Footnotes
[1.]“William Gerard, son of William who died at Eton-hall in 26 Edward III. [1352], by his marriage with Joan, daughter and heiress of Sir Peter Bryn de Brynhill, convertible into Sir Peter Brynhill de Bryn, became possessed of Bryn, Ashton, and other estates, which have remained in the Gerards of Bryn ever since.” ... “This family have had four seats within the township of Ashton, viz., Old Bryn, abandoned five centuries ago; New Bryn, erected in the reign of Edward VI.; Garswood, taken down at the beginning of the present century; and the New Hall, the present residence of the family, built by the Launders about the year 1692, and purchased by the Gerards forty years ago” (Baines, Hist. of Lancaster, 1836, vol. iii., pp. 637, 639).[2.]Infra p. [27].[3.]Tutbury is in Staffordshire, on the borders of Derbyshire, near to Etwal.[4.]Public Record Office, Domestic, Elizabeth, vol. 215, n. 19. “Return of Prisoners in the Tower,” endorsed in Lord Burghley's hand, “2 Julii, 1588” [an error for August]. “April 1, 1585. Imprimis, the Earl of Arundel, prisoner three years four months.... August 23, 1586. Sir Thomas Gerard, Knight, prisoner one year eleven months: indicted for treason.” At the end of the list are the names of five Priests “committed for religion.” From the Tower Sir Thomas Gerard was removed to the Counter in Wood-street (Domestic, Eliz., vol. 217, n. 27).[5.]Sir Gilbert Gerard was of the family of the Gerards of Ince, a younger branch of the Gerards of Bryn. His eldest son, Sir Thomas, was the first Lord Gerard of Gerards Bromley.[6.]Domestic, Eliz., vol. 187, n. 48, viii.[7.]P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 251, n. 14. Feb. 3, 1595.[8.]Probably Edmund Lewckener, who appears in the College books as one of the new fellows on Sir W. Petre's foundation in 1566.[9.]Prece vel pretio (MS.).[10.]John Elmer, Bishop of London from 1576 to 1588.[11.]There were 47 Catholics in the prison, of whom 11 were Priests, amongst whom were William Hartley and John Adams, future martyrs, and William Bishop, the first Vicar Apostolic (P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 170, n. 11).[12.]In a letter dated October 3, 1614 (Stonyhurst MSS., Angl. A., iv., 24), Father Gerard says that “7 florins of Liége make but 6 of Brabant, 12s. English.” So we may turn his florins into pounds by taking off the last cypher.[13.]Another occasion may present itself for placing before the reader the many anecdotes of the English Martyrs related in the Autobiography, that are now passed over.[14.]Father Gerard was present, he says, at the martyrdom of William Thomson, who suffered at Tyburn, April 20, 1586. Father Holt became Rector of the English College at Rome, October 24, 1586; and the name of John Gerard is the first entry for 1587 in the College Catalogue.[15.]When Father Gerard has occasion, in his Narrative of the Powder Plot, to relate what he knows of Father Ouldcorne's history, he gives an account of this journey (infr. p. [279]).[16.]P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz. vol. 217, n. 81.[17.]P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 199, nn. 95, 96.[18.]Ibid, vol. 217, n. 3. The Calendar gives for its date Oct. 1, 1588. The postscript of the letter bears the date “8 Septembris.”[19.]They both suffered in Fleet Street; Christopher Bales on March 4, 1590, and George Beesley on July 2, 1591. They were condemned under the statute 27 Elizabeth, for being made Priests beyond the seas and exercising their functions in England.[20.]Ad subcuratorem pacis, et ad censorem (MS.). The above are conjectural renderings. These seem to have been only village officials.[21.]Irenarchâ aut curatore pacis (MS.).[22.]Ut vanitas veritatem occultet (MS.).[23.]Father William Weston, commonly called Father Edmonds.[24.]The name “Yelverton” is added in the margin. Sir Christopher Yelverton was at this time Queen's Serjeant, and subsequently Speaker of the House of Commons, and Puisne Judge of the King's Bench. He died in 1607. His son, Sir Henry Yelverton, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, condemned Father Edmund Arrowsmith in 1628, and died in the January following.[25.]Dr. Andrew Perne, Master of Peter-house, Cambridge, and second Dean of Ely. He is incidentally mentioned by Miss Strickland as having changed his religion four times (Lives of the Queens of England, vol. vii., p. 208).[26.]“It [Braddocks] seems to have been formerly moated round, and two sides of the moat remain at present” (Morant, History of Essex, London, 1768, vol ii., p. 559).[27.]Their names appear in 1580, among the signatures of the thirty Nuns of Sion, then at Rouen, in a petition to the Catholics of England, praying them not to allow “the only Religious Convent remaining of our country” to perish for want of support (Public Record Office, Domestic, Eliz., vol. 146, n. 114). The convent reached Lisbon in 1594, and in 1863 returned to England and settled at Spetisbury, near Blandford. It is the only Religious House in England that can trace an unbroken descent from a foundation made before the Reformation. Sion House was founded by Henry V. in 1413.[28.]William is said to have been knighted at a later date. Three baronetcies were conferred on various branches of the family, William of Canfield (1628), Richard of Thundersley (1628), and Sir William Wiseman, Knight, of Riverhall (1660). The two last mentioned are extinct. The Wisemans of Braddocks were descended from John Wiseman, Esq., ancestor of the present baronet, who purchased the estate in Northend about 1430, and was the first of the family who lived in Essex.[29.]P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 247, n. 3.[30.]“While the house at Sawston was erecting, Sir Edmund resided on his estates in Essex, and served the office of Sheriff for that county in 20, 21, [1578-9] and 30 Elizabeth” [1588] (Burke's Landed Gentry, 1850, vol. i., p. 602).[31.]The relationship is by affinity and half-blood. Jane, daughter of Sir William Dormer, by his first wife, Mary Sidney, married Don Gomez Suarez, Count of Feria; and Dorothy's father, Robert Lord Dormer, was a son of Sir William, by his second wife, Dorothy Catesby (Burke's Peerage).[32.]Lady Penelope Devereux, daughter of Walter first Earl of Essex, wife of Robert third Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick.[33.]Charles Blount, eighth Baron Mountjoy, who in 1603 was created Earl of Devonshire. He was married December 26, 1605, to Lady Rich, after her divorce, and in the lifetime of her husband, by William Laud, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. The Earl of Devonshire died in a few months after this marriage, April 3, 1606.[34.]William Wiseman, Richard Fulwood, and Ralph Willis were with Father Gerard at Lady Gerard's house before Michaelmas, 1592 (P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 248, n. 103).[35.]Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was beheaded at York, in 1572. He had four daughters: Elizabeth, wife of Richard Woodroff; Lucy, wife of Sir Edward Stanley; Jane, wife of Lord Henry Seymour; and Mary, the second Abbess of the English Benedictine Convent at Brussels.[36.]This venerable Community was transferred in 1794 to Winchester, and in 1857 to East Bergholt, in Suffolk. This was the first English Convent founded after the Reformation, and the first to come to England at the French Revolution.[37.]When this was written, the strict laws of Urban VIII. had not yet been made, which forbid the introduction of any public religious veneration except by the authority of the Holy See.[38.]Defecerunt scrutantes scrutinio (MS.).[39.]P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 248, n. 103.[40.]P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 247, n. 3.[41.]“Robert Wiseman, her other son, is also an obstinate recusant and will by no means take the oath. He is prisoner in the Clink.” (Young, Apr. 14, 1594. P. R. O., Dom. Eliz., vol. 248, n. 68).[42.]The Lady Mary Percy, of whom mention has been previously made. She “was a devout Catholic, and had come to London a little before my imprisonment, to get my help in passing over to Belgium, there to consecrate herself to God. She was staying at the house of her sister,” who had lost the faith, Jane, the wife of Lord Henry Seymour, with whose Protestant servants Father Gerard was confronted later on. “I dined with them on the day the witnesses mentioned. It was Lent; and they told how their mistress ate meat, while the Lady Mary and I ate nothing but fish ” (infr. p. [lxviii].).[43.]He had previously said that “between Midsummer and Michaelmas last, Scudamore the Priest was there by the name of John Wiseman and stayed there one night.” John was apparently the name of the younger Jesuit, who died in the Novitiate at Rome.[44.]Amongst the letters seized at Braddocks in a search apparently in 1592, was one “sent by Dolman the Priest to Mrs. Wiseman, dated 28 die Jun., advertizing her of her son Thomas and her son John their healths, and of his going to Wisbech, and that he was sorry her daughter Jane had no warning whereby she might have wrote an epistle in Latin to the Priests at Wisbech, that they might have understood her zeal” (P. R. O., Dom. Eliz., vol. 243, n. 95).[45.]P. R. O., Dom. Eliz., vol. 248, n. 68.[46.]Young adds, “Mr. Wiseman and his mother had many more servants, both men and maids, all which were recusants, and none of them would come to church, to the great offence and scandal of all Her Majesty's good subjects in that country.”[47.]Stonyhurst MSS. P., ii., p. 550.[48.]Mr. “Homulus” is Ralph Emerson, the Lay-brother, of whom Father Campion wrote to the General, “Homulus meus et ego” (infr. p. [lxx]). It was of the greatest consequence that no names to strike the eye should appear in letters, in case they were intercepted.[49.]Probably White Webbs in Enfield Chase, called “Dr. Hewick's house” (P. R. O., Gunpowder Plot Book, n. 70).[50.]P. R. O., Dom. Eliz., vol. 248, n. 36.[51.]In the original the words “is Richard Fulwood” are interlined, and “he will not tell” underlined or erased.[52.]Being learned. Erased in Orig.[53.]It was of the last importance for the friends of a prisoner to know, if possible, what replies he had really given, not only that they might take measures, if necessary, for their own safety, but also that they might know how far to go in their own answers when summoned. The persecutors were constantly in the habit of publishing all sorts of pretended replies which they said had been given by prisoners in their secret examinations, so that prisoners seized every possible opportunity of communicating the truth to their friends, often, as we shall see, in the most ingenious way.[54.]It will be noticed, both from this passage and many others, that the persecuted Catholics followed that common doctrine of theologians, maintained also by many Protestant moralists, that an unjust oppressor has no right, by the law of God, to exact or expect true answers from his victims, if such true answers would help his unjust designs, except where the question is of the faith of the prisoner. It is quite likely that many will be startled now-a-days at such direct denials, owing to our present freedom from those extreme circumstances in which such denials were then made. Their own lives were at stake, or those of other innocent persons, whom it would have been a sin to betray; and for those persons' sake, if they held such denials to be lawful, they were bound to make them. The English law, with a tenderness then unknown, would now protect a man from all efforts to make him criminate himself. The persecutors themselves, who showed so great indignation at their victims' falsehoods, told lies systematically in order to ensnare the Catholics; a thing which no code of morality ever countenanced, whether Catholic or Protestant. We propose to discuss this subject more fully in the sequel.[55.]This was the unfortunate Countess of Arundel, whose husband, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was at this time (1594) in the tenth year of his imprisonment in the Tower. He died the following year in the same prison, the noblest victim to the jealous and suspicious tyranny of Elizabeth, non sine veneni suspicione, as his epitaph still testifies.[56.]This holy martyr's true name was Nicholas Owen. Father Gerard gives an interesting account of him in the Narrative of the Powder Plot (infra p. [182]).[57.]We learn from Frank that it was called Middleton's.[58.]Sir Thomas Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere and Viscount Brackley, was Attorney General at this date, 1594, and Lord Chancellor in 1609, when this was written. His having been a Catholic is not mentioned by his biographers.[59.]Father Gerard was first confined in the Counter, as he tells us later. Father Garnett in one of his letters speaks of the Counter as “a very evil prison and without comfort.” There were in London three prisons of this name: the Counter, a part of the parish church of St. Margaret in Southwark; the Counter in the Poultry, “some four houses west from the parish church of St. Mildred”; and the new Counter in Wood-street, removed from Bread-street in 1555 (Stow's Survey of London, ed. Thoms, pp. 99, 131).[60.]Even the gentle Father Southwell could not but show his estimate of this reprobate man. We translate the following from Father More's History of the English Province, l. v., n. 15. “Though he readily answered the questions of others, yet if Topcliffe interposed he never deigned him a reply; and when asked the cause of this, he answered: ‘Because I have found by experience that the man is not open to reason.’ ”[61.]Stonyhurst MSS., Angl. A., vol. ii., n. 27; P., vol. ii., f. 604.[62.]This was a prison in Southwark, adjoining the palace of the Bishops of Winchester. In Father More's Latin Narrative it appears as Atrium Wintoniense. “It was a small place of confinement on the Bankside, called the Clink from being the prison of the ‘Clink liberty or manor of Southwark,’ belonging to the Bishops of Winchester” (Brayley, History of Surrey, vol. 5, p. 348).[63.]Father Garnett writes, Nov. 19, 1594: “Sir Thomas Wilks goeth into Flanders, as it is thought for peace; whereupon the arraignment of the three Jesuits, Southwell, Walpole, and Gerard, is stayed. Gerard is in the Clink, somewhat free; the other two so close in the Tower that none can hear from them” (Stonyhurst MSS., P., ii., p. 550).[64.]“There is a little fellow called Ralph, who is in England for Father Persons, is a great dealer for all the Papists; he is a very slender, brown little fellow” (Confession of Ralph Miller. P. R. O., Domestic, Eliz., vol. 173, n. 64).[65.]John Rigby suffered at St. Thomas' Watering, June 21, 1600, for having been reconciled by a Catholic Priest.[66.]Ann Line executed at Tyburn, Feb. 27, 1601, for harbouring a Catholic Priest. “She told her confessor, some years before her death, that Mr. Thomson (Blackburn), a former confessor of hers, who ended his days by martyrdom in 1586, had promised her, that if God should make him worthy of that glorious end he would pray for her, that she might obtain the like happiness” (Challoner, from Champney's MS. History).[67.]Francis Page, S.J., suffered at Tyburn, April 20, 1602, for his Priesthood.[68.]These words are given in the MS. in English.[69.]Roger Filcock, S.J., alias Arthur, executed for his Priesthood, with Mark Barkworth, alias Lambert, O.S.B., and Ann Line, at Tyburn, Feb. 27, 1601.[70.]John Jones, alias Buckley, suffered at St. Thomas' Watering, July 12, 1598; and Robert Drury at Tyburn, Feb. 26, 1607, for being Priests in England.[71.]Tres valedictiones mundo datæ a tribus in diverso statu morientibus (MS.).[72.]Qualis vita, finis ita (MS.).[73.]“Morbum regium” (MS.). Consumption is a form of scrofula, or King's evil, and seems to be the form most likely to be brought on by the causes here mentioned. In classical Latin, however, morbus regius signifies jaundice; and this may be the meaning here.[74.]
Father Bartoli, in his Inghilterra (bk. v., ch. 13), has the following passage about Father Gerard, whom he knew personally at Rome: “At his first entrance into this prison (the Clink) he procured himself a habit of the Society, and continued to wear it from that time forward, even in the face of all London when he was being taken to his different examinations; so that the people crowded to see a Jesuit in his habit, while the preachers were all the more exasperated at what they thought an open defiance of them.”
Father Weston in his Narrative (Father Laurenson's copy, p. 93) gives it as one of the signs that warned Catholics that Anthony Tyrrel was wavering in his faith, that without any necessity, in the Clink prison, he would wear secular dress. His own clerical costume in prison he mentions as a matter of course. “Egressus sum sequenti die, mutato habitu in sæcularem” (p. 98).
On the back of a playing card (the seven of spades), which is attached to the original document, is written in Sir Edward Coke's handwriting:
“Polewhele 1
Walpole 1
PatCullen 1
Annias 31
Willms 1
Squier
Jarrard 1.”
Polewhele, Patrick Cullen or O'Collun, Williams, and Squire were all executed for high treason, the latter on the accusation of having, at Father Walpole's instigation, poisoned the pommel of Elizabeth's saddle. Annias apostatized after two years' imprisonment.
“One necessary condition,” says Father Garnett in another paper (P. R. O., Domestic, James I., vol. 20, n. 2), “required in every law is that it be just. For if this condition be wanting, that the law be unjust, then is it ipso facto void and of no force, neither hath it any power to oblige any. And this is a maxim, not only of divines, but of Aristotle and all philosophers. Hereupon ensueth that no power on earth can forbid or punish any action which we are bound unto by the law of God, which is the true pattern of all justice. So that the laws against recusants, against receiving of Priests, against confession, against Mass, or other rites of Catholic religion, are to be esteemed as no laws by such as steadfastly believe these to be necessary observances of the true religion.