LITMIR.BIZ

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at Catesby's own table, to inculcate on his host the necessity of submitting meekly to the persecution then going on. Whereupon Catesby burst out in a rage: "It is to you and such as you," he exclaimed, "that we owe our present calamities. This doctrine of non-resistance makes us slaves. No priest or pontiff can deprive a man of the right to repel injustice." Garnet, alarmed at this utterance, immediately wrote to his superior in Rome, and in due time received two letters, one from the General, the other from the Pope, putting him under strict orders to do all in his power to prevent any attempt against the State. These letters were shown to Catesby, but he protested that they were written on wrong information, and he volunteered to send a special messenger to Rome to put before the authorities there the true state of things. This promise satisfied Garnet, and he felt sure the matter was disposed of, at least, for a time.

      This was on May 8, 1605. On October 26, Catesby went to confession to Father Greenwell, or Greenway, or Texmunde, or Tessimond, a Yorkshire man, and revealed the whole plot. Greenwell showed his horror at the proposition and forbade him to entertain it, but Catesby refused to be convinced, and asked him to state the case to Garnet, under seal of confession, with leave to speak of it to others, after the matter, had become public. This will explain how the fact of the confession came out in the trial. Unfortunately, Greenwell was foolish enough to communicate it to Garnet under seal of confession. He was bitterly reproved for doing so, but it was too late; had he kept it to himself, Garnet would not have died on the scaffold. On November 5 after midnight, the plot was discovered, and Guy Fawkes, who was guarding the powder in the cellar of the building where Parliament was to meet, was seized, and acknowledged that the thirty-five barrels of powder which had been placed there were "to blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains" – an utterance that won from the king the expression: "Fawkes is the English Scævola." The other conspirators had time to flee, but were caught on November 8, at Holbeach House. They made a brief stand, but in the fight four were killed, among them Catesby. The others, with the exception of Littleton, who, it would seem, had betrayed them, purposely or otherwise, were taken prisoners and lodged in the Tower.

      "More than two months intervened," says Lingard, "between the apprehension and the trial of the conspirators. The ministers had persuaded themselves, or wished to persuade others, that the Jesuit missionaries were deeply implicated in the plot. On this account the prisoners were subjected to repeated examinations; every artifice which ingenuity could devise, both promises and threats, the sight of the rack, and occasionally the infliction of torture were employed to draw from them some avowal which might furnish a ground for the charge; and in a proclamation issued for the apprehension of Gerard, Garnet, and Greenway, it was said to be plain and evident from the examinations that all three had been peculiarly practisers in the plot, and therefore no less pernicious than the actors and counsellors of the treason."

      The mention of Gerard in the warrant arose from the fact that two years previously, namely on May 1, 1604, the first five conspirators, Catesby, Percy, Wright, Fawkes, and Winter, met "at a house in the fields beyond St. Clement's Inn, where," according to Fawkes' confession, "they did confer and agree on the plot; and they took a solemn oath and vowed by all their force to execute the same, and of secrecy not to reveal it to any of their fellows, but to such as should be thought fit persons to enter into the action, and in the same house they did receive the sacrament of Gerard, the Jesuit, to perform their vow and oath of secrecy aforesaid, but that Gerard was not acquainted with their purpose." This document is in the handwriting of Sir Edward Coke, but there appear in the original paper, just before the phrase exculpating Gerard, the words huc usque (i. e. up to this). Coke read the passage to the judges, "up to this" but the words that would have freed Gerard from suspicion he withheld. "At length," continues Lingard, "the eight prisoners were arraigned. They all pleaded not guilty, not, they wished it to be observed, because they denied their participation in the conspiracy, but because the indictment contained much to which till that day they had been strangers. It was false that the three Jesuits had been the authors of the conspiracy, or had ever held consultations with them on the subject: as far as had come to their knowledge, all three were innocent." They maintained their own right to do as they had done, because "no means of liberation was left but the one they had adopted."

      Gerard and Greenwell escaped to the Continent, whereas Garnet, after sending a protestation of his innocence to the Council, secreted himself in the house of Thomas Abingdon, who had married a sister of Lord Mounteagle, the nobleman who had first put the authorities on the scent. According to Jardine (Criminal Trials, 67-70) much ingenuity was employed at the trial to prevent Mounteagle's name from being called in question. With Garnet were Father Oldcorne and Owen, a lay-brother, and also a servant named Chambers. Oldcorne was the chaplain of the house, but Hallam in his Constitutional History (I-554) says: "the damning circumstance against Garnet is that he was taken at Hendlip in concealment, along with the other conspirators." As Oldcorne and the two others had nothing whatever to do with the affair and as all the conspirators had been already shot or hanged, "the damning evidence" of perverting the facts of the case is against Hallam.

      On February 1, the Bill of Attainder was read, and day after day, till March 28, the commissioners visited the Tower to elicit evidence. Oldcorne was repeatedly put on the rack, but nothing was extorted from him. So also with Owen, Chambers and Johnson, the chief steward of the house where the priests were found. On March 1, after Owen had been tortured, he was told he would be stretched on the rack the two following days. The third experiment killed him, and it was given out that "he had ripped his belly open with a blunt knife." Garnet, when threatened with the rack, replied that "the threat did not frighten him – he was not a child."

      The trial was finally called for March 28. The most distinguished lawyer in the realm at that time was Attorney-General Coke. He began his charge by recalling the history of all the plots that had been hatched since Elizabeth's time; he declaimed against Jesuitical equivocation and the temporal power of the Pope, and insisted that all missionaries, and the Jesuits in particular, were leagued in conspiracy against the king and his Protestant councillors. But when he got down to the real merits of the indictment, he soon betrayed the groundlessness of his charge. Not a word did he say of the confessions or the witnesses or their dying declarations, although he had boasted he would prove that Garnet had been the original framer of the plot and the confidential adviser of the conspirators. His whole charge rested on his own assertions, and was supported only by a few unimportant facts, susceptible of a very different interpretation (Lingard, op. cit., IX, 63).

      Garnet answered that he had been debarred from making known his information of the plot for the reason that it had been imparted to him under the seal of confession, and could not be revealed until it had become public property. His concealment of it, nevertheless, was considered by the judges as misprision of treason, and on that ground, and not by anything adduced by the attorney-general, was he condemned. Indeed, Coke had so utterly failed to prove his case that even Cecil confessed that nothing had been produced against Garnet, except that he had been overheard to say in conversation with Oldcorne in the Tower, that "only one person knew of his acquaintance with the conspiracy." It is this particular feature of the trial that has evoked ever since a great deal of hypocritical denunciation of Garnet's lack of veracity. When asked if he had spoken to Oldcorne or written to Greenway, he replied in the negative; but it was proved that he had done both. As it is Coke who alleges this inveracity of Father Garnet, we may reject it as a calumny for that same distinguished personage declared in his official report that Garnet, when on the scaffold, admitted his complicity in the crime, whereas this was flatly denied by those who were present at the execution. If Coke could lie about one thing, he could lie about another. But in any case a criminal court is not a confessional, and the worst offender can plead "not guilty" without violating the truth. Garnet was executed on March 3, 1606, but his body was not quartered until life had left it.

      Gerard, who had been proscribed, but who was perfectly innocent of any knowledge of the conspiracy, had made haste to leave the country. It was a difficult thing to do but he finally succeeded, and at the very time that Garnet was standing on the scaffold, Gerard was leaving London as a footman in the train of the Spanish ambassador. A lay-brother was with him in some other capacity. Such was his farewell to his native country. He had been sent there as a missionary in 1588, and had stepped ashore on the Norfolk coast just after the defeat of the Armada – a time when everyone was hunting for Papists. The story of the adventure of this handsome,

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