The Catholic World, Vol. 16, October 1872-March 1873

by Various

The Poor Ploughman.

A true worker and a good was he,

Living in peace and perfect charity;

God loved he, best, and that with alle his herte,

At alle times, were it gain or smart;

And then his neighbour right as himselve.

He wolde thresh, and thereto dyke and delve

For Christe's sake, for every poor wight

Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.

His tithes paid he full fair and well,

Both of his proper work, and his cattel.—S. Anselm.

A Dark Chapter In English History.[103]

One of the most gratifying features of the literature of the present, and one that in some measure compensates us for the evils produced by the many worthless books that are still allowed to issue from the press, is its tendency by close investigation and collation to vindicate the truth of modern history, and especially of that portion of it directly or indirectly relating to the XVIth century. Gradually, but most effectually, the inventions and gross calumnies of the post-Reformation writers are being dissipated, and the meretricious grandeur with which the characters and acts of the anti-Catholic sovereigns, statesmen, and generals of that eventful period were designedly clothed, has been stripped off, revealing to their descendants the deformity and impiety of the heroes of the Reformation. Whether we turn to England or Germany, Edinburgh or Geneva, we find the men and women who in our own school-boy days we were urged to regard as patterns of patriotism and morality, become under the scrutiny of living historiographers the veriest counterfeits—the prey of passion and the untiring enemies of every principle of government and religion which we are bound to respect. Yet this is what, logically, we might have anticipated. A bad cause needs to be sustained by vicious instruments; but so closely and consistently has the web of falsehood been woven around the true designs and actions of the reformers that it required the labor of many skilful and patient hands to undo the meshes and reduce the fabric, so dexterously spun, to its original elements. This is peculiarly difficult with the works of English historians and biographers of the past three centuries, whose unanimity in magnifying the virtues and screening the crimes of their public men is so remarkable as to utterly destroy the value of their works as authorities among people of other nations. The beastly vices of the eighth Henry were, of course, so glaring that they could neither be denied nor extenuated; but who would expect to find that his worthy daughter Elizabeth, the “virgin queen” and Gloriana, before whose benign altar even Shakespeare offered the incense of his flattery, should at this remote period be discovered to be: as a woman ugly, ill-tempered, and unchaste, and as a ruler fickle, cruel, cold-blooded, and thoroughly despotic. James I., the head of a long line of gallant princes, to whom his pliant prelates attributed “divine illumination,” and subsequent historians praised for his learning and wit, we at length know to have been a miser and a charlatan, as deformed in mind as he was uncouth in person. “His cowardice,” says his compatriot and co-religionist Macaulay, “his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person and manners, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision” to his English subjects. The unscrupulous Northampton and the subtle Cecil, the trusted ministers of [pg 177] both sovereigns, who had long been regarded as the unswerving champions of English independence and the bulwark of Protestant ascendency, are now proved to have been all along the paid tools of Catholic Spain, with whose ill-gotten gold their lofty palaces were built and their luxurious wants regularly supplied.[104] The chivalrous and romantic Raleigh of other days, examined by the inexorable scrutiny of the XIXth century, turns out a spy in the pay of a foreign and by no means friendly power; the philosophic Bacon, a common peculator; and Coke, the father of English common law, a falsifier of sworn evidence and a concocter of legal conspiracies against the liberties of his countrymen. Yet these were the leading personages, who, with many others equally corrupt, in their day and generation swayed the destinies of England, desolated the church of God, originated or abetted plots and schemes, at home and abroad, for the spoliation and extermination of the professors of the ancient faith.

This tardy measure of historical justice is partly due to the appearance in different parts of Europe of important public and private documents and correspondence, which have shamed British Protestant authors into something like truthfulness, but principally to the revival of Catholicity in England, which has been the means of drawing out a mass of original and reliable information, that had long been allowed to slumber in the dark closets of a few noble families or in inaccessible libraries during the gloomy era of persecution and proscription. Our readers are already familiar with the articles which formerly appeared in these columns on the long-unsettled and vexed question of the character of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the justice or injustice of her treatment by Elizabeth—contributions to current literature which in their collective form have found their way among the literati of all nations, and, from their admirable cogency of argument and conscientious appeals to contemporary authorities, have at length cleared away from the character of that ill-starred lady the foul aspersions and unexampled obloquy heaped on it by the minions of the English sovereign.

Some more recent publications have thrown additional light on the tragic incidents of her reign and of that of her successor James, which, as far as they relate to the Catholics of Great Britain, are full of freshness and interest. Chief among them is the Life of Father John Gerard, for many years a Jesuit missionary in England under both rulers, with his account of the celebrated Gunpowder Plot, written soon after the failure of that conspiracy. Many of the participants in the plot were personally known to him, and he himself was accused of having taken an active part in its formation; but, though his name has been frequently mentioned in connection with it and his manuscript narrative more or less correctly quoted, it remained for a member of his Order, the Rev. John Morris, the able editor of the book before us, to present to the world for the first time the only complete and accurate history of an event which has been the fruitful subject of misrepresentation and comment by every writer on English history for the last two hundred years.

Few incidents of modern times can be said to have provoked more hostility [pg 178] to the church and the Jesuit Order than the Gunpowder Plot, few have been so dexterously used by the enemies of Catholicity to poison the public mind against the priesthood, and none the details of which are so little understood even at the present day by friends and foes. The 5th of November, the anniversary of its discovery, has long been a gala-day with the more ignorant of the British populace; Protestant writers, divines, and politicians of the lower sort are not yet tired of alluding to the time when, as they are wont to allege, the Catholics by one fell swoop attempted to destroy king, lords, and commons; and even Lingard and Tiernay, with the very best intentions and after considerable examination of authorities, give a partial assent to the old popular conviction that, in some way or another, the Jesuits were at the bottom of the diabolical scheme, which in reality was the creation of a handful of desperate laymen. In fact, the former, with a penetration totally at variance with his general character, alludes to the taking of the oath of secrecy by Catesby and his companions in terms that would lead any superficial reader to adopt this absurd hypothesis. “All five,” he says, “having previously sworn each other to secrecy, received in confirmation of their oath the sacrament at the hands of the Jesuit missionary Father Gerard.”[105] It is true that in a subsequent edition of his History he endeavored to explain away, but in a very unsatisfactory manner, the implication of guilty knowledge on the part of Gerard; but, whether from an imperfect acquaintance with the writings of that priest, then unpublished, or from that spirit of timidity which too often characterized the conduct of the English Catholics of the last generation, his refutation is not of that full and hearty nature which might be expected from so clear and critical a scholar.

What Dr. Lingard was unwilling or unable to undertake may now, in view of more complete evidence, be accomplished by persons of lesser erudition, who, untrammelled by national partiality, are not alarmed at popular clamor or unwilling to disturb time-honored but unfounded historical fallacies. We design, therefore, in this article to prove:

1. That the Gunpowder Plot was formed and carried out to its disastrous end by not more than a dozen desperate men, the victims of unrelenting persecution for conscience' sake.

2. That the Catholic body in England, lay and clerical, till its discovery, neither were aware of its existence, approved of its aims, nor rendered any assistance to its projectors.

3. That no priest, Jesuit or other, was concerned in its formation, or afforded it any encouragement at any time; and that of all the seculars and regulars in the kingdom but two were ever aware of its existence, and that to them the knowledge came under the seal of confession and could not be revealed.

4. That those two used every possible effort to dissuade the conspirators from their design, and denounced on every occasion all violent attempts to redress the wrongs under which the Catholics suffered.

The state of England at the beginning of the XVIIth century, when James of Scotland was called upon to ascend the throne of his mother's murderer, was deplorable in the extreme. Less than half a century had sufficed to change entirely the whole face of the country socially [pg 179] and morally, and the once “merrie” people were divided into two hostile camps, one the army of plunder and persecution, the other the cowering, dissatisfied, and impoverished masses. Many were yet alive who recollected with sorrow the time when the cross gleamed on the spires of a thousand churches, when the solemn sacrifice was offered up on myriads of altars, when the poor and afflicted easily found food and shelter at the numerous convents and abbeys that dotted the land of S. Augustine, and the young and the aged, the weak woman and the strong man, together bowed their knees in reverence before the statues of the “blessed among women” and other saints. Now all was reformed away—changed not with the consent of the people nor by the argument or eloquence of the preacher, but by the brute force and cunning fraud of a corrupt sovereign, a dissolute and avaricious court, and, partially at least, by a venal and cowardly episcopate. The churches no longer resounded from morning till night with the solemn sacred chants, the monasteries were in ruins or the scenes of impious revelry, the festivals of the church were abolished, and the peasantry, formerly accustomed to look forward to them as days of rest from hard toil and occasions of innocent enjoyment, were sullen and discontented. Those who had shared in the ecclesiastical plunder spent their time in the metropolis in wild extravagance, while the gentry, most of whom still adhered secretly to the faith, remained at home, the prey of anxiety and the tax-gatherer. The masses were fast degenerating into that state of stolid ignorance and unbelief from which all subsequent legislation has failed to raise them. The laws of Elizabeth aimed at the suppression of all outward manifestation of Catholicity and the ultimate protestantizing of the nation; those of James, at the utter extirpation of the Catholics themselves.

As early as a.d. 1559, the first year of Elizabeth's reign, a law was passed compelling every person holding office, either temporal or spiritual, under the crown, to take an oath of allegiance declaring the queen the supreme head of the church. The penalty for refusing this oath was forfeiture of goods and imprisonment, and a persistence in such refusal, death. Whoever affirmed the spiritual supremacy of the pope was declared guilty of treason; penalty, confiscation and death. Attendance at Mass was to be punished by perpetual imprisonment, and non-attendance at Protestant service by a weekly fine. In the fifth year of her reign, any aider or abettor of such offenders was for the first offence to be fined and imprisoned for life, for the second to suffer death. Any clergyman celebrating Mass or refusing to observe the regulations of the Book of Common Prayer forfeited offices, goods, and liberty. In the thirteenth year, introducing into the kingdom a bull or other instrument of the pope was treason, penalty death; abetting the same, death; acting under such authority, death; introducing, wearing, or having in his or her possession an Agnus Dei, cross, etc., confiscation and perpetual imprisonment; and for leaving the kingdom without permission, forfeiture of lands and personal estate. In the twenty-third year, any person granting absolution from sin in the name of the “Roman Church,” or receiving the same, their aiders, etc., was declared guilty of treason, penalty death; and for not disclosing knowledge of such offenders, confiscation and imprisonment. In the twenty-ninth year, the tax for non-attendance at Protestant service [pg 180] was increased to £20 per lunar month, or forfeiture of two-thirds of all lands and goods; and for keeping a schoolmaster or tutor, other than a Protestant, a fine of £10 per month was imposed, together with imprisonment at pleasure. By the statutes of the 21st, 27th, and 28th Elizabeth, every priest, Jesuit, or other ecclesiastic ordained out of the realm was obliged forthwith to leave the kingdom, and in case of his return he was to suffer death; those who received or harbored him were subject to a like punishment. Those being educated abroad were required to return home, and after neglect to do so, upon their being found in the kingdom, were to be put to death. For contributing money for colleges abroad and for sending students there, fine and imprisonment for life were considered adequate punishments; but by the 25th chapter of Elizabeth, all who persisted in refusing attendance on Protestant worship were liable to be transported for life, and if they evaded the statute they were liable to suffer death.[106]

We see, therefore, by this comprehensive penal code that every office under the crown was reserved as a bribe to recreant Catholics; that private tutors were commanded to teach nothing but the new heresy in Catholic families, while those who objected to such method of instruction could neither send their children abroad nor contribute to the support of those already there. All priests were obliged to take the oath of supremacy and observe the Book of Common Prayer; such as did not were to be banished, and if they returned were to be executed forthwith. No priest could, of course, be ordained at home, and if ordained abroad he was to be hanged whenever caught, without delay. If one of the laity attended Mass or wore the image of his crucified Redeemer, he was to be imprisoned for life; if he did not attend Protestant service, he was to be fined enormously; if he had no money to pay the fine, he might be banished for ever from his home and country, and if he endeavored to conceal himself at home his career was to be ended by the hangman.

Nor must it to be supposed that these sanguinary statutes, affecting the rights and liberties of at least one-half of the population, were nothing but the splenetic fits of a jealous and tyrannical bigot or mere idle threats to frighten a half-civilized horde. On the contrary, we have abundant facts to prove that they were thoroughly and cruelly enforced, and that the sufferers were principally the better class of the community. In 1573, the Rev. Thomas Woodhouse was drawn, half-hanged, and then quartered alive in the usual way at Tyburn, for having denied the queen's supremacy. Two years later, Father Cuthbert Mayne was executed with similar barbarity in Cornwall for having in his possession a copy of a Jubilee and for saying Mass in the house of a Mr. Teagian; the latter, with fifteen others, for being present on the occasion, was imprisoned for life. In 1577, Mr. Jenks was tried and convicted at Oxford for exposing some Catholic books for sale, and about this time we are informed the prisons were so full of “recusants” that a pestilence broke out and large numbers of the inmates perished. Among the sufferers in 1578 we find the names of Father Nelson and a Mr. Sherwood, who were hanged and quartered solely for being recusants. In 1582, Fathers Campion (the celebrated Jesuit missionary), Sherwin, and Briant, after the mockery of a trial, were executed in London, [pg 181] and in May of the year following no less than seven other priests suffered death at Tyburn. Thus nearly every year supplied its quota to the martyrology of the church in England, not to speak of the nameless thousands who died in confinement by the quick but silent process of torture and pestilence, or abroad, broken-hearted and neglected. During the fourteen years succeeding the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, when fanaticism was rampant and bigotry held full sway in the councils of Elizabeth, sixty-one clergymen, forty-seven laymen, and two gentlewomen expiated their offence of being Catholics by a horrible and ignominious public death; while, according to the records still extant, the total number of the “good Queen Bess'” ecclesiastical victims amounted to the handsome number of one hundred and twenty-three, including one hundred and thirteen seculars, eight Jesuits, one friar, and one monk, besides innumerable laymen in whose veins flowed the best blood of the land.

The rack and the thumb-screw almost invariably preceded the half-hanging and disembowelling, so that many looked upon the gallows as a welcome relief from worse sufferings. Priests were tortured to compel them to disclose the names of their penitents, and laymen to force them into the betrayal of their pastors. Father Campion was four times racked, and then secretly brought before the queen to discuss theology with that model Supreme Head of the Church; while others like Nichols found it more convenient to swear to all their tormentors required, for, as that recreant shepherd naïvely says in his Apology, “it is not, I assure you, a pleasant thing to be stretched on the rack till the body becomes almost two feet longer than nature made it.” Father Gerard, who speaks from personal experience, has left us in his Memoirs the following account of this most effectual method of extorting confessions in the glorious reign of that queen to which so many of our modern writers refer with pride and congratulation:

“Then they led me to a great upright beam, or pillar of wood, which was one of the supports of this vast crypt. At the summit of this column were fixed certain iron staples for supporting weights. Here they placed on my wrists manacles of iron, and ordered me to mount upon two or three wicker steps; then raising my arms they inserted an iron bar through the rings of the manacles, and then through the staples in the pillar, putting a pin through the bar so that it could not slip. My arms being thus fixed above my head, they withdrew those wicker steps I spoke of, one by one, from my feet, so that I hung by my hands and arms. The tips of my toes, however, still touched the ground; so they dug away the ground beneath, as they could not raise me higher, for they had suspended me from the topmost staples in the pillar. Thus hanging by my wrists I began to pray, while those gentlemen standing around me asked again if I was willing to confess. I replied, ‘I neither can nor will.’But so terrible a pain began to oppress me that I was scarcely able to speak the words. The worst pain was in my breast and belly, my arms and hands. It seemed to me that all the blood in my body rushed up my arms into my hands, and I was under the impression at the time that the blood actually burst forth from my fingers and the back of my hands. This was, however, a mistake, the sensation was caused by the swelling of the flesh over the iron that bound it.... I had hung this way till after one of the clock, as I think, when I fainted.”[107]

It must not be supposed, however, that the zeal of the queen's ministers was satisfied with these harsh measures against the clergy and the more prominent delinquents. All Catholics were put beyond the pale of the law. The country swarmed [pg 182] with spies and informers. Lists were accurately made out and carefully preserved of the recusants who owned property of any sort, and every possible method of espionage was adopted to detect them in the slightest infraction of the bloody code. Domiciliary visits became the order of the day, or rather of the night, for that was the time usually chosen by the pursuivants. Doors were broken open, closets ransacked, bedrooms of women and invalids invaded without ceremony; and frequently, the previous movements having been properly concerted, whole families were simultaneously borne off to prison, there to be detained without the least warrant of law for months and years. The tax of £260 annually, equal to at least five thousand dollars at the present day, was not only vigorously enforced, but upon the faintest rumor of a foreign invasion or domestic broil, special imposts were laid on the remaining property of the Catholics, and the owners were carried to the nearest dungeon till the affair blew over, when they were as unceremoniously dismissed until the next occasion arose for plunder and personal revenge.

Thus was the work of reformation and evangelization urged briskly forward in free England, and she was fast becoming converted and enlightened. Torture, death, and confiscation dogged the steps of the unhappy recusant who dare to profess, even in the privacy of his house, the faith of his fathers for ten centuries—that religion which had raised his ancestors from barbarism, freed him from the thraldom of feudalism, and given him Magna Charta, trial by jury, and representative government. The crown lawyers, like Coke, Stanhope, and Bacon, laid the plans, pious bishops like those of London, Ely, and Winchester, leaving their flocks to the devouring Puritan wolves, constituted themselves a sort of episcopal sheriffalty, and vied with each other in their ardor for the spread of the Gospel and their love for the spoils of the Papists. Their leader in all this was a vulgar wretch named Topcliffe, whose audacity, profanity, and lewdness made him the terror of men and the abhorrence of women, but whose usefulness was so apparent that he was constantly the object of government favors and clerical eulogy.

But human hate and diabolical ingenuity, it was thought, could not last for ever. On the 24th of March, a.d. 1603, Elizabeth died, to the last the prey of vain desires and unsatisfied ambition. For weeks before her decease she was haunted by the phantoms of her innumerable crimes, and so terrified at the approach of death that she refused to lie in her bed or to receive any sustenance from her usual attendants. The courts of Europe, to which she had ever been an object of dislike and fear, could ill conceal their pleasure at the event, but millions of her subjects, the impoverished, the widowed, and the orphaned, made desolate by her despotic cruelty, in silence execrated her memory.

The Catholics generally found consolation in the thought of her successor, and, with that unqualified confidence in the house of Stuart, which now seems like fatality, they began to hope for better days under his sway. Was he not, they asked each other, the son of Elizabeth's royal victim, and could he be unmindful of the affection with which the Catholics of the three kingdoms ever regarded his mother? Had he not before he ever put foot in England authorized Father Watson to promise in his name justice and protection, [pg 183] and did not Percy, the agent and kinsman of the great Duke of Northumberland, assure his friends, on the strength of the royal word solemnly pledged, that the days of persecution were at an end? Poor deluded people, they little knew how much deceit lay in the heart of him whom the Protestant lord primate rather blasphemously averred “the like had not been since the time of Christ.” He had scarcely put on the crown when the Catholics discovered that they had neither mercy nor justice to expect from him. Once secure in the support of the Protestant party, he turned a deaf ear to their complaints, and even had the mendacity to deny his own word of honor, giving as a reason “that, since Protestants had so generally received and proclaimed him king, he had now no need of Papists.” Being by nature intolerant, he oppressed the Puritans, by whom he had been trained, to please the Episcopalians, and to gratify both he ground the Catholics into dust; arrests for recusancy multiplied, illegal visitations became more frequent, and if possible more annoying, the arrears of the monthly tax which he at first pretended to remit were demanded, and the amount, already enormous, was even increased so as to satisfy the ever-increasing rapacity of his pauper courtiers who had followed him into England. In place and out of it, he made the most violent attacks on the faith of his dead mother and of at least one-half of his English subjects, and his remarks were taken up and repeated from every Protestant pulpit and in every conventicle throughout the length and breadth of the land, till the hopes of the Catholics grew fainter and fainter, and finally expired. Unlike Elizabeth, he was not only expected to live a long life, but his progeny would succeed him, the heirs of his authority and cruelty; and being constitutionally a coward and an intriguer, he was bent on making peace with foreign powers, and thus cutting off all sympathy which the Catholic sovereigns might have felt it their interest to express for their suffering co-religionists in Great Britain.

Though the principles of reciprocal protection and allegiance were not as well defined at that period as, they have since been, the Catholics of England would have been more or less than human if they could have regarded James' government with any feeling other than detestation, and the wonder is not that a plot was laid to destroy it, but that so very few of the persecuted multitude could be found to embark in it, notwithstanding the manifold reasons afforded by the king and parliament for their destruction. It was an age of conspiracies and counterplots, when the highest and most trusted in every land endeavored by force or fraud to accomplish political and personal ends, success being the only criterion of merit. The history of Europe from the middle of the preceding century is full of dark schemes and secret contrivances, in which nobles and princes figure alternately as the bribers or the bribed, the patrons or the victims of the assassin, now devoted patriots and anon double-dyed traitors. The long civil wars, the vicious legacy of the Lutheran attempt to unsettle the faith of Christendom, had nearly ceased from sheer exhaustion, and unemployed soldiers of desperate fortunes but undoubted courage were to be easily had for any enterprise, no matter how dangerous.

Of this character was Guy or Guido Fawkes, whose name, though not himself the originator of the Gunpowder Plot, is most intimately [pg 184] associated with it in popular tradition. The real authors were Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, Thomas Winter, and John Wright; all of whom were country gentlemen of good family and education, but, except Catesby, very much reduced in circumstances owing to the unjust and repeated exactions of the penal laws, which had not only robbed them of their property and shut them out from all public employment, but had branded them with the stigma of traitors to their country and enemies to their sovereign; for, having in the early part of their lives conformed to Protestantism, they had subsequently returned to the church into which they had been baptized—an offence in the eyes of the rulers of that day of the deepest dye.

In the early part of 1604, the five conspirators met in London, and, having taken a solemn oath of secrecy, determined on their future schemes for the total destruction of the government. Wishing, however, it seems, to exhaust all milder remedies, they sent agents to Spain and other foreign powers friendly to the Catholic cause, to induce them to use their good offices in mitigating the sufferings of the English recusants. The answers were generally favorable, but non-committal, and the practical result nothing. They then determined to depend on themselves alone, and in the autumn rented a building adjoining the Palace of Westminster, the old House of Parliament, and commenced to undermine the dividing wall. This, some three yards thick of solid masonry, they found a work of difficulty, and from the paucity of their numbers and their inexperience in manual labor, advanced slowly. A circumstance soon occurred to modify their plans. A portion of the cellar immediately under the prince's chamber, which had been used by a coal dealer, was vacated by the tenant, and Percy rented it, ostensibly for storage purposes. The mine was abandoned, and thirty-two barrels of powder, which had been stored previously at Lambeth, were introduced in the night-time, and covered from observation by wood, furniture, etc. All that was now required to complete the conspiracy was a proper moment for the application of the match. This work had brought them into the spring of 1605, and, as parliament was not to assemble for some months, they resolved to separate, some going into the country to see their relatives, and others to the Continent to enlist the assistance of such adventurers as could be found willing to take service under the anticipated new régime. Meanwhile eight more persons were admitted into the plot, the principal of whom were Rokewood, Grant, Tresham, and Sir Everard Digby, all young men of family and fortune, whose proud spirits chafed continually under the social and political ostracism to which all recusants of the period were doomed.

The opening of parliament, expected in September, was, however, postponed till the 5th of November, but, to the secret satisfaction of Catesby and his fellows, the penal laws continued to be rigidly enforced, and additional measures of persecution were devised by the king's council for the adoption by the legislature when it should meet. As that time approached and everything augured success, the parts of the leading actors in the bloody drama were distributed. Fawkes was to fire the powder which was to blow the king, his oldest son Henry, and the lords and commons into eternity; Prince Charles, the next in succession, having been seized by Percy, was to be [pg 185] proclaimed king at Charing Cross by Catesby; while Tresham, Grant, and Digby were to gain possession of the person of the infant princess Elizabeth, at Lord Harrington's country-seat. After the explosion, Fawkes was to sail for Flanders to bring over reinforcements, and the others, a protector for the royal children having been appointed, were to rendezvous at Digby's residence and raise the country in favor of the new government. There was a method in the madness of these men, and the first part of their programme would undoubtedly have been carried out but for one important fact upon which it seems they did not reckon: Cecil was fully cognizant of all their movements, and for his own good reasons, as we shall hereafter see, allowed them to proceed unchecked to the very last moment.

That moment expired soon after midnight on the night of the 4th-5th of November, only a few hours before the expected catastrophe. As Fawkes was entering the cellar to assure himself that all was in readiness, he was seized by a body of soldiers under the command of Sir Thomas Knevett. His dress denoted that he was prepared for a journey, arms and matches were found upon his person, a dark-lantern was discovered in a corner, and the removal of the débris that was piled in the vault revealed the powder arranged ready for explosion.

The scene that ensued was highly dramatic, and did great credit to the histrionic genius of the secretary. The lords of the council were hastily summoned to the king's bed-chamber, the prisoner was brought up for examination by torch-light, and the royal pedant sat on the side of his couch in his night-clothes for several hours, questioning and cross-questioning the would-be murderer. But Guy was made of stern stuff, and, while he freely admitted that his intention had been “to blow the Scotch beggars back to their native mountains,” he obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates. The news spread with rapidity, and London at daylight was in the wildest commotion. The other conspirators in the city, with the exception of Tresham, fled to Digby's house near Dunchurch, where a hunting party had assembled, but upon the disclosure of the treason and its failure the guests rapidly dispersed, two or three only, from friendship or other causes, resolving to remain with the conspirators and share the fate which now seemed certain to overtake them. One of these was Stephen Littleton, who resided at Holbeach in Staffordshire, a strongly Catholic county, and thither the whole party, numbering between forty and fifty, including grooms and other servants, proceeded through Warwick and Worcester, vainly endeavoring on their road to excite the people to join them. At Holbeach they resolved to make a stand, but an accident destroyed whatever little chance might have remained of a successful resistance. Their ammunition, which had been wet during their hurried journey, exploded while being dried, and not only seriously injured Catesby and three others, but afforded an excuse for their handful of followers to forsake them. In this condition they were soon surrounded by the forces of Sir Richard Walsh, who, after summoning them to surrender and receiving a defiant negative, ordered his men to fire. The brothers Wright, Percy, and Catesby, fell mortally wounded; Rokewood, Winter, Morgan, and Grant were wounded and taken prisoners, and Digby and the two others were soon after captured. They were immediately [pg 186] taken to London, tried, and with Fawkes executed on the 30th of the following January.

Under ordinary circumstances, this insane conspiracy of a dozen desperate men would have ended here, and the plot itself have become lost in the thousand-and-one concerted crimes against authority which disfigure the annals of European monarchy in the middle ages; but the Puritan party in England, the more insatiable enemies of the Catholics, who saw in it an excellent opportunity for wholesale spoliation of what yet remained to the persecuted, endeavored to involve the millions in the treasonable guilt of the few, and Cecil, who had so long nursed the designs of the traitors, had his own deep schemes to subserve by endorsing this foul calumny. But James, bigot as he was, could not, in the face of such palpable facts to the contrary, go to this extreme length. “For though it cannot be denied,” he said in his speech to parliament recounting the discovery and origin of the plot, “that it was only the blind superstition of their errors in religion that led them to this desperate device, yet doth it not follow that all professing that Romish religion were guilty of the same.” Yet the Puritan party, who hungered for the spoils, by constant repetition succeeded in fastening the imputation of guilt on the entire Catholic body in England, and for a long time it was partially believed abroad, and re-echoed without hesitation by subsequent historians. The author of Her Majesty's Tower, to whom Catholicity owes little else, has, we are happy to say, had the manhood to set the matter in its true light in his recent publication. He says:

“The news of this plot was heard by the old English Catholics with more astonishment than rage, though the expression of their anger was both loud and deep. The priests were still more prompt to denounce it than their flocks. The venerable Archpriest, George Blackwell, took up his pen before a single man had yet been killed or captured in the shires, and in a brief address to the Catholic clergy stigmatized the plot as a detestable contrivance in which no true Catholic could have a share—as an abominable thing, contrary to Holy Writ, to the councils, and to the instructions of the spiritual guides. Blackwell told his clergy to exhort their flocks to peace and obedience, and to avoid falling into snares.”

But it was necessary for the purpose of affording a decent pretext for further penal legislation, long since agreed upon in the council, as well as to destroy the sympathy still felt at foreign courts for the persecuted English, that the blame of the foul conspiracy should be laid not on the inhuman laws which had driven gallant and loyal men into deadly conflict with the government, but on the church. As it was impossible to implicate any considerable number of the laity or the secular clergy, it was resolved to single out the few Jesuits then in the country, and through them the entire Order, as fitting objects of national hatred and universal obloquy. The trick was not new even then, though since much practised and refined. Its execution was consonant also with the parliamentary design of exterminating Catholicity in the three kingdoms. The old clergy, or, as they were called, “Queen Mary's priests,” were few, aged, and sure soon to die out in the course of nature, while the authorities had taken good care that they should leave no successors of native education. The Jesuits, on the contrary, were young men, generally scions of noble houses, gentle in breeding, and, from their continental training, thorough linguists, acute reasoners, and polished [pg 187] gentlemen. Their erudition made them feared by the half-taught sophists of the reformed prelacy, their refined manners secured their admission into the best families, and their noble enthusiasm defied the utmost severity of the Puritan and Episcopal magistrates. Their knowledge of the country was accurate, and, though they were accused by such hired defamers as Coke of using many aliases, the odium was not theirs, but the law's, that made their very presence in their native land treason. No religious community, it is well known, is the church, nor is she responsible for the conduct of each particular member, but the orders may be regarded as the vedettes of her grand army, and before it can be successfully attacked they must be driven in or captured.

Accordingly, one of the first steps taken by the king's advisers after the trial of the conspirators was to issue a proclamation for the arrest of Fathers Gerard, Greenway, and Garnett, three of the four Jesuit missionaries then known to be in England. In this official document it was alleged “to be plain and evident from the examinations that all three had been peculiarly practisers in the plot.” Now, let us examine for a moment upon what those grave accusations were based. Simply on confessions of the prisoners, for it has never been alleged that the slightest proof, documentary or oral, other than those and the admission of Father Garnett, the provincial, were ever produced to connect the priests with the conspiracy. The examinations were conducted with the most exquisite tortures, taken down by the creatures of the government, and afterwards mutilated and altered by the attorney-general to suit his own views. Fawkes, by special command of his majesty, was so frequently racked that he could not use a pen to sign his name, much less could he read what had been written for him, and Nicholas Owen, a lay-brother, was so stretched that his bowels protruded and he expired in the hands of his tormentors. Of Father Gerard, mention was made by two of the original plotters, Fawkes and Winter, in allusion to the oath of secrecy. The latter said that “the five administered the oath to each other in a chamber in which no other body was,” which the latter confirms more in detail.

“The five,” he says, “did meet at a house in the field, beyond S. Clement's Inn, where they did confer and agree upon the plot, and there they took a solemn oath and vows by all their force and power to execute the same, and of secrecy not to reveal it to any of their fellows, but to such as should be thought fit persons to enter into that action; and in the same house they did receive the sacrament of Gerard the Jesuit, to perform their vow and oath of secrecy aforesaid. But that Gerard was not acquainted with their purpose.”[108]

This last sentence was by order of Coke underlined with red, notated hucusque, and was carefully suppressed in the reading of the examination on the trial! The original document is still preserved in the Public Record Office, and how such an indefatigable student as Mr. Dixon could have overlooked this part of it is, to say the least, very suspicious. His version of the affair is as follows:

“An upper room of Widow Herbert's house was turned into a chapel; and when the priest was ready for his part, Catesby, Percy, Tom Winter, Jack Wright, and Fawkes assembled in the house—a quaint old Tudor pile at the corner of Clement's Lane—first in the lower room, where they swore each other upon the Primer, and then in the upper room, where they heard Father Gerard [pg 188]say Mass, and took from his hand the sacrament on that oath. Each of the five conspirators was sworn upon his knees, with his hand on the Primer, that he would keep the secret, that he would be true to his fellows, that he would be constant in the plot.”

Is this perversion of the facts of history accidental, or a piece of downright dishonesty? At first, overlooking the writer's known hostility to the Jesuits, and his insinuation about the priest being “ready for his part,” we concluded that the sentence describing how the conspirators were sworn was intended to commence after the word “Primer,” to preserve the unity of the action, but by inadvertence was put after the mention of the taking of the sacrament, thus conveying the false idea that the conspirators swore also after or during Mass; but, having had occasion to refer to the index, we find that we had done Mr. Dixon's dexterity injustice at the expense of his veracity. In seeking for the page of his book upon which this opaque statement appears, we find the following words in the index under the head “Gerard”—“administers the oath of secrecy to the Powder Plot conspirators in a house in Butcher's Row, p. 95.” Thus the author of Her Majesty's Tower, who, we presume, occupies a decent position among men of letters in his own country, not only cannot discover after the “occasional labor of twenty years” a most essential point of testimony bearing on the very subject to which his book is mainly devoted, but to make out a case against the much-hated Jesuits actually falsifies and perverts facts already known and admitted; doing in the year of grace 1869 gratuitously, what Coke in 1606 did for hire. Can the force of malice go further? Digby, who, it will be remembered, was subsequently admitted into the plot, on his trial went even further than the originators of it; and, in exculpating the Jesuit Order, was most emphatic in denying any knowledge of the conspiracy on the part of Gerard, either in its progress or, as far as he knew, at its inception. So much for Father Gerard's innocence as proved by others; the following is his own statement, made years after the occurrence when he was beyond the reach of English law, and subsequently affirmed in substance on his solemn oath:

“I have stated in the other treatise of which I spoke, that a proclamation was issued against those Jesuit fathers, of whom I am one; and, though the most unworthy, I was named first in the proclamation, whereas I was the subject of one and far inferior in all respects to the other. All this, however, I solemnly protest was utterly groundless; for I knew absolutely nothing of the plot from any one whatsoever, not even under the seal of confession, as the other two did; nor had I the slightest notion that any such scheme was entertained by any Catholic gentleman, until by public rumor news was brought us of its discovery, as it was to all others dwelling in that part of the country.”[109]

The treatise referred to in this extract is his Narrative, and in it Gerard takes frequent occasion to reiterate in the most positive manner, speaking in the third person, all knowledge of the conspiracy, even to saying Mass on the occasion alluded to by Fawkes. The house in Clement's Inn, he fully acknowledges, was used by him and his friends, among whom there were at least two priests during his absence; and we can well believe that the two prisoners were mistaken in his identity, as we have no evidence that they were familiar with his appearance or personally acquainted with him. However, this does not signify. Some priest undoubtedly celebrated Mass, and the question is, Did he administer the oath, or knowingly administer [pg 189] the sacrament in confirmation of it? Winter and Fawkes declare he did not; Digby, who was most intimate with Father Gerard, denied in open court that that Jesuit knew anything about the plot; and Gerard himself repeatedly, under the strictest forms known in his Order, asserts his entire innocence, and it has never even been hinted that any other priest was concerned in the early stages of the conspiracy. This matter may therefore be considered closed.

Now, it is equally certain that Fathers Garnett and Tesimond, alias Greenway, did become acquainted with the plot during its progress; but the information came to them under the seal of confession, and could not be revealed. It is unnecessary to support this proposition by argument, as its wisdom is now generally recognized by the civil law even in Protestant countries. Confidential communications to priest, doctor, or lawyer are at last held sacred. What was the extent of their knowledge, and what was their conduct on receiving the same? In Thomas Winter's public dying declaration, communicated by an eye-witness to the author of the Narrative, he said: “That whereas divers of the fathers of the society were accused of counselling and furthering them in this treason, he could clear them all, and particularly Father Tesimond, from all fault and participation therein.” “And indeed Mr. Thomas Winter might best clear that good father, with whom he was best acquainted,” adds Father Gerard, “and knew very well how far he was from counselling or plotting that business. For himself, having first told the father of it (as I have heard) long after the thing was ready, and that in such secret as he might not utter it, but with his leave, unto his superior only, the father, both then and after, did so earnestly persuade him, and by him the rest, to leave off that course (as his duty was), that Mr. Winter might well find himself in conscience to clear this father from his wrongful accusation of being a counsellor and furtherer of the plot.”[110]

This statement was also repeatedly confirmed by Father Tesimond, both in his writings and in his account of the matter soon after his escape, published by Joannes in his Apologia.

Gerard and Tesimond having fled the country to avoid the popular tumult, “which,” says Mr. Dixon, “took no note of the difference between the children of S. Edward and the pupils of S. Ignatius,” the only remaining victim was the provincial Father Garnett. Him the government spies soon hunted down, and in company with Father Ouldcorne arrested at Hendlip House and lodged in the tower. This capture occurred on the 28th of February, and his trial took place on the 28th of March; the intervening month having been spent by the officers of the crown in procuring evidence of his guilt, but with so little success that an attempt was made to procure his condemnation by parliament, without the intervention of a jury, by inserting surreptitiously a clause in the bill of attainder introduced against the families of Digby and others. Cajolery was first resorted to, next torture, then the subterfuge of allowing him speech with his fellow-prisoner Ouldcorne, overheard unknown to them by persons secretly hidden for the purpose, and again torture, but all to no effect. He at first refused to admit any knowledge of the conspiracy, but finally confessed that he had heard of it from Father Tesimond (Greenway) under the seal of confession, and that he [pg 190] had reprimanded that priest for ever so communicating it to him, and had admonished him to use all efforts to dissuade the conspirators from their rash designs. This was all that could be proved against him at his trial, but he was of course condemned, not however for treason, but for misprision of treason, and two months after executed, declaring his entire innocence most solemnly. Father Ouldcorne, who was also found guilty of knowledge after the fact, on no better evidence, suffered with him.

The provincial was examined no less than twenty-three times before his trial, and much stress was laid during its progress and long afterwards on his equivocations in answer to the various searching queries touching the guilt of himself and others. The question of the morality of such evasion of the truth under the peculiar circumstances has, however, no practical value for us, as now by the well-recognized policy of law in all civilized countries no person is bound to criminate himself either as a principal or a witness, and every individual is allowed to be the judge of his own case in this respect. No one has a right to entrap a prisoner into a confession of guilt, much less compel disclosures by foul means or torture.

Let us inquire for a moment how far Father Garnett's statements in prison were borne out by his previous conduct. Several letters of his are still extant addressed to Father Persons, the English superior at Rome, on the state of the Catholics in England previous to the explosion of the plot, in which he intimates his suspicions that something desperate was about to be attempted against the government, and begs the superior to influence the Holy Father to interfere. On the 29th of August, 1604, he wrote: “If the affair of toleration go not well, Catholics will no more be quiet. What shall we do? Jesuits cannot hinder it. Let Pope forbid all Catholics to stir.” In May following he says: “All are desperate, divers Catholics are offended with Jesuits; they say that Jesuits do impugn and hinder all forcible enterprises.” On the 24th of July, after reviewing the threatening state of affairs in the kingdom, he repeats his request for pontifical assistance in keeping the people quiet. He then wrote:

“Wherefore, in my judgment, two things are necessary; first, that his holiness should prescribe what in any case is to be done; and then that he should forbid any force of arms to the Catholics under censures, and by brief publicly promulgated, an occasion for which can be taken from the disturbance lately raised in Wales, which has at length come to nothing.”[111]

His public acts were consistent with his views thus confidentially expressed. It is acknowledged that he was mainly instrumental in defeating the Grey conspiracy, in which Father Watson and many Catholics were involved, and, when Catesby and the other conspirators approached him on the subject of forcible resistance to James' government, he denounced all such attempts in the most positive manner. “It is to you and such as you,” said that desperate plotter to the provincial, “that we owe our present calamities. This doctrine of non-resistance makes us slaves. No authority of priest or pontiff can deprive a man of his right to repel injustice.” When it became apparent that such men as Catesby could not be stayed by ordinary means, he recommended that before any forcible measures were adopted an agent should be sent to Rome, and in the meantime took steps to procure the co-operation of the sovereign pontiff [pg 191] himself to suppress all attempts at insurrection. In fact, his whole life was divided between his duty to God and his efforts to teach peace and longanimity to his persecuted countrymen, but the very fact that he was a Jesuit and a Catholic missionary was enough to condemn him in the eyes of the judges of that day. Let us hope that posterity will do him fuller justice.

The general accusation against the Order was grounded on the fact that many of the conspirators were converts and pupils of the Jesuits, and therefore they were their agents and instruments. This is plausible, and might be worthy of attention if true, but it lacks the essential element of reliability. Some were Catholics from their birth, others had only for the time being or during their minority outwardly conformed to Protestantism, and were simply reclaimed from their vicious habits by the Jesuits. But even if they had all been converts it would not strengthen their opponents' position. So were many hundreds, nay, thousands of Englishmen who took no act or part in the conspiracy. Besides the Jesuits that had suffered in the preceding reign, the four fathers we have just mentioned had spent each over eighteen years in the country, laboring with a zeal and success seldom equalled, and it was this very success in gaining souls to Christ that furnished the greatest incentive for their destruction. Their intimacy with the conspirators was simply that of pastors with their penitents; the assertions of Bates, the servant of Catesby, to the contrary notwithstanding. That poor wretch was tortured and tampered with to induce him to make some accusation against the missionaries, and then hanged, but not before he retracted on the scaffold every sentence uttered by him when a hope of pardon had been held out as the reward of his perjury. Further, Mr. Dixon's wild attempts to throw discredit on the English Jesuits abroad rest on no foundation whatever, nor has he a single impartial authority to support him in his broad assertions and elaborate reports of what are said to have been strictly private interviews and confidential correspondence between the plotters in England and the Jesuit colleges abroad. Owen and Baldwin, the alleged foreign correspondents, the parties most sought to be implicated, were never tried, but the latter was examined in England ten years after and discharged, nothing having been proved against him. So much for the bugbear of Catholics justifying wholesale assassination as a remedy for persecution, that has been such a sweet morsel under the tongues of Protestant divines and zealots for so many centuries.