God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (58 page)

^fn6
Another was self-mortification: ‘This remedy did Saint Benet use, feeling some fire in his flesh through the thinking of a woman; who, stripping off his clothes, rolled himself stark naked upon thorns and weltered so long there till his body became all of a goare [
sic
] blood, and so vanquished his temptation.’

The
Exercise
also recommended thoughts of death and cited a priest who had opened the coffin of a woman he had fancied and, finding the corpse ‘rotten and stinking very filthily’, dipped his handkerchief in the ‘carrionly filth’. Thereafter, ‘when either this or any other woman came to his mind, he presently took this cloth, and all to be-smothered his face withal, saying “Glut thy self, thou luxurious wretch, glut thyself with this filthy saviour of stinking flesh”, and by this means was rid of this temptation.’ (Loarte,
Exercise
, sigs 108–9)

26

Yours Forever

‘I never allowed it,’ Garnet protested to Anne a week after his trial, ‘I sought to hinder it more than men can imagine, as the Pope will tell. It was not my part (as I thought) to disclose it.’ Garnet had heard that five hundred Catholics had turned Protestant in the wake of the trial. Many were ‘scandalized’ by his acquaintance with the plot, ‘but who,’ he asked, ‘can hinder but he must know things sometimes which he would not?’ Other co-religionists deemed Garnet a coward for having given up too much information.
¹
He begged them to consider what they would have done if they had been examined upwards of twenty-three times ‘upon so many evidences’. He had hurt nobody, he informed his ‘very loving & most dear sister’ Anne, and ‘howsoever I shall die a thief, yet you may assure yourself your innocency is such that I doubt not but if you die by reason of your imprisonment, you shall die a martyr’.

Garnet was concerned about Anne’s health – her ‘weakness’ – and he hoped that if she did survive prison and escape abroad, she would not cloister herself in a convent. He also advised that St Omer was not as ‘wholesome’ as Brussels, but he thought it ‘absolutely the best’ if Anne could stay in England and ‘enjoy the use of sacraments in such sort as heretofore’. He wished that she and Eleanor could live ‘as before, in a house of common repair of the Society or where the superior of the mission shall ordinarily remain’. Again, he reminded Anne of the Rules: ‘you must know that none of the Society can accept a vow of obedience of any, but any one may vow as he will & then one of the Society may direct accordingly.’ She could ‘do the like’ with her vow of poverty, ‘but this I would have you know, that all that which is out for annuities I always meant to be yours, hoping that after your death you will leave what you can well spare to the mission’.

Garnet entrusted Anne with his instructions for the Jesuits: Richard Blount was to look after missionary business – the collections, distributions and communications – while three priests were authorised to take Jesuit confessions and the vow renewals ‘until a superior be made’. Garnet wanted his debts honoured, even the £4 2
s
that he owed, ‘though not in rigour’, to Thomas Wintour. This should be paid to the late plotter’s sister. ‘As for the goods at your house’, he was confident that anything on show would be left alone. ‘I gave order that the books should be taken away, neither was there any place fit to hide them, but if they or anything else be found in holes, you must challenge them as yours as indeed they are. Otherwise let all things lie that are hidden.’

Garnet wrote his final two sentences in Latin:

Tempus est ut incipiat judicium a domo Dei
.

Vale mihi semper dilectissima in Xto et ora pro me
.
²

The first was a scriptural quotation:

The time is come that judgment should begin at the house of God.

(1 Peter 4:17)

The second was his farewell to Anne:

Goodbye my ever dearest in Christ and pray for me.

It was not, in fact, Garnet’s last letter to Anne. Nor is it likely that she read it. The Lieutenant of the Tower forwarded it to Salisbury the following day recommending that it remain secret. He also proposed that ‘if good search be made at the house at Erith, his books will be found there’.
³

The last letter came on 21 April, Easter Monday (Plate 37). In the interim, Garnet had been examined several more times and had been told many things: that he might be spared death; that Tesimond had been captured and had disclaimed their walking confession; that Richard Fulwood and another servant had been taken with a letter and a cipher; that Edward Oldcorne was dead. Only the last statement was true. The Jesuit was executed on 7 April at Red Hill, near
Worcester, alongside his servant, Ralph, who had hidden in the hole at Hindlip with Nicholas Owen. ‘It pleaseth God daily to multiply my crosses,’ Garnet lamented to Anne, ‘I beseech Him give me patience & perseverance
usque in finem
.’ He catalogued his hellish year:

I was after a week’s hiding taken in a friend’s house. Here, our confessions & secret conferences were heard & my letters taken by some indiscretion abroad. Then the taking of yourself. After, my arraignment. Then the taking of Mr Greenwell [Tesimond]. Then the slander of us both abroad. Then the ransacking anew of Erith & the other house. Then the execution of Mr Hall [Oldcorne] & now, last of all, the apprehension of Richard & Robert with a cipher, I know not of whose, laid to my charge & that which was a singular oversight, a letter written in cipher together with the cipher, which letter may bring many into question.
Sufferentiam Job audistis et finem Domini vidistis, quoniam misericors Dominus est et miserator
.

Sit nomen Domini benedictum
. 21 April.

Yours
in aeternum
^fn1

as I hope, H.G.
⁴

There was almost half a page left, so Garnet, perhaps mindful that forged words could be added, filled it with an oversized Jesuit seal: the monogram IHS surmounted by a cross and encircled by the sun. Below, three nails pierce a heart with words from the psalm (72:26): ‘
Deus cordis mei: et pars mea Deus in aeternum –
God of my heart and God that is my portion forever.’

*

Henry Garnet was executed in St Paul’s churchyard on Saturday, 3 May 1606. Easter week had been deemed too holy and May Day, the traditional day of misrule, too riotous. ‘Will you make a May game of me?’ he had asked. The 3rd of May – the feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross – seemed more apposite to him. It also suited John
Gerard, who quietly sailed away from England, assisted, he claimed, by Garnet’s ascending spirit.
⁵

‘Dressed in a poor black habit and clothes reaching down to his feet’, Garnet was taken from his cell and led through the courtyard towards the hurdle and horses that would take him along Cheapside to St Paul’s. According to some Catholic reports, Anne rushed down from her cell to see him. Before either could speak, the Lieutenant of the Tower, who had only given permission for Anne to watch from her window, ‘fell into a great rage, reviling the keeper with many oaths’. The man protested that he was only following orders, which sent the Lieutenant into a ‘greater passion’. He demanded that Anne be taken away, ‘which was suddenly done, the gentlewoman seeming much amazed at her so unexpected bringing down & so hasty returning’.
⁶

At the scaffold, beyond the ‘great fire prepared for the burning of his bowels’, Garnet’s supporters saw the face of a saint-in-the-making. According to a manuscript account that was preserved for years by friends of the Vauxes in Northamptonshire, he appeared ‘very modest and grave, yet cheerful & somewhat smiling’. Luisa de Carvajal wrote of his ‘peaceful and composed demeanour’.
⁷
Conversely, Garnet’s critics saw a nervous, shifty man casting about for a last-minute reprieve.
⁸
Many dwelt on his association with equivocation. Although ‘he will equivocate at the gallows’, Dudley Carleton quipped, ‘he will be hanged without equivocation’.
⁹

When Garnet spoke, he repeated his defence, denounced the plot and defended Anne’s honour:

I understand since my arraignment that it is reported I am married. On my troth, as I hope to be saved, the honourable gentlewoman (so slandered) is as pure a virgin for any thing I know, as she was the first day of her birth & so I desire you all to think of her.
¹⁰

John More, writing three days later, thought Garnet had ‘served himself with his accustomed equivocations’. He did cede, however, that the Jesuit ended his life ‘in a reasonable constant manner’.
¹¹

Stripped to his shirt (which he had sewn at the sides so ‘the wind might not blow it up’), Garnet kissed the ladder and climbed. He begged that ‘Catholics in general might not face the worst for his
sake’ and ‘he admonished them all to keep their hands out of treason’. He said his prayers, crossed his arms to his breast, told the hangman he was ready ‘and so was put off, commending his soul to God’.
¹²

Accounts differ as to whether he ‘had favour to hang till he was dead’ or had his feet pulled by well-wishers.
¹³
Either way, he was spared the spectacle of his own evisceration.

*

Anne was kept alone in the Tower for three more months. ‘She is in good health,’ reported Luisa de Carvajal, ‘and from what they tell me, happy.’ On 7 June 1606, Eleanor’s son, William, was buried at Great Ashby in Leicestershire. ‘It was a shame,’ wrote Luisa, ‘for he was a very devout and honourable person.’ The cause of death is unknown. ‘His wife was very young and their children very small.’

Towards the end of August, Anne was released into plague-stricken London. Although ‘on the customary bail’, Luisa noted that she ‘goes wherever she wants’.
¹⁴
She soon joined Luisa, John Gerard and others in the campaign to prove Garnet’s martyrdom, saintliness and, thus, his innocence. There were stories about his crossed arms, locked in position even as he hung, and his parboiled head that ‘never waxed black’.
¹⁵
But the tale that caught the imagination of London, and of Europe, was that of ‘Garnet’s Straw’.

A husk or ear of corn ‘bedewed’ with Garnet’s blood had apparently jumped out of the straw-lined basket into which his severed limbs were thrown, and into the hands of a ‘silkman’ called John Wilkinson. (Some accounts, probably more truthfully, have Wilkinson plucking it from the basket.) He had been entreated by one Mrs Griffin of Drury Lane to obtain a memento of Garnet’s ‘passion’. The straw may not have seemed like much compared to the shirt bagged by ‘a person of great account’, or the ‘modicum of the said Father’s flesh’ that Wilkinson ‘fain would have snatched’, but Mrs Griffin declared herself delighted with her ‘jewel’ and placed it in a crystal reliquary.
¹⁶

Soon afterwards, the bloodstain reportedly transmogrified into ‘a perfect face, as if it had been painted’. It even had a ‘little reddish blemish’ on the forehead, said to be the wound that Garnet received when he was thrown down from the gallows. The Griffins were discreet with their relic and only showed it to a few people, but as
soon as Anne heard about it, she rushed to Drury Lane and instantly declared it a miracle. She begged to borrow it for a couple of days, took it to Clerkenwell and put it on display. Hugh Griffin was ‘much troubled’ before he could get it back. Soon England was ‘belittered with the news’.

Anne’s enthusiastic promotion of the straw was too much for the Italian Jesuit historian, Daniello Bartoli, who wrote later in the century that she was ‘not infrequently excessive in her ardour’. He also noted her great devotion to Garnet. ‘Spontaneous beatification by popular acclamation’
¹⁷
would not do in Rome, but it had been going on in England throughout the missionary period and Anne had learned from the master. Apparently she had only needed to look at the straw to recognise it as Garnet. Luisa had been less sure, but had shown great willing: ‘At first glance it cannot be seen that well, but it can be seen clearly and distinctly after studying it and even better with a candle in my view.’ The Earl of Suffolk thought it ‘a marvel’, but ‘it did not look like the father’. Luisa reasoned that ‘this is what he must have looked like after his death, because it is no doubt true what some say that if they are looking for whom it resembles, they will find no one in a thousand whom it looks like as much as the father.’

In public, the Spanish ambassador, Zúñiga, played the straw down, informing Salisbury that while he had seen it out of curiosity, ‘I have never been such an enemy to my money as to give it for straws.’ Privately, he kept it safe and smuggled a print out for his wife to circulate. One wonders if he also had a hand in the straw’s journey towards Liège, where it was preserved by the English Jesuits there before disappearing around the time of the French Revolution.