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Father Henry Garnet’s Treatise of Equivocation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

A. E. Malloch
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Extract

In 1850, during its first year of publication, Notes and Queries printed the enquiry of one ‘J.M.’, who asked for information about a treatise of equivocation to which he had found reference in a seventeenth-century book. A number of replies in subsequent issues provided bits of information about the treatise, and called attention to a manuscript copy in the Bodleian. This flurry of items in Notes and Queries seems to have prompted David Jardine (1794-1860), who later wrote a history of the Gunpowder Plot, to prepare an edition of the treatise, which was published in 1851. Jardine composed a preface, but since he could not establish who had written the work, and was not optimistic that the matter would ever be clarified, his account is far from complete. There did, however, exist documents that could identify the author, and exactly 100 years after the appearance of Jardine's edition, an article by A. F. Allison showed conclusively that the treatise had been written by Father Henry Garnet, S.J. Since the treatise played a significant part in the history of ‘equivocation’ in England, and was a subject of controversy at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, I believe it will be useful to provide an account of what is now known about the work.

Type
Articles
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 387 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1980

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References

Notes

1 ‘Preface’, A Treatise of Equivocation (London, 1851), xv.Google Scholar Jardine's edition will be cited hereafter as Equivocation.

2 Allison, A. F., ‘The Writings of Father Henry Garnet, S.J. (1555-1606)’, Biographical Studies, 1 (1951), 7–21.Google Scholar

3 Stonyhurst MSS., Collectanea P.2, f. 552; a note on f. 553 identifies this letter as one addressed to Persons. See also Allison, 15, for a passage in a letter to an unidentified correspondent, dated 18 November 1600, where Garnet makes essentially the same statement. In the preamble to the treatise he says that though Father Southwell sufficiently put to silence those who spoke against him, ‘yet because I perceive this kind of doctrine seemeth strange both to heretics and also to divers Catholics, I have thought it necessary to discuss it more exactly’, Equivocation, 4. There is an interesting reference to the disquiet felt by Catholics in England about the doctrine in Andreas, Eudaemon-Ioannes, Apologia pro Henrico Garneto (1610), 17–18.Google Scholar

4 CRS, 5 (1908), 334—transcribed from Thomas Leake's account of the trial and execution of Southwell, Stonyhurst MSS., Anglia 6, ff. 125-128. See Anglia A.2.1, f. 9 for another version of the accusation.

5 British Library, MS. Lansdowne 84, n. 102. The report of the interrogation is printed (from a copy among the Petyt MSS. in the Inner Temple) as an appendix to Philip Caraman's translation of Gerard's memoir, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, 2nd edition (London, 1956), 281;Google Scholar see also pages 125-7 for Gerard's own recollection of the interrogation.

6 The lecture was printed at Oxford in 1598 as the first of the Quaestiones sex (STC 36). On page 5 of the preface Abbot reports that Gerard was interrogated concerning equivocation, and notes that Gerard has since escaped from the Tower.

7 Westmister Archives 6, n. 57, f. 3.

8 A brief apology (1601: A&R 613), sig. Cc4v-[Cc7v]; A treatise tending to mitigation (1607: A&R 641, STC 19417), 279: ‘… since the arraignment of M. Robert Southwell, when first they fell upon it’.

9 Equivocation, 4-5. Garnet also refers to Southwell's piece on equivocation in his long letter to the Father-General, Claudio Acquaviva, sent to Rome, apparently, in March 1598: see editorial note, CRS, 51 (1958), 283. The letter is a point-by-point reply to the attacks on the Jesuits in Fisher's Memorial. After responding briefly to Fisher's comments on equivocation, Garnet says: ‘Scripsit ille [Sotuellus] quidem hac de re nonnihil, quod tamen haeretici nunquam viderunt: froferam si voletis’ (287). The whole passage is tantalising. It seems probable that Garnet on this occasion would have mentioned his own treatise if it had then existed. If he had not composed it by early March 1598, then we can establish precisely when it was written, namely, between the time he wrote to Acquaviva about Fisher's Memorial, and 22 April 1598 when he wrote to Persons that he had composed the treatise. By the same token, it could be argued that Southwell's piece was misplaced between the time Garnet offered to produce it for Acquaviva, and the time he wrote in the preamble to his treatise that it could not be found. But there are many unverified assumptions in this hypothesis. What seems indisputable is that Robert Southwell did write something on equivocation, which has since been destroyed or lost.

10 The index of the Douay version of the Old Testament (1609-10) contains an entry, ‘Equivocation is sometimes lawful’, with references to six passages in scripture. There were at least as many passages from the New Testament commonly cited in the literature on equivocation (see Equivocation, chapter 4), but the doctrine was not yet a point of controversy in 1582, when the Rheims New Testament was published, and there are no references to equivocation in its ‘Ample and particular table directing the reader to all Catholic truths, deducted out of the holy scriptures, and impugned by the adversaries’.

11 Commentarius in cap. Humanae aures 22, q. 5: de veritate responsi partim verbo, partim mente concepti; et de arte bona et mala simulandi. It is sometimes claimed (as, for instance, by Basil Fitzgibbon, The Month, 2 [1949-50], 195) that Continental theologians were prompted to develop doctrines like equivocation by news of the plight of Catholics in England. The claim cannot here be supported, Azpilcueta explains that he composed his treatise to resolve a matrimonial case sent to him by the Jesuits at the College of Valladolid—not the English seminary at Valladolid, which was not established till some five years after the publication of the treatise. The case was strictly hypothetical, as Azpilcueta pointed out (q. 3. n. 4), since it assumed a situation that could no longer occur under the revised canons of the Council of Trent. Scores of Continental theologians were to debate the oratio mixta in the decades following the appearance of Azpilcueta's work, but their writings make virtually no reference to the plight of the English Catholics. They were academicians, and their reference-points were the previously-published works of their colleagues.

12 Robert Persons in his Treatise tending to mitigation, 313, notes that the term has come to have this meaning, but adds that he prefers amphibology to equivocation as a way of designating in English the particular sort of double meaning associated with the oratio mixta. The critics of equivocation could scarcely find terms abusive enough to describe the oratio mixta. John King (71559-1621), while Vice-Chancellor at Oxford, was particularly resourceful in two Gunpowder Plot anniversary sermons. In 1607 (STC 14985) he spoke of the Jesuits’ ‘mixed hermaphroditical, epicene, half-born, and half-unborn propositions’ (25); in 1608 (STC 14986), speaking again of the Jesuits, he condemned ‘their mental reservations, their amphibolous, amphibious propositions, which live, as those creatures part in the land, part in the water, so these half in the lips, half in the heart and conscience’ (27), and went on to ask, ‘What hope of truth and simplicity from these or their imps, when they have … patronaged, published, persuaded to the whole world the lawfulness of their heterogeneous, mongrel propositions?’

13 That appears to have been done by Gregory Martin in a work entitled Resolutiones quorundam csuum nationis Anglicanae. An unsigned manuscript note described it thus: ‘This treatise was never printed, but goeth from man to man amongst the recusants in written hand. The effect of it is to resolve certain doubts concerning the behaviour of priests, and other papists, how they shall deal and answer when they are called in question by the state, et cetera. It was first compiled, as it was thought, by Gregory Martin, whose resolutions being somewhat long, have some that are shorter annexed unto them, made by Cardinal Allen and Persons’ (Bodleian Library, Rawlinson d. 858, f. 145). A copy was available to Thomas Morton, who quotes from it (apropos equivocation) on pages [41J-43 of his Exact discovery of romish doctrine (1605: STC 18184), and on pages 85 and 88 of his Full satisfaction concerning a double romish iniquity (1606: STC 18185). It may also be the work discussed in the preface to George Abbot's Quaestiones sex, 7-15.

14 In the De mendacio and Contra mendacium.

15 The stories make their appearance regularly in the theological works on lying. Garnet includes brief versions in the fifth chapter of his treatise: ‘So is it recorded of St Francis that being asked of one who was sought for to death, whether he came not that way, he answered (putting his hand into his sleeve—or as some say, into his ear), “He came not this way”. St Athanasius, first flying by water his persecutors and being so narrowly pursued that he could not escape, turned his course backwards and, meeting the enemy's ship, asked whom they sought for. Who answered that they sought for Athanasius. He told them that he was a little before them, flying as it seemed some which pursued him’ (Equivocation, 50-51).

16 A treatise tending to mitigation, 402.

17 Equivocation, 3.

18 Coke recalled Southwell's use of the text and incorporated it in his questioning of Gerard: see note 5. I use the English version of the text which appears in chapter 1 of Garnet's treatise (Equivocation, 6).

19 Equivocation, 102.

20 Allison, 15.

21 SP 14/18, n. 86, q. 13.

22 SP 14/18, n. 87, ad 13. Though both surviving manuscript copies of the treatise are in fact titled, ‘A treatise against lying and fraudulent dissimulation’, it seems always to have been referred to by its cancelled title (legible on both copies), ‘A treatise of equivocation’, not only by Garnet's adversaries, but by Garnet himself and by Catholic authors who defended him after his death, such as Persons and Eudaemon-Ioannes.

23 A true and perfect relation of the whole proceedings against the late most barbarous traitors (1606: STC 11618 et seq.), sig. I, sig T2. The fuller account of Garnet's trial in the British Library (Add. MS. 21203) confirms that Garnet was not accused of being the author.

24 Antiiogia adversus apologiam Andreae Eudaemon-loannis (1613: STC 45).

25 Confutatio Anticotoni (1611), 104.Google Scholar Eudaemon-Ioannes’ remark is perfectly accurate, but is so phrased as not to be inconsistent with Garnet being the author, or with Eudaemon-Ioannes knowing that Garnet was the author. Eudaemon-Ioannes knew that there was a copy of the treatise at the English College in Rome (see his Responsio ad epistolam Isaaci Casauboni [1612], 153). He knew of the pamphlet exchange between Thomas Morton and Persons on the subject of equivocation (see his Apologia pro Henrico Garneto, 18). He and Persons were rectors respectively of the Greek and English Colleges in Rome in the years following the Gunpowder Plot, and both were engaged in pamphlet wars arising out of the Plot.

26 Anticoton, ou refutation de la lettre déclaratoire du Père Coton (1610), 23.

27 Réponse apologetique à l'Anticoton et à ceux de sa suite (1610), 56.Google Scholar

28 Ad Frontonem Ducaeum SJ theologum epistola (1611: STC 4742), 109.Google Scholar

29 Responsio ad epistolam Isaaci Casauboni, 152.

30 Casaubon, however, had knowledge of at least some of the statements about equivocation written by Garnet during his imprisonment in the Tower: he quotes SP 14/216, n. 217A on page 111 of the Epistola, and SP 14/216, n. 218 on page 123. Elsewhere Casaubon lists documents relating to Garnet which he received from the Lieutenant of the Tower (Bodleian Library, MS. Casaubon 25, ff. 65-66).

31 SP 14/18. n. 87, ad 14.

32 Stonyhurst Collectanea N.l, f. 122. The text can be found in Allison, 10.

33 It is not possible to say what manuscript copy Morton was using, as he cites the treatise by chapternumber only.

34 So a note on the MS., in Coke's hand, explains. Coke set down further notes (undated) about themanuscript in a document headed, ‘Concerning the book of equivocation these things are to beobserved’. SP 14/17, n. 33.

35 See ‘Preface’, Equivocation, xi-xiii.

36 SP 14/216, n. 151, a report of the interrogation of Vavasour on 9 December 1605. Vavasour explainedthat he had re-copied the last page of A, which had become worn.

37 SP 14/17, n. 33. By the manner in which Coke refers to Francis Tresham, these notes would appear tohave been written sometime before Tresham's death on 22 December 1605.

38 See Allison, 9-10, 14-15.

39 In another essay I have traced the development of the doctrine in the works of continental theologians, ‘Equivocation: A Circuit of Reasons’, Familiar Colloquy, Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Barker, edited by Patricia Bruckmann (Ottawa, 1978), 132-43.