The Life Of Father John Gerard

I.

The life and character of a witness are the grounds on which we base our estimate of his credibility. That he should have spoken of himself at great length and with many and minute details is a circumstance most favourable to the formation of an accurate judgment respecting him. Such is fortunately our position with regard to Father John Gerard, the author of the Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot. He has left a full and most interesting autobiography in Latin; and we have felt that we could not do the reader a better service, or better establish the good fame of a man who has been unjustly accused, than by prefixing to his Narrative translations of large portions of his Autobiography. When the life of Father Gerard is before the reader, we will address ourselves directly to the subject of his veracity, and in conclusion, we will give what is known of the history of the Autobiography, and of the autograph manuscript from which the Narrative of the Powder Plot is printed.

John Gerard was the second son of Sir Thomas Gerard, of Bryn,[1] Lancashire, Knight, and Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Port, of Etwal, Derbyshire, Knight. In the Narrative[2] of the Plot, when he has occasion to speak of his elder brother Thomas, who received knighthood from King James on his accession, he says “that was to him no advancement whose ancestors had been [pg x] so for sixteen or seventeen descents together.” This Sir Thomas was made a baronet at the first creation of that dignity in 1611.

“I was born,” in 1564, “of Catholic parents, who never concealed their profession, for which they suffered much from our heretic rulers; so much so that, when a child of five years of age, I was forced, together with my brother who was also a child, to dwell among heretics under another roof, for that my father, with two other gentlemen, had been cast into the Tower of London, for having conspired to restore the Scottish Queen to liberty and to her kingdom. She was at that time confined in the county of Derby” [at Tutbury[3]] “at two miles distance from us. Three years afterwards, my father, having obtained his release by the payment of a large sum, brought us home, free however from any taint of heresy, as he had maintained a Catholic tutor over us.”

Sir Thomas Gerard was again in the Tower of London later on, and had been there more than two years when his son landed in England as a Priest.[4] A little before this imprisonment, he had been summoned by his kinsman,[5] Sir Gilbert Gerard, the Master of the Rolls, to compound for his recusancy by the “free offer” of a yearly sum to be paid to the Queen, “to be freed from the penalty of the statute.” As it gives an excellent idea of the exactions to which wealthy Catholics were continually subjected in those days, we subjoin Sir Thomas' “offer.” The original in the Public Record Office[6] is signed by himself.