What Gunpowder Plot Was

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

Soon afterwards Garnet received a letter from the General of the Society, directing him, in the Pope’s name, to hinder all conspiracies, and this letter he showed to Catesby when next he saw him:—

“I showed him my letter from Rome,” wrote Garnet afterwards, “and admonished him of the Pope’s pleasure. I doubted he had some device in his head, whatsoever it was, being against the Pope’s will, it could not prosper. He said that what he meant to do, if the Pope knew, he would not hinder, for the general good of the country. But I being earnest with him, and inculcating the Pope’s prohibition did add this quia expresse hoc Papa non vult et prohibet, he told me he was not bound to take knowledge by me of the Pope’s will. I said indeed my own credit was but little, but our General, whose letter I had read to him, was a man everywhere respected for his wisdom and virtue, so I desired him that before he attempted anything he would acquaint the Pope. He said he would not for all the world make his particular project known to him, for fear of discovery. I wished him at the last in general to inform him how things stood here by some lay gentleman.”

This suggestion took shape in the mission of Sir Edmund Baynham. We are only concerned here with Garnet’s expostulations, and again it must be said that they appear to have been singularly mild, considering all that Catesby had admitted.

A few days later Garnet learnt the whole truth from Greenway, in a way which is said to have been tantamount to confession. Admitting once more that he may have been bound to keep silence to others on these details, he could not keep silence to himself. There are no partitions in the brain to divide what one wishes to know from what one wishes not to know, and if Garnet thoroughly abhorred the plot, he was surely bound to take up Catesby’s earlier self-revelations, and to strive to the uttermost to probe the matter to the bottom, in all legitimate ways. No doubt he had moments in which his conscience was sorely troubled, but they were followed by no decisive action, and it is useless to say that he expected to meet Catesby at ‘All-hallowtide.’ With all the Jesuit machinery under his hands, he could surely have found Catesby out between July and November, and this omission is perhaps the most fatal condemnation of Garnet’s course. If he had for many months known enough otherwise than in confession to enable him to remonstrate with Catesby in November, why could he not have remonstrated four months before with much more hope of success?

Still more serious is Garnet’s own account of his feelings when Greenway imparted the story to him, saying that he thought the plot unlawful, and ‘a most horrible thing.’ He charged Greenway ‘to hinder it if he could, for he knew well enough what strict prohibition we had had.’ Greenway replied ‘that in truth he had disclaimed it, and protested that he did not approve it, and that he would do what lay in him to dissuade it.’ Yet up to the discovery of the plot, Garnet, though he met Greenway at least once, took no means of inquiring how Greenway had fared in his enterprise. “How he performed it after,” he explained, “I have not heard but by the report of Bates’s confession.”[291]

On July 24, Garnet writes a letter to the General of his Society, in which, as we are told, nothing learnt only in confession ought to have been introduced. Accordingly, either in this or a later letter,[292] he merely speaks in general terms of the danger of any private treason or violence against the King, and asks for the orders of his Holiness as to what is to be done in the case, and a formal prohibition of the use of armed force. Surely some stronger language would be expected here. It is true that, according to his own account, Garnet remained ‘in great perplexity,’ and prayed that God ‘would dispose of all for the best, and find the best means which were pleasing to Him to prevent so great a mischief.’ He tells us, indeed, that he wrote constantly to Rome ‘to get a prohibition under censures of all attempts,’ but as the answer he got was that the Pope was of the opinion that ‘his general prohibition would serve,’ it does not seem likely that Garnet enlarged on the real danger more than he had done in the letter referred to above. He expected, he says, some further action; ‘and that hope and Mr. Catesby’s promise of doing nothing until Sir Edmund had been with the Pope made me think that either nothing would be done or not before the end of the Parliament; before what time we should surely hear, as undoubtedly we should if Baynham had gone to Rome as soon as I imagined.’[293] In a further declaration, Garnet disclosed that there was more in his conduct than misplaced hopefulness. Speaking of Catesby’s first consultation with himself, he adds:—

“Neither ever did I enter further with him then, as I wrote, but rather cut off all occasions (after I knew his project) of any discoursing with him of it, thereby to save myself harmless both with the state here, and with my superiors at Rome, to whom I knew this thing would be infinitely displeasing, insomuch as at my second conference with Mr. Greenwell,” i.e. Greenway, “I said ‘Good Lord, if this matter go forward, the Pope will send me to the galleys, for he will assuredly think I was privy to it.’”[294]

To say that Garnet had two consciences, an official and a personal one, would doubtless err by giving too brutally clear-cut a definition of the mysterious workings of the mind. Yet we shall probably be right in thinking not only that, as a Catholic, a priest, and a Jesuit, he was bound to carry out the directions conveyed to him from the Pope, but that those directions commended themselves to his own mind whenever he set himself seriously to consider the matter. It was but human weakness[295] to be so shocked by the persecution going on around him as to regard with some complacency the horrors which sought to put a stop to it, or at least to find excuses for omitting to inquire, where inquiry must necessarily lead to active resistance. The Government theory that Garnet and the other Jesuits had originated the plot was undoubtedly false, but, as far as we are able to judge, they did not look upon it with extraordinary horror, neither did they take such means as were lawful and possible to avert the disaster.

To sum up the conclusions to which I have been led. There may be difference of opinion as to my suggested explanations of some details in the ‘traditional’ story; but as a whole it stands untouched by Father Gerard’s criticisms. What is more, no explanation has been offered by any one which will fit in with the evidence which I have adduced in its favour. As for the plot itself, it was the work of men indignant at the banishment of the priests after the promises made by James in Scotland. The worse persecution which followed no doubt sharpened their indignation and led to the lukewarmness with which Garnet opposed it; but it had nothing to do with the inception of the plot.

As to the action of the Government, it was in the main straightforward. It had to disguise its knowledge that James did not discover the plot by Divine inspiration, and having firmly persuaded itself that the Jesuits had been at the bottom of the whole affair, it suppressed at least one statement to the contrary, which it may very well have believed to be untrue, whilst the Attorney General—not a man easily restrained—put forward his own impression as positive truth, though he had no evidence behind it. On the other hand, James, having before him in writing Garnet’s account of the information gained from Greenway in confession, refused to allow it to be used against the prisoner.