The Gunpowder Plot and Lord Mounteagle's Letter, Being a Proof, with Moral Certitude, of the Authorship of the Document / Together with Some Account of the Whole Thirteen Gunpowder Conspirators, Including Guy Fawkes

CHAPTER LV.

Father Garnet did not go nearer London than Gothurst, in Buckinghamshire, between ten and fifteen miles distant from Great Harrowden.

We know that he was at Gothurst when Catesby was there, on Tuesday, the 22nd of October, one day after the date of the post scriptum mentioned in the last chapter. Probably the post scriptum of the 21st October was written at Gothurst and not at Great Harrowden, though the letter itself of the 4th October undoubtedly was penned at Harrowden, between ten and fifteen miles distant from Gothurst, as just remarked.

The Honourable Anne Vaux, whose maternal grandfather was Sir Thomas Beaumont, Master of the Rolls, was a level-headed woman of acute mental perceptions as well as of great moral ardour and intense spiritual exaltation.[A]

[A] The psychologist will have observed that these qualities are not seldom combined in a certain order of minds. Cf., Shakespeare’s “great wits to madness are near allied”— some thinkers will be inclined to say.

Miss Vaux was allied to both Catesby and Tresham, and their words, and still more their doings, during the few months then last past, had been not unnoticed by her. She evidently had that strange premonitory foreboding, that curious sense of swift approaching doom, which have marked all tragedies written or unwritten since the world began.

Moreover, the large number of cavalry horses in the stables of Norbrook and Huddington (those places being her fellow-pilgrims’ and her own places of sojourning when en route for Holywell) had alarmed Anne Vaux’s imagination. And in reply to the lady’s anxious inquiries she had been told by her iniquitous, head-strong connections— Catesby and the rest— that the horses were wanted for the troop of horse whereof Catesby was to be in charge, with King James’s permission, in aid of the cause of the Spanish Archdukes in the Low Countries, then still in rebellion against the Spanish sovereignty.

Again; at either Harrowden or Gothurst, Miss Vaux sought out her father’s friend, and her own honoured and beloved spiritual counsellor, the chief of the English Jesuits, and told him that she feared that some trouble or disorder was a-brewing; and, moreover, that some of the gentlewomen, namely, the wives of the conspirators, “had demanded of her where they should bestow themselves until the burst was past in the beginning of the Parliament.”

Garnet, in reply, asked his inquirer who told her this; but she said “she durst not tell who told her so; she was [choked] with sorrow.”[A]

[A] Garnet’s examination of the 12th March. Foley’s “Records,” vol. iv., p. 157.

At Coughton, Father Garnet said Mass on the 1st of November, All Saints’ Day.

There “assisted” at this Mass the Lady Digby,[B] Mr. and Mrs. Brookesby, Miss Anne Vaux, and almost the whole of Sir Everard Digby’s Gothurst household.

[B] Lady Digby had been brought up a strong Protestant, and, like most converts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Church of Rome from Calvinistic Puritanism, she became an ardent devotee of the Jesuits. (The point of contact was probably a common interest in the problems of the mystical life, and a tendency towards a grave, sober, strict regularity of “daily walk and conversation.”) George Gilbert, a gentleman of high Suffolk family and great wealth, was likewise a convert from Calvinism, through the instrumentality of the Jesuit Fathers, Darbyshire and Parsons. Gilbert, as a young man, daily “waited upon the ministry” of the once celebrated Puritan Divine, Dering, the friend of Thomas Cartwright. George Gilbert died in Rome in 1583, holding in his hand a crucifix made in prison by “the Blessed” Alexander Briant, a martyr friend of “the Blessed” Edmund Campion. Of Briant it is said he was “of a very sweet grace in preaching,” and that he was “replenished with spiritual sweetness” when suffering the tortures of the rack. George Gilbert mainly defrayed the cost of painting on the walls of the Church of the English College at Rome certain pictures of some of “the English Martyrs,” although “old Richard Norton,” of Norton Conyers, near Ripon, and some others who as exiles had “with strangers made their home,” likewise subscribed to the expense of the pious and artistic work. I saw, on the 13th October, 1900, through the kind courtesy of the Right Reverend Monsignor Giles, D.D., Rector of the English College, copies of these remarkable pictures, copies which are painted on the walls of that very College where Father Oldcorne himself had been educated.

The original pictures on the walls of the Church are no longer in existence. The copies, however, even in our own day, have played an important part in “the beatification” of those of the English Martyrs already beatified, including “the Blessed” Thomas Percy Earl of Northumberland, who suffered death at York in 1572.— See the “Acts of the English Martyrs,” by the Rev. J. H. Pollen, S.J. (Burns & Oates).

At Gothurst, however, was Sir Everard himself, busy making his final preparations for the war he was about to levy upon his King.

We find Sir Everard there also on November 2nd, All Souls’ Day, the last he and his ill-fated comrades were destined to keep on earth.— See Gerard’s “Narrative.”

On All Saints’ Day, Father Garnet appears to have offered some prayers, or otherwise advised the offering of the same, which had a certain reference to the King, the Parliament, and the hoped-for triumph of his Church over her enemies, especially over those then molesting the faithful English remnant of “the elect.” He also appears, according to his own admission, to have spoken a sermon which might be easily construed as bearing some allusion to the then wretched condition of the unhappy English Catholics.[A]

[A] See Letter to Miss Anne Vaux, dated 2nd March, 1605-6, quoted in Foley, vol. iv., p. 84, where Garnet says: “There is a muttering here of a sermon which either I or Mr. Hall [an alias of Father Oldcorne] made. I fear mine, at Coughton. Mr. Hall hath no great matter, but only about Mr. Abington, though Mr. Attourney saith he hath more.”

Now, I infer that all this tends to demonstrate that Father Henry Garnet felt that a great burden or load had been lifted from his heart in regard to the aforetime perilous, but then practically abortive, Gunpowder Treason Plot. Therefore he must have known, from some source or another, that the Plot would be squashed before Tuesday, November the 5th, had dawned upon a “fallen world,” and all danger from the Plot finally swept away.

Again, in the Mass for All Saints’ Day there is a hymn, one verse of which is: “Take away the faithless people from the boundaries of the faithful, that we may joyfully give due praises to Christ.”

Cardinal Allen had induced the Pope “to indulge” the recital of these words by Catholics for the harmless “intention” of the “Conversion of England.”

Garnet, at Coughton, appears to have urged the recital of the same words for “the intention” of the “confounding” of the anti-popish “politics,” and the “frustration” of the “knavish tricks” of James at the forthcoming Parliament. If Garnet did so, then he must have known that James and his Parliament would be in existence to work mischief! And this once more proves that he knew the Plot would be squashed and finally swept away.

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