God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (37 page)

By now his wrists were so swollen that the gauntlets could barely be fastened about them, and the pain was intense. This time when he fainted it took the gaolers so long to resuscitate him they sent for Sir Richard Berkeley in case he was dying. Gerard came to, sitting on a bench, supported by gaolers on either side, with warm water being trickled down his throat. Berkeley appeared reluctant to continue with the session, but with Gerard still refusing to talk he had little choice; this time, though, the ordeal lasted only an hour before Berkeley called a halt. Two months later Berkeley would resign his position as Lieutenant of the Tower. It was reported to Gerard afterwards that he had done so ‘because he no longer wished to be an instrument of torture of innocent men’. Whether or not Berkeley believed Gerard to be innocent is unknown—this might just have been the partisan view of Gerard’s source. Nonetheless, it certainly seemed Berkeley was unhappy implementing a process that had no judicial basis in English law.
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In 1565 the English ambassador to France, Sir Thomas Smith, had written in disgust at Continental practices: ‘Torment…which is used by the order of civil law and custom of other countries…is not used in England, it is taken for servile.’ This suitably jingoistic condemnation of foreign practices—torture was legally permitted in most European countries—neatly masked the fact that, though it might never appear in English statute books, torture did occur in England and in Elizabethan England more so than at any other time.
*
Of the eighty-one recorded cases of torture (of which Gerard’s is one) that took place between 1540, when the Privy Council registers begin, and 1640, after which no further mention is made of the practice, fifty-three of those cases took place in Elizabeth’s reign, mostly for crimes against the State. Furthermore, not all instances of torture appear to have been recorded—there is no torture warrant for Southwell, for example, despite Topcliffe’s letter clearly detailing what he had in mind for the Jesuit. Probably some warrants are simply missing from the registers; possibly the Catholic chroniclers of the period have talked up the amount of torture that took place; perhaps there was sufficient Governmental queasiness surrounding the practice that some torture cases went deliberately unrecorded. And certainly the Government
was
made deeply queasy by the practice, as a report of 1583 revealed. This report, denying the popular and widespread rumours that Campion and his fellows had been barbarously racked in the Tower, stressed again and again that only those known to be guilty were ever tortured. No ‘innocent was at any time tormented; and the Rack was never used to wring out Confessions at Adventure upon Uncertainties’. Further, ‘the Queen’s Servants, the Wardens, whose office and Act it is to handle the Rack, were ever, by those that attended the Examinations, specially charged to use it in as charitable manner, as such a Thing might be’.
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Charity and torture are not words that usually go hand in hand, but evidently Richard Berkeley had, in the case of John Gerard, elected to be charitable. Gerard’s torture now ceased. In one final act of charity before he resigned his job, Berkeley wrote to Robert Cecil, saying: ‘Gerard, a prisoner in the Tower, being ill and weak, hath importuned me to signify his petition to be allowed to take the air on a wall near his prison. I am told to advertise you of this, being their mouth, as they term me. The man needs physic.’
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For the next few months Gerard remained in his warder’s care. The effects of his torture were such that he was unable to move his hands for several days and he was entirely dependent on the warder to feed him. ‘He had to do everything for me,’ Gerard recalled afterwards. Nonetheless, the authorities made sure to remove Gerard’s knife, scissors and razors when he was alone: standard Tower procedure for a prisoner facing torture.
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‘At the end of three weeks, as near as I can remember, I was able to move my fingers, and to hold a knife and help myself.’ Now Gerard was able to send to his friends in the Clink for some money with which to bribe his warder. The first items he bought with this money were oranges, which he presented to the warder as a token of friendship. Now the warder was happy to bring him more oranges. ‘Each day’, wrote Gerard, ‘I did exercises with my hands after dinner…cutting up the orange peel into small crosses; then I stitched the crosses together in pairs and strung them on to a silk thread, making them into rosaries. All the time I stored the juice from the oranges in a small jar.’ Then Gerard asked the warder if he might send his crosses and rosaries to friends in the Clink. The warder agreed. Gerard asked if he might have paper to wrap them in. The warder agreed. Gerard asked if he might write a few lines in charcoal to his friends. The warder agreed, so long as he could check the words himself. Gerard agreed. Then, with the warder out of his cell, Gerard scribbled a second note to his friends, this time in his secretly hoarded orange juice. It was an old trick, familiar to every Catholic in the Clink, and the recipients of Gerard’s crosses knew exactly what to do with the paper, holding it up to the fireside until their hidden message became visible. Gerard had successfully restored communications with the outside world.
*
And the outside world brought happy news. From Henry Garnet, Gerard now received word to prepare himself for trial and execution.
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On 13 May 1597 Gerard was led out again to meet his examiners (only Francis Bacon was absent this time). Attorney General Coke laid out the case for the prosecution. He started with Gerard’s priesthood and his coming to England as a Jesuit, a fact Gerard did not deny. Then he asked whether Gerard had ever withdrawn the Queen’s subjects from their allegiance to the English Church. To this charge Gerard also pleaded guilty. This was sufficient to convict him of treason. In a supplementary question Coke now asked Gerard how he could hope to bring about the conversion of England without meddling in politics, this surely being the best means to achieve his ends. Gerard picked his words with care, recording them afterwards with equal care:

‘I would want the whole of England to return to Rome and the Catholic faith: the Queen, her Council, and yourselves also, and all the magistrates of this realm; yet so, my Lords, that neither the Queen, nor you, nor any officer of state forfeit the honour or right he now enjoys; so that not a single hair of your head perish; but simply that you may be happy both in this present life and in the life to come…I am not at enmity with the Queen nor with you, nor have I ever been.’

For all the sophistication of the missionary training, the schooling in rhetoric and debate, this was a staggeringly simple statement, defining an ambition of almost childlike innocence. And it seems impossible to take it at anything but face value. To Gerard, politics equalled intrigue and possibly bloodshed; his mission—a religious mission—was to achieve a bloodless coup, a quasi-miraculous return of England to the Catholic Church without any loss of life, any loss of office, or any loss of any freedom currently enjoyed by any person in the land. It was little wonder Coke, as Gerard recorded, ‘was at a loss for an answer’.
⁴⁹

Now the examination moved onto the vexed issue of equivocation, used by Gerard again and again throughout his examinations to avoid naming names and incriminating others. To Coke, equivocation ‘countenanced lying and undermined social intercourse between men’. To Gerard, ‘the intention was not to deceive, which was the essence of a lie, but simply to withhold the truth in cases where the questioned party is not bound to reveal it’: to deny a man that to which he had no claim could not be accounted deception. Significantly, Gerard ruled that equivocation could only be used in cases of religion, not in criminal cases under lawful interrogation. It was a statement that left his examiners in little doubt as to his views on the legal basis of the Church of England. He summed up his position thus: ‘In general, equivocation is unlawful save when a person is asked a question, either directly or indirectly, which the questioner has no right to put, and where a straight answer would injure the questioned party.’ All this Coke noted carefully, promising to use it against Gerard at his trial.
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The examination over, Gerard was sent back to his cell with the expectation that this promised trial would take place in a matter of weeks, at the commencement of Trinity Term, the summer sitting of the law courts. But then inexplicably the whole process stalled. The assizes passed with no trial date being set and suddenly it seemed Gerard was about to enter the same kind of limbo as Southwell, forgotten to the world. By the end of July he had determined that this being the case he should at least earn himself the consolation of saying mass again.

At the opposite corner of the Queen’s Privy Garden from the Salt Tower was the Cradle Tower, home to fellow Catholic prisoner John Arden. Arden had been arrested in January 1587 on suspicion of complicity in the Babington Plot and had been condemned to death, but so far sentence had not been carried out and now he was permitted to receive visitors again. Gerard began the complicated procedure of secretly making contact with him. ‘I signed to the gentleman to watch the gestures I was going to make…He watched me as I took a pen and paper and pretended to write; next, I placed the letter over the coal fire and held it up in my hands as though I were reading it; then I wrapped up one of my crosses in it, and went through the motions of despatching it to him. He seemed to follow what I was trying to indicate.’
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Arden had not followed what Gerard was trying to indicate. When he received the cross from Gerard’s warder, specially bribed for the occasion, he carefully threw the wrapping paper in the fire. It took another three days, and another painful charade in which Gerard mimed the making of orange juice ink, before Arden realized what was required of him and finally read Gerard’s proposal. The pair began to plan for their forbidden mass. Friends from the outside agreed to provide the necessary equipment. A date was set: 8 September, the feast of the birth of the Virgin Mary, the day after Queen Elizabeth’s sixty-fourth birthday. The hardest part for Gerard was persuading his warder to let him visit Arden’s cell and a significant amount of money appears to have changed hands. On the evening of 7 September Gerard was duly escorted to Arden’s cell, ready to say mass early the following morning before the Tower was properly awake. It was only then that he realized precisely where Arden’s cell was situated: ‘while we were passing the time of day together, it struck me how close this tower was to the moat encircling the outer fortifications’. Now Gerard voiced a new proposal to Arden: escape.
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Days later Henry Garnet received a secret communiqué from Gerard asking for permission to attempt a break-out of the Tower of London. The Jesuit Superior had long been used to fielding such enquiries. While Walpole was still a prisoner in York, word had reached Garnet via his Jesuit colleague in the north, Richard Holtby, that there was a chance Walpole might be able to escape. Holtby asked for counsel. Garnet deferred to Holtby’s knowledge of local conditions and Holtby advised against it. His reasons were twofold. Even in prison Walpole was proving inspirational to northern Catholics. More practically, were he to escape it was likely that ‘a general search…would follow and that, for one priest at liberty, several might be captured, along with many laymen, some of them perhaps less well prepared to endure torture and death’. Walpole, himself, agreed: ‘Similar considerations occurred to me. I proposed it only to satisfy others.’
*
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But this did not mean that no one ever attempted escape. In 1596 Richard Fulwood had fled the Bridewell, accompanied by the Jesuit Father John Percy, two seminary priests and six laymen. Garnet wrote to Aquaviva:

‘Your Lordship should not be astonished that Catholics sometimes break out of prison. While there are certain prisons in which they are treated with humanity and give a pledge that they will not attempt escape, this prison was utterly barbarous and reserved chiefly for whores and vagabonds. Catholics were forbidden access to it and there was no communication permitted between prisoners. Here no pledge was given, for no one had the humanity to ask it. This escape, therefore, caused no scandal at all’.

The crucial factor determining whether Garnet permitted an attempt or not was the nature of any accompanying repercussions, and in the case of Gerard’s proposal it seemed Garnet could find no reason to deny him. He only begged him ‘not to risk [his] neck in the descent’.

Now the preparations intensified. Since his early orange juice correspondence with the Clink Catholics, Gerard had succeeded in bribing his warder to carry more letters in and out of the Tower for him. Through this means he made contact with his old servant Fulwood and with John Lillie, a former Catholic prisoner from the Clink and the occupant of the cell used as a chapel. It was Lillie who, since Gerard had arranged his release from prison, had undertaken the Jesuit’s business. Between them they formed a plan.
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On the evening of 3 October Gerard was conducted to the Cradle Tower by his ever-compliant warder. Once again he had begged permission to spend the night in Arden’s cell so that the two of them might celebrate mass early the following morning. As soon as the warder had barred the cell door behind him, Gerard and Arden set to work, chipping away the bolt on a second door that led up to the roof. By midnight they were standing on the battlements, looking out over the moat to Tower Wharf and, beyond that, to the River Thames. There they could just make out a rowing boat, with Fulwood and Lillie at the oars, and at the tiller Gerard’s old warder from the Clink. Slowly the three men brought the boat alongside the wharf.