God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (49 page)

Garnet concluded that he would assure Rome that ‘neither by strength nor stratagems we could be relieved, but with patience and intercession of princes’.
²³

This, in any case, was his testimony after the event. A few days later, he received a stern admonition from General Aquaviva against ‘any violent attempt whatsoever’. It was the Pope’s express commandment that Garnet ‘hinder by all possible means all conspiracies of Catholics’. Should anything happen, he read, ‘nobody will be ready to believe that it was contrived without at least the consent’ of the Jesuits.
²⁴

Not long afterwards, Catesby visited Garnet and the sisters again, ‘as he was seldom long from us, for the great affection he bore the gentlewoman with whom I lived, and unto me’. They privately suspected that Catesby was also running from debtors in London, but it seemed that, having ‘gotten leave’, he wanted to tell the Jesuit superior about the plot. Both men were irritable and defiant. Garnet ‘refused to know’ any particulars and cited the papal prohibition. Catesby insisted that his plan was good for England, that the Pope would approve and that Garnet did not have the power to stop him. They finally agreed to send a messenger – Sir Edmund Baynham – to inform the Pope ‘how things stood here’ in general terms. Catesby promised to do nothing until Baynham’s return. Garnet summoned and dispatched their emissary, but ‘would not be the author of his going further than Flanders, for that the Pope would not take well that we should busy ourselves in sending messengers’.
²⁵

Thereafter, the Jesuit superior, who always seemed far more concerned about how the plot would play out in Rome than in Westminster, tried to bury his head in the sand. Within days, however, Tesimond had told him ‘all the matter’ of the powder plot. The burden of knowledge had been too great for Catesby’s ‘perplexed’ confessor. He needed his superior’s direction and so, by way of a walking confession (it being ‘too tedious to relate so long a discourse’ kneeling), he had revealed everything he knew. ‘I was amazed,’ Garnet later declared, ‘and said it was a most horrible thing.’ He told Tesimond that it was ‘unlawful’ and must be hindered, ‘for he knew well enough what strict prohibition we had’. According to Tesimond, Garnet wrote to Rome on 24 July: ‘There is a risk that some private endeavour may commit treason or use force against the King, and in this way all the Catholics might be forced to take arms.’

He requested another prohibition. (It did not help that Pope Paul V had only held the keys for two months; Clement VIII had died on 5 March and his successor, Leo XI, had lasted seventeen days.) A few days later Garnet was still fretting about the reaction in Rome. ‘Good Lord,’ he exclaimed to Tesimond, ‘if this matter go forward the Pope will send me to the galleys, for he will assuredly think I was privy to it.’
²⁶

If Garnet is to be believed – and it is by no means certain that the author of a treatise on equivocation should be – he had not known that John Grant was one of the plotters when he and his fellow pilgrims sojourned at Norbrook on their way to and from Wales in the early autumn; nor, indeed, Robert Wintour, with whom they stayed at Huddington Court, near Worcester. Nonetheless, Anne was highly suspicious.

They had set off from White Webbs on Friday, 30 August 1605: Garnet, Anne, Eleanor’s son William and his wife Dorothy, ‘Little John’ Owen the carpenter, and several other servants. Mary, Lady Digby and John Percy, S.J., came from Gayhurst. Ambrose and Elizabeth Rookwood joined them further north. They numbered about thirty in all and for the final leg, from an inn to the well, ‘the gentlewomen went barefoot’ according to custom.
²⁷

Before the trip, Garnet had been ‘in the greatest perplexity that ever I was in my life and could not sleep anights’. Anne would have noticed. ‘I ceased not to commend the matter daily to God, so did I not omit to write continually to Rome.’
²⁸
She would have noticed. During the pilgrimage,

being at Wintour’s and at Grant’s and seeing their fine horses in the stable, she told Mr Garnet that she feared these wild heads had something in hand and prayed him for God’s sake to talk with Mr Catesby and to hinder anything that possibly he might, for if they should attempt any foolish thing, it would redound to his discredit.
²⁹

Thomas Wintour might have wanted all the plotters to live the ‘monastical’ life, ‘without women’. His disparaging remark in his ‘jerkin’ letter about Henry Morgan’s ‘she-mate’ – quite possibly Morgan’s wife, Mary, rather than a mistress
³⁰
– suggests a streak of misogyny that might have been shared with other plotters: Percy was possibly a bigamist, Fawkes was a demobbed bachelor and Catesby, who made sure that Garnet was alone when he ‘moved the matter’ at Thames Street, was a widower.
³¹
But there were other plotters, including Robert Wintour, Robert Keys and the Wright brothers, who were married. Many also had sisters and female confidantes. It stretches credulity (just as, frankly, it often does today) to suggest that the women were completely excluded.

Anne Vaux was, in any case, deemed a superior type of woman, an honorary man, a virago, and like her sister-in-law Eliza, busy praying for Tottenham to turn French, she seems to have been privy to certain strategic conversations. She recalled, for example, Francis Tresham’s visits, ‘sometimes in the company of Mr Catesby’, at which Garnet ‘always gave him good counsel and persuaded him to rest contented’. She remembered Garnet’s words: ‘Good gentlemen, be quiet. God will do all for the best. We must get it by prayer at God’s hands, in whose hands are the hearts of princes.’
³²

Anne may not have known the details of the Gunpowder Plot, but she knew enough by the autumn of 1605 to implore Garnet to talk to Catesby – not Grant, not Wintour, Catesby – and Garnet had agreed that he would. He ‘assured’ Anne afterwards that the horses were for the regiment Catesby was raising for Flanders. He had written to help advance him to ‘a Colonel’s place’ and Catesby ‘showed her his letter and said he would get a licence though it cost him £500’.
³³

Whether or not Anne believed them is another matter. ‘In my cousin Catesby’s promises there is so little assurance,’ Francis Tresham had written to his father earlier in the year. ‘You know his promises,’ he added in another letter.
³⁴
In all likelihood, Anne knew them too. She was certainly dismayed, after returning from Wales, to learn that Catesby had been having ‘great meetings’ at White Webbs. ‘It would make the house more noticed,’ she exclaimed to Garnet, ‘and why did we absent ourselves but to have it out of suspicion?’ Then some, or one, of the wives had asked her where she and Garnet planned to ‘bestow themselves until the brunt was past in the beginning of the Parliament’. Clearly, they thought she knew what was going on. When she told Garnet about this, either at Harrowden Hall or at Gayhurst, she refused to name names; she had her own secrets and loyalties to uphold, but she knew then that ‘some trouble or disorder’ was coming, and Garnet could no longer pretend otherwise.
³⁵

Anne and Eleanor’s return to Harrowden Hall in October 1605 must have been tense for other, more personal reasons. Here was the Vaux ancestral seat, the home of their dear, simple, late father and the place, for Anne at least, of first steps, words and memories. It was also the big house whither they had moved upon the death of their mother and the marriage of their father to Mary Tresham. It was the birthplace of their half-siblings and now the home of Eliza (technically their half-sister-in-law), her Jesuit chaplains and her children, including Edward, fourth Lord Vaux, who had just turned seventeen. Despite the ‘moody atonement’ that Sir Thomas Tresham had apparently discerned among the Vaux women in 1599, Anne and Eleanor ‘had not been in that house for many years’. More than a decade had passed since Eleanor’s rant there at Tresham, whom she had labelled (
in absentia
) a brass-faced, Machiavellian conman and ‘a scandal to the Catholic religion and to all Catholics’.
³⁶

Now the old rogue was dead. He had passed away on 11 September 1605 after six weeks ‘in such extremity, tossing and tumbling from one side and from one bed to another’. The pilgrims returning from the well had called in at Rushton Hall to pay their respects, for, whatever his personal flaws, Sir Thomas had not been a scandal to the Catholic faith. He had worked tirelessly for the right to worship his own faith in his own country in his own way. Had he retained his senses at the last, he would have died a disappointed man. His ‘moth-eaten term of life’ perhaps represented for the next generation the futility of ‘Christian patience’.
³⁷
His death marked the changing of the guard. Anne and Eleanor and Robert Catesby, who soon joined them at Harrowden Hall, could not but have been reminded of their own fathers’ struggles; Tresham had been a brother-in-arms, if only figuratively, to Vaux and Catesby, as well as their brother-in-law.

About a month after Tresham’s death, Catesby and Wintour tried to inveigle his son, Francis, into the Gunpowder Plot. If we are to believe Francis Tresham’s account – and since most of the participants were lying or equivocating some of the time, any narrative of the Gunpowder Plot is necessarily based more on credibility than certainty – they had little success. Francis, whose recently inherited property was the attraction, subsequently told his servant that ‘his soul and heart abhorred so foul an action’, that he had refused to support it, tried to stop it and had given the plotters money to escape abroad.
^fn2
He sold his father’s chamber in the Inner Temple (where Garnet’s treatise on equivocation was subsequently found) and procured a licence, dated 2 November, to travel ‘beyond the seas’ for two years.
³⁸

Whatever the truth of Francis’s involvement, we may believe that Catesby had an easier conversation with Sir Everard Digby, whom he recruited as the two rode through Wellingborough after their sojourn with the Vauxes at Harrowden Hall ‘about St Luke’s Day’ (18 October), 1605. Digby had sworn on a primer to keep the plot secret and had subsequently received communion, though ‘at whose hands’ he would never tell. He later claimed to have enlisted in the ‘certain belief’ that ‘those which were best able to judge of the lawfulness’ of the plot had been ‘acquainted with it and given way unto it’. He had, he wrote, ‘more reasons … to persuade me to this belief than I dare utter’, even secretly to his wife. Not one of those reasons, however, was ‘directly’ of a priest and he had deemed it ‘best not to know any more’.
³⁹

Following Catesby’s advice to take a ‘convenient house in Warwickshire or Worcestershire’ for the Midlands rebellion, Digby leased Coughton Court from the recusant Throckmorton family.
^fn3
Although Garnet later admitted that he suspected Digby’s recruitment, and although he ‘perceived also an intention in him to draw us to that country for their own projects’, he accepted Digby’s offer to stay at Coughton. Catesby and Digby promised to visit Garnet there on All Saints Day, 1 November. ‘But they broke,’ Garnet recalled, adding that had they kept their word, he would have ‘entered into the matter with Mr Catesby and perhaps might have hindered all’. Instead, he preached his All Saints sermon, taking as his text two lines from the feast day hymn:

Gentem auferte perfidam

Credentium de finibus
:

Take away the perfidious people

From the land of believers.
⁴⁰

^fn1
I Henry IV
, Act 1, Scene 2. Shakespeare’s history plays were politically charged, especially for those interested in the making and unmaking of kings.
The History of Henry the Fourth
(as it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 25 February 1598) was the sequel to
Richard II
, probably the play specially performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men for the Earl of Essex’s allies the day before the 1601 rising.

^fn2
‘I know,’ Tresham reportedly told Catesby, ‘that it is both damnable and that thereby the Catholics will be utterly undone whether it be effected or no, for if it be effected what can the Catholics do, what strength are they of, as of themselves, having no foreign power to back them? For though at the first it might drive those of the contrary religion into a maze and confusion, yet when they should find by whom it was done, they would in their fury run upon the Catholics and kill them where-soever they met them.’

Tresham was extremely fearful of the Puritans and wondered ‘what would they not do to the utter subversion of the Catholics’ if the plot was effected and ‘there was neither King nor nobility to bridle them’. (Wake, ‘The Death of Francis Tresham’, p. 37)

^fn3
The sprawling Throckmorton kin network encompassed Catesbys, Treshams, Wintours and Vauxes (Catherine Vaux, daughter of Nicholas, first Baron Vaux, was the wife of Sir George Throckmorton, d. 1552). In 2009 the Throckmorton family celebrated its 600th anniversary of residence at Coughton. The house is managed by the National Trust and is open to visitors for ten months of the year.