“I will now venture to tell your lordship of a curious MS. that a very unforeseen accident brought into my hands, at a considerable distance of time from the oppression of the Society, and from the total removal of the Jesuits from the College. It is a long account of the Gunpowder Plot, from beginning to the end in the original handwriting of Father John Gerard. It is a folio volume of about 300 pages, composed with an extensive knowledge of the persons concerned, and of whom several curious anecdotes are recounted. Father John Gerard suffered much on occasion of that Plot, wherein the prosecutors tried every means to involve him in one manner or another. During the plundering and ransacking of the Houses at the oppression, such an account was reported to have been found in the Novitiate by the notorious Alfani, and it immediately was sought for by our countrymen, and instructions were said to have come from our Court at London for obtaining it at any price. But on further examination that account contained no more than relations of the religious lives and edifying death of those Jesuits who suffered on that occasion. I have never heard what became of those papers, but suppose them to have been destroyed, with very many others of no less edification. I must find some good place wherein to deposit the relation above mentioned; it is very curious, though it contains no new intelligence of the fact described in it. It is written with a singular candour that distinguishes the good religious man, and with a politeness that marks [pg ccli] the gentleman. Your lordship may signify all this with my best respects to Mr. More” [the last English Provincial before the suppression], “desiring his counsel on the manner of disposing of this valuable MS., every line of which may be esteemed a relic for the eminent sanctity of the writer.”
Lastly, we have an extract from a letter written from Rome, March 26, 1791, by the Rev. John Thorpe to the Rev. Marmaduke Stone, President of the English Academy at Liége.
“Among other things with me is one very singular piece, which I look upon as a kind of property of your House, at least in the light wherein it stood twenty years ago. It is an original folio MS. all in the handwriting of venerable Father John Gerard, wherein he gives an ample relation of the Gunpowder Plot; and it is, I believe, the only relation extant that was written by a person accused of being in any manner acquainted of it. This article demands your secrecy, and it is earnestly recommended to it; but your counsel is also asked, where and how this rare depositum should be placed. Religion has nothing to fear from it. A summary of its contents was sent some time ago to England, and was in the hands of Lord Arundell. At the time of the Society's suppression here, a commission came hither from England (supposed to be given by the Court) for purchasing at any rate, if any such relation should be found among the Jesuits' archives. A long Latin account of Father Garnett's sufferings was triumphantly seized among the papers of the Novitiate, and occasioned the vulgar mistake of what was sought being really found; but the contents, when understood, notoriously demonstrated the contrary. This is written in English, in that easy devout style for which everything of the writer is remarkable. It is a valuable relic.”
Though we cannot exactly determine the date of the MS., we can approximate to it pretty nearly. First of all, it is clear from the mention of Sir Thomas Gerard's knighthood at p. 27, that the book was written before the creation of baronets in 1611. At page 282, Father Southwell's martyrdom is said to have happened eleven years before. As he died in 1595, and Father Gerard escaped from England in May, 1606, the Narrative would seem to have been written in the latter part of that year. We [pg cclii] have, besides, Father Grene's statement that it was “written soon after the martyrdom” of Father Garnett, and Father Gerard's own assertion in his Autobiography: “I myself, when I came from England to Rome, was ordered to put in writing an account of the whole affair, and did so as well as I could.”
The original MS. of the Autobiography no longer exists. Father Grene had seen it; for an analysis of it, transcript. ex autographo ipsius, in his hand is in the second volume of the MSS. kept at Stonyhurst under the name of Collectanea, which we have quoted under the letter P. The MS. we have used,[228] which belongs to Stonyhurst, bears the title, “Narratio Patris Joannis Gerardi de rebus a se in Anglia gestis.” It purports to be a copy from an original at the Novitiate of St. Andrew, in the hands of Father Francis Sacchini, the historian. We have no means of knowing whether it is the same copy as that which existed, according to Father Grene,[229] in the volume of the Collectanea called D, in the English College at Rome. He mentions it under the title of “Narratio P. Joannis Gerardi de tota vita sua. Copia.” The Autobiography was composed in 1609, as is plain from the mention of Robert Drury's martyrdom, which our author says happened two years before the time when he was writing. This good Priest suffered at Tyburn, Feb. 26, 1607.
We now leave Father John Gerard in the hands of the reader, parting from him with sincere respect, and sharing good old Father Grene's affection for him, who in some notes, written in preparation, apparently, for an English Menology, has set down as applicable to Father Gerard the phrases, “Non ipse martyrio, sed ipsi martyrium defuit,” and, again, the Church's antiphon for St. Martin, “O beatum virum, qui totis visceribus diligebat Christum! O sanctissima anima, quam etsi gladius persecutoris non abstulit, palmam tamen martyrii non amisit.”
Additional Notes.
P. [x]. and p. [26].—Elizabeth, the mother of John Gerard, was the eldest of the three daughters and co-heiresses of Sir John Port, and at her father's death, June 6, 1557, Etwall became the property of Sir Thomas Gerard. This is the “dwelling-house within two miles of” Tutbury “Castle where” Mary Queen of Scots “was kept,” where Father Gerard lived when a child for three years. Sir John's second daughter, Dorothy, took Dale Abbey in Derbyshire to her husband, George Hastings fourth Earl of Huntingdon; and Margaret, the third daughter, by her marriage conveyed Cubley in the same county to Sir Thomas Stanhope, grandfather of the first Earl of Chesterfield.
Father Gerard had three sisters, Mary, wife of John Jenison; Dorothy, wife of Edmund Peckham; and Martha, wife of Michael Jenison. In the British Museum (Harl. MSS. 6998, f. 197) there is a report, dated June 16, 1595, from Edward Cokayne, evidently a Derbyshire magistrate, of assistance given by him to William Newall, “one of the messengers of Her Majesty's Chamber,” in searches in that county. The following paragraph relates to one of Father Gerard's sisters: “The first house that we searched according to his direction was the house of one Mr. Jenison, that married one of my Lady Gerard's daughters, she being a great recusant, and not her husband: howsoever, it is reported that there is great resort of strangers, but what they be, we cannot learn, neither at this time did we find any there, but pictures in the chambers according to their profession. Only one West that was a messenger between the seminaries was fled six weeks before we came, and whither he is gone, as yet we cannot learn.”
P. [xii].—It is not easy to reconcile the dates at this period of Father Gerard's life. He could not have been nineteen when he went to France, for he lived at Rhemes three years, one at Clermont, and about a year in England before he was committed to the Marshalsea; he was a full year in that prison, and after his discharge his recognizances were renewed for perhaps another year before leaving England for Rome, and he was in the College about seventeen months before he was ordained Priest towards the close of 1587, when he yet wanted several months of the canonical age for the Priesthood, that is, twenty-five. From this we should gather that when he first went to Rhemes he was under seventeen, which would have been in 1580.