God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (57 page)

*
In July 1585 Claudio Aquaviva had written to Robert Persons, expressing concern about Garnet’s suitability for the mission: ‘Further, about Father Henry Garnet, I shall have to think much [before sending him to England]. For, not to mention the need I have of him here [in Rome]—this is something I am too easily tempted to put before the advantage of England—a number of reasons occur to me why we should think this Father more suited to a quiet routine than the wandering and ever anxious life that the mission of England means.’

*
Sir Christopher Yelverton, a Justice of the King’s Bench, was half-brother to Edward Yelverton of Norfolk, John Gerard’s first host.

*
It was not just all mention of Lord Mounteagle that was missing from the various examinations read out at Garnet’s trial; from copies marked up by Sir Edward Coke it is clear many statements were subtly manipulated to boost the prosecution’s case. No mention was made, for example, of Guy Fawkes’ assertion that Gerard was ignorant of the plot and all references to Garnet’s ‘mislike’ of the plot were omitted. It was also striking that the prosecution made no attempt to prove the actual indictment against Garnet; rather it worked on cracking open Garnet’s admission of misprision of treason, implying that his concealment of the plot indicated his approval of it.

*
On 15 July 1606, two months after his escape, Gerard wrote to Robert Persons, suggesting possible employment for himself. ‘I could have care of the garden,’ he told Persons, ‘for I am excellent at that (if you will permit me to praise myself) for that was much of my recreation in England, and I hope my brother will witness with me that he has seen a good many plants of my setting, and tasted the fruit of some of them.’ Curiously John Gerard was also the name of a famous Elizabethan botanist, author of
The Herbal, or General History of Plants
, and supervisor of Sir William Cecil’s London gardens.

*
Southwicke’s efforts deserved some form of recompense. On 9 February Dr Dupont, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, contacted Cecil, saying he had arrested Southwicke for lurking ‘suspiciously’ and for ‘being a stranger’. Southwicke was subjected to several days of questioning before Cecil was able to secure his release.

Epilogue

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

attrib. Sir John Harington

T
HE MOST IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCE
of the Gunpowder Plot was that Robert Cecil achieved his Oath of Allegiance. The text was based on the Appellants’ abortive oath of just three years earlier, for which Cecil had campaigned so stealthily, but this new one came wrapped in the rank scent of fear. The oath read:

I A.B. do truly and sincerely acknowledge…that our sovereign lord King James is lawful and rightful king of this realm…and that the Pope, neither of himself nor by any authority of the Church or See of Rome, or by any other means with any other, has any power or authority to depose the King, or to dispose any of his Majesty’s kingdoms or dominions, or to authorize any foreign prince to invade or annoy him or his countries, or to discharge any of his subjects of their allegiance and obedience to his Majesty, or to give licence or leave to any of them to bear arms, raise tumult, or to offer any violence or hurt to his Majesty’s royal person, state or government.
¹

The oath was floated in on a raft of fresh anti-Catholic legislation, as the Government considered its response to Catesby’s outrage. Parliament, so troublesome to James in its first incarnation, now showed itself foursquare behind him, raising the subject of popery as soon as it met. In the opening speech of the new session Sir George More, MP for Loseley in Surrey, called upon the House to make the safety of the King its paramount concern. Just ten days later a Commons sub-committee drafted its first bill. The acts that followed were wide-reaching. No known Catholic recusant might enter a royal palace. No known Catholic recusant might come within 10 miles of the City of London. No known Catholic recusant might practise the law or medicine, or hold a commission in the Army or Navy; neither might a known Catholic recusant, nor anyone with a recusant wife, hold public office. Known Catholic recusants might possess neither arms nor armour (except those necessary for their own immediate defence), though, perversely, they were required to provide both at the county musters. It was made lawful for any Crown officer, ‘if need be’, forcibly to enter any house in the country in pursuit of a known Catholic recusant. Recusancy fines were stiffened and new penalties were introduced targeting those Church papists who attended their local church, but refused to receive communion. It was decided to make 5 November a day of national thanksgiving.
*
Looming over the entire proceedings—affixed to spikes topping Parliament House—were the severed heads of Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy, grisly sentinels now sightlessly guarding the building they had once sought to destroy.
²

It was not, stressed the King in his post-plot speechmaking, that all Catholics were dangerous: ‘many Catholics were good men and loyal subjects.’ But how could you tell a moderate, ‘good’ Catholic from a ‘malignant and devilish’ one? Surely it was safer then to make Catholics identify themselves, forcing them to attest to their moderation? Surely it was an act of kindness, too, to give those moderate Catholics an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty? The oath, wrote James later, ‘was only devised as an Act of great favour and clemency towards so many of our subjects, who though blinded with the superstition of Popery, yet carried a dutiful heart towards our obedience’. Parliament simply wanted to discover ‘whether any more of that mind [i.e. the Gunpowder Plotters], were yet left in the country’. So the Oath of Allegiance enjoined its takers to defend the King against all conspiracies, and to ‘abhor, detest and abjure as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position, that Princes which be excommunicated or deprived by the Pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects’. ‘Heretical’: it was an injudicious choice of word. Were those who accepted the oath thereby condemning to perdition every Pope who had ever argued the case for papal supremacy? This was theologians’ battleground. For good measure the new legislation had also enshrined in print—so making it official—the supposed ‘doctrine’ that the papacy sanctioned murder.
*
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It seemed at first, though, that many of those Catholics to whom the oath was tendered—those already up before the law for their recusancy—were prepared to swear to it, eager to distance themselves from Catesby’s actions. The Government’s biggest coup came when the Archpriest George Blackwell, arrested in June 1607, declared himself willing to take the oath, and advised the secular priests under him to do likewise; earlier, Blackwell had expressed his revulsion at the plot, calling it ‘intolerable, uncharitable, scandalous, and desperate’. But by now the Vatican had responded, issuing a Brief forbidding all English Catholics from putting their names to the oath. And suddenly Europe’s printing presses exploded into action, with Churchmen and non-Churchmen alike rushing to add their comments to the ensuing debate about the authority of Popes, the authority of Kings and the right of an English Parliament to decide upon such matters. George Blackwell was upbraided by the Vatican for his ‘fear or imbecility’ and dismissed from office. From a prison cell in the Clink, one Catholic priest, claiming to speak for the Jesuits (but actually writing for the Government), explained how Catholics might in all conscience take the oath. And John Donne, an ex-Catholic but one with impeccable credentials (two of his uncles were Jesuits, while his great-great-uncle was Sir Thomas More), was moved, probably at James’s suggestion, to explain to Catholics why martyring themselves for the oath was a wasted cause.
⁴

Amid this confusing welter of contradictory opinion (from some of Europe’s finest minds), England’s Catholics floundered. Because, in attempting to codify their loyalty for them, the English Government had, in reality, forced them to ask of themselves questions to which no one had ever been able to find satisfactory answers. No theologian, ancient or modern, had been able to agree on the extent of the Pope’s power to depose. No priest going to his death had been able to agree on
what
had greater call over
which
parts of his loyalty, country or conscience. And every Catholic knew this. And now every Catholic charged with recusancy was expected to do the impossible and find an answer, or be accused of treason and suffer the penalty of praemunire: life imprisonment and the loss of all possessions.

The evidence suggests that the Government was sympathetic to their plight and that the oath was not administered as vigorously as it might have been; in 1608 James instructed his judges to show a ‘mild inclination’ and tender the oath only to newly converted Catholics or to those considered troublesome. Some Catholics seem to have taken the oath; many (according to John Donne) seem to have refused; a few wrote desperate letters seeking advice. In the summer of 1606 Lady Jane Lovell wrote to Robert Cecil, explaining that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that she had been advised by her doctor to go abroad for treatment; however, she had also just heard rumours that the oath was to be extended to those travelling overseas. A new clause was introduced to this effect in late August that year, followed, a few months later, by a clause extending the oath to all those entering the country. Lovell’s anguish was this: she would rather die at home, she wrote, ‘than do that thing which a religious and Catholic conscience cannot justify [i.e. take the oath]’; could Cecil help? It seems that Cecil did help: the last in her acutely painful series of letters to the Secretary was written from Brussels. Lovell was profuse in her gratitude.
⁵

It seems pertinent to ask what the Oath of Allegiance actually achieved, as distinct from the achievements of its companion anti-Catholic legislation. Certainly, Catholics seem to have fallen away from overt demonstrations of their faith in the months immediately following the plot. From the English ambassador in the Low Countries came a report, dated August 1606, that recusants once happy to support missionary priests had ‘retracted their contributions’. From Father Richard Holtby, who succeeded Henry Garnet as head of the Jesuit mission in England, came a letter, dated October 1606, revealing that ‘whole countries and shires [were now running] headlong, without scruple, unto the heretics’ churches to services and sermons’. And from the informer William Udall came the news that some three hundred Catholic households were about to write to James, begging leave to flee the country for the American colony of Virginia, rather than continue facing persecution at home. Their desperation to escape England can be measured by the fact that an earlier group of would-be Virginian settlers had been found to have disappeared without trace, leaving little more than a ‘Gone Away’ note behind them. But how much this weakening of Catholic resolve was in consequence of the Oath of Allegiance, and how much it was the result of an unprecedented tightening of all the other laws in place against them in general, is unclear.
⁶

What is clear is that the oath did nothing at all to reassure Protestants that their Catholic compatriots could be trusted. Even with legislation in place to separate those Catholics who believed the Pope could depose a ruler from those Catholics who did not (and might therefore be regarded as loyal), Protestant paranoia remained strong. And for this reason alone the oath must be adjudged to have failed—for what is the point of introducing safeguards if nobody feels safe once they are in place? So the anti-Catholic persecution continued. In 1610 new laws were passed by Parliament targeting married women recusants; in 1613 a bill was introduced into the House of Commons to force Catholics to wear a red hat (like Jews in Rome), or multicoloured stockings (like clowns), so that they might better be recognized and ‘hooted at’ in the street. The Great Fire of London, in 1666, was blamed upon Catholics, just as Robert Southwell had predicted when he wrote in his
An Humble Supplication:
‘If any displeasing accident fall out, whereof the Authors are either unknown or ashamed, Catholics are made common Fathers of such infamous Orphans, [even of]…the casual fires that sometimes happen in London.’ And in 1678-9 the rantings of a fantasist called Titus Oates led to a spate of Catholic executions and imprisonments, as London once again rang to the rumours of a ‘popish plot’, this time of an ‘intended general massacre of all the Protestants in the world’.
⁷

Only time, a changing political scene and a chance occurrence could undo this pattern. By the close of the eighteenth century Britain at last felt sufficiently trusting of its Catholics to permit them, in limited form, to celebrate mass, and so the first Catholic Relief Acts were passed. Then in June 1828 a Catholic Irish barrister called Daniel O’Connell, a leading voice in the emerging Irish anti-Union lobby, stood for, and won, a County Clare by-election: the law preventing Catholics from becoming MPs did not, it transpired, prevent them from standing for election. The Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, hitherto an opponent of Catholic emancipation, realized that to pacify Ireland he would need to make concessions. And in April the following year, 1829, a final Catholic Relief Act was passed. Now Catholics could worship freely, could vote again, could sit in Parliament, could follow a profession, could be a part of that society from which they had been excluded for so long. Three hundred years earlier, almost to the month, King Henry VIII had stood before a small papal court in London’s Blackfriars, and had failed to win from it his troublesome divorce, thereby setting in motion every event in this story.
⁸