that Catholics should not only be quiet from any molestations, but should also enjoy such liberty in their houses privately as themselves would desire, and have both Priests and Sacraments with full toleration and desired quiet. Both the Priests that did kneel before him when he gave this promise (binding it with the word of a Prince, which he said was never yet broken), did protest so much unto divers from whom I have it. And divers others, persons of great worth, have assured me the same upon the like promise received from His Majesty, both for the common state of Catholics and their own particular.”
It is dangerous to make too much of evidence against which there may be the shadow of a suspicion. Father Gerard’s personal testimony can be accepted without the smallest hesitation; but that of Father Watson, who was probably one of the priests he mentioned who “did kneel before”James when he made the solemn promise which Father Gerard heard of at second hand, should be received with more caution. Lord Northampton’s statement in his speech at Sir Everard Digby’s trial should certainly obtain very careful consideration. “No man,”said he,[77] “can speak more soundly to the point than myself; for being sent into the prison by the King to charge him with this false alarm” (i.e., the report that James had promised toleration to Catholics), “only two days before his death, and upon his soul to press him in the presence of God, and as he would answer it at another bar, to confess directly whether at either or both these times he had access unto his Majesty at Edinburgh, his Majesty did give him any promise, hope, or comfort of encouragement to Catholics concerning toleration; he did there protest upon his soul that he could never win one inch of ground or draw the smallest comfort from the King in those degrees, nor further than that he would have them apprehend, that as he was a stranger to this state, so, till he understood in all points how those matters stood, he would not promise favour any way; but did protest that all the crowns and kingdoms in this world should not induce him to change any jot of his profession, which was the pasture of his soul and earnest of his eternal inheritance. He did confess that in very deed, to keep up the hearts of Catholics in love and duty to the King, he had imparted the King’s words to many, in a better tune and a higher kind of descant than his book of plainsong did direct, because he knew that others, like sly bargemen, looked that way when their stroke was bent another way. For this he craved pardon of the King in humble manner, and for his main treasons, of a higher nature than these figures of hypocrisy, and seemed penitent, as well for the horror of his crime as for the falsehood of his whisperings.”
Probably Northampton may have exaggerated, possibly he may have lied, in making this statement; but there is this to be remembered, that owing to his false testimony against the Jesuits, already recorded in this chapter, Father Watson must be regarded as a somewhat discredited witness, and it will not do for us Catholics to accept his verbal evidence against King James, and then to turn round and repudiate the evidence against the Jesuits in his own handwriting,[78] without some very strong reason for so doing. A reason of a certain strength does indeed exist; for Watson’s evidence against James was given freely and uninterestedly; whereas his evidence against the Jesuits may very probably have been offered in the hope that it might be accepted as the price of pardon, or at least of some mitigation of the awful sufferings included in the form of death to which he had been sentenced.
Even if we altogether discard Watson’s evidence of James’s promises, enough remains to satisfy my own mind that the new king had given the Catholics more or less hope of toleration; and, if I am too easily satisfied on this point, there can be no sort of question that Sir Everard Digby, who was often with Father Gerard, and that many other English Catholics had been assured, rightly or wrongly, and believed, wrongly or rightly, that King James had solemnly promised to give them immunity from persecution, if not freedom of worship, and that he had basely and treacherously broken his faith with them and sold them for the price of popularity among his far more numerous Protestant subjects: who, then, can blame them for considering themselves to have been most unjustly, perfidiously, and infamously treated by that monarch?
It may be worth while to quote here again from Goodman, the Protestant Bishop of Gloucester, respecting the persecutions of the Catholics in the reign of James.[79] “Now that they saw the times settled, having no hope of better days, but expecting that the uttermost rigour of the law should be executed, they became desperate; finding that by the laws of the kingdom their own lives were not secured, and for the coming over of a priest into England it was no less than high treason. A gentlewoman was hanged only for relieving and harbouring a priest; a citizen was hanged only for being reconciled to the Church of Rome: besides, the penal laws were such and so executed that they should not subsist:—what was usually sold in shops and openly bought, this the pursuivant would take away from them as being popish and superstitious. One knight did affirm that in one term he gave twenty nobles in rewards to the doorkeeper of the attorney-general; another did affirm, that his third part which remained to him of his estate did hardly serve for his expense in law to defend him from other oppressions, besides their children to be taken from home to be brought up in another religion. So they did every way conclude that their estate was desperate, etc.”If objection should be taken to Goodman as a witness on the Protestant side, on the ground that he eventually became a Catholic, I would reply that, at the time he wrote what I have quoted, he was, as the editor of his Court of James the First says,[80] “an earnest and zealous supporter of the Church,”of England, and of James I., Goodman himself writes[81] in that very book:—“Truly I did never know any man of so great an apprehension, of so great love and affection—a man so truly just, so free from all cruelty and pride, such a lover of the church, and one that had done so much good for the church.”Such an admirer of King James might certainly be trusted not to say a word that he could honestly avoid about the ill-treatment endured by any class of his subjects during his reign.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] History of England, from the Accession of James I. to the outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642, Vol. i. p. 79.
[58] Gardiner’s History of England, Vol. i. p. 85.
[59] Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.
[60] Somers Tracts, Vol. ii. p. 147. From the Cotton Library, Faustina, c. 11, 12, fol. 61.
[61] “James was an alien.”“Supposing that on such principles King James was rejected, who would come next? The Lady Arabella Stuart, descended from Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. in the same manner as King James, save that her father was a second son, and King James’s father was the eldest. But she had the fact of her birth and domiciliation within the kingdom of England as a counter-poise to her father’s want of primogeniture.”“Without openly professing Roman Catholicism, she was thought to be inclined that way, and to be certainly willing to make favourable terms with the Roman Catholics.”Introduction by J. Bruce to Correspondence of King James VI. of Scotland with Cecil and others.
[62] Dodds’ Church History of England, Vol. iv. p. 8. Tierney’s Notes.
[63] Dodds’ Church History of England, Appendix i. p. xxxv.
[64] Lingard, Vol. vii. chap. i.
