The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (47 page)

It is true that there were passages in the works of the Fathers of the Church which referred to the lawfulness of dissimulating under certain specific conditions. Furthermore, in late-sixteenth-century Europe numerous subjects, who differed from their rulers in religion, faced the problem of what has been described as ‘secret adherence’, which inevitably entailed a good deal of dissimulation along the way. It might well be impossible to profess one’s true religion in public without vicious penalties or even massacre – this applied to crypto-Protestants in Catholic countries as much as to crypto-Catholics in Protestant countries. This kind of secret adherence was given the name Nicodemism by Calvin, after the Pharisee Nicodemus, a believer in Christ who out of fear visited Him only by night. It was a form of behaviour which received tacit acceptance.
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Equivocation as a particular method of procedure was, however, a novelty.
*
It was this procedure, rather than the mere fact of concealment, which seems to have caused general disquiet as a result of the Southwell trial. This disquiet, it must be emphasised, was shared by Catholics as well as by those Father Garnet called heretics; among the former, the ‘strange’ practice was ‘much wondered at’.
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At Southwell’s trial, Anne Bellamy, a Catholic woman who was the exception to the honourable record of her sex during this period, had testified that the priest had taught her to deny the truth in answer to the question ‘Is there a priest in the house?’ Francis Tresham’s reaction was to have Vavasour make a copy of Garnet’s treatise ‘that we may see what they can say of this matter’. This was exactly the purpose for which Garnet had written the book.
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Equivocation was essentially a scrupulous way of behaving by Catholics who shrank from telling outright lies. ‘He that sticketh not at lies, never needeth to equivocate’: this observation by the Jesuit Robert Persons is at the heart of the doctrine of equivocation and central to its understanding. Father Garnet put it even more robustly: liars took ‘a readier way to serve their turn, by plain untruths and evident perjuries’.
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In times of danger, a flat lie to protect the truth (such as Thomas Habington’s denial of the priests’ presence at Hindlip) would be most people’s instinct. In the same way, Catholic priests in front of the English authorities might have been expected to deny outright the truths which would have condemned them to death – notably the fact of their own priesthood. But they did not do so. Heroically, they attempted to balance the needs of their predicament with the prohibition of the Church on outright lying. Yet the lies they so painstakingly avoided, or believed they avoided, were of the nature that conspirators of all types – to say nothing of governments protecting national security – utter without a qualm.

The underlying principle of equivocation was that the speaker’s words were capable of being taken in two ways, only one of which was true. A typical example, which caused a great deal of Protestant indignation, had occurred in February when a certain Father Ward swore to the Dean of Durham that he was ‘no priest’ – meaning, it transpired, that he was not ‘Apollo’s priest at Delphos’. Secondly, Father Ward swore that he had never been beyond the seas: ‘it’s true, sayeth he, for he was never beyond the Indian seas’. One can see the absurdity of this: at the same time one can admire the earnest conscience which found it necessary to justify such life-saving lies.

Obviously the authority of the questioner was an all-important point about equivocation, as well as the seriousness of the matter at issue. Father Robert Persons cited the case of a man who denied he was a priest to an unjust questioner, adding the mental reservation that he was not a priest ‘so as I am bound to utter it to you’. As Father John Gerard wrote, the intention was not to deceive ‘but simply to withhold the truth
in cases where the questioned party was not bound to reveal it’.
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Furthermore, it could be argued that certain equivocating answers actually addressed themselves to the real question at issue. For example, the question ostensibly asked might be ‘Are you a traitor?’ A priest might therefore lawfully answer ‘No’ to his interrogator because, despite his priesthood, he knew himself not to be a traitor.

Father Garnet’s treatise, because it was provoked by the trial of Southwell, took as its starting point the Bellamy question.
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He justified the denial, saying that a Catholic could ‘securely in conscience’ answer ‘No’ when interrogated about the presence of a priest concealed in a house on the ground that he had a ‘secret meaning reserved in his mind’. Similarly the question ‘Did you hear Mass today?’ could be answered negatively because the person interrogated ‘did not hear it at St Paul’s or such like’. Biblical precedents were meticulously cited in the cause of justifying equivocation, including the words of Jesus Christ himself. When Christ told his disciples that ‘the girl is not dead but sleepeth’, before raising Jaira’s daughter from the dead, this was a form of equivocation. So was Christ’s declaration that he did not know when the Day of Judgement was to be: since as God the Son he knew exactly when it was to be.
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Unfortunately there were severe disadvantages to the use of equivocation. A leading Catholic authority on the Gunpowder Plot has gone so far as to describe its use as ‘the best weapon in Coke’s armoury, and, admittedly, the Achilles heel of his opponents’. First of all, the practice gave an impression of insincerity, not to say deviousness, even to the recusants themselves. The Appellant priests, for example, enemies of the Jesuits, ridiculed the practice: ‘in plain English’, this was lying. This was something on which any government skilled in propaganda could easily build. Secondly, almost more damagingly,
the doctrine of equivocation could be presented as alien, somehow unEnglish, and thus used to underline the notion of the Jesuits as Roman spies with no allegiance to Britain. Anniversary sermons on 5 November would regularly denounce equivocation in strong language of unequivocal disgust.
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At the trial, Coke, wondering aloud what the ‘blessed’ Protestant martyrs Cranmer and Ridley would have made of such ‘shifts’, argued that they would never have used them to save their lives.
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Thirdly, the doctrine of equivocation could be belittled and mocked.

Father Garnet, in his treatise, was concerned to stress that the occasions when equivocation could be legitimately used were ‘very limited’; anyone who swore upon his oath to a falsehood ‘in cases wherein he was bound to deal plainly’ committed a sin. But of course in the question as to which cases necessitated plain dealing by Catholic priests, and which did not, lay the crux of the dispute between Garnet and his captors. He might see himself as having a heart loyal to the King, but as a man imprisoned on a most serious charge he needed to convince the King’s mighty Councillors. It was unlikely, however, that Salisbury, Coke and Popham wanted to be convinced.

On arrival in the Tower the next day, Father Garnet was housed comfortably enough. It took him time to get such items as bedding and coal for his fire, but he described his room as ‘a very fine chamber’. He was allowed claret with his meals, as well as buying some sack out of his purse for himself and his neighbours.
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Garnet even declared mildly that the dreaded Sir William Waad was a civil enough governor, except when Waad got on to the subject of religion, which caused him to indulge in ‘violent and impotent [uncontrolled]’ speeches.
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Father Garnet was lucky – for the time being at least. Others were not so lucky. On 19 February, the Privy Council
issued orders which allowed ‘the inferior sort’ of prisoners connected to the Powder Plot to be put to the torture.
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The so-called inferiors included Little John and Ralph Ashley, as well as Father Strange, captured in the autumn, and the serving man from White Webbs, James Johnson. These orders, enlarged three days later, provided for those prisoners already in the Tower to be put to the manacles while other prisoners could be fetched thither for that purpose. The horrors were by no means over.

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There is a tradition that Robert Wintour’s wife Gertrude had various secret meetings with her husband during the two months he was on the run; but, given the persistent official attention to Huddington as a known recusant centre, one wonders whether either of them would have run the risk – for the future of their children was at stake.

*
He was writing long after the event but with information derived from Francis Bacon, who would have been present at the execution.

*
This is the version given by Father Gerard, who was not present; but it would have been pieced together carefully from the recollections of eye-witnesses: as was always done with the deaths of Catholics at the hands of the state, great trouble was taken to treasure the details of the final scenes.

*
This quarto version is now in the Bodleian Library, with Garnet’s corrections (and Coke’s own marks) clearly visible (Bodleian, Laud MS., misc. 655). The folio copy in Vavasour’s handwriting has disappeared.

*
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the use of the word in this doctrinal sense to 1599.

*
The real parallel was with a prisoner’s plea of ‘Not Guilty’, as Father Gerard himself pointed out (Morris,
Gerard’s Narrative,
p. ccxii).

†
See Mark 13:32, where Christ observes: ‘But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ Matthew 24:36 is virtually identical.

*
No one ever drank water with their meals during this period – which would have been another kind of death sentence – so that it was a question of what kind of alcohol, beer being most common, was served. Private funds were also an essential component of even the most spartan regime in prison.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Jesuits’ Treason

I will name it the Jesuits’ treason, as belonging to them…

SIR EDWARD COKE
March 1606

I
n the Tower of London, the torturing of the ‘inferior’ prisoners was pursued without pity. James Johnson was believed to have been racked for four or five days, and on one occasion, according to the official record, for three hours at a time. His crime was to have worked for Father Garnet under the name of ‘Mr Meaze’, at White Webbs. As a result of torture, he identified Garnet as Meaze when confronted with him. Ralph Ashley, suspected of having assisted Little John in his work, was among the other servants who were tortured. Father Garnet asked Anne Vaux to try to get hold of some money belonging to the Society of Jesus, in order to provide beds for the sufferers (the alternative for these broken bodies was the floor of a dungeon and straw).
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Nor were the priests, including Father Oldcorne, spared. Father Strange, that ‘gentleman-like priest’ who loved tennis and music, was a victim because of his friendship with Catesby, even though Strange had never been involved in the treason. Like Johnson, who was released in August, Father Strange lived out the rest of his life disabled, and ‘totally incapable of any employment’, as a result of his sojourn in the Tower.
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Most brutal of all was the treatment given to Nicholas
Owen, better known to the recusants as Little John. Since he had a hernia caused by the strain of his work, as well as a crippled leg, he should not have been physically tormented in the first place: as Gerard wrote in his
Narrative,
‘the civil law doth forbid to torture any man that is broken’. But Little John, unlike many of those interrogated, did have valuable information about the hiding-places he had constructed: if he had talked, all too many priests would have been snared ‘as partridges in a net’. In this good cause, the government was prepared to ignore the dictates of the law and the demands of common humanity. A leading Councillor, on hearing his name, was said to have exclaimed: ‘Is he taken that knows all the secret places? I am very glad of that. We will have a trick for him.’
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The trick was the prolonged use of the manacles, an exquisitely horrible torture for one in Owen’s ruptured state. He was originally held in the milder prison of the Marshalsea, where it was hoped that other priests would try to contact him, but Little John was ‘too wise to give any advantage’ and spent his time safely and silently at prayer. In the Tower, he was brought to make two confessions on 26 February and 1 March. In the first one, he denied more or less everything – knowing Oldcorne (or Hall), knowing Garnet, under that name or any of his aliases, let alone serving him. He even remained vague about his own aliases: it was reported that ‘he knoweth not whether he is called Little John’.
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