Father Henry Garnet, the chief of the English Jesuits, left London at the end of August, 1605,[154] and proceeded towards Gothurst (now Gayhurst), in the Parish of Tyringham, three miles from Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire.[A]

Now, who was Henry Garnet, whom the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, described in Westminster Hall as “a man— grave, discreet, wise, learned, and of excellent ornament, both of nature and art;” but around whose name so fierce a controversy had raged for well-nigh 300 years? He was born in 1555, and brought up a Protestant of the Established Church; his father being Mr. Briant Garnet, the head master of the Free School, at Nottingham; his mother’s name was Alice Jay. Henry Garnet was a scholar of Winchester School, and the intention was to send him to New College, Oxford. However, he resolved to become reconciled to the Pope’s religion, and in 1575 joined the Jesuit Novitiate in Rome, where the great Cardinal Bellarmine was one of his tutors.

Now, to the end that the claims of Truth and Justice, strict, severe, and impartial, may be met in relation to this celebrated English Jesuit, it will be necessary to repeat that as far back as about the beginning of Trinity Term (i.e., the 9th June, 1605), Catesby, in Thames Street, London— outside the Confessional— had propounded to Garnet a question, which ought to have put the Jesuit expressly upon inquiry. For that question was, in case it were lawful to kill a person or persons, whether it were necessary to regard the innocents which were present, lest they also should perish withal.

And this the rather, when Catesby on that very occasion “made solemn protestation that he would never be known to have asked me [i.e., Garnet] any such question as long as he lived.”— See “Hatfield MS.,” printed in “Historical Review,” for July, 1888, and largely quoted in the Rev. J. Gerard’s articles on Garnet, in “Month” for June and July, 1901.

On the 24th of July, 1605, Garnet had sent a remarkable letter to Rome, addressed to Father Aquaviva, the General of the Jesuits.— See “Father Gerard’s Narrative,” pp. 76, 77, in “Condition of Catholics under James I.,” edited by Rev. John Morris, S.J. (Longmans, 1872).

In this letter, which of course was in Latin, Garnet says— amongst other things betokening an apprehension of a general insurrectionary feeling among Catholics up and down the country in consequence of the terrible persecution which had re-commenced as soon as James I. had safely concluded his much-desired peace with Spain— “the danger is lest secretly some Treason or violence be shown to the King, and so all Catholics may be compelled to take arms.”

Garnet then proceeds: “Wherefore, in my judgment, two things are necessary, first, that His Holiness should prescribe what in any case is to be done; and then, that he should forbid any force of arms by the Catholics under Censures, and by Brief, publicly promulgated; an occasion for which can be taken from the disturbance lately raised in Wales, which has at length come to nothing. It remains that as all things are daily becoming worse, we should beseech His Holiness soon to give a necessary remedy for these great dangers, and we ask his blessing and that of your Paternity.” (The italics are mine.)

Now, by the word “censures” here, I presume, Garnet meant excommunication, that is, a cutting off from the visible fellowship of Catholics and (what would frighten every Catholic, whether his faith worked by love or fear, that is, whether it were a rational form of religion or a mere abject superstition) a deprivation of the Sacraments of his exacting Church, which are, according to Rome’s tenets, the special means devised by the Founder of Christianity whereby Man is united to “the Unseen Perfectness.”