God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (36 page)

In the December of Walpole’s return to England—1593—an adventurer named William Polwhele voluntarily confessed—on the grounds of an over-burdened conscience—to a plot to murder the Queen. He, Polwhele, was to be the assassin and he suggested the Council investigate a man named John Annias to discover more.
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Annias, under questioning, provided two further names: those of Patrick Cullen and John Daniel, both Irishmen.
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Cullen, in turn, pointed the finger at Father William Holt, an English Jesuit connected with the Scottish Court back in its pro-Catholic/pro-France days of the early 158os and now known to be living on the Continent, consorting with Catholic exiles, in particular the northern rebels. Holt, said Cullen, was the man behind the plot, but actually he, Cullen, was to be the assassin.
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Daniel, when it came to him, pointed the finger wider still. The first name he mentioned was that of Hugh Cahill, yet another Irishman (and yet another who voluntarily admitted to being the assassin-designate). Daniel—supported by Cahill—said that those behind the plot were Holt, Hugh Owen and Sir William Stanley.
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Owen was an English Catholic, living in Flanders and widely regarded as one of the leaders of the discontented exiles. Stanley was a former officer in Elizabeth’s Army who, sent to the Netherlands to fight against the Spanish, had surrendered to Spain first the besieged town of Deventer and then his entire regiment; now he fought alongside Philip’s Catholic forces, stamping out heresy. Holt, Owen and Stanley and a plethora of Irishmen: three names, and an entire nation, long suspected by the English Government as a source of Catholic unrest.
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On 17 February 1594, as the confessions flowed, the Council appointed officers to every English port to search, interrogate and, if need be, detain anyone entering the country.
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But it was the very last name Daniel and Cahill mentioned that is of interest here. As he waited in Calais to board a boat for England, said Cahill, he was met by a short, tanned, well-set man, ‘with black hair, very like a Spaniard, about 33 or 34 years old’. The man’s name was Henry Walpole. He was accompanied by a Jesuit named Archer (who specifically urged Cahill on in his assassination attempt). Both Archer and Walpole advised Cahill to travel in secret, a statement confirmed by Daniel. If true, this was sound advice from Walpole to any Catholic Irishman wishing to enter Protestant England, but the implication was clear: Walpole was aware of Cahill’s mission and was therefore a potential accessory to murder.
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In the event Walpole appears to have satisfied his interrogators that he was entirely innocent of conspiring the Queen’s death: witnesses to his trial make no mention of any assassination plot. Under examination he admitted meeting both Cahill and Cullen in Calais, but since all three of them were engaged in the same search for transport across the Channel this was not in itself suspicious. He also admitted that he had heard rumours of a planned assassination attempt while still in Valladolid and that, in hindsight, he now wished ‘he had taken more intelligence thereof, but withdrew for fear of entangling himself’. He believed that ‘if any member of his society had been known to deal in such a horrible enterprise, the General [Aquaviva] would cast him out’. It was not enough to save his life, but it was enough to clear his name of misprision of murder.
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But the Jesuits as a whole remained severely tarnished by these accusations. In their absence, Holt and the unknown Archer were considered guilty as charged. This purportedly Catholic-led, Irish-backed mishmash of a plot, for which Patrick Cullen would eventually hang, might have seemed farcical in so many of its details, but it confirmed the government’s suspicion that the Society was growing ever more inimical to English interests.
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For if, as had been claimed, its members were prepared to promote Elizabeth’s assassination in order to save English Catholicism, then the Bloody Question had just been provided with an equally, and unequivocally, bloody answer. So why then was John Gerard, a known Jesuit, allowed to remain so long unpunished?
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One cannot escape the conclusion that this was a regime that still actively did not want to kill. Campion and Southwell had both had distinct and inspirational voices that had needed silencing, and quickly. Walpole, however unwittingly, had been linked to the Cullen conspiracy. But William Weston was now entering his tenth year of captivity, despite being the one-time head of the mission. And, significantly, since Southwell’s death, not a single Catholic had been executed in London. If this was a reaction to the outcry at his execution, then one legacy of those Tyburn scenes seems to have been to make the Government loth to proceed indiscriminately against Gerard now. So although Richard Topcliffe might write to Robert Cecil that the Jesuit was ‘very desperate and dangerous’, clearly, in the absence of any pressing reason to proceed against Gerard, the Council was prepared to play a waiting game.
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Meanwhile, they kept him in prison and under surveillance.
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Clues about how long Gerard was watched in the Clink, and by which of his fellow prisoners, are few. The only fact that is clear is that the informer was a Catholic missionary, for on 2 October 1596 the Secretary to the Privy Council, Sir William Waad, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, revealing the latest information to come from his ‘priest in the Clink’. The priest had told Waad ‘of a very tall handsome man…come from beyond the seas, apparelled all in black, a black satin doublet, velvet gascons, a long cloak with buttons. He was thrice in one week at the Clink, but being warned by Garnet, cometh no more’. Clearly Waad meant Gerard here, rather than Garnet, because in his next sentence he advised removing Garnet to a more secure prison (impossible with Garnet still at liberty) on the grounds that ‘he giveth advertisement [information] beyond the seas’. But this confusion aside, both Waad and Robert Cecil were now aware that their prisoner was receiving visitors and communiqués from the Continent. It took until spring the following year, some six and a half months later, for the Government to act on the knowledge.
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Now Gerard takes up the story. For some time he had known that a fellow priest in the Clink ‘was a little unsteady and seemed rather too anxious to be free again’. Gerard had therefore been ‘careful not to confide in him’.
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However, at the beginning of April 1597 this unsteady missionary (who evidently had not yet been set free) went to the authorities to inform against Gerard. ‘He said he had been standing next to me’, recorded Gerard, ‘when I handed a packet of letters from Rome and Brussels to Father Garnet’s servant “Little John” [Nicholas Owen]…and that I was in the habit of receiving letters from priests abroad addressed both to me and my Superior’. Gerard, himself, neither confirms nor denies these accusations, but given his other activities in the Clink it seems highly likely he had taken on the role of sorting-office for the mission, and highly unlikely he had done so in front of a man he mistrusted. Nonetheless, the accusation provided sufficient excuse for the Government to turn against him. On the night of 11 April 1597 John Gerard was unceremoniously removed to the Tower of London.
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He was taken to a ‘tall tower, three storeys high with lock-ups in each storey’. This was the Salt Tower, standing at the south eastern corner of the Inner Ward, the first circle of the palace’s defensive battlements. He was assigned a room one floor up. Next morning he was able to examine this new cell. One window had been blocked up, reducing what light there was to a trickle, but on either side of its stone surrounds Gerard could make out the names, in chalk, of all the orders of the angels. Above the window were the names of the cherubim and seraphim, above them the names of Mary and Jesus and, at the very top, God’s name, written in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Close by, chiselled into the wall, was the name of the author of this private oratory: Henry Walpole.
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Gerard remained in this cell just a single day, drawing comfort from ‘a place sanctified by this great and holy martyr’. The following day he was moved upstairs to the second floor, to another cell which was ‘large and, by prison standards, fairly comfortable’.
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His warder now offered to fetch him a bed, if his friends could provide him with one, and Gerard directed him to the Clink, from where he returned shortly, with a mattress, a coat and fresh linen, and the promise of a retainer from the Clink Catholics if he treated Gerard well.
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Next day Gerard was led out for interrogation. Waiting for him were Sir Richard Berkeley, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney General, Sir Thomas Fleming, the Solicitor-General, Sir Francis Bacon, then still at the start of his legal career, and Sir William Waad, representing the Privy Council. The examination began. And this time there is an official transcript.

The first question was whether or not Gerard had received any letters from beyond the seas. He admitted he had. Now his inquisitors began firing questions at him: whose letters were they, where were they going to, who had delivered them, what did they contain? Only once did Gerard seem rattled, confessing at first that he had burnt the letters, before admitting that, in truth, he had forwarded them on. But for the rest of the session he refused to name the senders, conveyors, or intended recipients of the letters. As to their contents, he had only read two or three of them and they had dealt solely with matters concerning the maintenance of scholars overseas; these he had sent on to parties more concerned than himself with financial affairs. Again and again, his examiners were forced to report that ‘he refuseth to disclose’ names. Towards the end of the examination Gerard was permitted to set down the reasons for this obstinacy. The writing is small and neat, each letter printed separately, very different from the extravagantly cursive secretary script surrounding it. ‘I refuse not for any disloyal mind I protest as I look to be saved, but for that I take these things not to have concerned any matter of state with which I would not have dealt, nor any other but matters of devotion as before.’ Questioned about why he had written the above in a feigned hand, he replied ‘that he would bring no man to trouble and for that he will not acknowledge his own hand’. Two matters remained. First, why had he recently attempted to escape from prison (a fact of which Gerard, himself, makes no previous mention)? He had done so in order to have the ‘more opportunity to save more souls’. Last, and with the only name they had at their disposal, his interrogators asked him about Henry Garnet. Were the letters for Garnet? Where was Garnet? Gerard refused to answer. Now his examiners produced the Privy Council’s torture warrant. ‘I do not think’, Robert Persons had written confidently, and incorrectly, in 1584, ‘that they will be so ready again to torture the priests they seize; so that those of us who are now sent will run much less danger of suffering than those who went before.’ He continued: ‘This is a great point, because truly to be hanged is child’s play in comparison with being tortured.’
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‘We went to the torture-room in a kind of solemn procession,’ Gerard recalled, ‘the attendants walking ahead with lighted candles.’ It is likely that the room in question was in the basement of the White Tower: underground, cavernous and very dark, though in the candlelight the instruments of torture were clearly visible.
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Gerard’s interrogators showed him the devices and asked him to confess. Gerard refused.
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He was led to an upright wooden post, one of the roof supports for the chamber, into which a number of iron staples had been driven. Metal gauntlets were attached to his wrists and he was commanded to climb up a set of wicker steps at the foot of the post. His arms were raised above his head and an iron bar was thrust through the rings of one of the gauntlets, then through the highest staple and then through the rings of the second gauntlet. The bar was then fastened with an iron pin to prevent it slipping and one by one the wicker steps were removed from under him. Still, though, his toes touched the floor and his captors were forced to scrape away the earth beneath his feet until they hung clear of the ground. Again he was asked to confess.

Gerard opened his mouth to respond, but, as he recalled later, ‘I could hardly utter the words, such a gripping pain came over me. It was worst in my chest and belly, my hands and arms. All the blood in my body seemed to rush up into my arms and hands and I thought that blood was oozing out from the ends of my fingers and the pores of my skin. But it was only a sensation caused by my flesh swelling above the irons holding them.’ For a while Gerard was tempted to answer any question put to him and it was only (he wrote afterwards) thanks to God’s mercy that he was able to resist this urge. He consoled himself with the thought that ‘the utmost and worst they can do to you is to kill you, and you have often wanted to give your life for your Lord God’. Seeing his continued refusal to speak, his examiners now left Gerard in the care of the gaolers.
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Some time in the early afternoon Gerard fainted. The gaolers replaced the wicker steps beneath his feet, supporting his body until he came to. Then, when they heard him beginning to pray, they removed the steps again. This continued some eight or nine times over the course of the afternoon until the Tower bell rang at five o’clock. Soon afterwards Gerard was released and taken back to his cell. The next day he was returned to the torture-chamber.