What Gunpowder Plot Was

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

“Thomas Bate,
Nottingham,		H. Northampton,
Suffolk,		Salisbury,
E. Worcester,		Mar,
		Dunbar.”

Indorsed:—“The exam. of Tho. Bate 4 Dec. 1605. Greenway, §.”[271]

Out of this document arise two questions which ought to be kept carefully distinct:—

1. Did the Government invent or falsify the document here partially printed?

2. Did Bates, on the hypothesis that the document is genuine, tell the truth about Greenway?

1. In the first place, Father Gerard calls our attention to the fact that the document has only reached us in a copy. It is quite true; though, on the other hand, I must reiterate the argument, which I have already used in a similar case,[272] that a copy in which the names of the Commissioners appear, even though not under their own hands, falls not far short of an original. If this copy, being a forgery, were read in court, as Father Gerard says it was,[273] some of the Commissioners would have felt aggrieved at their names being misused, unless, indeed, the whole seven concurred in authorising the forgery, which is so extravagant a supposition that we are bound to look narrowly into any evidence brought forward to support it.

Father Gerard’s main argument in favour of the conclusion at which he leads up to—one can hardly say he arrives at this or any other clearly announced conviction—is put in the following words:—

“If, however, this version were not genuine, but prepared for a purpose, it is clear that it could not have been produced while Bates was alive to contradict it, and there appears to be no doubt that it was not heard of till after his death.”

The meaning of this is, that the Government did not dare to produce the confession till after Bates’s death, lest he should contradict it. If this were true it would no doubt furnish a strong argument against the genuineness of the confession, though not a conclusive one, because at the trial of that batch of the prisoners among whom Bates stood, the Government may have wished to reserve the evidence to be used against Greenway, whom it chiefly concerned, if they still hoped to catch him. I do not, however, wish to insist on this suggestion, as I hope to be able to show that the evidence was produced at Bates’s trial, when he had the opportunity, if he pleased, of replying to it.

Father Gerard’s first argument is, that in a certain ‘manuscript account of the plot,[274] written between the trial of the conspirators and that of Garnet, that is, within two months of the former,’ the author, though he argues that the priests must have been cognizant of the design, says nothing of the case of Bates’s evidence against Greenway, ‘but asserts him to have been guilty only because his Majesty’s proclamation so speaks it.’[275] To this it may be answered that, in the first place, the manuscript does not profess to be a history of the plot. It contains the story of the arrest of Garnet and other persons, and is followed by the story of the taking of Robert Winter and Stephen Littleton. In the second place, there is strong reason to suppose, not only from the subjects chosen by the writer, but also from his mode of treating them, that he was not only a Staffordshire man, or an inhabitant of some county near Wolverhampton, but that his narrative was drawn up at no great distance from Wolverhampton. It does not follow that because his Majesty’s proclamation had been heard of in Wolverhampton, a piece of evidence produced in court at Westminster would have reached so far.