Dudley by the hue-and-cry, and made fast. Stephen Littleton and Robert Winter were betrayed several days after by a servant of Mrs. Littleton of Hagley, in whose house they had been secreted. Thomas Bates, Catesby's servant, was arrested in Staffordshire; Keyes in Warwickshire. They were all carried up to London, and lodged in the Tower. Tresham, who had never left London, and who appears to have been confident of his own safety, was arrested and committed to the Tower on the 12th of November, or four days after the death or seizure of his associates at Holbeach. Guido Fawkes, in the mean while, had been repeatedly examined, not only by lords commissioners named by the king, but also by the Lord Chief Justice Popham, Sir Edward Coke, and Sir William Wood, the lieutenant of the Tower. No promises, no threats, could shake his firmness, or disturb his self-possession. When urged with the argument that his denial of the names of his companions was useless, because by their flight they had been sufficiently discovered, he said, "If that be so, it would be surperfluous for me to declare them, seeing by that circumstance they have named themselves." He confessed freely to all his own doings, said he was ready to die, and rather wished ten thousand deaths than to accuse Percy or any other. But he was told that Percy and several of his confederates were apprehended, and he was racked apparently beyond the limits of mortal endurance. On the 8th of November, before any violent torture was applied, he signed his name to a deposition with a bold firm hand; but two days after his signature to a fuller statement, in which he names his accomplices, is in a faint and trembling hand, jagged and incomplete, bearing every appearance of being written in bodily agony. The Christian name (Guido) alone is completed, and after it there is a scrawl as if the pen had fallen from his hand.* This single incident tells a tale Gmdo faukes THE AUTOGRAPHS OF GUIDO FAWKES, BEFORE AND AFTER TORTURE. of horror. But it appears that Fawkes never put the government in possession of a single secret with which they were not previously acquainted, and that he would, under no excruciating pain, impeach the Jesuits, some of whom were suspected, from the beginning, of being implicated in the plot. Thus his examiners were barbarous to no purpose. Bates, the servant of Catesby, was less able to go through the ordeal: he confessed what • Jardine, Criminal Trials. ever was wished, and was the first to implicate the Jesuits. Nor was Tresham much more firm than Bates; for, though he did not implicate the priests in the gunpowder treason, he confessed that Father Garnet and Father Greenway were both privy and party to a traitorous correspondence carried on about a year before the death of Elizabeth with the court of Spain by Catesby and others. Soon after his committal to the Tower, this wretched man, who appears to have been overreached by the government he saved, was attacked by an agonizing disease. In his extremity of weakness he was allowed the assistance of a confidential servant and the society of his wife. On the 22nd of December, at the close approach of death, he dictated to his servant a statement in which he most solemnly retracted all that he had confessed about Garnet and Greenway. This paper he signed, and made his manservant and a female servant of the Tower put their hands to it as witnesses. In the course of the night he gave this statement to his wife, charging her to deliver it with her own hands to Cecil; and he expired about two o'clock on the following morning. Catholic writers have ascribed his death to foul play at the hands of government. This suspicion seems rather groundless, but there are reasons for believing that some state secrets respecting the discovery of the plot were buried in the grave of the miserable man. On the 15th of January, 1606, a royal proclamation was issued against Garnet, Greenway, and Gerard, all three English Jesuits who had been lurking in the country for years. The trial of the surviving chief conspirators commenced on the 27th of January, having been delayed nearly two months, mainly in order to bring in the priests, and to get possession of the persons of Baldwin, a Jesuit, Owen, and Sir William Stanley, then residing in the Flemish dominions of the Spaniards, who refused to give them up. On the day of the trial, "the queen and the prince were in a secret place by to hear, and some say the king was in another." The prisoners, Sir Everard Digby, Robert Winter, Thomas Winter, Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant, Guido Fawkes, Robert Keyes, and Thomas Bates, with the single exception of Digby, who confessed the indictment, pleaded not guilty; not, as they observed, because they denied a full participation in the powder plot, but because the indictment contained many things to which they were strangers. The evidence produced consisted entirely of the written depositions of the prisoners and of a servant of Sir Everard Digby. No witness was orally examined. There was nothing developed on the trial to connect the conspiracy with many English Catholics beyond the actual plotters. Indeed, the Papists in general regarded the whole affair with horror, and Sir Everard Digby pathe tically lamented that the project, for which he had Jesuits, Gerard and Greenway, after many advensacrificed everything he had in the world, was tures, effected their escape to the Continent. Gardisapproved by Catholics and priests, and that net, who at some former time had been well known the act which brought him to his death was to Cecil, was treated in the Tower with compaconsidered by them to be a great sin. In general rative leniency; and, from an expression of regret the principal conspirators again denied that either used by a dignitary of the Protestant church, who Garnet or any other Jesuit was aware of the pro- afterwards became a bishop, we may presume that ject of the powder, though several allowed that he was never laid upon the rack. But his comthey had frequent conference both with Garnet and panion Hall, or Oldcorn, another Jesuit, who was Greenway. In extenuation, they pleaded the suf- found in the same hiding-place at Hendlip, ferings they and their families and friends had un- Garnet's confidential servant Owen, and anodergone, the violated promises of the king, who ther servant called Chambers, appear to have before his accession had assured them of tolera- been tortured without mercy, as also without tion, their despair of any relief from the esta- effect for no one of them would confess anyblished government,-their dread of still harsher thing of importance against Garnet or any other persecution, and their natural desire to re-esta- Jesuit or priest. Owen, after undergoing the blish what they considered the only true church of minor torments, in order to escape the rack, Christ. They were all condemned to die the usual with which he was threatened on his next exadeath of traitors, and sentence was executed to the mination, tore open his bowels with a blunt knife, letter for this was not an occasion on which the which he had obtained by a stratagem, and died government was likely to omit an iota of the tor- true to his master. Whatever was the extent of turing and bloody law. Sir Everard Digby, Ro- Garnet's guilt, or of the moral obliquity which he bert Winter, John Grant, and Thomas Bates, derived from the intriguing, crafty order to which suffered on the 30th of January; Thomas Winter, he belonged, he was indisputably a man of extraRookwood, Keyes, and Guido Fawkes-" the Devil ordinary learning and ability: he baffled all the of the Vault" on the next day: they all died courageously, repenting of their intention, but professing an unaltered attachment to the Roman church. The scene chosen for their exit was the west end of St. Paul's churchyard. Before they were led to the scaffold, the Jesuit Garnet, of whom so much had been said, was on his way to the Tower, having been discovered hid in a secret chamber at Hendlip, near Worcester, the seat of Thomas Abingdon, who had married the sister of Lord Mounteagle. The other two The finding of Garnet and his friend Hall, or Oldcorn, in the curious old mansion house, is one of the most romantic incidents we court lawyers and cunningest statesmen in twenty successive examinations. They could never get an advantage over him, nor drive him into a contradiction or an admission unfavourable to his case.* But in the congenial atmosphere of the Tower a certain craft had attained to the highest perfection; and there has scarcely been a de are acquainted with. Mr. Jardine has given the full account.-See Criminal Trials. Coke, in his speech on Garnet's trial, said he was one having "many excellent gifts and endowments of nature; by birth a gentleman, by education a scholar, by art learned, and a good linguist." The whole of this English Jesuit's history is interesting. At one time he gained his livelihood in London by correcting the press for Tottel, the celebrated printer. vice fancied by romance-writers, but was put | escape torture; but, according to government documents, which, we need hardly say, are in many essentials open to doubt, he began to confess from his inward conviction that it would be of no use to persist in denying a fact, avowed by Oldcorn, and supported by Forset and Locherson. After much subtilizing and equivocating, he was driven to admit that, when Fawkes went over to Flanders, he had given him a recommendatory letter to his brother Jesuit, Baldwin; and, finally, that the design of blowing up the Parliament House with gunpowder had been revealed to him, as far back as the month of July of the preceding year, by Greenway, who had received it in confession from Catesby, and, as he believed, from Thomas Winter also. But he added that he had earnestly endeavoured to dissuade Catesby, and desired Greenway to do the same. He further stated that Catesby had at one time propounded a question to him, in general terms, as to the lawfulness of a design meant to promote the Catholic religion, in the execution of which it would be necessary to destroy a few Catholic friends together with a great many heretical enemies. And he said that, in ignorance of what Catesby's design really was, he had replied, that, "in case the object was clearly good, and could be effected by no other means, it might be lawful among many nocents to destroy some innocents." Oldcorn, who was no longer of any use, was now sent down to Worcester, with Mr. Abington, the owner of the house at Hendlip, and a priest named Strange, to be tried by a special commission. Abington, whose sole offence appears to have been the concealment of the two Jesuits, received the king's pardon, through his brother-in-law, Lord Mounteagle; Oldcorn and Strange, together with several other persons, were executed. The Roman church unwisely and unjustly put the name of Oldcorn on its roll of martyrs. into actual operation within those horrible walls. Some of the most revolting practices of the Inquisition may be traced in this English state prison. Garnet's keeper of a sudden pretended to be his friend,-to venerate him as a martyr; and he offered, at his own great hazard, to convey any letters the prisoner might choose to write to his friends. Garnet intrusted to him several letters, which were all carried to the council, as were also the answers to them; but so cautious was the Jesuit, that there was nothing in this correspondence to weigh against him. Failing in this experiment, the lieutenant of the Tower removed Hall, or Oldcorn, to a cell next to that of his friend Garnet, and they were both informed by the keeper, who recommended extreme caution and secrecy, that, by opening a concealed door, they might easily converse together. The temptation was irresistible, and both the Jesuits fell into the trap. Edward Forset, a man of some learning, and a magistrate, and Locherson, a secretary of Cecil's, who had tried his ears before at eavesdropping, were placed in such a position between the two cells that they could overhear nearly every word the prisoners uttered; and as they conversed they took notes of all that was said. Their main subject was how they should arrange their defence. Garnet said that he must needs confess that he had been at White-Webbs, in Enfield Chase, with the conspirators, but that he would maintain that he had not been there since Bartholomew-tide. "And in truth," said he, " I am well persuaded that I shall wind myself out of this matter." On the following day the conversation was renewed, the eavesdroppers being at their post as before. Garnet said several things which went to connect him with the conspirators; and he told Hall that, at the next visitation of the commissioners, they must both " expect either to go to the rack, or to pass quietly with the rest." He also added, that he had heard that one James, or Johnson, had been upon the rack for three hours. In the third conversation, Hall, or Oldcorn, related how he had been examined, and what he had said. Garnet said, "If they examine me any more, I will urge them to bring proofs against me, for they speak of three or four witnesses." In a fourth conversation there dropped nothing of any consequence. But the commissioners thought that they had already enough to drive the matter home. Garnet had hitherto denied all acquaintance with the first stages of the plot: he and Oldcorn were now charged with their own words; and at first they boldly denied having uttered them. Oldcorn, however, confessed to their truth on the rack. Still Garnet held out; and, when showed Oldcorn's examina-church, reveal any secret which had been received tion, he said that his friend might accuse himself falsely, but that he would not accuse himself. According to the Catholic account, he was then led to the rack, and made sundry admissions to On the 3rd of March "Henry Garnet, superior to the Jesuits in England," was put upon his trial for high treason, before a special commission in Guildhall. The case excited immense interest; all the members of parliament attended; the king himself was present in a by-corner, and the Lady Arabella Stuart in another. Coke had again a grand opportunity for display, and he spoke for some hours. When the Jesuit replied, he was not permitted so much space. Coke interrupted him continually; the commissioners on the bench interrupted him; and James, who seems to have felt a respect for his powers of argument and eloquence, declared that the Jesuit had not fair play allowed him. Garnet pleaded that he had done his best to prevent the execution of the powder treason; and that he could not, by the laws of his under the sacred seal of confession. He carried himself very gravely and temperately, and half charmed that immense audience; but, upon the evidence of the depositions obtained in the Tower, * "the and the oaths of Forset and Locherson, spials set of purpose," a verdict of guilty was returned, and the lord chief justice pronounced the sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering. During the whole trial they extracted nothing from the Jesuit: they had expected great discoveries, but they made none. Instead, therefore, of being hurried to execution, Garnet was kept six weeks in prison, during which the greatest efforts were made to wring further avowals from him, and to lead him to a declaration of the principles of the society to which he belonged. In the first purpose they entirely failed, but in the second they partially succeeded; and, if the declarations concerning equivocation were fairly obtained, and if he expressed his real feelings, the Jesuit certainly entertained opinions as inconsistent with all good government as they were contrary to sound morality." It happened, however, rather unfortunately, that King James, and his ministers, and their predecessors, had made opinions nearly allied to those of the Jesuit the fixed rules of at least their political conduct. Garnet was executed on the 3rd of May; and Cecil got the order of the Garter as a reward for his exertions in the detection of the plot and his "constant dealing in matters of religion." Several other Catholics were put to death in Warwickshire and the adjoining counties; some for being personally concerned, some for harbouring priests and proclaimed traitors. There were other victims of a more elevated rank, but not one of these was punished capitally. The Earl of Northumberland, the kinsman of the traitor Percy, was seized on the first discovery of the plot, and committed to the care of the Archbishop of Canterbury; and, after the capture of the conspirators at Holbeach, the three Catholic lords, Stourton, Mordaunt, and Montague, were arrested, upon the ground that they all meant to be absent from parliament, and therefore must have known of the gunpowder treason. No one of them was ever put upon a fair trial, but the Star Chamber arbitrarily condemned them to heavy fines, and to imprisonment during the king's pleasure. The Earl of Northumberland was removed to the Tower, and closely examined many times. He demanded a public trial; but in the month of June they brought him up to the Star Chamber, and there accused him of having sought to be the head of the Papists, and a promoter of toleration;" of having admitted Percy, a Catholic, to be a gentleman-pensioner, without exacting from him the proper oaths, and of having preferred the safety of his money to the safety of the king. It is said that James and his ministers believed that Northumberland was the person to whom the conspirators had intended to offer the regency or protectorship; but no mention was made of this in the Star Chamber. The "I was assured there was nothing that was not known before by the confessions of those that were executed."-Letter of Sir Allan Perey to Sir Dudley Carleton. † Jardine. earl was sentenced to pay a fine of 30,0007., to be deprived of all his offices, and to be imprisoned in the Tower for life.* The parliament, which was to have been blown into the air on the 5th of November, met for the dispatch of business on the 21st of January, 1606. The penal statutes had made a few madmen, and, as if the dominant party wished to make more, they immediately called for an increase of severity. James tried to moderate the fierceness of the Commons, by which attempt he put his own orthodoxy in question; and, as he had chosen this unlucky moment for opening a matrimonial negotiation for his son, Prince Henry, with the most Catholic court of Spain, the Puritans began to murmur that he was little better than a Papist himself. Laws the most irritating, oppressive, and cruel, against the whole body of Catholics, were carried through both Houses by overwhelming majorities; and James, more from fear than from any other motive, assented to them. A few of these laws will give a notion of the spirit that was abroad. No Catholic recusant was to appear at court, to live in London, or within ten miles of London, or to remove on any occasion more than five miles from his home, without especial license, signed by four magistrates. No recusant was to practice in surgery, physic, or law; to act as judge, clerk, or officer, in any court or corporation, or perform the office of administrator, executor, or guardian. In all cases of marriage where the ceremony was performed by a Catholic priest, the husband, being a Catholic, could have no claim on the property of the wife, nor the wife, if a Catholic, on that of the husband. Every Catholic that neglected to have his child baptised within a month of its birth, by a Protestant minister, was to pay for each omission 100%.; and 207. was the price to be paid for burying anybody in any other place than a churchyard of the establishment. Every householder keeping Catholic servants was to pay for each individual 10/. per lunar month, and the same sum was to be paid for each Catholic guest he might entertain. Every Catholic recusant was declared to be in all respects excommunicated: his house might be broken open and searched, his books and furniture, having any relation to his idolatrous worship," might be burnt, his horses and arms taken from him at any moment by the order of a magistrate. A new oath of allegiance was devised in which was a formal renunciation of the temporal power of the pope, and of his right of interfering in the civil affairs of England. Such Catholics as would take this oath were liable only to the penalties which have been enumerated; but such as 66 Jardine, Criminal Trials. The second volume of this work a highly valuable illustration of English history and English lawis devoted entirely to the gunpowder plot, and contains, not only everything valuable that has been published on the subject, but numerous extracts from original and unpublished MSS. in the State The little Paper Office, Crown Office, and other repositories. volume is admirably complete as a contribution to history, and is, at the same time, as exciting and amusing as a romance. refused the oath were to be imprisoned for life, and to forfeit their personal property and the rents of their lands. It was expected that most of the Papists would take this oath, which did not trench on any religious dogma; but it was loaded with offensive epithets, and though some of the leaders of the Catholic clergy in England decided in its favour, the Jesuits condemned it, and the pope, Paul V., forbade it in a breve, which Blackwall, the archpriest, had the courage to publish to his congregation, though he himself would have recommended the taking of the oath. Blackwall, who was seventy years old, was soon lodged in a prison, where he remained till his death, which happened six or seven years after. Drury, another priest, was hanged, drawn, and quartered. James fondly thought that he could decide the question of the oath with his theological pen; and, with some assistance from his divines, he brought out a tract entitled, An Apology for the Oath of Allegiance.' Parsons, the celebrated Jesuit, and Cardinal Bellarmino, who, according to no favourable judge,* "had the best pen of his time for controversy," replied to the Apology. James rejoined by publishing what he called A Monitory Preface.' To Parsons, he said, the fittest answer would be a rope. Bellarmino, who had appeared under a feigned name, was not more gently treated. "An obscure author," said his majesty, "is this, utterly unknown to me, being yet little known to the world for any other of his works; and therefore must he be a very desperate fellow in beginning his aprentisage, not only to refute, but to rail upon a king." James's courtiers, including most of his bishops, told him that he had completely vanquished his opponents, and gained immortal fame; the Catholics (and not a few Protestants) thought that he had done a very silly thing, and his brother princes, that he had degraded the royal dignity. He was by this time in great distress for money. The Commons seemed disposed to vote a liberal subsidy, but the bill lay a good while on their table, and at last they came to a decision that it should not pass till they had prepared their list of grievances. The king, who abhorred the word grievance, had to digest, as he could, sixteen long articles; but he evaded the question of redress, and the Commons kept aloof from the subsidy. Cecil and the other ministers made halfpromises in their master's name; the House of Lords was wondrously loyal and liberal, but it was not until the month of May that the Commons voted three subsidies and six fifteenths. While the money question was pending a report was spread that the king, who was away hunting, was assassinated at Oaking, in Berkshire, together with his three favourites, Philip Herbert Earl of Montgomery, Sir John Ramsay, and Sir James Hay," which treason some said was performed by English Jesuits, some by Scots in womens' apparel, and others said by Spaniards and French VOL. III. • Bayle, Dict. men; but most reports agreed that the king was stabbed with an envenomed knife."* Others, however, would have it, that the thing had not been done with a poisoned knife, but that the king had been smothered in his bed as he lay asleep; while others were equally sure that he had been shot with a pistol as he was riding out on horseback. There was a great consternation both in the Parliament House and in the city, with great weeping and lamentation of old and young, rich and poor, maids and wives, who again expected an English St. Bartholomew's. But about three o'clock in the afternoon James arrived safe and sound at Whitehall, and was heartily greeted by the people. It has been supposed that Cecilperhaps the king himself was no stranger to the origin of this bruit, which is supposed to have quickened the generosity of the Commons. Having got the subsidies, James prorogued parliament on the 27th of May to the 18th of November. In the month of July James received a visit from his brother-in-law, Christian IV., king of Denmark; and in the round of costly feasts, hunts, and entertainments, which he gave on this occasion, he forgot the Commons, Garnet, the gunpowder-plot, and all state matters whatsoever. A satirical letter-writer of the time observes that the parliament had voted the subsidies very seasonably, so that the court was able to show off to advantage, and to entertain the royal Dane with shows, sights, and banquetings from morn till eve.t "This short month of his stay," says another contemporary, "carried with it as pleasing a countenance on every side, and their recreations and pastimes flew as high a flight as Love mounted upon the wings of Art and Fancy, the suitable nature of the season, or Time's swift foot could possibly arrive at. The court, city, and some parts of the country, with banquetings, masques, dancings, tiltings, barriers, and other gallantry (besides the manly sports of wrestling and the brutish sports of baiting wild beasts), swelled to such a greatness, as if there were an intention in every particular man this way to have blown up himself." possess too many corroborative accounts of these entertainments to doubt that they were gross and indecorous. At a feast given by Cecil at Theobalds the two mighty princes, James and Christian, got so drunk that his English majesty was carried to bed in the arms of his courtiers, and his Danish majesty mistook his bed-chamber, and offered the last of insults to the Countess of Nottingham, the handsome and spirited wife of the lord high admiral of England. But at the same great entertainment James's subjects, ladies as well as gentlemen of the highest rank, gave proof that they were capable of following the example of their sovereign. "Men," says an eye-witness," who had * Stow. We |