God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (54 page)

Of the three accused Jesuits, he had probably been in the deepest. He was Catesby’s and Wintour’s confessor and had revealed the plot to Garnet. Catesby’s man, Bates, had implicated him, telling his examiners that the Jesuit had urged secrecy ‘because it was for a good cause’. Bates also confessed to the juncture of plotters and priests at Harrowden Hall in mid-October and to the messages exchanged between himself (on behalf of Catesby and Digby) and Garnet and Tesimond at Coughton on 6 November. He said that after delivering the news of the plot’s discovery, he and Tesimond had left Coughton to see Catesby and the rebels at Huddington. Bates was subsequently ‘heartily sorry’ for his confession, but did not retract it.
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Against John Gerard, the most damning piece of evidence was Fawkes’s testimony that he had given Communion to the first five plotters at their fateful May meeting in the Strand in 1604. None of the plotters suggested – and Gerard vehemently denied – that he had been admitted to the burning secret.

Henry Garnet appeared to have been everywhere and known everyone. That ‘nest for such bad birds’, White Webbs, had been his and Anne’s before Catesby and his friends had come to roost. Investigators knew about the journey to St Winifred’s Well and Garnet’s prayers at Coughton. They knew about the earlier ‘Spanish treason’, and Garnet’s 1602 letter recommending Wintour to the Madrid-based Jesuit, Joseph Creswell (the same Creswell who, in 1588, had served as chaplain to Parma’s troops and penned the proclamation that would have been distributed in England in the event of a successful Armada
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). They knew about Garnet’s dispatching of Sir Edmund Baynham to Rome (Baynham, a notorious roisterer, who had briefly been imprisoned for ‘some desperate speeches’ against James and was now labelled by Coke ‘a fit messenger for the devil’
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). They knew about the papal breves on the succession, Robert Persons’ pro-Spanish tract on the same subject and the latest Jesuit resistance theories that expounded the ‘lawful and meritorious’ case for the killing of ‘heretic’ rulers. They argued that the Gunpowder Plot had arisen ‘out of the dead ashes of former treasons’ and – a clinching observation here – Coke
noted that ‘gunpowder was the invention of a friar, one of the Romish rabble’.
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Thus: Tesimond had encouraged the plot, Gerard had sanctified it and Garnet had worked all the angles, domestic and foreign. If Bates had been the only plotter to make a direct accusation, if, indeed, the others had wilfully refused to acknowledge Jesuit involvement in the plot, ‘what torture soever’ was threatened, it was surely because they had been told it was a mortal sin to betray a priest. Rumour had it that Francis Tresham received a warning in his cell ‘that if he accused this Garnet it was impossible for him to be saved’.
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And so it was that this bloody band of elusive gentleman-priests, who wore hair shirts under their ‘feathers and fashions’,
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who hunted in public and scourged themselves in private, who thirsted for murder and marched towards martyrdom, and taught Catholics how to lie – so it was that Anne and Eleanor and Eliza Vaux’s friends and ‘ghostly fathers’ were depainted as the true villains of the piece.

Henry Garnet, meanwhile, who was terrified of torture, and Edward Oldcorne, who practised extreme self-mortification, were sitting in a hole knowing they could not hold out for much longer.
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The Jesuit superior had been ‘changing burrows’. On 4 December, he had joined Oldcorne at Hindlip, the grand mansion of the Worcestershire recusant, Thomas Habington. ‘So large and fair a house that it might be seen over great part of the country’, Hindlip’s finest features were embedded in its masonry. It was a gamble to go there: a house in gunpowder country, known to officials, with a Jesuit-in-residence. But despite many searches, Hindlip had never given up her priests.
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It may have felt sanctified, untouchable, at the very least it was familiar. Eleanor and the children seem to have gone elsewhere; their trail runs cold, though the presence of a French prayer book, inscribed ‘Baronne Brooksby’, in the library of neighbouring Harvington Hall (a place equipped with Owen-built hides), suggests that perhaps they did not stray far.
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Anne stayed with Garnet and the ever-faithful Owen. The carpenter, a Jesuit lay brother since around 1600, was about fifty now and lame (a ‘resty’ horse had fallen on him a few years earlier).
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A month before their arrival, Hindlip had been turned upside down, not by pursuivants, but a baby – Mary Habington had given birth to a boy, William, a future poet, on 4 November 1605.

Garnet retired to a ‘lower chamber descending from the dining room’ and waited for ‘the heat of this persecution’ to pass.
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He wrote to the Privy Council disavowing the plot and any Jesuit involvement. He stressed the importance of his order’s fourth vow of ‘holy obedience’ to the Pope. There had been an ‘express prohibition of all unquietness’ and Garnet had ‘inculcated’ it, he wrote, ‘upon every occasion of speech’. He had also sought a further ban ‘under censures of all violence towards his Majesty’. ‘I will infer,’ he continued, ‘that it is no way probable, in never so prejudicated a judgement, that the authors of this conspiracy durst acquaint me or any of mine with their purposes.’
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I will infer … no way probable
– neat words that prevented an outright lie. If the government’s detraction of Garnet is a caricature, so is the saint of his apologists.

On the afternoon of Saturday, 18 January 1606, a recusant friend of the Habingtons tipped them off to an imminent raid. Only Mary Habington was home, her husband having ridden to Shropshire to execute a will. On Sunday the search was confirmed for ‘one day in that week’.
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At the break of the following day, Anne Vaux heard the dreaded noises. She knew the drill. Garnet and Oldcorne were helped into position. Owen, whose ‘crooked’ leg was an obvious tell, ducked into another hide with Oldcorne’s servant, Ralph. Pictures, papers, books and vestments, rosaries, relics, chalices and other ‘church stuff’ were stashed ‘in the most safe secret places they had’.

Sir Henry Bromley had the house surrounded with a ‘seemly troop’ of a hundred men. The Catholics played for time, ‘sending to the gates, as the custom is, to know the cause of their coming and to keep them in talk with messages to and fro’. Bromley was wise to the tactic and ‘caused the gates with great violence and force of men to be broken down’. He carried detailed instructions from London: ‘You must take care to draw down the wainscot’ in the east part of the parlour, where ‘it is conceived there is some vault’. The lower floors ‘must be tried with a broach’ and the wainscoting pierced with a gimlet. ‘For the upper rooms, you must observe whether they be more in breadth than the lower rooms and look in which places the rooms be enlarged.’ Special attention was to be paid to chimneys and loft spaces, particularly any ‘double loft’ or seemingly inaccessible garret, ‘for these be ordinary places of hovering’.

Armed with their tools, Bromely’s men tried every room, but although they found a suspiciously large number of warm beds, ‘parcels of apparel’ and scholarly books, no ‘hovering’ was discerned. When Thomas Habington returned home that night, he vowed to ‘die at his gate’ if any priest could be found ‘in his house or in that shire’. According to one manuscript account, ‘this liberal or rather rash speech could not cause the search so slightly to be given over.’

Nicholas Owen and Ralph Ashley must already have been hungry; they had a single apple between them. The priests were better off. They had a store of marmalade and sweet meats and could receive warm broths and caudles (a medicinal mulled wine) through a reed in the masonry linked to Mary Habington’s room. They had ‘means to do
servitii piccoli
[urinate]’, but they could not light a fire on these ‘wet winter nights’, since they were hiding in a chimney. Nor had there been time to take out incumbent books and altar furniture. It was a tight squeeze. ‘We continually sat,’ Garnet recalled, ‘save that sometimes we could half stretch ourselves, the place being not high enough.’ It was painful and ‘both our legs, especially mine, were much swollen’. Despite this, ‘we were very merry & content within’ and heard each other’s general confessions.

On Monday and Tuesday Hindlip retained its secrets. Thomas Habington continued to bluster. His wife refused to leave. Anne is not specifically mentioned, though if she behaved according to past and future form, she was probably more virago than virgo. ‘I did never hear so impudent liars as I find here,’ Bromely groused, ‘all recusants and all resolved to confess nothing, what danger soever they incur.’ He despaired of finding ‘any man or any thing’, but on the third day, Wednesday, his men started to pull up the floorboards and ‘at last’ he could return good news: ‘popish trash hid under boards in three or four several places.’

Owen and Ashley, their solitary apple long gone, struggled through that cold January night. They were behind the wainscot panelling in the Gallery, a room ‘foursquare going round about the house’. They could hear the patrol. The following morning, Thursday, when the footsteps were at their faintest, they slipped out ‘so secretly and stilly, and shut the place again so finely that they were not one whit heard’. They made for the door, but it was shut, and the patrol returned, and they were taken. They refused to give up the hide and only after the
wainscot was systematically stripped, and the walls smashed about a bit, were ‘two cunning and very artificial conveyances’ discovered in the wall, ‘so ingeniously framed, and with such art, as it cost much labour ere they could be found’. Scant consolation for Nicholas Owen to witness admiration for his work.

Bromley redoubled the search. ‘I have yet persuasion,’ he informed Salisbury ‘very late’ that night, ‘that there is one or two more in the house, wherefore I have resolved to continue the guard yet a day or two.’ According to Luisa de Carvajal, who probably heard it from Anne, Bromley’s men drilled ‘lines of holes in the floors’ and made such a mess of the walls that ‘they feared that, despite the house being so sturdy and large, it might fall down about their ears’. More hides were uncovered, nearly all containing ‘books, massing stuff and popish trumpery’. Habington continued to lie with impressive front, but he had no good answer when the deeds to his house were plucked out of a hide.

‘Every day’ the two priests heard men ‘most curious over us’. Garnet believed that the search was ‘not for me, but for Mr Hall’ – Oldcorne’s alias – and also for Gerard, but ‘of me never no expectation’. There was evidently a lot of intelligence about. On Sunday, 26 January, a man who had sheltered Robert Wintour in Worcestershire
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claimed from the county jail that Oldcorne was still at Hindlip. He also insinuated that the Jesuit had commended the plot. The search continued.

‘After we had been in the hole 7 days & 7 nights & some odd hours, every man may well think we were well wearied & indeed,’ Garnet recalled, ‘so it was.’ But the greatest nuisance was not fatigue, or cold, or even cramp, but the lack of a close stool. An eyewitness, possibly the pursuivant who discovered them on Monday morning, wrote that ‘those customs of nature which of necessity must be done, and in so long a time of continuance was exceedingly offensive to the men themselves’ did ‘much annoy them that made entrance in upon them’. Garnet and Oldcorne ‘confessed that they had not been able to hold out one whole day longer, but either they must have yielded or perished
in the place’. In the end, wrote Luisa, ‘they opened up the walls in such a way that it was impossible not to find the hiding place’.

‘When we came forth,’ Garnet later informed Anne,

we appeared like 2 ghosts, yet I the strongest though my weakness lasted longest. The fellow that found us ran away for fear, thinking we would have shot a pistol at him, but there came needless company to assist him & we bade them be quiet & we would come forth. So they helped us out very charitably.

Their ‘chimney conveyance’ astonished the searchers, who had been expecting boarded-up corners. It was ‘strangely formed’ with an entrance ‘curiously covered over with brick, mortared and made fast to planks of wood, and coloured black like the other parts’. Again, Owen’s ‘skill and industry’ were admired. In all, eleven hides were found, the most recorded in any house.

Garnet and Oldcorne were seized on 27 January 1606. One hundred and twenty miles away, at the plotters’ trial in Westminster Hall, lawyers fulminated against ‘Jesuits not then taken’. It took a few days for Garnet’s identity to be confirmed and the news to filter through, but finally the prosecution had its leading man. The last act of ‘that heavy and woeful tragedy, which is commonly called the Powder-Treason’, could begin.
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^fn1
The thanksgiving prayer remained in the Church of England service book until 1859. From around the 1670s, it became popular to burn effigies of the Pope, sometimes with live cats trapped inside to mimic the wailing Whore of Babylon. William of Orange’s landing at Torbay on 5 November 1688 reinforced the providential nature of the date. By the eighteenth century, effigies of Guy Fawkes had become common and today, with Bonfire Night continuing largely as a secular tradition, he has morphed into a more generic scarecrow-type figure. In Lewes, East Sussex, however, where the sectarian origins of ‘the Fifth’ are not ignored, images of any public figure, or thing, are considered fair kindling for the fire. In 2012 representations of Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul V were joined by those of Lance Armstrong, Angela Merkel, Mitt Romney, Geri Halliwell, the Olympics and the Queen.