True Relations

Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England

Frances E. Dolan

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812244854, 9780812244854
• eBook ISBN: 9780812207798
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the motley ranks of seventeenth-century print, one often comes upon the title True Relation. Purportedly true relations describe monsters, miracles, disasters, crimes, trials, and apparitions. They also convey discoveries achieved through exploration or experiment. Contemporaries relied on such accounts for access to information even as they distrusted them; scholars today share both their dependency and their doubt. What we take as evidence, Frances E. Dolan argues, often raises more questions than it answers. Although historians have tracked dramatic changes in evidentiary standards and practices in the period, these changes did not solve the problem of how to interpret true relations or ease the reliance on them. The burden remains on readers.Dolan connects early modern debates about textual evidence to recent discussions of the value of seventeenth-century texts as historical evidence. Then as now, she contends, literary techniques of analysis have proven central to staking and assessing truth claims. She addresses the kinds of texts that circulated about three traumatic events—the Gunpowder Plot, witchcraft prosecutions, and the London Fire—and looks at legal depositions, advice literature, and plays as genres of evidence that hover in a space between fact and fiction. Even as doubts linger about their documentary and literary value, scholars rely heavily on them. Confronting and exploring these doubts, Dolan makes a case for owning up to our agency in crafting true relations among the textual fragments that survive.

PART I

Crises of Evidence

Chapter 1

True and Perfect Relations

Henry Garnet, Confessional Identity, and Figuration

As provincial of the English Jesuits, Henry Garnet was a person of interest to the Jacobean state. But he became the target of an urgent and extended manhunt when Guy Fawkes, during interrogation, claimed the Gunpowder Plot conspirators had met in his house. When he was finally discovered hiding in a cramped priest hole on January 27, 1606, an intensive process of interrogation and evidence collection began. He was arraigned and tried on March 28, 1606—almost five months after the plot was discovered and two months after the condemnations of the six major conspirators. James I himself attended the trial in King’s Bench, over which Sir Edward Coke presided. So many people attended that Coke complained that it was difficult to hear. A jury found Garnet guilty after a fifteen-minute deliberation. But then more than a month elapsed before his execution on May 3, 1606, in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Fr. John Gerard claims that the execution was so crowded that spectators paid twelve pence apiece to stand on purpose-built bleachers, and “All windows were full, yea, the tops of houses full of people, so that it is not known the like hath been at any execution.” Himself a hunted man who had escaped from the Tower, Gerard could not attend because he left England the very day of the execution. Instead, he depended on “a Priest of great credit and estimation” for information about “these particulars,” a priest who had been “glad to give twelvepence only to stand upon a wall.”¹

His life and the Jesuit mission at stake, Gerard was an interested observer. Yet he had to rely on oral and printed accounts of the trial as well as the execution, even as he contested them. With Garnet’s death, contests to evaluate his story intensified. Gerard and other Catholics entered the fray to spin Garnet’s story in their own direction, defending him for making some disclosures in the process of the investigation and offering hagiographic descriptions of his martyrdom, including reports that his head, displayed on a pike, did not decay and that his face had appeared on a straw splashed with his blood.² The Crown, in turn, invested in a lengthy apology for its own actions, making its case to an international audience in A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuite, and his Confederats (London, 1606). Although the indefinite article concedes that there might be other true relations of these proceedings, this was the official account of Garnet’s trial and execution, quickly translated into Latin and broadly distributed.³ In this chapter, I will focus on this text. Whereas A True and Perfect Relation has often been cited as a context for more obviously literary works, especially Macbeth,⁴ I argue that it offers us an entry point into a contestation in which all the key players were ambivalently but busily engaged in figuration and its interpretation. Trials such as Garnet’s, and readers’ “virtual” participation in them via written accounts, helped to motivate and popularize skeptical reading practices and to hone the skills this kind of reading requires. But they also spread doubt about these practices.

A True and Perfect Relation is not the best known or most frequently cited text about the Gunpowder Plot. That honor goes to His Majesties Speach in This Last Session of Parliament (1605), also known as “the King’s Book” since it was the official government narrative of the plot and its discovery. The King’s Book is 96 pages long. It remains widely cited by scholars. Assembled and printed very quickly, it seems to have been published at the end of November 1605, just weeks after the plot was first discovered; efforts were made to publish it even earlier, but new conspirators and confessions kept coming to light. For Mark Nicholls, an influential historian of the Gunpowder Plot, the King’s Book documents “the slow, tentative way in which the investigators acquired their knowledge of the plot,” presenting, albeit in simplified form, “as much as the government knew at that time.”⁵

In contrast, A True and Perfect Relation is extremely long—416 pages—and belated. It was published as much as seven months after Garnet’s execution. The text’s girth and belatedness render its purpose less clear. If the King’s Book rushed to place the case against the traitors before the public, A True and Perfect Relation tells a story most people probably knew. Its purpose is to elaborate on the issues at stake, although it also lays out a chronology of the plot and the prosecution’s case. It is a rumination more than a procedural.

Figure 1. Title page of A True and Perfect Relation. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Ultimately, Garnet’s trial focused on the fact that he had known of the plot, largely through a nested confession; fellow Jesuit Oswald Tesimond sought Garnet’s advice about a confession he had heard, that of Robert Catesby. Although Garnet seems to have advised strongly against such a conspiracy, he was held accountable for not revealing what he had learned in these complexly privileged communications. Throughout the trial, we find a double attitude toward confession that is well expressed by Lewis Owen in his The Unmasking of All Popish Monks, Friers, and Jesuits (1628): “For in truth, there is nothing that openeth a wider gap, or way unto sinne, than Auricular Confession” wherein “under pretence of confessing their sinnes, they [Catholics] maliciously consult, how to effect and practice their sinfull purposes.” Henry Garnet is Owen’s prime example: “First, he heard their Confession, then he absolved them of all their sins, and afterwards ministred the Sacrament unto them. Where you may perceive how their Sacrament of Confession (or Penance, as they call it) served him for a cloake to cover his treacherie, or rather a net to catch such wicked Traytors; and the other Sacrament (which they affirme to be the very body of Christ) to be as it were a Signet, wherewith he sealed their mouthes up close . . . from ever revealing the same.”⁶ In this passage, Owen tellingly uses a figure that almost immediately slips out of his control: a cloak, which obscures and thus enables treachery, becomes, somewhat confusingly, a net, which enables the State to catch wicked traitors and, therefore, one might imagine, a good thing. Opening the mouth to confess and receive communion effectively shuts it. We could not find a clearer articulation of the view that what is wrong with the sacraments is that they stand in the way of the state’s own ability to extract a confession. The judicial process is in competition with auricular confession, striving for the same goal of full disclosure and repentance. What stands as confessional identity in court, and in the subsequent print accounts that attempt to fix and disseminate this identity, is often marked by withholding confession or protesting innocence, that is, by attempting to resist an identity already thrust on one.

I am especially interested in the way the lord chief justice, members of the Privy Council, and the ordinary (or minister) of Newgate prison rely on tropes to weld confessions and identities together. Perhaps because the resulting ligature is figurative, it often unties itself within the very text that posits it. These men’s fascination with equivocation has in part to do with their own reliance on manipulating meanings and resorting to tropes. In the end, it seems as if those who are not on trial, the winners who write the history of these trials, are the ones who feel compelled to speak so as to compensate for the silence or evasion of those at the bar. And in their speech, they, like Owen above, rely on figurations that slither out of their control and ally them with the dark figures and equivocations they decry.

At the end of the chapter, I look briefly at another moment in which, in the wake of a crisis, an attempt was made to secure a “true and perfect” relation between confession and identity. In this case, I consider the rhetorical aftershocks of the executions of the alleged Popish Plot traitors. Both of the moments I will discuss are a little after the most intense panic, when the broader consequences of crises began to manifest themselves. Although more than seventy years intervene, we can find in both 1606 and the early 1680s a concern regarding whether Catholics can or will speak the truth of their “confessional identities” in a way that will be credible to others.⁷ Furthermore, through the recycling of titles, texts, and tropes, the later moment circles back onto the earlier one, suggesting the difficulty of resolving or moving beyond the problems entailed both in confessing one’s own identity and in identifying the truth in others’ confessions.⁸ Throughout, I am interested in how scholars, too, circle back, restaging partisan debates in their attempts to secure a stable relation between confessions and identities.

Published by Authority

From the title page on, A True and Perfect Relation addresses “those that were hearers” at Garnet’s trial but might have missed important details. In the proceedings themselves, Coke asks indulgence for “the necessary repetition of some thinges before spoken” and then argues that this is valuable: “Nay it may be thought justifiable to repeate in this case, for that in respect of the confluence & accesse of people, at the former araignment, many could not heare at that time” (O2v–O3r). So even those present in court require repetition during the proceedings, in case they have missed something, as well as the subsequent repetition provided by the printed account. A True and Perfect Relation is extremely self-conscious about its own status as a text and about the investigation’s reliance on texts. It was not enough that the defendants confess: in court, “their severall examinations (subscribed by themselves) [were] shewed particularly unto them, and acknowledged by them to be their own & true.” What is more, “for further satisfaction to so great a presence and audience, and their better memorie of the carriage of these Treasons, the voluntarie and free confessions of all the said several Traitors in writing subscribed with their owne proper hands, and acknowledged at the Barre by themselves to be true, were openly and distinctly read” (sig. K3). The reading aloud is explicitly described here as an instructive performance, satisfying the audience, inscribing the contents in memory, and disciplining the defendants by making them listen to what they have already confessed, subscribed, and acknowledged.⁹ The text also addresses readers who will encounter the proceedings for the first time through print or who require a more exhaustive contextualization of the trial and its issues. In a preface “To the Reader,” the editor acknowledges that some may wonder why it is necessary to publish the proceedings after the sentencing and executions. In the wake of the executions, what else is there to learn? He explains that the text is needed because “there do passe from hand to hand divers uncertaine, untrue, and incoherent reports, and relations of such Evidence, as was publiquely given upon the said severall Arraignments” (sig. A2v). This text aims to counter and correct those untrue relations and to offer a genealogy of the treason, for which there was not time in the urgency of its first discovery and prosecution.

Yet even this attempt to set the record straight acknowledges its own provisionality. Coke’s remarks at the arraignment and trial are presented “as neere to his owne words, as the same could be taken” (O2v; cf. D2r).¹⁰ In turn, Gerard admits the provisionality of his attempts to counter the official version. He presents Sir John Crooke’s [the king’s sergeant’s] pleading “as near as it could be remembered by two or three sufficient men that were present and did carefully observe both that and all other speeches.” Gerard explains that Coke “began his speech with a low voice, that so his words could not at the first be so distinctly heard; but it tended to this effect.”¹¹ How are we to interpret the gap between what was actually said and what could be taken or gathered or remembered? This is especially interesting with regard to the earl of Northampton’s speech, which appears in A True and Perfect Relation in a form in which it was never delivered “having been enlarged upon” (title page). Northampton makes numerous speeches in the text: at Sir Everard Digby’s arraignment (which is presented “as it was taken . . . by T. S.” [M1r]), at Garnet’s arraignment, and after Garnet’s conviction. This last speech is the longest. It begins on signature Dd1r. By signature Xx3r, Northampton refers to something about which “I need not at this time say much, when much cannot be said for want of time.” He concludes on signature Eee4r, that is, 199 printed pages later.

The editor of the text explains to us at some length both why he presents the speech in this enlarged form and the process by which he secured this expanded version “exceeding the proportion wherin it was first uttered.” While “others” had “overrun” or perused the “maimed copy” of their remarks and pointed out corrections, Northampton found the “fragment” he was given to review “so farre short not onely of that which should have bene, but of that also which was at the arraignment delivered” that he remedied both problems, offering a memorial reconstruction of what he thought he said “as neere as his Lordship could call to minde” as well as the “amplified and enriched” version that “should have been.” He left it to the editor to choose between the two. Mindful of the “egernesse” with which a transcript of the speech “was desired by the Auditors after the delivery,” the editor concluded that “it would better fit the motive in folio, then in decimo sexto, in the fruit then in the blossom, and the larger the better” (sigs. Eee4r–v).¹² The editor takes full responsibility for offering the expanded speech to the reader, although, as we shall see, Northampton seems to have framed the text largely as a vehicle for this speech. Garnet’s whole trial is about the reliability of what Catholics say on the stand, yet the authorized version of Northampton’s “enlarged” concluding speech is authorized precisely because it is not what he was able to say in court.

The fact that this text undoubtedly was a piece of propaganda occludes the fact that it also had a very particular author, one whose status reminds us that the Privy Council was internally divided—as were at least some of its members. In her biography of Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, Linda Levy Peck offers a detailed explanation of his contribution to the text’s composition (or compilation), with the help of Sir Robert Cotton, who conducted research, edited, and prepared the manuscript for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Spelling
• Introduction
• Part I. Crises of Evidence
• Part II. Genres of Evidence
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments