in a prison containing priests than in the outside world. By modern standards, there was even a kind of informality prevalent in Jacobean prisons: inmates could send out to buy food, and, if necessary, could make purchases by stretching out money from prison windows. Obviously, more than mere food – information, letters – could be obtained by these means. In certain prisons, prostitutes and thieves would bribe their jailers to let them out under cover of darkness to go about their work, returning at dawn having earned the necessary money to make themselves comfortable.
Of the many prisons in the capital, one of them, the Clink, in Southwark near the present Blackfriars, was always full of Catholics: it has been described as a recusant ‘propaganda cell for the whole capital’. Certainly Father Gerard had heard numerous confessions from his co-religionists when he was held there. Newgate, the chief criminal prison, also contained a ‘great store of priests and other Catholics’, to whom people of all sorts had ‘continual access’.18
As for the Gatehouse, in January 1606 one of Salisbury’s informants, Anne Lady Markham, complained about the sheer corruption of the place. Recusants were able to bribe their jailers to pass letters to their friends ‘to tell what they have been examined of’; then they got back vital information which enabled them to guess ‘shrewdly’ how to answer.19 Unfortunately the comparatively free conditions at the Gatehouse could also be used by the government for its own purposes. Unwittingly, Garnet’s nephew, Father Thomas, was to be part of the entrapment which followed.
Another innocent agent was Anne Vaux, who with Thomas Habington’s sister Dorothy (a convinced Protestant who had been converted into a fervent Catholic) had followed the Jesuits up to London, at a discreet distance. The two women lodged in Dorothy Habington’s house in Fetter Lane, just off Fleet Street. They came into a London in which the main topic of discussion in official circles was religion and its consequences: this was emphasised by the House of Commons debate, a few days earlier, on the vexed subject of Protestant husbands having to pay the fines of their recusant wives. At the Plotters’ trial, Sir Edward Coke had dealt with the matter tartly when Digby raised it, declaring that a recusant wife, one way or another, was always the husband’s fault and he must pay up. But Sir Everard Digby’s feelings were more in tune with the spirit of the times than those of the dismissive Coke. Members felt uneasy about the measure, and it was agreed that it should be ‘further considered on’.20
The next day, 5 February, everyone felt much happier discussing the ‘Armour and Munitions’ to be seized from recusants, and their elimination from the army. Much virulent anti-Catholic talk followed. The Papists were divided into three, of which the first group, ‘old, rooted, rotten’, were unlikely to be reclaimed at this stage, but fortunately they were more superstitious than seditious. The second group, the converts (described as the ‘Novelists’ were the greatest danger. As for the third, ‘the future tense of the Papists’ – its youth – this was a group which must be nipped in the bud, with great care taken that recusants should not get away with their own marriages and christenings, as opposed to those of the state. By the end of the month, the incoming Venetian Ambassador was struck by the universality of the discussion: ‘here they attend to nothing else but great preparations for the annihilation of the Catholic religion’.21
This harsh talk from the male world did not mean that two recusant gentlewomen, both unmarried, could not manage to live at liberty in London. The social rule by which women were not persecuted to the hilt (as Martha Bates had been allowed her traitor husband’s money for her relief) still obtained. So long as Anne Vaux remained quietly in Fetter Lane, living in the recusant world which was by definition discreet, she was unlikely to get into trouble. But of course for many years Anne Vaux had planned her life not so much to stay out of trouble as to help and protect Father Garnet. And that continued to be her motive in coming to London. She wanted news of him. She also wanted, if possible, to communicate with him directly.
Father Garnet’s first examination in front of the Privy Council took place on 13 February.22 His journey from the Gatehouse prison to Whitehall did not pass unremarked. Father Garnet told Anne Vaux later that among other comments from the crowd he heard one man say derisively to another: ‘There goes a young Pope.’ The Council, however, treated him with outward respect. They addressed the Jesuit throughout as ‘Mr Garnet’ (they did not recognise his priesthood, but at the same time did not treat him with the contempt which would have been accorded a common criminal) and took off their hats when they spoke to him. These Councillors were the familiar band of Popham, Coke, Sir William Waad and Lords Worcester, Northampton and Nottingham, with Salisbury as their leader.
There was, however, one unpleasant indication of how the Council might promote derision in its own style. At some point in an early interview Salisbury leant forward and twitted the Jesuit about his relationship with ‘Mistress Vaux’ since Salisbury had intercepted a letter from her to the priest signed ‘Your loving sister, A G’.
‘What, are you married to Mrs Vaux! She calls herself Garnet. What, you old lecher [senex fornicarius]!’ At the next interview, according to Garnet’s account in a letter to Anne, Salisbury pretended to put the matter to rights. He put his arm around Garnet’s shoulders and told him that he had spoken ‘in jest’. The rest of the Councillors hastened to assure Garnet that they knew he led an exemplary life in that respect.23
If it was a jest, it was a strange one to make at that time and in that place to a middle-aged priest about his relationship with a Catholic spinster in her forties. But it was not a jest. On the contrary, it was part of a deliberate campaign to blacken the reputation of Father Garnet, so that the somewhat flimsy evidence which connected him to the Plot (of which he was supposed to be the leading conspirator) could be enhanced with hints of his personal depravity.
The charge was, inevitably, not an unfamiliar one in relation to celibate Catholic priests working clandestinely in England. Their very dependency on the women’s domestic world, the false relationships to which they had to pretend for security’s sake, meant that it was easy to spread such a smear. Father John Gerard had been charged with the same scandal concerning Lady Mary Percy, unmarried daughter of a previous Earl of Northumberland, who had founded the first English convent abroad since the Reformation. The accusation was made by Richard Topcliffe when Gerard was held in the Tower.
‘It was you who stayed with the Earl of Northumberland’s daughter,’ said Topcliffe. ‘No doubt you lay in bed together.’ Even though Gerard knew Topcliffe was speaking ‘without what even he considered the slightest evidence’, the priest shook with anger at his indecency.24
Anne Vaux was not the only woman linked to Father Garnet (even though, according to the Councillors, his exemplary life was supposed to be well known). Dorothy Brooksby, from the prominent recusant family of Wiseman, was a young woman married to Anne Vaux’s nephew William. Her two baby girls formed part of the extended household over which the Vaux sisters presided, and which included Father Garnet. At a later examination Coke taxed Garnet with attending a Catholic christening at White Webbs, and Sir William Waad went further, saying ‘gibingly’ that the priest was surely present at the baby’s begetting also. Garnet protested against the unseemly insult as being not fit for ‘this place of justice’, at which Coke compounded it by suggesting that Mrs Brooksby’s baby, being a priest’s child, had ‘a shaven crown’.25
This kind of crude badinage, however amusing for Coke and Waad, however distasteful to Father Garnet, was in a different class from the derogatory slant given to Garnet’s twenty-year partnership – for that is the appropriate word to use – with Anne Vaux. For years, those who wished to denigrate the Jesuits had accused Garnet of effrontery – ‘face’ – in carrying a gentlewoman up and down the country with him.26
That partnership had indeed been at the very centre of recusant life. One of Digby’s servants, examined about Father Garnet after his master’s capture, unconsciously suggested a parallel between Anne and the Biblical Ruth: ‘Mrs Anne Vaux doth usually go with him [Garnet] whithersoever he goeth.’27 Of course in one sense the relationship was paternal: Garnet was Anne Vaux’s ‘ghostly father’, her spiritual director, and she was his penitent, his ‘daughter in Christ’. Nevertheless it was a true partnership because without Anne Vaux’s continuous, energetic, thoughtful loyalty Father Garnet could never have carried out his ministry in England for so many years without capture. But it was certainly not a partnership in any physical sense. Rather, it was a spiritual union, of the type experienced by saints in the Catholic Church such as St Francis and St Clare or the two founders of the Benedictine Order, St Benedict and St Scholastica.
Unfortunately, as Father Gerard wrote later in this context: ‘The sensual man perceiveth not these things which are of the spirit of God [Animas Homo non percepit ea quae Dei sunt].’ Garnet’s enemies, in seizing on an apparent weakness, were measuring others by ‘their own desires, not feeling any spark of that heat which moved so many Maries to follow Christ and his Apostles’. (Father Garnet himself, in bygone years, had sometimes in his thoughts likened Eleanor Brooksby and Anne Vaux, the widow and the virgin, to the two women ‘who used to lodge our Lord’.)28
Of course no one who actually knew Anne Vaux credited the story. Her ‘sober and modest behaviour’ would impress even the government’s interrogators. Anne Vaux was so manifestly that type of good woman, the backbone of many faiths, not only the Catholic one, who would ‘willingly bestow her life’ labouring to do God service.
She had never shown the slightest interest in getting married and her earliest struggles to obtain control of her fortune from Sir Thomas Tresham had been with the intention of using it to help the priesthood. Here was one who would surely have acted as a powerful abbess or reverend mother in pre-Reformation days. Many of Anne Vaux’s similarly pious contemporaries had indeed fled the country to join the religious orders set up for expatriate Catholic women on the continent. Anne Vaux, encouraged by Father Garnet, discovered a different vocation: she was to be a practical and courageous Martha in England, rather than a contemplative Mary in a convent in Flanders.
Strangely enough, given the government’s indictment of Garnet at the head of the list of conspirators, his early examinations contained very few allegations about the Plot itself. The smear concerning Anne Vaux might be unpleasant, but it was not proof of treason. In general, Garnet’s admissions to the Council concerned those things of which he at least did not feel ashamed: that he had been at Coughton on 1 November, and that he had received Catesby’s explanatory letter of 6 November. But he steadfastly denied any complicity in the Plot itself; nor did he reveal any names of conspirators.
What did take place at Garnet’s interview while he was still in the Gatehouse was a prolonged questioning on matters of theology, including the doctrine of equivocation. Salisbury told Garnet this was ‘the high point’ on which he had to satisfy the King, in order to prove that he could be trusted as a loyal subject; in other words, that his was not the heart of a traitor. The discussion was given a special emphasis by the fact that the manuscript of a treatise on equivocation was lying displayed on the Council Table.29
At this moment the Jesuit, convinced that the examination was about details of the Powder Treason on which he could clear himself, was unaware how much weight was going to be attached to this subject. Nor indeed could he have foretold how the malevolent image of an equivocating Jesuit, fostered by Coke, would seize hold of the popular imagination.
The treatise had been among the ‘heretical, treasonable and damnable books’ belonging to Francis Tresham to which Coke had alluded at the trial of the Plotters. Coke had referred then to the ‘equivocating’ – swearing to things they knew to be false – by the conspirators: this, he said, had been encouraged and justified by the Jesuits.30 But Father Garnet of course had no idea of the course of the trial: the only men who might have warned him – the defendants – were already dead by the time he reached London.
Since the book was to assume an enormous importance in the government’s eyes, its discovery by Coke was either a lucky chance or a tribute to his sharp intelligence. It had happened like this: at the beginning of the previous December, Coke, who lodged in the Inner Temple, had the idea of searching a particular chamber there which Sir Thomas had obtained for the use of his two younger sons, Lewis and William, and where Sir Thomas himself sometimes stayed. Coke was rewarded. Two versions of the same book were found, one quarto and a folio copy of it in what turned out to be the handwriting of Francis’ servant William Vavasour. What Coke did not realise, for some reason, was that Garnet had written the treatise himself. Coke imagined that he had merely made corrections. It was a strange oversight, given that the quarto was actually marked ‘Newly overseen by the Authour and published for the defence of Innocency and for the Institution of Ignorants’.§ But Garnet was asked only ‘where and when he did peruse and correct’ the treatise, and so was able – for what it was worth – to preserve his anonymity.31
The quarto version had originally been entitled A Treatise of Equivocation, but that title had in fact been crossed out, as Garnet pointed out to Salisbury. The title A Treatise against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation had been substituted (although the earlier title could still be made out). To Garnet, the alteration was an important one of clarification. Indeed, between the nature of Garnet’s correction and the government’s continued use of the original title lay the whole matter of the dispute between them. To Father Garnet, equivocation was a precise doctrine which had nothing to do with lying, a practice he roundly condemned. To the government, on the contrary, equivocation was not only lying but hypocrisy, since it wrapped a mantle of holiness round the lies.
What Coke had found, and now laid before the Councillors, had in fact been written by the Jesuit a few years earlier. The inception of the treatise was due to a general disquiet on the subject of equivocation following the trial of Father Robert Southwell in 1595. This trial probably introduced knowledge of the doctrine into England, both among officials and among the public.
It is true that there were passages in the works of the Fathers of the Church which referred to the lawfulness of dissimulating under certain specific conditions. Furthermore, in late-sixteenth-century Europe numerous subjects, who differed from their rulers in religion, faced the problem of what has been described as ‘secret adherence’, which inevitably entailed a good deal of dissimulation along the way. It might well be impossible to profess one’s true religion in public without vicious penalties or even massacre – this applied to crypto-Protestants in Catholic countries as much as to crypto-Catholics in Protestant countries. This kind of secret adherence was given the name Nicodemism by Calvin, after the Pharisee Nicodemus, a believer in Christ who out of fear visited Him only by night. It was a form of behaviour which received tacit acceptance.32
Equivocation as a particular method of procedure was, however, a novelty.‖ It was this procedure, rather than the mere fact of concealment, which seems to have caused general disquiet as a result of the Southwell trial. This disquiet, it must be emphasised, was shared by Catholics as well as by those Father Garnet called heretics; among the former, the ‘strange’ practice was ‘much wondered at’.33
At Southwell’s trial, Anne Bellamy, a Catholic woman who was the exception to the honourable record of her sex during this period, had testified that the priest had taught her to deny the truth in answer to the question ‘Is there a priest in the house?’ Francis Tresham’s reaction was to have Vavasour make a copy of Garnet’s treatise ‘that we may see what they can say of this matter’. This was exactly the purpose for which Garnet had written the book.34
Equivocation was essentially a scrupulous way of behaving by Catholics who shrank from telling outright lies. ‘He that sticketh not at lies, never needeth to equivocate’: this observation by the Jesuit Robert Persons is at the heart of the doctrine of equivocation and central to its understanding. Father Garnet put it even more robustly: liars took ‘a readier way to serve their turn, by plain untruths and evident perjuries’.35 In times of danger, a flat lie to protect the truth (such as Thomas Habington’s denial of the priests’ presence at Hindlip) would be most people’s instinct. In the same way, Catholic priests in front of the English authorities might have been expected to deny outright the truths which would have condemned them to death – notably the fact of their own priesthood. But they did not do so. Heroically, they attempted to balance the needs of their predicament with the prohibition of the Church on outright lying. Yet the lies they so painstakingly avoided, or believed they avoided, were of the nature that conspirators of all types – to say nothing of governments protecting national security – utter without a qualm
The underlying principle of equivocation was that the speaker’s words were capable of being taken in two ways, only one of which was true. A typical example, which caused a great deal of Protestant indignation, had occurred in February when a certain Father Ward swore to the Dean of Durham that he was ‘no priest’ – meaning, it transpired, that he was not ‘Apollo’s priest at Delphos’. Secondly, Father Ward swore that he had never been beyond the seas: ‘it’s true, sayeth he, for he was never beyond the Indian seas’. One can see the absurdity of this: at the same time one can admire the earnest conscience which found it necessary to justify such life-saving lies.
Obviously the authority of the questioner was an all-important point about equivocation, as well as the seriousness of the matter at issue. Father Robert Persons cited the case of a man who denied he was a priest to an unjust questioner, adding the mental reservation that he was not a priest ‘so as I am bound to utter it to you’. As Father John Gerard wrote, the intention was not to deceive ‘but simply to withhold the truth in cases where the questioned party was not bound to reveal it’.a36 Furthermore, it could be argued that certain equivocating answers actually addressed themselves to the real question at issue. For example, the question ostensibly asked might be ‘Are you a traitor?’ A priest might therefore lawfully answer ‘No’ to his interrogator because, despite his priesthood, he knew himself not to be a traitor.
Father Garnet’s treatise, because it was provoked by the trial of Southwell, took as its starting point the Bellamy question.37 He justified the denial, saying that a Catholic could ‘securely in conscience’ answer ‘No’ when interrogated about the presence of a priest concealed in a house on the ground that he had a ‘secret meaning reserved in his mind’. Similarly the question ‘Did you hear Mass today?’ could be answered negatively because the person interrogated ‘did not hear it at St Paul’s or such like’. Biblical precedents were meticulously cited in the cause of justifying equivocation, including the words of Jesus Christ himself. When Christ told his disciples that ‘the girl is not dead but sleepeth’, before raising Jaira’s daughter from the dead, this was a form of equivocation. So was Christ’s declaration that he did not know when the Day of Judgement was to be: since as God the Son he knew exactly when it was to be.b
Unfortunately there were severe disadvantages to the use of equivocation. A leading Catholic authority on the Gunpowder Plot has gone so far as to describe its use as ‘the best weapon in Coke’s armoury, and, admittedly, the Achilles heel of his opponents’. First of all, the practice gave an impression of insincerity, not to say deviousness, even to the recusants themselves. The Appellant priests, for example, enemies of the Jesuits, ridiculed the practice: ‘in plain English’, this was lying. This was something on which any government skilled in propaganda could easily build. Secondly, almost more damagingly, the doctrine of equivocation could be presented as alien, somehow unEnglish, and thus used to underline the notion of the Jesuits as Roman spies with no allegiance to Britain. Anniversary sermons on 5 November would regularly denounce equivocation in strong language of unequivocal disgust.38 At the trial, Coke, wondering aloud what the ‘blessed’ Protestant martyrs Cranmer and Ridley would have made of such ‘shifts’, argued that they would never have used them to save their lives.39 Thirdly, the doctrine of equivocation could be belittled and mocked.
Father Garnet, in his treatise, was concerned to stress that the occasions when equivocation could be legitimately used were ‘very limited’; anyone who swore upon his oath to a falsehood ‘in cases wherein he was bound to deal plainly’ committed a sin. But of course in the question as to which cases necessitated plain dealing by Catholic priests, and which did not, lay the crux of the dispute between Garnet and his captors. He might see himself as having a heart loyal to the King, but as a man imprisoned on a most serious charge he needed to convince the King’s mighty Councillors. It was unlikely, however, that Salisbury, Coke and Popham wanted to be convinced.
On arrival in the Tower the next day, Father Garnet was housed comfortably enough. It took him time to get such items as bedding and coal for his fire, but he described his room as ‘a very fine chamber’. He was allowed claret with his meals, as well as buying some sack out of his purse for himself and his neighbours.c Garnet even declared mildly that the dreaded Sir William Waad was a civil enough governor, except when Waad got on to the subject of religion, which caused him to indulge in ‘violent and impotent [uncontrolled]’ speeches.40
Father Garnet was lucky – for the time being at least. Others were not so lucky. On 19 February, the Privy Council issued orders which allowed ‘the inferior sort’ of prisoners connected to the Powder Plot to be put to the torture.41 The so-called inferiors included Little John and Ralph Ashley, as well as Father Strange, captured in the autumn, and the serving man from White Webbs, James Johnson. These orders, enlarged three days later, provided for those prisoners already in the Tower to be put to the manacles while other prisoners could be fetched thither for that purpose. The horrors were by no means over.
* There is a tradition that Robert Wintour’s wife Gertrude had various secret meetings with her husband during the two months he was on the run; but, given the persistent official attention to Huddington as a known recusant centre, one wonders whether either of them would have run the risk – for the future of their children was at stake.
† He was writing long after the event but with information derived from francis Bacon, who would have been present at the execution.
‡ This is the version given by Father Gerard, who was not present; but it would have been pieced together carefully from the recollections of eye-witnesses: as was always done with the deaths of Catholics at the hands of the state, great trouble was taken to treasure the details of the final scenes.
§ This quarto version is now in the Bodleian Library, with Garnet’s corrections (and Coke’s own marks) clearly visible (Bodleian, Laud MS., misc. 655). The folio copy in Vavasour’s handwriting has disappeared.
‖ The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of the word in this doctrinal sense to 1599.
a The real parallel was with a prisoner’s plea of ‘Not Guilty’, as Father Gerard himself pointed out (Morris, Gerard’s Narrative, p. ccxii).
b See Mark 13:32, where Christ observes: ‘But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ Matthew 24:36 is virtually identical.
c No one ever drank water with their meals during this period – which would have been another kind of death sentence – so that it was a question of what kind of alcohol, beer being most common, was served. Private funds were also an essential component of even the most spartan regime in prison.