God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (49 page)

The post-peace celebrations were lavish. The negotiating party, giddy with relief, danced, dined, exchanged their presents and watched from the windows of Whitehall as, below them, the King’s bears fought to the death with a pack of greyhounds. Then they were escorted back to their residence at Somerset House through the half-dark of an August evening by a troop of fifty torchmen. Days later the constable was on his way back to Dover and a boat to the Continent, leaving Tassis with the unenviable task of continuing the secret attempts to buy relief for English Catholics. Three months later, in November, the constable would write up a report of his brief time in England. It was a realist’s summation. ‘The temporal resources of the Catholics of this Kingdom’, he told Philip, ‘are very weak, and they could not and would not dare to attempt anything.’ Moreover, he added, ‘they do not want foreigners, especially the Spanish, to come in here’. The best way, he wrote, for Spain to assist England’s Catholics was by maintaining the peace. For only with lasting peace could the suspicion that Catholics were fifth columnists and traitors be removed from English minds.
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The constable would get his peace. The treaty would hold and the Spanish invasion forces that Guy Fawkes and Thomas Wintour had hung their hopes upon would never again sail up the Channel to threaten England’s shores. But by now Fawkes, Wintour and their associates had moved on to another plot altogether and the elements of this particular tragedy were almost all in place.

There is little information about the activities of John Gerard and Henry Garnet at this time. Gerard remained in Northamptonshire, travelling the county from family to family as before, from Vauxs to Treshams to Catesbys. It seems likely that alongside his regular pastoral work he was involved in an attempt to ease relations between the Jesuits and the Appellants. He, himself, makes no mention of this, but William Watson, in his evidence to the Council, refers to a series of talks between Gerard and the Appellants in the late spring of 1603 and two letters exist from Henry Garnet, both written that April and both alluding to the possibility of a ‘union’ between the two factions. One of them, dated 9 April, specifically mentions a hoped-for meeting between Watson and Gerard. Whether or not this last meeting took place is unclear, but Watson was dismayed at the outcome of the others: they ‘ended only in breach’, he told the Council. It was, perhaps, this ‘breach’ that led Watson to delate Gerard as one of those Jesuits agitating for a Spanish invasion. According to Watson, Gerard had ‘bought up all the great horses he could throughout the country’ in preparation for war. This intelligence the Council carefully filed away for future use.
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Henry Garnet, meanwhile, was backing Tassis’ attempt to buy relief for England’s Catholics. In September 1603 he had written to Persons in Rome, asking him to use his influence at Philip’s Court to ‘solicit that they [the Spanish] will give money for any little ease’. In July the following year he contacted the papal nuncio in Flanders directly. The ‘principal [English] councillors’, he wrote, ‘give their oath that, on the prompt payment of 200,000 escudos, all the monetary fines will be relaxed against Catholics’; he urged Rome to act upon this information. Three months later, in confirmation of Garnet’s claim, Tassis reported home what he believed to be a serious offer from the Council of limited religious tolerance in return for further pensions from Spain.
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The offer would come to nothing, but soon Garnet was writing again, this time to Claudio Aquaviva. Now he suggested that English Catholics contribute to the payments for their relief as a further incentive to the Council to help them. ‘For otherwise,’ he added, ‘in my opinion, nothing will be done.’ Once Garnet visited Tassis, in secret, at Walsingham House close by the Tower; twice more he entered Somerset House to talk with him there; and in August 1604, at the height of the peace negotiations, he was back at Somerset House to meet with the Constable of Castile. No records exist of these conversations, but doubtless the subject was the buying of tolerance; and, clearly, for Garnet the hope of achieving some relief for his co-religionists outweighed the danger of his being caught. His actions should be viewed in conjunction with the instructions he now carried with him and with the information to which he was now privy.
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In July 1603 Garnet had received word from Claudio Aquaviva, exhorting him to extreme caution. The English Jesuits, wrote their general, must in no way meddle ‘in matters that did not concern their apostolate’; neither must they allow others to ‘attempt anything that…might bring considerable distress not only on you and me, but on all Catholics in general’. ‘I implore you to be prudent’, Aquaviva continued with uncharacteristic emphasis. ‘Shun every species of activity that might make priests of our Order hated by the world and branded the instigators of tragedy.’ These instructions, wrote Aquaviva, came by order of the Pope. On 22 September 1603 Garnet wrote back to Aquaviva, warning him, cryptically, of ‘restless men who, even in our name, entice our most intimate friends to rebellion’. He explained that, on learning of the trouble from ‘one of our brethren’, he had ‘sent a message and all was [now] quiet where previously the greatest danger had threatened’.
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About 29 September, just days after this letter, one such ‘intimate friend’ sought Garnet out. His information, as Garnet later recollected it, seems almost colourless now: he said, wrote Garnet, ‘that there would be some stirring, seeing the King kept not [his] promise’. But distance is altering: it bleeds the colour out of the significant and, by contrast, saturates the insignificant in lurid hues. Garnet’s ‘intimate friend’ was Robert Catesby, long-time supporter of the Jesuits, fast on his way to becoming (in the words of the Attorney General) ‘a pestilent traitor’. The ‘stirring’ to which he referred would transform itself into ‘that most horrid and hellish conspiracy’, the Gunpowder Plot. And Garnet’s response to Catesby’s announcement would prove prophetic. ‘I greatly misliked it,’ Garnet remembered afterwards as he argued for his life; ‘it was against the Pope’s express commandment…[and] I earnestly desired him that he…would not join with any such tumults. For in respect of [his] often conversations with us, we should be thought accessory.’
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Mary Gerard married John Jennison; Martha, the younger sister, married Michael Jennison. In her will, dated 1604, Mrs Jennison denounced John as being ‘contrary in religion’, i.e. Catholic.

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When asked by English Protestants why he kept Catholics around him at Court, James’s response, according to the French ambassador, was that ‘with one tame duck, he hoped to catch many more wild ones’.

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Curiously, Watson regarded John Gerard as being ‘of a good disposition in nature’ and wished that he could be persuaded ‘to live like a secular Priest’. This did not stop him from naming all those whom Gerard had introduced into the Society.

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On 22 August 1582 the sixteen-year-old James was taken hostage by the Earl of Gowrie and his faction. He was held captive until June the following year, when he was finally able to make his escape.

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It seems Henry Garnet’s immediate response was to contact the Vatican, though his letter has not survived. He, however, would later testify to this effect and a response from the Papal Nuncio in Flanders, of late July, appears to corroborate his evidence. The Nuncio commanded Archpriest Blackwell (Watson’s Superior) ‘to exhort [his priests] to do nothing against the public peace or anything that may make their religion hateful and suspect. They shall count for joy any contumely then may endure for the name of Jesus’. He continued: ‘the Pope will be most ready to use his authority amongst Catholics to secure the safety of his Majesty’s person and state and will call out of his kingdom all those whom his Majesty may reasonably judge to be noxious to himself and his state’. It was a clear papal prohibition of Catholic unrest.

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Gerard would write of his Scottish contact: he ‘made haste unto the Court to open the matter unto the King himself; but found it already known the day before he came, and so spake nothing of it, being not then needful, nor he willing without cause to be acknowen of acquaintance with Father Gerard’.

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A witness to the hangings wrote, ‘The two priests that led the way to the execution were very bloodily handled; for they were cut down alive; and Clark, to whom more favour was intended, had the worse luck; for he both strove to help himself, and spake after he was cut down. They died boldly, both, and Watson (as he would have it seem) willing.’

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The evidence linking Dutton, Fawkes and the unnamed informant to the same conspiracy is circumstantial but compelling. On his arrival in Spain in May 1603 Dutton claimed that another of his circle was about to visit Brussels, seeking ‘arms and munitions against James’. Fawkes, two month later, claimed to have been sent to Spain by an unnamed Englishman who had recently crossed to Brussels to ‘give a complete account about England’ to the Archduke and to ask for military aid. The presence at Albert’s Court of two different individuals both independently agitating for a Spanish invasion of England is unlikely, particularly as Dutton and Fawkes said they were part of a wider group of conspirators, therefore it seems sensible to view the three men as co-plotters.

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It was the widely held belief throughout mainland Europe that the only way to do business with the English was by bribing their Government ministers. ‘There is no one’, wrote one Venetian envoy to his Doge, ‘who sooner or later is not forced to apply to the Council and…seek the protection of some member and that can only be gained in England by presents and gifts.’

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The Constable of Castile, realistic to the last, instructed him to get the offer in writing immediately. ‘I see no assurance for our expense but their word,’ he wrote cautiously, ‘and although that of a king and such important people could be trusted in very great matters, in the spending of money more resoluteness is necessary for the accidents that can happen.’

Twelve

‘I never yet knew a treason
without a Romish priest.’

Sir Edward Coke, January 1606

R
OBERT
C
ATESBY’S ‘STIRRING’
was of a scope greater than anything that had gone before. The plots—real and imagined—that measured out Elizabeth’s reign had shared the same fingerprints, notably the invasion of England by a foreign army and the killing of the Queen. What Catesby planned for James was far more than a marksman’s bullet or a dagger in the back. What Catesby planned for England was far more than the loss of its King and a new regime. He planned to kill as many of its royal family as were assembled in one place at one time. He planned to kill its MPs, its peers, its bishops, its law lords; to blow the heart out of its Government, its Church and its judiciary; to leave it staring aghast at the smoking, twisted ruins of its Parliament building, at the windowless, pockmarked façade of its great abbey, at the debris-strewn streets of its capital city. He planned to dismantle it from the top down. As Thomas Wintour, Catesby’s cousin and his brother in political violence, later explained, Catesby ‘had bethought him of a way at one instant to deliver us from all our bonds and without any foreign help’. ‘[I]n that place’, Catesby told Wintour, referring to Parliament, ‘they have done us all the mischief, and perchance God has designed that place for their punishment.’
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Catesby and Wintour: it was a connection that encompassed kinship, an early attempt at rebellion (under the Earl of Essex’s leadership), and the abortive invasion talks with Spain: Wintour later testified that his journey to Spain had been at Catesby’s request.
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Its bloodlines reached out through the wider Catholic community, tying both men to the Treshams and the Vauxs, and caught fast in the web of these inter-connections were the Jesuits. Robert Catesby’s father had supported the Jesuit mission since its inception, alongside Sir Thomas Tresham and Lord Vaux. Robert himself had loaned Henry Garnet his house at Uxbridge, to which John Gerard had ridden after escaping from the Tower. Robert’s cousin, Anne Vaux, had cared for Garnet since his arrival in England, renting for him his latest safe house, White Webbs, near Enfield Chase, where Catesby was a frequent visitor. Catesby’s cousin by marriage was Elizabeth Vaux, John Gerard’s provider, and Catesby’s spiritual confessor was the Jesuit Father Oswald Tesimond, who joined the mission in the spring of 1598 and was stationed with Garnet.
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On Wintour’s side the connections continued. Wintour’s elder brother, Robert, owned Huddington Court, near Worcester, equipped with a hiding place bearing all the trademarks of Garnet’s servant, Nicholas Owen. Soon to be based at Huddington was the Jesuit Father Nicholas Hart, who arrived from Rome in 1604. Wintour himself had gone to Rome in 1601 carrying a letter of recommendation from Father Edward Oldcorne. A ‘son of mine called Timothy Browne’ was how Oldcorne described Wintour, the alias suggesting Wintour had no State licence to travel. It was as Timothy Browne that Wintour would later arrive at the Spanish Court and in Spain he would carry a letter of recommendation from Henry Garnet.
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Garnet was in the habit of issuing
laissez passers
to Catholics heading abroad, entrées to a world of international charity and religious aid. Over the years he had written numerous letters to his fellow Jesuits overseas, in order, as he put it, ‘to commend friends’. Most of these friends were men and women hoping to join the priesthood or to enter a convent. Some, like Wintour, had other ambitions in mind.
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‘As I remember’, testified Garnet afterwards, ‘the first motion of the matter of Spain was between Christmas and Candlemas [2 February] the year before the Queen died [1602]’; he continued, ‘Catesby, and Wintour dealt with me about a sending into Spain, and I wrote of their business…to Father Creswell.’ This information came in a series of sworn declarations by Garnet to the Government, but though the facts contained therein might have been correct they were also noncommittal; in his private letters to Father Oswald Tesimond and to Anne Vaux he was more revealing. To Tesimond he wrote, ‘I was moved in it, but would not consent to any invasion, but only to commend them for to receive pensions of the King of Spain.’ To Anne Vaux he described Wintour and Catesby as ‘conspirators in the Spanish action’, adding, ‘I utterly dissuaded that intent, and they promised to desist, and…they told me they would only sue for pensions in Spain.’
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