Farewell, good friend Tom, this day I will save thee a labour to provide my dinner.
FATHER HENRY GARNET
3 May 1606
FATHER HENRY GARNET SAID HIS farewells in the Tower very early on the morning of Saturday 3 May. King James was no longer in London. The royal interest in the theological arguments aroused by Henry Garnet’s trial had waned in favour of the other great kingly passion, the chase. James had left for Newmarket in Suffolk on the Friday, hunting his way happily northwards. Sir William Waad was left in charge of delivering his prisoner, as he had been in charge of delivering the conspirators in January.
The Jesuit, who had by now spent nearly three months as a prisoner in the Tower, said a courteous goodbye to those who had served him. To one of the cooks who called out, ‘Farewell, good sir,’ he attempted a mild jest: ‘Farewell, good friend Tom, this day I will save thee a labour to provide my dinner.’ Even his captors were visibly moved. Lady Waad, well aware of what lay ahead, told him that she would pray for him, adding: ‘God be with you and comfort you, good Mr Garnet …’1
At the last moment, as Garnet, wearing a black cloak over his clothes and a hat, was being strapped to the hurdle which would take him to his death, there was a commotion in the courtyard. A woman rushed forward. It was Anne Vaux.
It was in fact an administrative mistake that she should have been let out of her prison for this harrowing moment. Waad had given instructions that Mistress Vaux should be permitted to watch the priest’s departure at a window. But her keeper allowed Anne right out into the courtyard itself, where the wicker hurdle lay with its burden. Anne was however dragged away before she could exchange one last word with her mentor, or even utter a prayer over the man who for twenty years had been the centre of her world.2
Evidently the patriotic protests of Sir Arthur Gorges, who thought the site of St Paul’s Churchyard holy to the memory of Queen Elizabeth, had been disregarded, for this was the place chosen for the execution. The hurdle was drawn by three horses all the way from the Tower. Father Garnet lay on it with his hands held together and his eyes closed; he had the air of ‘a man in deep contemplation’.3 An enormous crowd awaited him at St Paul’s. A scaffold had been erected on the west side for the prisoner, and there were wooden stands set up for spectators. The surrounding windows were also packed with onlookers.
Not all of them, of course, were hostile. At least one priest was present in disguise, hoping to perform the last rites on Father Garnet’s moribund body, as Garnet in the past had done for others. This priest spent twelve pence for a seat on the stand and, as a result, he was able to supply Father Gerard later with numerous details for his Narrative.4
A Protestant account described Father Garnet as looking guilty and fearful at the prospect of his final ordeal, but in fact his main problem, once he had left the hurdle, was to secure any kind of repose in which to prepare himself for death.5 The Sheriff of London was present, as were Sir Henry Montague, the Recorder of London, the Dean of Winchester, Dr George Abbot, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Dr John Overal. In their different ways, all these gentlemen were determined to secure the last-minute repentance and even the conversion of this notorious Jesuit. It might be thought that someone who had already endured so much for the sake of his Church was unlikely to desert it at the end: but even in the last weeks in the Tower Garnet had been subjected to various doctrinal debates – in all of which of course he remained firm in favour of the Catholic Faith.
The Jesuit dealt quite easily with the request, made by the Recorder in the name of the King, to reveal any further treasons of which he had secret knowledge. He had, said Garnet, nothing more to say on that subject. But when the divines set about arguing with him about the superior merits of Protestantism, the priest ‘cut them off quickly’, asking them not to trouble themselves – or him: ‘he came prepared and was resolved’. Garnet then desired some place apart where he could pray.6
This was not to be. Montague stated his orders were that Garnet should acknowledge himself justly condemned, and then seek the King’s forgiveness. Garnet replied that he had committed no treason or offence against the King. They could condemn him for nothing except for keeping the secrets of the confessional: this was the only way in which he had had ‘knowledge of that Powder Treason’. However, Garnet added, if he had indeed offended the King or the state, he asked for forgiveness with all his heart.
These last words encouraged the Recorder to believe he had secured the vital admission he wanted. He called out to the crowd to pay attention: the Jesuit had just asked for the King’s forgiveness for the Powder Treason. But Garnet refused to accept this and he repeated that he was not guilty. The same open disagreement then took place on the controversial subject of Catesby, and Tesimond’s confession to Garnet. Once again the priest refused to be browbeaten into giving way.
‘You do but equivocate,’ exclaimed Sir Henry Montague, ‘and if you deny it, after your death we will publish your own hand [writing], that the world may see your false dealing.’
‘This is not the time to talk of equivocation,’ answered Garnet. ‘Neither do I equivocate. But in troth,’ he went on and then reiterated it: ‘in troth, you shall not find my hand otherwise than I have said.’ This solemn declaration, made twice over, impressed the spectators. The Recorder’s own reputation was not enhanced when Garnet demanded to inspect the famous document in his own writing. Montague had to reply, somewhat foolishly, that he had left it at home.7
When Garnet was asked – according to custom – whether he had anything further to say, he apologised for his own weakness, including his failing voice. But he did call attention to the appropriate date on which he was to die: ‘Upon this day is recorded the Invention [Finding] of the Cross of Christ, and upon this day I thank God I have found my cross …’ Although Garnet continued to deny his own guilt, he did take the opportunity to express once more his horror at the fact that Catholics had planned such an enterprise. In the future, he directed all Catholics to remain ‘quiet’, possessing their souls in peace: ‘And God will not be forgetful of them.’
At this point, someone standing in the crowd near by shouted out: ‘But Mr Garnet, were you not married to Mrs Anne Vaux?’ The accusation stung Garnet, in a way nothing else could.
The priest turned to the people, and answered: ‘That honourable gentlewoman hath [suffered] great wrong by such false reports. For it is suspected and said that I should be married to her, and worse. But I protest the contrary … she is a virtuous good gentlewoman and, therefore, to impute any such thing into her cannot proceed but of malice.’ Having delivered himself of this broadside, Garnet was at last allowed to pray – at the foot of the ladder he would shortly mount.8
He himself assisted in the stripping off of his clothes down to his shirt; this was very long and Garnet had had the sides sewn up almost to the bottom in the interests of modesty ‘that the wind might not blow it up’. One more Protestant minister did come forward, but Garnet refused to listen to him, or even acknowledge his presence. On the ladder itself, he paused and made the sign of the Cross, desiring all good Catholics present to pray for him. However one member of the crowd had evidently been assured that there would be a dramatic last-minute conversion to Protestantism (a government-inspired rumour). This disappointed person shouted out: ‘Mr Garnet, it is expected you should recant.’
‘God forbid,’ he replied. ‘I never had any such meaning, but ever meant to die a true and perfect Catholic.’
This aroused a protest from Dr Overal, the Dean of St Paul’s: ‘But Mr Garnet, we are all Catholics.’ But this the Jesuit would not have, as for him there was only one Catholic Roman Church, and that was under the Pope.9
Henry Garnet was now ready. He prayed for the welfare of the King and the Royal Family. Then he made the sign of the Cross. His last prayers were in Latin, the language of the ‘one’ Church into which he had been born and in whose service he had spent his life. They included ‘Into thy hands, 0 Lord, I commend my spirit’, uttered several times, and ‘Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of mercy, protect us from the enemy, and receive us at the hour of our death.’ This was the last prayer he said before he was told that the hangman was ready. The priest crossed his arms over his breast – it had not been thought necessary to bind his arms – and ‘so was cast off the ladder’.
Then an odd thing happened. Many of the spectators had deliberately made their way to St Paul’s in order to see a spectacle which included drawing and quartering performed upon a living body. But the mood of the fickle crowd suddenly changed. A great number of those present – they cannot all have been Catholics – surged forward. With a loud cry of ‘hold, hold’, they stopped the hangman cutting down the body while Garnet was still alive. Others pulled on the priest’s legs, something which was traditionally done by relatives in order to ensure a speedy death. This favour was not something the crowd had chosen to perform for the conspirators in January, even though these had been ‘men of good sort’, popular and much esteemed. As a result Father Garnet was ‘perfectly dead’ when he was finally cut down and taken to the block.10
Even the traditional words ‘Behold the heart of a traitor’ received no applause. Nor did anyone cry out, ‘God save the King’ as was customary. Instead, there was an uneasy murmuring among the spectators.
That same day, 3 May, Father John Gerard, who had himself been named in the January proclamation, managed at last to get away from England to the continent and safety. He believed he owed his preservation to the intercession of the martyred Father Garnet. Gerard planned to make the crucial Channel crossing among the attendants of two envoys, Baron Hoboken and the Marquis de Germain. Hoboken represented the Archdukes and had been summoned to hear complaints concerning Hugh Owen and Father Baldwin in Flanders. The Marquis had, ironically enough, come from Spain to congratulate King James on surviving the Gunpowder Plot. However, these ‘high officials’ took fright at having such an incriminating presence in their midst. But at the last moment, as Gerard believed, ‘Father Garnet was received into heaven and did not forget me.’ The officials changed their minds, and the Marquis de Germain came in person to help Gerard into the livery which would enable him to pass as one of his entourage. ‘In my own mind,’ Gerard wrote, ‘I have no doubt that I owed this [reversal of decision] to Father Garnet’s prayers.’11
Father John Gerard lived on for over thirty years after the death of his friend and colleague; he died in Rome in his early seventies. Like Father Tesimond, also named in the proclamation, who had escaped a few months earlier in that cargo of dead pigs, Father Gerard lived to write a full Narrative of the events of the Powder Treason, many of which he had experienced first hand, while meticulous researches among survivors filled in the gaps. In 1609 when he was at the Jesuit seminary in Louvain, he wrote an Autobiography, which gave an account of his missionary life in England. It has been suggested by his editor and translator (both books were written in Latin) Father Philip Caraman that Gerard in conversation with the novices must have frequently told ‘anecdotes of hunted priests, of torture and everyday heroism of his friends among the English laity’. Someone then suggested to the General of the Jesuits that all this would make an inspiring if distressing record.12
Anne Vaux also lived for another thirty years, despite the ill-health and bad eyesight which had dogged her throughout her life. She was released from the Tower in August 1606, about the same time as her servant James Johnson was let go (although the intention with Johnson seems to have been to let him act as a decoy to lead the authorities to recusant safe houses). Shortly after her release, a priest mentioned that Anne Vaux was ‘much discontented’ that she had not been allowed to die with Garnet. He added discreetly on the subject of her work and health: ‘I believe the customers [the priests] and she will live together, but I fear not long.’ His forecast was however incorrect, for Anne Vaux proved to be one of those dedicated people in whom a strong vocation prevails over a weak physique.13
At first, with her sister Eleanor Brooksby, Anne remained in London, presumably to fulfil Father Garnet’s last instructions to lie low until matters had quieted down (although Anne did suffer another spell in prison for recusancy in 1608). The sisters then moved to Leicestershire, where they continued to harbour and protect priests, their names appearing together on recusant rolls from time to time until Eleanor’s death in 1626. Anne’s toil over decades was acknowledged by at least two dedications in works by eminent Jesuits, translated into English, one of which, by Leonard Lessius, printed in St Omer in 1621, had the appropriate title of The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons …14 She never gave up her work for the ‘customers’. In 1635, the year of her death at the age of seventy-three, her name was reported to the Privy Council for harbouring a Jesuit school for the education of young English Catholic gentlemen at her mansion, Stanley Grange, near Derby.
It was Anne Vaux, in the early stages of her grief at the death of Father Garnet, who was responsible for nurturing the story of a miraculous straw-husk bearing his martyred image. She was, wrote one who knew her, ‘sometimes too ardent in divine things’ – although the priests she protected over so many years would not have agreed.15
The story of the straw-husk began with the usual desperate search for holy mementoes among those Catholics covertly present, after the death of Father Garnet. One of these was a young man called John Wilkinson who had been asked by a fellow recusant, Mrs Griffin, a tailor’s wife, to procure her some kind of relic. Wilkinson was therefore standing right by the hangman as he deposited Garnet’s severed head in the usual straw-lined basket. All of a sudden an empty husk of corn stained with the priest’s blood ‘did leap … in a strange manner’ into his hand. Wilkinson gave the husk to Mrs Griffin, who put it in a crystal reliquary.16
There were two versions as to when the bloodstain revealed itself to bear ‘the proportion, features and countenance of a pale, wan dead man’s face’ perfectly resembling Father Garnet, with his eyes closed, beard bespotted with blood and a bloody circle round his neck. Father Gerard heard that the image had been perceived by Mrs Griffin with a mixture of fear and joy, after three or four days. Another story linked the husk to the equally miraculous whiteness of Father Garnet’s features, visible once his head was hoist on its pole by London Bridge. Although these heads were customarily parboiled (which made them black), Father Garnet’s pallor was so remarkable as to cause general wonder. It also attracted a crowd of spectators, to the extent that after six weeks the government had to order the face to be turned upwards away from the inspection of the curious. According to this second (anonymous) account it was at this point that the likeness appeared in the corn-husk.
The husk in its reliquary was a natural focus of devotion among the faithful – including Anne Vaux who was shown it in the course of the autumn - and curiosity among the rest. As a counterpoint to the comfort the husk gave to the bereaved Catholics, it caused the English government and its representatives abroad considerable irritation. Sir Thomas Edmondes complained about a reproduction of the image being circulated in Brussels, and the Archduke Albert managed to have a book on the subject of the straw-husk suppressed. Sir Charles Cornwallis, however, had less success with Philip III in Spain. He did not manage to get pictures of ‘Henry Garnet, an English man martyred in London’ censored, even though they were specifically designed to show up the King of England as a tyrant.17
Zuñiga, the Spanish Ambassador in London, was in fact among those who inspected the straw-husk. He did so, as he told Philip III, ‘from curiosity’ after hearing about the husk from several sources, although he denied that he had paid for the privilege, being ‘never such an enemy to my money as to give it for straws’.18 In actual fact, the husk was probably concealed at the Spanish Embassy for a while, before being smuggled abroad. There it found a place among the relics in the possession of the Society of Jesus, before disappearing in the general turmoil of the French Revolution.
Like her sister-in-law Anne, Eliza Vaux of Harrowden maintained her fidelity to the recusant cause for the rest of her life. She was released from her house arrest in London in April 1606 after a series of protests at her condition, made with characteristic vigour. Free to live at Harrowden once more, she continued to harbour priests, Father Percy taking the place of Father Gerard as her chaplain. In 1611, however, she was arrested once again and Harrowden was ransacked, owing to a rumour (untrue) that Father Gerard had returned to England. The next year Eliza Vaux was indicted at the Old Bailey for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment in Newgate. In July 1613, she was released on grounds of ill-health; she died about twelve years later without ever deserting the Faith which she had proudly chosen, and admirably served.19
Eliza had done her best for the family of six children which had been her responsibility following the early death of her husband. The eldest, Mary, had married Sir George Symeon of Brightwell Baldwin in Oxfordshire in 1604; the youngest, Catherine, became the second wife of George Lord Abergavenny ten years later. The middle daughter, Joyce, became a nun in the recently founded Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, dying in 1667, outlived all the family. After the suppression of the order by the Pope, ‘Mother Joyce’ spent her declining years at Eye in Suffolk, living with her brother Henry.20 Neither of Eliza’s younger sons, Henry and William, married. It was the marital career of Eliza’s eldest son Edward Lord Vaux which provided a strange, one might even say romantic, footnote, to the events of November 1605.
Edward’s projected marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard had been blighted by the discovery of the Powder Treason, and soon after Elizabeth had been married off to Lord Knollys, later the Earl of Banbury, forty years her senior. For a quarter of a century Edward himself did not marry. Then in 1632, he finally married his erstwhile sweetheart, Elizabeth Countess of Banbury, six weeks after the death of her aged husband.
Their love had evidently not been in abeyance all that length of time for Elizabeth, who bore no children to Lord Banbury for many years, gave birth to two sons in 1628 and 1630 respectively. These boys were widely supposed to be the offspring of Lord Vaux rather than Lord Banbury (who was by then over eighty). It was a view which Edward Vaux’s testament only encouraged. Being theoretically without issue, he left Harrowden to his wife Elizabeth on his death, in remainder to her elder son, Nicholas, second Earl of Banbury. Unfortunately – if not altogether surprisingly – Nicholas’ inheritance of the Banbury earldom was itself the subject of a long lawsuit, which, after Nicholas’ death, his own son and heir Charles continued with zest.* The result was that Harrowden itself had to be sold in 1694, to meet the legal costs.21
So the house in which Edmund Campion and John Gerard had been hidden was replaced by the present structure by the new owner Thomas Watson-Wentworth in the early eighteenth century. It is surely legitimate to regard Edward Vaux and Elizabeth Howard as indirect victims of the Powder Treason, since, given their enduring passion for each other, they must surely have enjoyed a long and happy marriage had they been allowed to wed in November 1605.
The mothers, wives and children of the conspirators were not coated with social ignominy, but they were, according to custom where traitors’ families were concerned, pursued with financial vengeance. Guy Fawkes of course left no descendants to suffer, no widow and no children. He died as he had lived since the distant days of his Yorkshire childhood, a soldier of fortune to outsiders, but to himself a latterday crusader, whose strongest allegiance was to the Church in whose honour he planned to wield his sword.
Robert Catesby’s mother Anne – deprived of a farewell as her son lurked in the fields by Ashby St Ledgers – was left trying to rescue something from the wreckage. She concentrated on holding on to her own marriage settlement from Sir William Catesby, for the benefit of her grandson, also named Robert. Lady Catesby was successful, as the settlement was not finally disturbed, despite the best efforts of the crown. But the younger Robert left no descendants, and, for better or worse, the direct Catesby line from the notorious conspirator died out.†22
Lady Catesby’s sister, Muriel Lady Tresham, who had similarly mothered a traitor in Francis Tresham – or at any rate one whom the government treated as such – faced the same problem of trying to salvage the Tresham estate. Unlike Lady Catesby, Lady Tresham still had three unmarried daughters needing portions (eight of her eleven children had survived infancy, which was an astonishingly high proportion for the late sixteenth century). Then there was the need to maintain Francis’ widow Anne and her small children. Although, as has been noted, the entail upon male heirs saved the Tresham estate from the worst effects of the attainder – Francis Tresham had no son – all Lady Tresham’s gallant efforts were vitiated by the financial irresponsibility of Francis’ brother Sir Lewis Tresham (he acquired a baronetcy in 1611). In the shadow of the ‘Catholic Moses’, as Sir Thomas Tresham had been known, his sons had grown up reckless and selfish, inheriting their father’s extravagance but not his moral strength, nor his grandeur. Already in difficulties before he inherited in 1605, Sir Lewis managed to complete the ruin of the family, and with the death of his son William in 1643 the Tresham baronetcy came to an end.23
Eliza Tresham, daughter of Francis, married Sir George Heneage of Lincolnshire. But her sister Lucy Tresham carried out her father’s ‘earnest desire’, expressed on his deathbed, that one of his girls should become a nun. Taking the name of Mother Winifred – an allusion, no doubt, to St Winifred of Holywell, to whom recusants had so much devotion – Lucy Tresham lived her life out in St Monica’s at Louvain, a new-founded convent in the Low Countries.24 While in one sense she was far away from the tumults of English Catholicism, in another sense she was only one among many women in these convents who had connections to the Gunpowder Plot.
There were already twenty-two English nuns, Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Ursula’s, Louvain, in 1606, the year in which its offshoot St Monica’s was founded. Father Garnet’s sisters, Margaret and Helen, who had been professed at St Ursula’s in the late 1590s, were among the first to move to St Monica’s. Alongside them, Lucy Tresham found herself enjoying what Father Garnet had called ‘that most secure and quiet haven of a religious life’, in a letter to his sister Margaret.25 Dorothea Rookwood, half-sister of Ambrose, was also there, and Mary Wintour, daughter of Robert and Gertrude, was professed in 1617.
One cannot help speculating about whether the subject of the Powder Treason was ever discussed in the convent refectory and, if so, in what terms. One can at least be sure that the most fervent prayers for the dead were offered on 3 May, the anniversary of Father Garnet’s death. There were further connections and, one may assume, further prayers for the dead. Mary Ward, founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was the niece of the Wright brothers, Jack and Christopher; Joyce Vaux and Susanna Rookwood, a further half-sister of Ambrose, were two of her earliest and closest associates.
The continued courageous and devout adherence to Catholicism was one thing that the families of the conspirators had in common after the event. Another daughter of Robert and Gertrude Wintour, Helena, was noted for her splendid gifts to the Jesuits,‡ while a son, Sir John Wintour, was ‘a noted Papist’ in the English Civil War. It is not absolutely clear whether Kenelin and John Digby, the sons of Sir Everard, were raised as Catholics after his death, since sources vary. But certainly the dazzling Sir Kenelm Digby – writer, diplomat, naval commander, lover and finally husband of Venetia Stanley – would describe himself in a memoir as a Catholic by the time he reached twenty, when he was living in Spain. It is likely that his devout mother had ensured a kind of covert Catholic instruction and influence all along, even if forbidden by law to bring up her sons in her own religion.26
Even the six children of Lord Monteagle, who had professed his new Anglican loyalties to King James, followed the religion of their pious Tresham mother, who remained a recusant. His eldest son Henry Lord Morley (the title which Monteagle inherited from his father in 1618) was a Catholic peer in the reign of Charles I. Monteagle was not at first disposed to grant the request of his eldest daughter Frances Parker, who was physically handicapped, to become a nun. But he finally surrendered, ‘in respect that she was crooked, and therefore not fit for the world’. He gave her a handsome dowry of a thousand pounds.27
If the Catholic strain remained, the strain of dissidence and bravado appeared to vanish – with one exception. Ambrose Rookwood, great-grandson of the conspirator, was named for him – an ill-omened name, one might have thought, and so it proved. After the Restoration, Ambrose rose in the Stuart army to become a brigadier under James II. Unfortunately he preserved his Jacobite sympathies following the ejection of the Catholic James from the throne in favour of his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary.
In 1696 Brigadier Rookwood was involved in a plot to assassinate King William. When one of his co-conspirators turned King’s evidence he was apprehended (in a well-known Jacobite ale-house) and taken to Newgate prison. After being tried for high treason, Ambrose Rookwood was put to death at Tyburn on 29 April 1696 – the second man of that name within the century to die for the ultimate offence. But Ambrose Rookwood the younger did not exhibit at the last quite the noble spirit of his ancestor; in a paper he delivered at the scaffold, he declared that he had only been obeying the orders of a superior officer.28
The Catholic peers who had been arrested at the time of the discovery of the Plot were subjected, like the conspirators’ families, to a process of political forgiveness – provided they paid up. Lord Montague, who should somehow have known better than to employ a young Yorkshireman called Guy Fawkes as his footman fifteen years previously, was one who had always spoken up fearlessly for ‘the ancient Faith’. At the moment of the Plot’s discovery, he was questioned on the subject by his father-in-law, the powerful and venerable Lord High Treasurer, the Earl of Dorset. Montague expressed his absolute horror at such an undertaking and still further shock at the very idea that he, Montague, could be involved. ‘I never knew what grief was until now,’ he told Dorset. Montague also asked his father-in-law’s advice on how he could get back into the King’s good graces without violating the integrity of his religious principles. The short answer was, of course, money. Montague paid a fine and he also underwent a spell of imprisonment. Thanks to Dorset’s influence, however, he escaped trial.29
His grandmother Magdalen Viscountess Montague, now in the evening of her life, certainly did not allow anything – including frequent searches of her establishments around the festivals of the Church such as Easter - to violate the integrity of her Faith: a Faith which she had held since her youth, when she had been Maid of Honour to Queen Mary Tudor. This representative of the grand old, unswervingly loyal Catholicism, whose prayers had been sought by Queen Elizabeth, died in 1608 at her house near Battle. There had been no less than five priests in the house to say Mass the day before, and William Byrd wrote an elegy to mark her death.30
Lords Mordaunt and Stourton were not so fortunate as Montague. Both Catholic peers – one connected to Robert Keyes, the other Francis Tresham’s brother-in-law – faced trial in front of the Star Chamber, and were condemned to imprisonment in the Tower. In 1608 they were transferred to the Fleet prison. Lord Mordaunt was fined ten thousand pounds, although it is not clear whether the money was ever handed over, since his son was ‘forgiven’ the fine in 1620. Lord Stourton was fined six thousand pounds but was finally allowed to settle for paying a thousand.31
Meanwhile Monteagle, the other Tresham brother-in-law, enjoyed the pension granted to him for his heroic role in discovering the conspiracy, and he otherwise occupied himself with his interest in colonial enterprises. He donated to the second Virginia Company and was elected a member of its council in 1609, and he had shares in the East India and North-West Passage companies. However, it has to be said that his executors complained that his pension was in arrears to the tune of nearly two thousand pounds at his death in 1622.32
At least Monteagle used his influence to protect his brother-in-law Thomas Habington from the ultimate consequences of harbouring the forbidden priests at Hindlip, which could have been death. Although Habington was condemned, the pleas of his wife to her brother secured his reprieve. So he survived to pursue his antiquarian interests with vigour for the rest of his long life. Thomas Habington died in 1647 at the age of eighty-seven, his enthusiasm, as with Anne Vaux, leading to longevity. The baby William Habington, who had been born at Hindlip on the inauspicious day – from the Catholic point of view – of 5 November 1605, survived this traumatic birthdate to become a poet, author among other works of Castara. He estimated his own work as ‘not so high as to be wondered at, nor so low as to be condemned’. Many recusants of the previous generation would have been happy to have been so judged.33
In political and personal terms, the clear loser from the affray of the Powder Treason was the Earl of Northumberland. Nothing was ever proved against him: none of the Plotters, tortured or self-preserving, confessed his name as the putative Protector; nor did the Jesuits incriminate him in the course of their overheard conversation. Salisbury was riding high at the time of Northumberland’s trial in front of the Star Chamber in June 1606, having been made a Knight of the Garter in April.§ Even he admitted that Northumberland would never have let those he loved perish in the explosion: a man of ‘his birth, alliance and disposition’. It seems, therefore, to have been the personal distrust of the King which cast a fatal blight upon Northumberland.34
What caused this distrust? The indictment charged Northumberland with ‘endeavouring to be the head of the English Papists, and to procure them Toleration’. The admission of Thomas Percy to the ranks of the King’s bodyguards without causing him to take the Oath of Supremacy, knowing him to be a recusant, was cited as proof. This was a charge with which Coke was able to make merry, in his usual style, when he described the promotion of Percy to such an intimate position as putting ‘an axe in his hand to carry it over the King’s head’. There was also Northumberland’s interest in the matter of the King’s horoscope, and how long he would reign.35 Northumberland’s patronage of Thomas Percy was an ineluctable fact, and he admitted to the treasonable affair of the horoscope (although since the chart had – quite correctly – predicted a long reign for James I, it is difficult to see that much damage had been done).
But it was surely the question of toleration and, above all, those promises made (or not made) by the King while still in Scotland which were the key element in James’ distrust of Northumberland. Coke himself summed it up when he said that the King himself had given his royal word (in verbo regio) that ‘he never did promise or command’ toleration.36 Whatever the truth was of those distant dealings – whether Thomas Percy lied then or the King was lying now – it was wrapped in a convenient Scottish mist which obliterated all memories of such a very different era. It was Northumberland who in 1606 paid the penalty for being the front man of the Catholics, a position from which, in 1603, he had hoped to reap the reward.
At his trial, Northumberland, who was hampered by his deafness (he had of course no counsel), was fined thirty thousand pounds, and sentenced to imprisonment at the King’s pleasure. He kept increasingly magnificent state during his incarceration. In the capacious Martin Tower he had a study, library, great chamber, withdrawing-room and two dining-rooms; while his personal cook (he was not reliant on Father Garnet’s ‘good friend Tom’) lived in a rented house on Tower Hill. His accounts show not only considerable expenditure on clothing, but also that he was in the habit of wearing the blue ribbon signifying his membership of the Order of the Garter, since it frequently had to be renewed.37 Nevertheless Northumberland remained in the Tower until 1621, when his son-in-law, the King’s favourite Lord Hay, successfully pleaded for his release. He retired to his estate at Petworth, where he died in 1632.
The government had pinned down Northumberland for his part in the conspiracy, but those ‘Plotters’ abroad who were the bane of the English government’s existence remained happily outside the long arm of its law. The Archdukes did not keep Hugh Owen long under house arrest and no charges were brought against him. When Owen moved on to Spain, Salisbury tried in vain to get him kidnapped and brought to England. However, Hugh Owen retired to Rome with a pension and lived to the age of eighty. That old soldier – and old intriguer – Sir William Stanley also lived on in freedom to the age of eighty. Only Father William Baldwin, the Cornish priest who had been named in the indictment of January 1606 as being part of the conspiracy, fell into the English net, although not for some years. The Archdukes had declined to extradite him then, but in the course of a journey to Rome in 1610 Baldwin was captured by the Protestant Elector Palatine, who despatched him to England. He remained in the Tower until 1618, even though no charge of treason was ever brought against him, presumably for lack of evidence. Father Baldwin’s final release was due to the intervention of the Spanish Ambassador. He was then banished, and thereafter he spent eleven years as Rector of the English seminary at St Omer.38
Spared from destruction by gunpowder, the Royal Family, that domestic phenomenon still new to the English in 1603, was surely set to prosper. Where religion was concerned, Anne of Denmark maintained the discreet stance with which she had handled the difficult months following the discovery of the treason. The more or less public Catholicism on which the Pope and others had pinned so many hopes while she was still in Scotland (and which had deluded them about James’ own Catholic sympathies) gave way to something more elegantly lethargic. In 1612 Pope Paul V would even go so far as to refer woundingly to the Queen’s ‘inconstancy’. In view of the many changes she had made in religious matters, he wondered if it was even true that she was a Catholic. Anne of Denmark was certainly a Catholic – she fitted up a chapel at her palace at Oatlands, and enjoyed having Catholic priests come to minister to her at Hampton Court.39 But from 5 November 1605 onwards she lived her life as a royal version of a Church Papist Like Church Papists in the reign of Elizabeth she wanted spiritual consolation in private, but no trouble in public.
There was however a fleeting quality to this perceived prosperity of the Royal Family, and May 1606, when Father Garnet on the scaffold prayed for its welfare, turned out to be the high point of its expansion. There were then four living children, two Princes and two Princesses, and the Queen was on the verge of giving birth yet again. But the expected baby, who was born on 22 June and named Sophia, died the next day.40 Then Princess Mary, the special child because she had been born in England following her father’s accession, died in September 1607 at the age of two and a half.‖
No treasonable horoscope would have dared to predict that the glorious Prince of Wales would be the next to die. Prince Henry had been the hope of the nation ever since he won all hearts at the first royal procession of the reign. Alas for such expectations: he died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen in November 1612. That left his brother Prince Charles, that timid, undersized child known to the conspirators as the Duke of York. He succeeded James in 1625 as King Charles I.
If the death of the healthy upstanding Prince Henry would have been an unlikely prediction for anyone in England in 1606, the execution of Charles I, by his own subjects in 1649, would have been an unthinkable one. The roundabout of history turned again. Nicholas Owen’s cunningly devised hiding-places, designed to protect Catholic priests from the government of James I, enabled James’ grandson Charles II to elude capture after his defeat by Cromwell at Worcester. Subsequently, the throne of England was lost to the male Stuarts. For all the seeming fecundity of the Stuart dynasty, the seventeenth century was destined to draw to a close exactly as the sixteenth century had done: with problems of succession and religion compounded by the reigns of two childless sisters – Mary II and Anne. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the Protestant succession passed as it had done in 1603 to a foreigner, the Elector George of Hanover.
King George I was the great-grandson of James I. His right to the throne was derived from his maternal grandmother. There is a delicate irony in the fact that this grandmother was none other than the Princess Elizabeth, that little girl whom the Gunpowder Plotters had intended to place upon the throne as their puppet monarch, and marry off to some suitably Catholic prince. A staunch Protestant all her life, even at the early age of nine, the Princess had once regarded with horror the prospect of receiving the crown in this unnatural manner. With the ripeness of time, however, the crown did come the way of her posterity. Indeed, it is the direct descendant of this same Princess Elizabeth, mooted in 1605 as sovereign in her own right, who sits upon the throne of Great Britain today as Queen Elizabeth II.
So the dramatis personae of the Powder Treason and of their descendants made their farewells, dead, fled or reintegrated in their different ways into English life. But the propaganda war was only just beginning.
* The present (10th) Lord Vaux of Harrowden descends In the female line from Mary Vaux, Lady Syrneon, the eldest sister of Edward, 4th Lord Vaux.
† The Catesby family, kin to Robert but not descended from him, is however flourishing today. The famous eighteenth-century naturalist Mark Catesby, author of Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731), was part of it.
‡ Vestments, embroidered by her, including a set of white High Mass vestments of which the chasuble bears the words ‘Ora pro me Helena Wintour’, are still to be seen at the Jesuit-run Stonyhurst College, Clitheroe, in Lancashire (see this page).
§ Although there were rumours that the lofty Kings of France and Denmark had protested at this, considering a Cecil too common for such an honour, Salisbury was installed a fortnight after Garnet’s death.
‖ She was buried, like the infant Princess Sophia, in Westminster Abbey. Poignant monuments to them both can be seen in the North Aisle of the Henry VII Chapel (see this page).