God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (38 page)

Then the plan began to unravel. From the rooftop Gerard and Arden watched as a man came out onto the wharf and hailed the rescue party, taking them for fishermen. For some time he stood there talking. Eventually he moved away, heading back towards his cottage on the wharf, while Fulwood and Lillie stood off from the river bank, making to row upstream. Time was ticking fast. The escape had been planned for the slack water at low tide, but as the rescue party paddled up and down waiting for the man to go to sleep the tide began to turn, gathering force by the moment. In frustration Gerard and Arden saw the boat now alter course and row away. The attempt had failed. Worse, the incoming tide was sweeping the boat towards London Bridge, pinning it against the piles driven into the river bed to break the flow of the current.
*
As the water level rose so each new wave threatened to capsize the boat.
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In the darkness Gerard could hear the men’s shouts for help and the answering cries of people on the river bank. Lights were moving and soon the water was alive with boats circling the trapped vessel, but not daring to close in for fear of being swept onto the piles themselves. More lights were lowered from the bridge and in their glow Gerard could see a kind of basket swinging from the end of a rope as shadowy figures attempted to pull the three men from their craft. It took a sea going ship to brave the tide and move near enough to the stricken rowing boat to haul the men to safety. Finally the river was quiet again and Gerard and Arden returned to their cell. It still remained for them to repair the broken lock before the warder arrived in the morning.

Next day Gerard received a letter from John Lillie. It began, ‘It was not God’s design that we should succeed last night, but He mercifully snatched us from our peril—He has only postponed the day. With God’s help we will be back tonight.’ So, at midnight on 4 October, having once more bribed the warder, Gerard and Arden stood again on the battlements of the Cradle Tower, overlooking the river. This time the rowing boat drew up alongside the wharf without incident. The gaoler from the Clink stayed behind while Lillie and Fulwood came to the edge of the moat, fastening one end of the rope they carried to a stake on the bank. They listened carefully for the chink of metal as Gerard tossed a small ball of iron down to them from the rooftop. Tied to the ball was a length of cord, which the two men now fastened to the free end of their rope, and Gerard began hauling it up to the battlements. The rope had been doubled at Henry Garnet’s insistence, to prevent it from snapping, and its passage aloft proved alarmingly noisy. Then another difficulty presented itself. As Gerard recalled, ‘The distance between the tower at one end and the stake at the other was very great and the rope, instead of sloping down, stretched almost horizontally between the two points.’ At this point John Arden began to waver. Gerard remembered, ‘he had always said it would be the simplest thing in the world to slide down. Now he saw the hazards of it’. But there could be no going back, not without more noise and more risk of being spotted.
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Arden went first, pulling himself bodily along the rope until he reached the wharf. Then it was Gerard’s turn: ‘I gripped the rope with my right hand, and took it in my left. To prevent myself falling I twisted my legs round the rope leaving it free to slide between my shins.’ But now Gerard realized that Arden’s crossing had slackened the rope and where once it had stretched taut across the moat, now it hung loosely. ‘I had gone three or four yards face downwards when suddenly my body swung round with its own weight and I nearly fell. I was still very weak, and with the slack rope and my body hanging underneath I could make practically no progress.’ It took huge effort for Gerard to reach the centre of the rope and there he stuck. ‘My strength was failing and my breath, which was short before I started, seemed altogether spent.’ Three and a half years of imprisonment and two bouts of savage torture had taken their toll.

It was ‘the help of the saints and…the power of [his] friends’ prayers’ that finally, Gerard reckoned, got him to the wall on the far side of the moat, but here his strength gave out altogether, leaving him dangling, his feet just touching the top of the wall. John Lillie seized his legs and pulled him up over the wall and down onto the wharf and Gerard was half carried, half dragged to the waiting boat.

They rowed a good distance from the Tower before putting into shore. From there, Lillie escorted John Arden to Anne Line’s house, while Fulwood took Gerard to Garnet’s latest London base at Spitalfields, to the east of the city, where Nicholas Owen was waiting with horses. As dawn broke, Gerard and Owen were heading west towards the village of Uxbridge, some dozen miles from London on the Oxford road. On the outskirts of the village stood Morecrofts, a house newly leased by the Jesuits. Here, Garnet was expecting them. ‘The rejoicing was great,’ remembered Gerard afterwards.

It just remained to put the final part of Gerard’s plan into operation. Before leaving his cell Gerard had written three letters. The first was to his warder, giving his reasons for escaping; the second was to the new Lieutenant of the Tower, assuring him that the warder had not been privy to the escape; the third was to the Privy Council, justifying his actions and assuring them that neither the warder nor the Lieutenant was in any way culpable. But concern for what might befall the warder led Gerard to go further still and a messenger was dispatched to intercept the man on his way to work that morning. Through this messenger Gerard now promised the warder an annuity of two hundred florins for life and the guarantee of a safe refuge if he left London immediately. The warder accepted and Richard Fulwood accompanied him to a house some hundred miles from London, belonging to friends of Gerard. In time he was joined there by his family, setting up his own house with the money Gerard sent him. He also converted to the Catholic faith.
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On the morning of 5 October the new Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, sat down to write a letter of his own—to the Privy Council. ‘This night there are escaped two prisoners out of the Tower, viz., John Arden and John Gerard. Their escape was made very little before day, for on going to Arden’s chamber in the morning, I found the ink in his pen very fresh…[The warder] is also gone this morning at the opening of the gates…I have sent hue and cry to Gravesend, and to the Mayor of London for a search to be made in London and all the liberties [outlying districts].’
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Strangely, though, Peyton’s call for a search received little support from the Council. The prevailing view was that if Gerard had friends prepared to help him escape in this manner, then he also had friends prepared to find him a secure hiding place. One Councillor was even reported to have told a gentleman in attendance he was glad Gerard had got away—this was the news that filtered back to Gerard. Garnet, writing to Robert Persons three days later, noted, ‘There is no great enquiry after him.’ Gerard, himself, somewhat coolly recorded, ‘A search was made in one or two places. As far as I could discover, nobody of note was taken.’ This was not arrogance, so much as a realistic appraisal of his worth to the mission. With Elizabeth entering her sixty-fifth year the promise of change was now palpable in the air and after his own enforced absence from the field Gerard was poised to seize whatever chance that change might bring. Few could doubt that the events of the immediate years to come would be vital to the continued existence of English Catholicism. Fewer still could doubt that Gerard had earned the right to be at the centre of those events.
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*
Leading the interrogation was Sir Thomas Egerton, who that year replaced Gerard’s cousin Sir Gilbert Gerard as Master of the Rolls of the Court of Chancery. Egerton was a lapsed Catholic—he had been listed as a recusant in 1577. In 1596 he was appointed Lord Keeper and in 1609 he became Lord Chancellor.

*
The thirteen to which he referred were the two Counters, in Poultry and Wood Street, Newgate prison and Ludgate prison (all serving the City); the Bridewell and the Fleet; the Gatehouse and the Convict prison (both in Westminster); the Southwark Counter, the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench, the Clink and the White Lion (all in Southwark). In addition to this, of course, there was the Tower.

*
In 1583 Robert Persons wrote to the Rector of the English College in Rome, highlighting Government concern at the numbers of priests it was holding in prison. ‘[O]ur opponents are not so anxious now to capture priests’, he noted, ‘…and so nowadays the heretics are usually annoyed if any priests give themselves away easily. This was the case lately with Lomax, one of your men, who was secretly scolded by the Magistrates because, when seized at port, he guilelessly confessed that he was a priest at the first word from the Magistrates, and so they were forced by his needless confession to send him to prison.’ Father James Lomax was arrested in the summer of 1583. He died in prison early in 1584.

*
In most prisons there appear to have been three ranks of paid accommodation, the Master’s Side, the Knight’s Ward and the Twopenny Ward. The penniless were cast into the Hole, a beggar’s ward whose inmates were dependent on alms from the rich for their survival; William Cecil was a long-standing benefactor of the residents of Newgate’s Hole. In 1606 official prison rates were set: according to these, a bed cost 4d for a single occupant, or 6d a night shared between several occupants. Mattresses were 1d extra.

*
In 1596 Sir Robert Cecil noted that, of all London’s gaols, the Clink had been particularly corrupted by its Catholic prisoners and that it might be necessary to dismiss the gaoler.

†
In March 1583 William Allen wrote: ‘In one of the prisons called the Marshalsea there are, besides the other Catholics, twenty-four priests who live there…Both in this and the other prisons many masses are said every day, with the leave or connivance of the gaolers, who are either bribed or favourable to religion; people from without are admitted from time to time for conference, confession or communion; and more than this, the priests are allowed to go out everyday to different parts of the city and attend to the spiritual needs of the Catholics, on condition that they return to prison for the night.’ On 25 February 1600 forty-eight people were caught attending a Catholic sermon at the Marshalsea. Most of the congregation, as well as the priest (a Scottish Capuchin friar), were visitors.

*
Line ran the Jesuits’ boarding house for three years, until her notoriety made it unsafe for her to continue. Soon afterwards she took lodgings in another building, from where she continued sheltering priests. She was arrested on 2 February 1601, charged with harbouring, and executed at Tyburn on 27 February, the last woman to suffer under the 1585 act.

*
In another example of papal impartiality, in 1155 Pope Adrian IV (the former Englishman Nicholas Breakspear) granted to King Henry II of England all temporal rights over (and possession of) Ireland.

*
Government informers were employed to tag the English exiles, but a letter, dated 2 January 1592, from W. Sterrel, an agent provocateur, to Thomas Phelippes, the Government’s code-master, revealed that the process was not foolproof. Sterrel writes about an informer, Cloudesley, a former servant to Hugh Owen. Cloudesley had just returned from the Continent, but had succeeded in messing up his mission, delivering Sterrel’s letters to the wrong people: ‘giving Owen’s to Westmoreland [Charles Neville, the northern rebel], and Westmoreland’s to Holt, which may do hurt, they being of divers factions’. Sadly Sterrel does not reveal the contents or purpose of these letters, but he does suggest Cloudesley should instead be employed ‘about the prisons’, to hunt out information there.

*
The credibility of this conspiracy is in doubt, as is that of the so-called Lopez plot, discovered that same month. Sceptics look to the fact that the Earl of Essex, who had taken onto his payroll many of Francis Walsingham’s spies on the latter’s death in 1590, was keen to prove himself indispensable to the ageing Queen after she over-ruled his choice of candidate for the post of Attorney General. Suspicion of the case grows in direct proportion to the number of people apparently so willing—voluntarily—to claim the assassin’s role. Neither is it helped by Daniel’s testimony that when he and Cahill took their leave of the Jesuits they were told ‘to use all haste, as there were an Englishman and a Scotchman appointed for a similar purpose’. Earlier, Cahill had said that his recruiters particularly ‘wanted to employ a tall, resolute, and desperate Irishman’ for the job.

*
This did not stop the rumours flying on the Continent, though. On 9 May 1595 Charles Paget, in Brussels, wrote to Thomas Throgmorton, in Rome, saying, ‘In England, executions are out for Fathers Edmonds [Weston], Walpole, and Gerard.’ By this point, of course, Walpole was already dead.

†
Unwilling to give his name, so as not to compromise him, Gerard says of the priest that he was someone ‘whom I had occasion to help many times. On his arrival in England I had arranged for him to live in a fine house with some of my best friends’. From this clue it seems likely the priest was Robert Barwise, or Barrows (
alias
Johnson and Walgrave). Barwise was a Londoner, born in 1563 and educated at Reims. He returned to England in 1589 and during Lent 1593 he stayed at Broadoaks. On 10 March 1594 he was arrested ‘in the Queen’s highway by Newell and Worsley’ and committed to the Clink by Richard Young. Topcliffe mistakenly lists him as a Jesuit and describes him as ‘very dangerous’, but it seems the greatest danger Barwise posed was to his fellow Catholics. While at Broadoaks he ‘rode a gelding of Wiseman’s and wore his cloak, though Wiseman told him it was very dangerous for him to go to his house, because of the often watches and searches’. In 1594 he provided Richard Young with information about a Catholic book called
News from Spain and Holland.
In 1602 he provided undisclosed evidence to Robert Pooley (which Pooley duly forwarded to Cecil), as well as details of ‘the secret in and out passages of the Jesuits, the conveyance of their closest affairs, and in what places they remain’. Interestingly, at his arrest Barwise admitted knowing John Annias and also mentioned a vague plot to kill Elizabeth and Cecil.