God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (42 page)

He hoped for death. The attendants urged him to relent: ‘You will be a cripple all your life if you live. And you are going to be tortured every day until you confess.’ Gerard prayed until he passed out. It was just after one o’clock. ‘The men held my body up or put the wicker steps under my feet until I came to. Then they heard me pray and immediately they let me down again.’ This happened ‘eight or nine times that day’. William Waad, clerk of the Privy Council, asked if he was ready now to obey the Queen and her Council. Gerard was uncooperative. ‘Then hang there until you rot off the pillar,’ Waad stormed. The Tower bell struck five. The commissioners departed. Gerard was taken down. On his return to the cell he announced within the earshot of several inmates that he had not betrayed his superior. Thus the message was conveyed to Garnet, Eleanor and Anne that they were safe, for the moment.

The following day, wearing a cloak with wide sleeves (his old gown was too small for his swollen hands), he was questioned again about
Garnet. Waad asserted that the Jesuit superior meddled in politics and was ‘a danger to the State’. Gerard replied, ‘I have lived with him and know him well, and I can say for certain that he is not that kind of man.’ He was manacled and tortured again, but not the following day. ‘The man needs physic,’ the Lieutenant of the Tower would warn in June.
⁵
By then Gerard could move his fingers, but it took five months for him to regain his sense of touch, ‘and then not completely’. Gradually he won the trust of his warder and received small kindnesses, like the oranges that he converted into orange-peel rosaries for his friends in the Clink. He was also allowed some paper to wrap them in and a pick for his teeth. ‘All the time I stored the juice from the oranges in a small jar.’

Orange juice can be used as invisible ink. Words can be scratched on paper with, say, a toothpick and later exposed by heat (see
Plate 36
for an example). The writing is then indelible, so interceptions cannot be concealed. (Lemon juice is less effective in this respect because water can also reveal it, but only temporarily, so that it will disappear again when dry. It would, however, be preferable for a letter that needed to be forwarded to multiple recipients.) So Gerard sent his messages via his former Clink prison mate, John Lillie, and his friends returned theirs on paper enclosing ‘some sweetmeats and other delicacies’, and the obliging warder obligingly passed everything on.

It was by means of his orange-juice letters that Gerard was able to correspond with another prisoner, John Arden, in the Cradle Tower. Arden came from Evenley in Northamptonshire some forty miles from Harrowden Hall. He had been implicated in the Babington Plot and confined to the Tower ever since.
⁶
From his cell in the Salt Tower Gerard could peer across a little courtyard garden into Arden’s cell. With the help of his well-bribed warder, he was able to visit Arden and thanks to Mrs Arden, who smuggled Mass equipment in with the linen, he gave him communion. It was only at this stage, Gerard later wrote, that he realised quite how close Arden’s cell was to the moat:

I thought it might be possible for a man to lower himself with a rope from the roof of the tower on to the wall beyond the moat. I asked the gentleman what he thought about it.

‘Yes, it could be done easily,’ he said, ‘if we only had some really good friends who were ready to run the risk of helping us.’

‘We have the friends alright,’ I said.

The Tower of London in 1597. The Salt Tower and the Cradle Tower are marked
.

We do not know what Anne and Eleanor thought of Gerard’s plan when John Lillie came to their house with it one day in September, but it received Garnet’s cautious approval. On the night of 3 October 1597, Lillie, Richard Fulwood and Gerard’s old warder from the Clink rowed up the Thames and looked out towards the Tower for two figures to emerge upon a roof. They had a rope in the boat and the plan was to tie it to a long weighted cord that Gerard would hurl down from the Cradle Tower roof. They would attach one end to a stake on the wharf and Gerard would gather up the other and affix it to a canon on the roof. He and Arden would then slide along the rope, over the moat and on to the wall, the wharf, the river and freedom.

‘At midnight,’ Gerard recalled, ‘we saw the boat with our friends approaching.’ They were just about to alight when ‘a man came out from one of the poor dwelling-places on the bank’ and chatted to them as if they were fishermen. The fellow soon retired for the night, but the rescue party ‘paddled up and down’ to give him time to slumber. The tide began to turn and the opportunity was lost. The boat turned back towards London Bridge, the old medieval bridge stacked with houses and underpropped by nineteen arches that could channel very dangerous currents at high tide. Gerard watched from the Tower as his friends’ little boat was dragged towards the bridge and then driven against its piles. ‘It stuck and it was impossible to move it forward or back,’ he observed. ‘Meanwhile, the water was rising and was striking the boat with such force that with every wave it looked as if it would capsize and the occupants be thrown into the river.’ He heard their shouts, thought he could discern Fulwood’s voice, though the distance was now about half a mile.

Men came out on to the bank and we were able to watch them in the light thrown by their candles. They rushed to their boats and pulled off to the rescue. Several boats came quite near, but they were afraid to pull alongside – the current was too strong. Forming a semi-circle round them, they stayed like spectators watching the poor men in their peril without daring to assist.

A basket was lowered from the bridge in an effort to winch the men to safety, but then a sea-going ship powered through the current and drew up alongside them. Lillie and Fulwood were pulled on deck.

Then immediately the small boat capsized before the third man could be rescued, as though it had only been kept afloat for the sake of the Catholics it carried. However, by the mercy of God, the man who was washed over into the river was able to grasp the rope let down from the bridge and he was hauled to safety. So all were rescued and got back to their homes.

The following day, which was Gerard’s thirty-third birthday, he received a message from Lillie: ‘It was not God’s design that we should succeed last night but He mercifully snatched us from our peril. He
has only postponed the day. With God’s help we will be back tonight.’

And so they were. This time there were no interruptions. Lille and Fulwood made it to the wharf, tied the rope as instructed and waited for the prisoners. The rope was too thick, ‘very difficult indeed to pull up’, and Gerard had miscalculated the incline. Due to the height of the moat wall, the prisoners had to work their way along the rope rather than slide down easily. Careful not to alert the guard in the garden at the foot of the Cradle Tower, a nervous John Arden went first. He made it across without incident, ‘but his descent slackened the rope’, making it much harder for Gerard. Less than six months earlier, the Jesuit had been in ‘an excruciating pain that distends the limbs unbearably’.
⁷
He said his prayers, gripped the rope with his arms and legs and began his descent:

I had gone three or four yards face downwards when suddenly my body swung round with its own weight and I nearly fell. I was still very weak, and with the slack rope and my body hanging underneath, I could make practically no progress. At last I managed to work myself as far as the middle of the rope, and there I stuck. My strength was failing and my breath, which was short before I started, seemed altogether spent.

Gerard’s friends could only watch and pray as he struggled to hold on. He drew strength, he said, from their prayers and the intercession of the saints. Slowly, painfully, he edged towards the moat wall. At last he could feel the stone against his toes, but the rope had become so slack that his head was no higher than his feet. He dangled lifelessly over the moat. But then John Lillie had his legs and pulled him onto the wharf. Gerard had to be given ‘cordial waters and restoratives’ before he could go on. The rope, untied and cut, swung back against the Tower wall.

‘We rowed a good distance before we brought the boat to land.’ Lillie escorted Arden to a safe house in the city run by Mistress Anne Line.
^fn1
Gerard and Fulwood headed north to the Vaux sisters’ house
in Spitalfields. Nicholas ‘Little John’ Owen was waiting there with the horses and before dawn broke they were in the saddle. They rode a dozen miles flat out to Morecrofts, near Uxbridge, where Anne, Eleanor, Garnet and their household received them with dinner and rapture. ‘The rejoicing was great. We all thanked God that I had escaped from the hands of my enemies in the name of the Lord.’

Gerard’s
Autobiography
is one of the most thrilling sources of the period. Evelyn Waugh likened him to Buchan, while the publishers of Philip Caraman’s 1951 translation compared him to Dumas. His prose is irresistibly swashbuckling and should be enjoyed, but with caution, for it is clearly partisan. He wrote in Latin around 1609 at the behest of his superiors and probably in the first instance for the edification of Jesuit novices. The initials of the Society motto,
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam
(To the greater glory of God), stud the top of his Preface page just as they have headed the homework of generations of Jesuit-educated children. Although writing from Louvain, Gerard never stopped being a missionary and his ‘simple and faithful narrative’ was forged, like the hagiographies of the time, in the furnace of the Counter-Reformation.
⁸
Thus, God was Catholic and Catholics were – mostly – good. Thus, God had carried Gerard through his torture and over the moat, and had chosen, during the first abortive escape attempt, to save the good Catholics, Lillie and Fulwood, before the ‘schismatic’ Clink gaoler. More controversially, Anthony Babington, ‘a very dear friend’ of Gerard, was executed ‘in the cause of Mary Queen of Scots’. The gunpowder plotter, Sir Everard Digby, had a ‘sincerity of purpose’ and his accomplice, Ambrose Rookwood, ‘died a martyr for the faith’. So too the ‘saintly’ seventh Earl of Northumberland, who was beheaded in 1572 for leading the northern rising three years earlier.
⁹

Gerard was selective with his material, which is the preserve of any writer, especially of autobiography, and keen to tell a good story, but his primary objective was to elide the Jesuit mission with God’s design. He gushed about his apostolic work in the Clink – ‘so many Catholics came to visit me that there were often as many as six or eight people at a time waiting their turn to see me’ – but he neglected to mention that he had once attempted to escape this ‘paradise’ on the South Bank.
¹⁰
His approach was probably not unlike the Jesuit line on equivocation: direct lies must not be told, but the truth might be embellished
or partially withheld for the good of the cause – the greater truth.

The
Autobiography
abounds with marvellous pen portraits of Gerard’s heroes and villains. Robert Southwell frets endearingly about blowing his cover; Richard Topcliffe swaggers about in ‘court dress’ and speaks ‘from the cesspool of his heart’; Dr Abbot, later Archbishop of Canterbury, wears ‘a silk soutane that came down to his knees’ and talks ‘volubly. It is all these men can do,’ Gerard adds, ‘they have no solid knowledge.’
¹¹
This reveals as much about Gerard as it does about Abbot and, indeed, it is at self-portraiture that he often unwittingly excelled.

He tried to be modest, knowing that humility was a good thing, but the man who had been fast-tracked into the priesthood couldn’t always keep the showboat off the page. He was particularly proud of the haul of aristocratic ladies that he won for his church. Lady Digby ‘formed a flattering opinion of me that I did not deserve’. Two ‘fashionable’ and ‘noble ladies, mother and daughter’, bribed their way into the Tower and ‘almost fought each other to be the first to kiss’ his feet. Dorothy Rookwood, who was known as ‘the saint’ in the convent where Gerard directed her, ‘was embarrassingly thankful to me for the little part I played in her vocation: she would sing my praises to the community, and so extravagantly, that when I came on a visit to Louvain, crowds pressed to see me’. One of the Flemish sisters apparently learned English ‘merely to make her confession to me’.
¹²

Gerard had clearly revelled in his Clink celebrity. He insisted on donning his Jesuit robes in examination (presumably over the hair shirt that he tells us he wore) and he insinuated that the priest who betrayed him was jealous of his popularity. Once, when the head warder banged on his cell door, Gerard had instantly known who it was, for ‘the other gaoler would never have dared to treat me in this way’.
¹³
He could afford to be imperious because he had astonishing charisma. Good looks also helped. He was tall – ‘Long John’ – and well set. In contemporary parlance he was ‘blackish’. He had dark curls, a ‘hawk’ nose and strong, angular features, ‘somewhat hollow underneath the cheeks’. He kept his beard ‘close’ and had ‘little mustachoes and a little tuft under his lower lip’. Topcliffe noted that he ‘smiles much’ and was ‘somewhat staring in his look or eyes’, which must have infuriated the interrogator, but didn’t seem to bother the ladies.
¹⁴