I will name it the Jesuits’ treason, as belonging to them …
SIR EDWARD COKE
March 1606
IN THE TOWER OF LONDON, the torturing of the ‘inferior’ prisoners was pursued without pity. James Johnson was believed to have been racked for four or five days, and on one occasion, according to the official record, for three hours at a time. His crime was to have worked for Father Garnet under the name of ‘Mr Meaze’, at White Webbs. As a result of torture, he identified Garnet as Meaze when confronted with him. Ralph Ashley, suspected of having assisted Little John in his work, was among the other servants who were tortured. Father Garnet asked Anne Vaux to try to get hold of some money belonging to the Society of Jesus, in order to provide beds for the sufferers (the alternative for these broken bodies was the floor of a dungeon and straw).1
Nor were the priests, including Father Oldcome, spared. Father Strange, that ‘gentleman-like priest’ who loved tennis and music, was a victim because of his friendship with Catesby, even though Strange had never been involved in the treason. Like Johnson, who was released in August, Father Strange lived out the rest of his life disabled, and ‘totally incapable of any employment’, as a result of his sojourn in the Tower.2
Most brutal of all was the treatment given to Nicholas Owen, better known to the recusants as Little John. Since he had a hernia caused by the strain of his work, as well as a crippled leg, he should not have been physically tormented in the first place: as Gerard wrote in his Narrative, ‘the civil law doth forbid to torture any man that is broken’. But Little John, unlike many of those interrogated, did have valuable information about the hiding-places he had constructed: if he had talked, all too many priests would have been snared ‘as partridges in a net’. In this good cause, the government was prepared to ignore the dictates of the law and the demands of common humanity. A leading Councillor, on hearing his name, was said to have exclaimed: ‘Is he taken that knows all the secret places? I am very glad of that. We will have a trick for him.’3
The trick was the prolonged use of the manacles, an exquisitely horrible torture for one in Owen’s ruptured state. He was originally held in the milder prison of the Marshalsea, where it was hoped that other priests would try to contact him, but Little John was ‘too wise to give any advantage’ and spent his time safely and silently at prayer. In the Tower, he was brought to make two confessions on 26 February and 1 March. In the first one, he denied more or less everything – knowing Oldcome (or Hall), knowing Garnet, under that name or any of his aliases, let alone serving him. He even remained vague about his own aliases: it was reported that ‘he knoweth not whether he is called Little John’.4
By the time of the second confession, long and ghastly sessions in the manacles produced some results (his physical condition may be judged by the fact that his stomach had to be bound together with an iron plate, and even that was not effective for very long). Little John admitted to attending Father Garnet at White Webbs and elsewhere, that he had been at Coughton during that All Saints visit, and other details of his service and their itinerary. However, all this was known already. Little John never gave up one single detail of the hiding-places he had spent his adult life constructing for the safety of his co-religionists.
The lay brother died early in the morning of 2 March. He died directly as a result of his ordeal and in horrible, lingering circumstances. By popular standards of the day, this was a stage of cruelty too far. The government acknowledged the fact in its own way by putting out a story that Owen had ripped himself open with a knife given to him to eat his meat – while his keeper was conveniently looking elsewhere – rather than face renewed bouts of torture. Yet Owen’s keeper had told a relative who wanted Owen to make a list of his needs that his prisoner’s hands were so useless that he could not even feed himself, let alone write.5
The story of the suicide was so improbable that neither Owen’s enemies nor his friends, ‘so well acquainted’ with his character over so many years, believed it. Suicide was a mortal sin in the Catholic Church, inviting damnation, and it was unthinkable that a convinced Catholic like Nicholas Owen should have imperilled his immortal soul in this manner. This ‘false slander’ concerning his death was contrasted by Catholics afterwards with Little John’s calm and steadfast demeanour in the Marshalsea, when he certainly knew what lay ahead but showed no fear. Father Gerard called Nicholas Owen’s end a glorious martyrdom.* His jailer’s words were different but equally evocative: he said, ‘the man is dead: he died in our hands’.6
The emollient handling of Little John’s master, Garnet, did not however cease immediately. With the exception of Sir William Waad’s angry ravings on the subject of Catholicism – which in any case the priest tried to bear patiently – Garnet considered himself well treated. Even his personal jailer (his ‘keeper’) appeared to be full of kindness towards him. One can imagine the Jesuit’s pleasure when this fellow, Carey, confessed that Garnet’s patient conduct had made such an impression upon him that ‘he had even conceived a leaning for the Catholic religion’.7
As a kindness – which had to be kept, naturally, an absolute secret – Carey volunteered to convey letters from Father Garnet out of the prison. Garnet took the opportunity to write to his nephew Thomas, the priest held in the Gatehouse. Then, as the ultimate favour, Carey placed Father ‘Garnet in a cell in the Tower which had a special hole in it through which he could talk to the prisoner in the next cell. This was Father Hall – in other words the Jesuit Edward Oldcorne.
Perhaps Father Garnet should have been suspicious about such a helpful arrangement. He did not of course know of the government’s similar behaviour concerning Robert Wintour and Guy Fawkes. Unlike Gerard and Little John, both veteran prisoners, Garnet had never done time in captivity, thanks in large part to the inspired activities of Anne Vaux. Father Garnet, far from being the wily manipulator of government depiction, was, as Father Tesimond would sum him up, ‘a charitable man … ready to believe all things, and to hope all things’.8 He was not a worldly person, and as such did not fear the Greeks bearing gifts.
As a result, from 23 February, John Locherson and Edward Fawcett, two government observers, were able to overhear a series of conversations ‘in a place which was made for this precise purpose’. (It was Locherson who had spied on Wintour and Fawkes.) The first conversation they reported introduced the name of Anne Vaux. Garnet had just heard that she was in London and was proposing to send her a note via Carey, who had offered to ‘convey anything to her’. It was Anne Vaux, said Garnet, ‘who will let us hear from all our friends’. There was an obvious risk for Anne in contacting her, but Anne – hopefully protected by the known ‘weakness’ of her sex – could play a vital role in passing on the recusant news. She could also supply Father Garnet with those necessaries which were essential to any kind of comfort in prison. Garnet proceeded to talk cheerfully to Oldcorne of his good relationship with Carey, how he had rewarded him financially already and proposed to go on doing so, quite apart from giving him ‘a cup of sack’ and another one for his wife. Garnet recommended Oldcorne to pursue the same course, including ‘somewhat’ for Mrs Carey.9
The task of the eavesdroppers was from time to time complicated by aspects of daily life in the Tower. For example, a cock crowed and a hen cackled at exactly the same time outside the window of the cell, drowning the priests’ murmurs, and since the names of various peers such as Northampton and Rutland had been mentioned it was feared that vital confidences had been missed. Much of what the government’s men overheard was innocent and touching, rather than damaging, although Father Garnet’s admission to a human failing – that he had drunk too much wine on one occasion – would be held against him later. It emerged second or third hand in a letter by John Chamberlain, who had heard that the Jesuit was drinking sack in his confinement ‘so liberally as if he meant to drown sorrow’. The two priests also took the opportunity to confess to each other (as they had last done at Hindlip).10
But there were promising passages in the spies’ report. Garnet was concerned to inform Oldcorne about the content of his examinations in front of the Council for the latter’s sake (what had and had not been admitted). He told his colleague that he expected to be interrogated further about certain prayers he had said at the time of the meeting of the last Parliament ‘for the good success of that business’. Garnet added to Oldcorne: ‘which is indeed true’. The underlining of the last phrase in the report was done by Coke, who obviously intended to make out that Garnet had prayed for the success of the Powder Treason. What Garnet had actually prayed for was Catholic relief from persecution, but the phrase was all too easily twisted.11
Not only were Garnet’s intimate conversations being monitored, but his clandestine correspondence with his nephew Thomas in the Gatehouse and with Anne Vaux was being similarly vetted. It was simple for Carey to take to the governor the letters he had promised to ‘convey’. Some of these were copied and then taken onwards; some may have been altered; some letters may even have been forged altogether. Even those places where Father Garnet used orange juice to write the most secret passages were not safe. Waad was able to heat up the letter and read the contents, having either been forewarned by Carey, or else, as would be maintained later, made suspicious by the excessive size of the paper employed – a lot of it apparently blank – and the insignificant contents of the letters. However, words written in orange juice remain visible once they have been exposed to heat (as opposed to lemon juice, which becomes invisible once more when it is cold). These were some of the letters which were probably held back altogether.†12
Father Garnet’s correspondence was shaped round a number of domestic articles essential for the daily round of a middle-aged prisoner. To Thomas Garnet, the Jesuit sent his spectacles wrapped in a long piece of paper which was apparently blank. He accompanied them with a note asking for the spectacles to be set in leather – ‘and let the fold be fit for your nose’ – and provided with a leather case. It was Anne Vaux who duly returned the spectacles to him. Her covering letter contained the optimistic phrase: ‘If this come safe to you, I will write and so will more friends who would be glad to have direction.’ She asked for spiritual guidance for herself – Garnet had been her protégé, but also her confessor for over twenty years and she needed a replacement (it is clear from their letters that neither the priest nor the woman was under any illusions about what the inevitable end of his imprisonment would be). She concluded, not with a signature – too dangerous – but with the simple words: ‘O that I might see you.’13
That, decided the authorities who read the letter, was easily arranged. In the meantime, Father Garnet replied with a series of letters, between 26 February and 1 March, to ‘his loving sister Alice’. In ink he acknowledged her presents of bedding and handkerchiefs, and asked for socks, a black nightcap and a Bible. In orange juice he warned her against the capture of more priests which might compromise the existing prisoners as well as themselves. ‘Take heed no more of our friends come in to danger. It will breed new examinations.’ He gave her practical instructions for the reordering of the Jesuit organisation in England: Father Anthony Hoskins was to be the temporary Superior until a new one was chosen by the proper procedure.
As to Anne’s obligation to him as her Father Confessor, he released her from it. Garnet implied that he would understand if she now decided to leave for Flanders and the placidly devout life of a convent there, a tranquillity which Anne Vaux had certainly earned. Yet if she could manage to stay in England, while somehow still getting to Mass and Communion, ‘I think it absolutely the best.’ In this case, Anne, her sister Eleanor Brooksby, her nephew William (and presumably the young mother Dorothy Brooksby) should lie low for a while.
At the end of February Father Garnet told Anne Vaux that the Council could find nothing against him ‘but presumptions’. Such presumptions were not enough for a state trial since Parliament itself called for proper proof. Something better, something meatier would have to be established. The likelihood is that Father Garnet himself was put to the torture five days after the death of Little John on 7 March. As a result he made a ‘Declaration’ or confession the next day.14
It is true that torture can take many forms, and it is not absolutely clear which form was used on Father Garnet, only that, in the words of Father Tesimond, ‘one suspects bad treatment somewhere’. Tesimond (who was by this time on the continent) believed that Garnet had been drugged, which would have been easy to achieve, given the draughts of sack he was imbibing, and which may explain the ease with which he was able to supply himself with wine. Then there was the question of sleep deprivation, an ageless technique of oppression which leaves no physical mark: Garnet was said to be confused, ‘heavy with sleep, so that he could scarcely hold up his head or keep his eyes open’ in front of the Commissioners. By early April, Garnet’s ‘partisans’ in Brussels were spreading the news that he had confessed only after ‘torments’, including starvation and lack of sleep. This caused great annoyance to the English Ambassador there.15
It is possible the rack or manacles were merely shown to Father Garnet, and that imagination – the dread which had hung over him for so long – did the rest. The view does not however explain several references to a second proposed bout of torture which presuppose that a first one had already taken place. On 24 March Garnet himself protested that it was ‘against common law’ to torture someone over and over again for the same information, but the Councillors replied, ‘No, not in cases of treason,’ since that depended on the royal prerogative. In a letter to Anne Vaux of 11 April Garnet lamented the possibility of being tortured ‘for the second time’. He resolved to tell the whole truth rather than face such an ordeal, accepting that he would die ‘not as a victorious martyr’ (as had Little John) but as a penitent thief. Another letter to Father Tesimond also talked of ‘a second time’.16
No great attention need be paid to the fact that Father Garnet at his trial agreed with Salisbury that he had been well treated. The dialogue (for which of course we depend on the official record, not on any Catholic version) went as follows: Had not Garnet been well treated since his arrest? ‘You have been as well attended for health or otherwise as a nurse-child’ (infant at the breast). Garnet then replied: ‘It is most true, my Lord, I confess it.’17 Modern experience of show trials teaches us what to make of these public statements.
Torture of some sort did, however, make Father Garnet break at long last the seal of the confessional, which he had preserved with such agonies of conscience. His Declaration of 8 March was extremely dramatic.18 By whatever method produced, it gave the government clear proof that, according to the law of England, Garnet had been guilty of misprision of treason – that is, of knowing about a treason in advance and not declaring it. And it was true, for in June 1605 Garnet had been told about Catesby’s proposed conspiracy by Father Tesimond. Although Father Garnet had taken many steps to avert what he considered to be a catastrophe, he had not actually told the King or the English Council.
In order to clear himself of the graver charge of actual treason – that he had personally directed the Powder Plot – Garnet decided to tell his interrogators ‘the little that he knew’. Contrary to his previous denials, Garnet had known something of the plot beforehand, but he had heard it in such a way that, ‘up to that moment, it could never have been lawful for him, without most grave offence to God, to breathe a word to a living soul’. This was because the seal of the confessional was ‘inviolable’.19 There was a direct conflict here between the common law of England – to which Mr Henry Garnet, born in Lancashire, was subject – and the doctrine of the Catholic Church – to which Father Henry Garnet, priest of the Society of Jesus, was bound. It was a conflict of loyalties which had been in theory possible ever since Father Tesimond came to him and made that walking confession.
When one of the Councillors asked the obvious question: why could he reveal the conversation now, in order to save his own life, and not do so earlier, ‘in order to save the life of the King and peers of the realm’, Father Garnet gave the orthodox Catholic reply. Breaking the seal depended on the will of the penitent (Catesby in this case), not that of the confessor.
Catesby had decreed that, in the event of the Plot’s discovery, the matter of his confession was no longer to be regarded as sacred. If ever Garnet should be ‘called in question for being accessory unto such a horrible action’, either by the Pope, by his Superiors or by the English state, he would ‘have liberty to utter all that passed in this conference’. But there was no doubt that the image of the equivocating – deceitful, malevolent and ultimately self-preserving – Jesuit was only deepened further by this revelation. As Salisbury observed on 9 March, it was ‘a small matter’ whether Garnet himself lived or died. The important thing was to demonstrate the treasonable practices of the Catholics and ‘to prove to all the world’ that it was for this reason, not for their religious beliefs, that they should be ‘exterminated’.20
Some of the details of the Declaration may have been dictated or suggested by the government, notably the reference to Hugh Owen.21 Garnet stated that Guy Fawkes told him he ‘went over for Easter [to the continent] to acquaint Owen’, adding, rather naively – or perhaps confusedly, given his state – ‘which I never imagined before, nor thought any resolution to be in Fawkes’. But in general Garnet, while admitting to the fatal walking confession of Father Tesimond, stuck firmly to his thesis: his horror at the conspiracy, his sleepless nights after the confession, and his intense desire to get the Pope to forbid all such violent enterprises.
When the King was shown this confession in writing, he considered it ‘too dry’ and asked for something slightly more emotive. In particular, he wanted details of the nobles who were involved. But Garnet failed him on this subject yet again in his second Declaration.22 Catesby, he said, had been close to the Earl of Rutland, yet did not try to spare him from the explosion. Even if Catesby had had some idea of disabling the (Catholic) Earl of Arundel to keep him from Parliament, he had avoided the company of Lady Derby and Lady Strange ‘though he loved them above all others because it pitied him to think that they must also die’.
While Salisbury reported triumphantly in letters abroad that Garnet had declared the Powder Treason to be absolutely ‘justifiable’, this was at the very least a governmental equivocation. Garnet had justified his behaviour following the Catesby/Tesimond confession: but he had never justified the conspiracy itself.
Some time before 11 March, Anne Vaux was taken into custody. She managed to disentangle herself from the trap laid by the government only to fall a victim to something she could not combat – sheer force. The keeper, Carey, using his mother as a go-between, had in his usual helpful fashion appointed a rendezvous at the Tower so that Anne might catch sight of Father Garnet, if not actually speak to him. But on her arrival Anne found the whole situation extremely suspicious. There were ‘such signs and causes of distrust’ that she cut short her visit, not even attempting to glimpse the Jesuit. Then, with that characteristic prudence which had enabled her to protect priests for so many years, she did not return to her own lodgings, realising full well she would be followed. She went instead to Newgate prison, ostensibly to visit the Catholic prisoners there ‘unto which many of all sorts had continual access’.23
The stratagem infuriated the authorities, who had expected to be led towards a nest of recusants. Anne Vaux was arrested and ‘with some rough usage’ carried back to the Tower as a prisoner. This was highly unusual, as women were hardly ever committed to the Tower, and Anne Vaux, an unmarried gentlewoman, was not even suspected of being an active Plotter. In the Tower she was interrogated on two occasions, 11 and 24 March.24 Since Father Garnet was also undergoing further interrogations at the same time – including interviews with the King, who was delighted to discuss such theological (and treasonable) matters as the seal of the confessional – the intention was obviously to play one prisoner off against the other.
From Anne Vaux the government learnt of the existence of a recusant safe house at Erith in Kent, unknown to them before. Here her first cousin, Francis Tresham, had come between Easter and Whitsuntide in 1605 and talked to Father Garnet. Anne also confirmed various movements of the conspirators, including a visit of Catesby, Tresham and Tom Wintour to White Webbs when Father Garnet was present. She talked of going to St Winifred’s Well with Lady Digby and others she would not name: ‘she will not say that Whalley [Garnet] was there’. She mentioned the gathering for the Feast of All Saints at Coughton, although she protested she knew nothing of Father Garnet’s allegedly inflammatory prayer on the text: ‘Take away the perfidious people from the territory of the Faithful.’ She remembered the visit to Rushton shortly after the death of Sir Thomas when Lady Tresham had kept to her mourning chamber, although Francis Tresham had entertained them at dinner.
Unfortunately, all these movements described by Anne Vaux placed Father Garnet firmly in touch with Francis Tresham in recent years. This was nothing but the truth, but it suited Coke’s plans. The government had been put out by Francis Tresham’s inconvenient deathbed recantation on the subject of Garnet and the Spanish Treason. Coke, with his agile and unscrupulous mind, intended to twist this truth into yet another denunciation of the evil doctrine of equivocation.
The government, however, had no intention of taking seriously Anne Vaux’s positive evidence about Garnet’s horror at the Powder Treason. They took what they wanted from her statements and ignored the rest. Yet Anne Vaux appended in her own hand a pathetic postscript to her first examination: she was sorry to hear ‘that Father Garnet should be any least privy to this wicked action, as he himself ever called it’, because he had made so many protestations to the contrary ever since. At her second examination, the Council was anxious that Anne should confirm that Garnet, while at White Webbs, had incited Francis Tresham to rebellion. Instead of this, Anne Vaux recalled the priest perpetually exhorting his friend to patience: ‘She remembereth that he used these words, “Good gentlemen, be quiet. God will do all for the best.” ’ As to toleration, Garnet had declared: ‘we must get it by prayer at God’s hands, in whose hands are the hearts of princes.’
Anne Vaux’s dignity and decency impressed the Councillors, although this would not inhibit Coke from introducing her name gratuitously into his prosecution speech at Garnet’s trial. In any case, by this time, the lewdly enjoyable story of their association had spread far outside the confines of the Council Chamber.
The trial of Mr Henry Garnet – as the government called him – took place on Friday 28 March at the Guildhall. It was, said Coke, the last act of that ‘heavy and doleful tragedy’ commonly called the Powder Treason. Before the tribulations of the Tower, Garnet had been much weakened by that ordeal at Hindlip and his physical condition was now very bad. It was unlikely that he could walk the distance to the Guildhall. This posed a problem which Sir William Waad solved by delivering the Jesuit in a closed coach. There were those who interpreted this unusual measure as fear of the Catholics among the crowds – it had not been granted, for example, to the conspirators, many of whom were ‘of better birth and blood’ than Garnet. But it seems clear from Waad’s correspondence that it was Garnet’s weakness which provoked the change: he was, in Waad’s words, ‘no good footman’.25
The trial started at about nine-thirty in the morning and lasted, as in January, all day.26 The King was once again there ‘privately’, as were many courtiers, both male and female, including Lady Arbella Stuart and Catherine Countess of Suffolk. But there is no mention of Queen Anne (who had attended the Plotters’ trial) being present. Either tact, given her known Catholic sympathies, kept her away or else the Queen’s pregnancy – her eighth child was due in June – made the occasion unsuitable.
Father Garnet, throughout the trial, stood in something ‘like unto a pulpit’ which enabled the curious to feast their eyes on this creature of irredeemable evil who had planned to kill them all, but who appeared before them now in the guise of an unassuming middle-aged man with thinning hair who needed spectacles.
The indictment began by citing Garnet’s various aliases: ‘otherwise Whalley, otherwise Darcy, otherwise Roberts, otherwise Farmer, otherwise Philips’. This was a ploy which enabled Coke to make play with the fact that ‘a true man’ would never have had so many appellations. Garnet was described as ‘Clerk, of the profession of Jesuits’. The date chosen for his treason was 9 June 1605, when he was said to have conspired with the late Robert Catesby not only to kill the King and his son, but also to ‘alter and subvert the government of the kingdom and the true worship of God established in England’. After that, Garnet was accused of conspiring with Tesimond, and Thomas Wintour and other ‘false traitors’ including Catesby, to blow up and utterly destroy King, Prince Henry, Lords and Commons with gunpowder.
Garnet pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ and he was also allowed to object to a juror, John Burrell, a merchant like the other members of the jury. No reason had to be given for the challenge,‡ but presumably Burrell was a specially venomous anti-Catholic. After that, there was a brief – comparatively speaking – address from the Serjeant-at-Law. Then Sir Edward Coke got under way. From first to last, he was concerned to make it clear that the recent conspiracy had been dominated by the priests: ‘I will name it the Jesuits’ treason, as belonging to them …’ He indulged in a long historic survey of conspiracies in the previous reign, as well as the present one, in all of which, said Coke, the Jesuits, with their doctrines of ‘King-killing’ and ‘Queen-killing’, had been central. As for Garnet, he had had ‘his finger’ in every treason since 1586.
Coke spoke eloquently in order to cover up one tricky area in the prosecution case: the fact that Garnet had not actually been personally involved in the actions which had brought the other Plotters to their doom in the midlands. By English law, he was undoubtedly guilty of misprision of treason, as has been noted, since he himself had admitted to foreknowledge of the conspiracy; but the greater charge of treason needed a little more manipulation if it was to stick. Coke’s solution was to declare that Garnet as the ‘author’ of the Plot was immeasurably more sinful than the conspirators who were the ‘actors’ in it (Plus peccat author quam actor). Coke enlisted the Book of Genesis to his aid. Here the serpent received three punishments ‘as the original plotter’, Eve two ‘being as the mediate procurer’ and Adam only one, ‘as the party seduced’. Garnet was the serpent.
Having laid down these principles, Coke proceeded to flesh them out by outlining at length the course of the Powder Treason. He was concerned to leave out no recent conspiracy which could conceivably be used to cast odium on what had happened. Thus the Main and Bye Plots of 1603 were said to be joined with the Gunpowder Plot, like foxes joined at the tails, ‘however severed in their heads’.
At every stage, Garnet was said to be involved, whether in March 1603, cheering on Catesby with a ‘warrant’ for his enterprise, or in the summer of 1605 when he was accused of sending Sir Edmund Baynham to Rome to get the Pope’s approval of the treason (the exact reversal of the truth). Then in late November at Coughton he had openly prayed ‘for the success of the great action’, and according to Coke prayer was much more than mere consent. Lastly, Coke denounced Garnet himself in terms which had become extended since his speech at the previous trial: where once he had referred to the ‘two Ds’ of the Jesuit sect, he now called Garnet ‘a doctor of five Ds, namely, of dissimulation, of deposing of princes, of disposing of kingdoms, of daunting and deterring of subjects, and of destruction’.
Coke now concentrated at some length on ‘dissimulation’ as represented by that Treatise of Equivocation, ‘seen and allowed [actually written] by Garnet’. Equivocation, said Coke, was an offence against chastity, since the tongue (speech) and heart (meaning) should rightly be joined together in marriage; equivocating statements were ‘bastard children’, conceived in adultery. This elaborate image gave Coke the opportunity to refer to Garnet’s own vows of chastity, which he had broken: ‘Witness Mrs Vaux for his chastity.’
Equivocation was certainly one of the two main prongs of the government’s attack. It was, however, when Coke came to the subject of Francis Tresham and his dying letter that he was able to denounce equivocation in the most effective terms. He asked permission to read the fatal letter aloud. This was the document which Tresham had ‘weakly and dyingly subscribed’. In the course of it Tresham exonerated Garnet from the Spanish Treason, mentioning, according to Coke, that he had not seen Garnet ‘for fifteen or sixteen years before’. This gave Coke an open opportunity to elaborate on the contradictory testimony of Garnet personally, as well as that of Anne Vaux, who was ‘otherwise a very obstinate woman’. Both had given evidence of ample meetings ‘within two years space’ and also many times before. According to Coke, Tresham had taken to heart the lessons of the ‘book of equivocation’, which had been found in his lodgings, and given vent to ‘manifest falsehoods’ even as he lay dying.
Garnet, never having seen Tresham’s letter – despite the latter’s instructions that he should do so – was in no position to contradict Coke’s magisterial statements. But, for all Coke’s indignation about a man who would equivocate on his deathbed, poor Tresham had not actually done so. His letter in fact referred to the long gap before 1602, not 1605.27 All Garnet could do, however, was mutter lamely: ‘It may be, my Lord, that he meant to equivocate.’ It was just the kind of damaging admission that Coke wanted.
At various points in the trial, a great deal of time was spent in reading aloud statements. The first batch concerned plots encouraged by the Jesuits to assassinate Queen Elizabeth; then came extracts from the confessions of the conspirators – including Francis Tresham’s original confession of 13 November in which he had implicated Garnet in the Spanish Treason and mentioned Monteagle. But times had changed: Monteagle was now an official hero for his association with the letter. Consequently, his name was omitted in court (the erasure can still be seen in the official document). Lastly, extracts from Garnet’s own confessions were read aloud as well as those of Anne Vaux, and an account of his conversations with Oldcorne.
The Jesuit was however allowed to speak himself. He did as well as he could under the circumstances, although he could scarcely hope to extinguish the leaping flames of hatred – especially on the subject of equivocation – which Coke had ignited. His arguments in defence of the doctrine were those of his treatise. They included the words of Christ on the Last Judgement Day: ‘in his godhead’ Christ knew well when the day of judgement should be, but he did not know it ‘so as to tell it to men’. Garnet explained that he had denied his conversation with Oldcorne because it had been a secret. In matters of Faith, however, Garnet stated firmly that equivocation could never be lawful.
The power of the Pope to excommunicate the sovereign of a country, thus releasing his (or her) subjects from obedience, was the area of Garnet’s weakness, as it had always been for Catholics because of the possible conflict of loyalties. Garnet argued valiantly enough, pointing to the fact that James had never been excommunicated. When he found the King ‘fully settled’ into his English kingdom, Garnet had burnt the briefs from the Pope calling for a Catholic successor to Elizabeth, and had constantly denied that these briefs legitimised any violent enterprise. Salisbury however pursued the point: if the King were to be excommunicated, were his Catholic subjects still bound to continue in their obedience? Garnet ‘denied to answer’, the most prudent thing he could do.
Coke now dismissed all Garnet’s protests that he had tried hard to dissuade Catesby, and denounced equivocation yet again as ‘open and broad lying and forswearing’. He also made little of the so-called seal of the confessional. The dismissal of this pretext – as the government considered it – was the other main theme of the trial. Under canon law, said Coke, Garnet could perfectly well have disclosed the matter communicated to him by Tesimond since it was ‘a future thing to be done, not then already executed’. Others joined in the fray. The Earl of Northampton, who had a reputation as a public speaker, vented his talent to the full in a series of sonorous phrases. From Garnet’s point of view, the most unfair of these was the Latin tag, quod non prohibet cum potest, jubet: what a man does not forbid when he can, he orders. Garnet asserted yet again that he had forbidden the treason.
But then this, like the earlier trial of the conspirators, was a showpiece. The odds had been weighted against Garnet from the beginning. Although treason as such – the charge on the indictment – was certainly never proved against him, misprision of treason was another matter. It was after all not likely that an English court would recognise the heavy burden that the seal of the confessional placed upon a Catholic priest (it was not part of common law).§
The matter was not dismissed without debate. Salisbury, by a characteristic sleight of hand, denied that there was such a thing as the seal of the confessional, and proceeded to demonstrate that Tesimond’s observations had not been made under these privileged circumstances anyway. The ingenious mind of the great man, grappling with the net in which he intended to trap his adversary, can be traced in Salisbury’s own handwritten comments on the subject in the state papers.28 Examining Garnet, he pointed to the three necessary component parts of a Catholic confession. ‘Satisfaction’ had to follow contrition and confession, and without full repentance there could be no satisfaction. Since Catesby had not promised Tesimond to hold back from ‘this evil act’ he had not made a full repentance; the original confession was invalid, and Tesimond (and later Garnet) released from the seal.
Salisbury then made the quite different point that Garnet could have disclosed the conspiracy out of his ‘general knowledge’ of Catesby, following that conversation about the death of the innocents which was not privileged. Garnet’s only answer to this was that he had not understood the significance of the conversation at the time. All along the King himself with his theological bent showed a keen interest in this topic. He had taken the opportunity to interview Garnet personally on the subject before the trial, and it was probably James who framed the questions subsequently put to him in court.29 The key question was ‘whether a priest is bound to reveal a treason dangerous to King and State if discovered unto him in confession, the party signifying his resolution to persist’. To this Garnet’s answer was: ‘The party cannot be absolved unless he come to submit himself; but the confessor is bound to find all lawful means to hinder and discover the treason.’ This of course Garnet strongly maintained he had done. But the truth was that in the crucible of the Gunpowder Plot the responsibilities of a subject and of a priest were irreconcilable.
After all the sound and fury, the jury of wealthy London citizens took only fifteen minutes to deliver their verdict. Mr Henry Garnet, chief of the Jesuits, was found guilty of treason for conspiring to bring about the destruction of the King and government by the Powder Treason. The prisoner was asked, according to the law, whether there was any reason why judgement should not be passed. Garnet merely referred himself to the mercy of the King and God Almighty. The judgement, duly pronounced, was that he was to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
It had been a foul, wet spring while Father Garnet and his fellow prisoners languished in the Tower of London. The day after his trial, a westerly gale of hurricane intensity swept over England and on across the North Sea, destroying churches in the Low Countries. There had been nothing like it since 1570 – the year of the Pope’s Bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth, which had done so much to imperil the Jesuits in England.30
Dudley Carleton told John Chamberlain that Garnet had the air of being greatly surprised when finally told he was going to die: ‘he shifts, falters and equivocates’. But, Carleton added gleefully, he will be ‘hanged without equivocation’.31 There is no other evidence of Garnet’s faltering from what was surely an inevitable fate given the verdict of the trial. Carleton’s comment merely symbolises the absolute obsession with the subject of equivocation in the minds of the public which followed upon the trial of Henry Garnet.
It did in fact take some weeks for Garnet to be hanged, with or without equivocation. Father Oldcorne, John Wintour, Humphrey Littleton and Ralph Ashley were put to death in the usual manner at Redhill, near Worcester, on 7 April, Father Oldcorne calling upon the name of St Winifred at the last. John Wintour, luckier than his two step-brothers, whose bodies were put up for public display, was allowed to be buried back at Huddington. There his body still lies in the Chancel ‘under playne stones’, along with that of his widowed sister-in-law Gertrude. Perhaps in the end the government heeded his plea that he had joined the conspirators at Dunchurch out of ‘ignorance and not malice’. Humphrey Littleton met his death saying that it was deserved ‘for his treason to God’ in betraying the whereabouts of the two priests. Stephen Littleton and Henry Morgan were executed at Stafford.32
It was, however, the middle of Lent, Easter being very late in 1606 (Easter Sunday was not until 20 April, almost at the end of the possible cycle). This was not thought a suitable season for the great public festivity which the execution of the chief Jesuit would constitute in London. But the day eventually chosen – 1 May – seemed likely, on further consideration, to produce altogether too much festivity, not necessarily of the desired sort. Father Garnet reacted angrily to the unseemly news. ‘What, will they make a May game of me?’ he exclaimed. It was true that May Day was a celebratory date of great antiquity, reaching back to the pagan fire festival of Beltane, which marked the start of the summer. On this day, it was the custom for ordinary people to go into the country and gather green boughs in order to spend the day ‘in triumph and pastime’.33 Perhaps this did not strike quite the right note and a roistering crowd could never be absolutely trusted to do the right thing. So the Council chose 3 May, unaware that in the Catholic Church this was the Feast of the Invention (or Finding – from invenire, the Latin word for discovery) of the Holy Cross by the British Princess Helena. It was a feast to which Father Garnet had a particular devotion.
Despite Garnet’s condemnation, the interrogations did not cease, nor did the concentration on the subject of equivocation. The day after the trial, Garnet made a new statement by which he hoped to clear up the Tresham affair. ‘In cases of true and manifest treason a man is bound voluntarily to utter the very truth and in no way to equivocate’, unless he knew about the treason by way of confession. In this case he was bound to seek all lawful ways to uncover the treason so long as the seal of the confessional was not broken. A few days later he wrote a letter to the King, protesting that he had been ‘ever of the opinion’ that it was unlawful to attempt any violence against the King’s Majesty and the state, ‘after he was once received by the realm’. When the government informed Garnet – a quite unequivocal lie – that they had captured Tesimond, Garnet took the opportunity to write his fellow priest a long letter apologising for the information he felt he must give away concerning Tesimond’s walking confession.34
This letter, which was of course read – although Garnet was unaware of the fact – is the fullest account of what actually happened on that summer’s day in the garden ‘at the house in Essex’ the previous year. Garnet maintained strongly to his fellow priest that everything had been told to him in confession, including as they walked ‘because it was too tedious [painful] to hear all kneeling’. As for the Powder Treason, ‘we both conspired to hinder it … I never approved it, nor, as I think, you’.
Although Waad in the Tower continued to insist that this so-called confession had in fact been nothing of the sort, the Jesuit never gave up. ‘I took it as confession,’ he said on one occasion, ‘even if wrongly.’ It would of course have suited the government’s book to have eliminated this tiresome matter of Garnet’s priestly oath of silence and to have concentrated on his treachery, pure and simple. This they never managed to do. The most Garnet ever conceded – somewhat dazed, and with the possibility at least of renewed torture – was this: ‘If it [the news of the conspiracy] were not in confession, he conceived it to be delivered in confession.’ There the irreconcilable matter rested.
Garnet’s last letter to Anne Vaux was dated 21 April. He had already taken his leave of her and concerned himself with the various alternatives for her future in an earlier letter. This final missive was full of anguish, beginning: ‘It pleaseth God daily to multiply my crosses.’ Garnet hoped that God would grant him patience and perseverance to the end, as he related the various disasters which had occurred – first, his capture ‘in a friend’s house’, then the confessions of the priests to each other and their secret conferences overheard at the Tower. After that, Tesimond had been captured (this was of course not true). Lastly, ‘the slander of us both’ – Garnet and Anne Vaux – had been spread abroad: this was all too true. Garnet concluded with a few lines in Latin which referred to the sufferings of Job. He signed himself: ‘Yours in eternum, as I hope, H G.’ Beneath the signature, he appended a rough drawing, a cross and the letters ‘IHS’ – the first three letters of the holy name of Jesus in Greek.35
* The Catholic Church has recognised Nicholas Owen as a martyr; he was canonised in 1970.
† Letters from Father Garnet to Anne Vaux which include passages originally written in orange juice are still in the Public Record Office; they can, therefore, never have reached their intended destination in this form (S.P. 14/216).
‡ Sir Edward Coke in his Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, concerning High Treason … merely wrote that Garnet challenged Burrell ‘peremptorily, and it was allowed unto him by the resolution of all the judges’ (p. 27).
§ Under English law today, Father Garnet would still be obliged to disclose the information he had received in the confessional from Father Tesimond, relevant to Catesby’s conspiracy. Under Section 18 of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989, it is an offence, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, not to disclose information concerning an intended terrorist action. This applies to priests (as well as, for that matter, doctors and psychiatrists). Only lawyers can claim privilege in not revealing information received from their clients. (Halsbury’s Statutes of England and Wales, 4th edn, 1994 reissue, 12, pp. 1339–40.)