Straw-Saint, Martyr, Most-Barbarous Archtraitor: Anti-Hagiographies of Henry Garnet in Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

In 1606 Henry Garnet, provincial of the English Jesuits and purported co-conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot against James I, was executed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Following his death, accounts of miracles occurring at his execution began to spread throughout England, including an account of a relic bearing his miraculous image. While Catholic writers promoted these accounts as evidence of Garnet’s innocence, Protestant contemporaries argued that Garnet was an illegitimate martyr and that his commemoration was evidence of Catholic support for regicide. This article demonstrates how London Protestant writers and publishers utilized anti-hagiographical arguments to intervene in attempts to promote Garnet’s sainthood, counter claims about the veracity of his relic, and shape his legacy in the decades following his execution.

1. Introduction

On 3 May 1606, the English Jesuit priest Henry Garnet was hung outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London as a traitor and terrorist for his alleged part in the infamous Gunpowder Plot (Fraser 1996). Though he was only one supposed co-conspirator executed after the plot’s unraveling, and far from the most famous today—the lay convert Guy Fawkes holds that dubious title—in the immediate aftermath of his death, rumors spread of miracles and signs of divine favor appearing at his place of execution, including oil springing from the ground.1 However, one miracle soon rose above the others. This was a sprig of wheat—or possibly a corn husk or ear of corn—that had been spattered with Garnet’s blood at the moment of his death. The blood, it was said, miraculously formed itself into a perfect image of the dead priest’s face, staining the straw forever.2

Word of this miraculous relic—or “Garnet’s straw”, as it soon came to be known—spread first through the priest’s inner circle and close correspondents. The story swiftly left this tight group and became a subject of public debate and study across Jacobean London, drawing in both Protestants and Catholics and English natives and resident foreigners. Over the next several years, the relic made it from the hands of the lay recusant who discovered it, to the Spanish embassy in London, to James I’s own Privy Chamber, before eventually traveling with Catholic exile communities to the continent (Ibid). As the relic traveled, the debate over its legitimacy and Garnet’s legitimacy as a potential saint also circulated in both manuscript and print. Nowhere was Garnet’s legacy and the veracity of his relic more hotly debated than within London. London’s urban area offered a unique arena for these debates because of the presence of foreign Catholic and Protestant communities, the large printing and import industries that circulated native and foreign literature, and a political culture that adopted popular print earlier than the rest of the country (Jenner 2011; Eisenstein 1979; Johns 2002). Due to the Plot’s notoriety, Garnet and four of his alleged co-conspirators share the dubious honor of being the only individuals known to have been executed in St. Paul’s churchyard, also the center of London’s print trade.3

Out of the three hundred and fifty-nine recognized English Catholic martyrs, Garnet is one of only forty-four who were not beatified or canonized. Of those, he is one of only four who was not given these honors because it was unclear if he had truly died in odium fidei (Pollen 1909). This article argues that one factor in Garnet’s continued ambiguous status is the effective Protestant literary campaign that intervened in Garnet’s memorialization and legitimation in seventeenth-century London. It examines publications sold in the St. Paul’s marketplace to explore how, as the Catholic communities of London attempted to construct hagiographical narratives portraying Garnet as a wrongfully executed martyr for the faith, Protestant writers produced anti-hagiographical arguments portraying Garnet and the straw relic as everything from foreign-backed frauds to the evidence of satanic powers. These anti-hagiographies, one facet of a larger genre of anti-Catholic popular literature, served to discredit arguments for Garnet’s sainthood and reinforce divergent ideas of martyrdom and political obedience.

The cooperation between publishers, clergy, and authorities to disseminate Protestant theology and messaging has been well-studied, and the print discourse surrounding Henry Garnet and his straw relic provides a compelling case for how publishers intervened in political-religious conflict.4 This article examines Garnet as a case study for interaction between remembrance, the physical spaces where print circulated, and post-Reformation canonization. It also proposes the term “anti-hagiography”, which scholars have previously applied largely to modern works, as a useful framework for understanding the goals and rhetorical tactics of Protestant anti-Catholic print.5

2. “That Horrible Conspiracy”

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, London’s atmosphere hung heavy with suspicion and paranoia. The Scottish James I, who had ascended to the throne of England only in 1603 after the death of his cousin Elizabeth I, had failed to live up to English Catholics’ hopes for a more tolerant monarch. Elizabeth I had been the target of several assassination or coup plots during her long reign, and James I inherited this unnerving legacy, with at least two plots against him uncovered and foiled in the first year of his reign (Akkerman 2021). In 1604, he ordered the removal of all Catholic priests—but specifically those of the Jesuit order—from England (Patterson 2000).

The Gunpowder Plot remains a subject of scholarly debate and historical ambiguity, with two main schools of thought: the “Pro-Plotters” and the “No-Plotters” as Antonia Fraser termed them. No-Plotter historians have argued that the plot was encouraged or even largely constructed by government agents including Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury and Secretary of State, as a convenient pretext to arrest prominent Catholics, including Garnet. The Pro-Plotters support the existence of the Plot as a real, organic assassination attempt and the logical escalation of a self-reinforcing cycle of government restriction on Catholic communities and Catholic resistance to these restrictions.6 Both camps, however, agree on the basic aims of the conspirators. Led by Robert Catesby, an Oxford-educated recusant who had previously conspired against Robert Cecil as a tangential member of the failed Essex Rebellion of 1601, the core group of thirteen men planned to plant explosives in the House of Lords to detonate during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. If successful, this plan would kill not only many of the members of Parliament responsible for the anti-Catholic legislation that so angered the recusant community, but also James I, who was set to preside over the opening. The plot was thwarted by an anonymous letter delivered to one member of Parliament, which led the authorities to discover conspirator Guy Fawkes and a store of gunpowder holed up beneath the House of Parliament on the night of 4 November. Though Catesby and his co-conspirators fled London, they were pursued, captured, and executed.⁷ Garnet himself was captured on 27 January 1606. He attempted to defend himself using the doctrine of equivocation, the idea that some lies are not sinful if they further the cause of justice, and asserted that his failure to alert the authorities was not treason because it served a higher religious purpose (Hadfield 2013). This “lying” became a cornerstone of Protestant satires of Garnet.

Seventeenth-century London was also unique in England for its Protestant and Catholic foreign communities, many of which became involved in the discourses around the Gunpowder Plot and circulated literature between England and the continent (Pettegree 1986). As Mark Netzloff has explored, the Gunpowder Plot and its origins in a transnational network of English and foreign actors challenged the state’s sovereignty and forced the Stuart government to contend with questions of non-state political actors and jurisdictional authority in an era before the development of modern ideas of citizenship and nationality (Netzloff 2010). In May 1606, as a direct result of the attempt on his life, James I instituted the Oath of Allegiance, which required English recusants to swear to the monarch’s supremacy over the pope (Dures and Young 2021). Later, around 1615, the Archdeacon of London instituted the Articles on Foreigners and Recusants in London Archdeaconry, which required ministers to record and investigate foreigners and potential recusants or reconciled Catholics within their parishes (Articles on Foreigners and Recusants in London Archdeaconry 1994). Fears about Catholics in England acting on behalf of foreign powers permeated Protestant accounts of the Plot, especially after the 1612 assassination of the French king Henry VI by a Catholic.8 The Plot particularly threatened warming relations between Spain and England, as the Spanish ambassador took temporary possession of the straw relic and personally promoted its validity to James VI. In the ambassador’s household it was put on view for foreign Catholics, reinforcing Protestant concerns that it would spark further violence and that the Plot was part of a larger Spanish offensive (Redworth 2008).

Garnet’s execution coincided with a pivotal moment in the construction of Protestant ideas of martyrdom and the legitimacy of political violence. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Catholic and Protestant constructions of martyrdom differed not only in the role of holy blood, but also in the relationship between the martyr and political obedience. As Shayn Altman has discussed, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, English Protestants began to redefine martyrdom to include obedience to the political order and, especially, to the head of state. This redefinition first coalesced in the sixteenth century, spurred on by incidents such as the Gunpowder Plot, and was promoted by officials including John Donne, who became Dean of St. Pauls’ Cathedral in 1621 (Altman 2023).

Like martyrdom, relics were a particularly contentious topic within Reformation English discourse. Beginning with Martin Luther himself, who called relics “the greatest lies”, Protestants had attacked the devotion to saints’ relics on the grounds that they were both unsupported theologically and regularly faked by profiteers.9 Many of England’s pre-Reformation relics were destroyed in the sixteenth century with the dissolution of the monasteries and chanceries or dispersed to private Catholic homes or with exiles to the continent, and eventually lost (Walsham 2015, pp. 377–79). Devotion to relics became one of the identifiers of Catholics and sympathizers in English Protestant print and an avenue for mockery. Despite this, and a 1571 ordinance banning the sale and ownership of Catholic devotional objects in England, English Catholics continued to produce, transport, and collect relics (Muller 2018, pp. 1–3). As Alexandra Walsham has noted, the Tridentine regulations that demanded centralized oversight of devotional objects were rarely enacted effectively in England because of the Church’s limited power there. This, and the lack of priests on the island, meant that lay Catholics had greater personal control of relics and more idiosyncratic relationships with them than their co-religionists on the continent (Walsham 2010, p. 129). English recusants and foreign Catholics alike attended the executions of priests in the hopes of collecting blood or body parts as martyrs’ relics, a practice that officials attempted to prevent and satirists skewered.10 In one of the broadsides produced in the immediate aftermath of Garnet’s execution, titled “The shamefull downefall of the Popes kingdome”, the author writes jauntily of Garnet at the gallows, “his Popish dignitie is lost:/his Reliques eke, to his great cost/And Papists endless shame…His holy Bones and holy Stockes/His holy Shirtes, and holy Smockee/are come vnto the Hang-man’s boxe” (Anonymous 1606b). The presence of relics immediately identify Garnet’s Catholicism, and their inability to prevent his execution demonstrates, for the author, their lack of true spiritual power. Garnet’s holy shirt and smock, soon to be transformed into relics themselves, are equally impotent.

What happened after Garnet’s execution and the circumstances that led to the discovery of his miraculous straw image are as murky as the Plot itself. The story of the relic’s discovery-and even its form—went through many permutations in the succeeding century. One influential version, from a 1610 pamphlet by the Creten Jesuit Andreas Eudaemon-Joannis, claims that a young Catholic named John Wilkinson was the one to retrieve the straw. Wilkinson witnessed the execution shortly before he left England for France, where he would undertake his own Jesuit education at the St. Omers College. Though he passed the straw with its miraculous image onto a pious Catholic woman, he did not share the story of its retrieval until he was in France. 11 There is an appealing circularity to this version of the story, where Garnet’s relic looks towards the future perpetuation of the faith by placing itself in the hands of a future Jesuit. Wilkinson as a character becomes implicitly a replacement for the dead priest and a possible future martyr, taking inspiration from Garnet exactly as English Protestants feared.12 Eudaemon-Joannis’s account is echoed by the later autobiography of John Gerard, another Jesuit accused of conspiring in the Plot who successfully escaped to the continent. Gerard claimed that it was the spiritual effect of the relic itself that prompted Wilkinson to abandon his secular life and enter the Society of Jesus and later St. Omers (Gerard 1955, pp. 232–33). However, while the connections to the broader Latin Christian network appealed to a Catholic reader, they likely served to reinforce the Protestant reader’s perception that the Gunpowder Plot was supported by foreign powers and that Garnet’s supposed relic would prompt the production of new and zealous Jesuits.

Another unpublished account, authored by an anonymous Jesuit who claimed to be present at the execution, gives still another chain of events in which the straw replaced an earlier miracle. The author reports that Garnet’s head stayed miraculously preserved even after “beinge cast into hoate water” and its lifelike visage attracted a cross-confessional crowd of hundreds of spectators to London Bridge. Seeing this crowd, the city magistrates turned the face away so it could no longer be viewed by the public. Only after the head was hidden from view did Garnet’s face appear on the straw. This account also deems the straw an “eare of a corne”, not a stalk of wheat (Anonymous n.d.). Though a corn relic is the more popular form in the earliest accounts, by the 1620, the corn had been firmly replaced by a straw or wheat relic. This echoes Protestant monikers for Garnet like “Straw-Saint”, potentially demonstrating that these anti-hagiographical narratives were so effectively disseminated that they impacted even pro-Garnet memorialization. By the 1620’s, depictions of Garnet’s straw had coalesced. The relic was uniformly represented as wheat, with Garnet’s face on the ear, most often with a cross on his forehead and a smaller head, potentially a cherub, beneath. This materiality was weaponized by Protestant writers, who equated the straw with the cheapness of the supposed miracle and the second portrait as evidence of Garnet’s “double-faced” equivocation, a motif that even appears in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Rogers 1965).

Though the central story shifted between tellings, English Catholics embraced Garnet’s straw and Garnet’s potential for sainthood as a martyr for the faith. In the decade after his death, Catholic writers, especially those with relationships to the Society of Jesus, began to review his life for evidence of sainthood. From the continent, the priests John Wilson and Thomas Worthingon published catalogues of English Catholic martyrs that included Garnet among their numbers (Questier 2022, pp. 376–78). This effort extended beyond the clergy and foreign diplomats to other learned Catholics, and prints of Garnet’s straw were widely sold and his martyrdom discussed in correspondence (Walsham 2001, p. 243). In a typically hagiographical statement, the Spanish noblewoman and Catholic missionary in England, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, wrote to a friend in Spain that Garnet “was truly a saint, even when he was alive” and offered her a ring owned by Garnet as another relic of the martyr (Carvajal y Mendoza 2012, vol. 1, p. 275). These accounts are just a small sample of the perspectives on the Gunpowder Plot and Garnet’s execution and relic that circulated in Catholic networks, and Catholic reactions to the Plot have been explored more fully by other scholars.13 For their Protestant contemporaries who are the focus of this article, these Catholic memorializations appeared as the first steps towards canonization, and tantamount to promoting regicide.

3. Developing Protestant Anti-Hagiography

Though Catholic publications remained officially banned in England, in reality these works circulated broadly and were easily accessed by those interested (Yamamoto-Wilson 2014). This was especially true in London, where both the printing and import industries thrived. As the Protestant minister and former Catholic John Gee reported in 1624, Catholics had “Printing-presses and booksellers almost in every corner”, largely selling translations coming from English exile communities on the continent (Gee 1624, p. 21). London also adopted political print and pamphlet circulation at a rate that far exceeded the rest of England, and polemical print was embraced even by city populations with relatively low literacy.14 This access to cross-confessional literature and the permeation of print through the city’s culture meant that Protestants in London had unusual knowledge of the trends and motifs in Catholic literature and vice-versa. It also allowed Protestant authors and booksellers to intervene effectively in English Catholics’ attempts to position Henry Garnet as a potential saint and the straw bearing his image as an authentic and miraculous relic.

St. Paul’s churchyard was the site of execution for the Gunpowder Plotters, but it held a much more important place for Londoners as the heart of the city’s print trade. While in the fifteenth century the bookselling and printing trades had been dominated by foreigners, by 1606 the Crown and the Stationer’s Company had introduced an effective licensing system that meant the sellers in St. Paul’s churchyard were almost entirely English Protestants (Mumby 1974, pp. 60–96). Henry Garnet was hung just feet from where booksellers would soon hawk pamphlets adorned with his miraculous image. The motivation behind the decision to execute Garnet and his alleged co-conspirators at St. Paul’s is left unstated in contemporary accounts. The earliest royally-authorized account of the affair, A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings Against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, published in 1606 by the king’s printer, notes only that the deans of both St. Paul’s and Winchester cathedrals attended to castigate Garnet (Anonymous 1606a). A 1616 recounting of Garnet’s trial and death by the Catholic Roger Widdrington, later translated and expanded for the English market by Cambridge scholar Thomas Preston, implies that the audience was expected to be larger than was usual for executions, likely due to the notoriety of the crime and Garnet’s position as superior of the English Jesuits (Preston 1679). Officials may have sought a venue that both set the plotters apart from ordinary criminals and could accommodate the crush of spectators. In addition to the formal print and news industry centered in the churchyard, St. Paul’s nave was known as a fashionable spot for gossiping where, as the essayist Francis Osbourne recounted, ordinary Londoners could hope to hear accounts of court and state proceedings from loose-lipped courtiers (Douglas-Irvine 1909). Executing the plotters in the epicenter of London’s formal and informal news networks ensured that the state’s account of the condemned men’s crimes, as well as their punishment, would propagated swiftly across the city. This geographic overlap allowed stationers to directly intervene in the public memory of executions, as crowds at the execution and later visitors to the site would encounter their wares as they viewed and discussed the executions.

As word of Garnet’s straw spread through the city, so did pamphlets undermining its validity through the shops and stalls lining St. Paul’s churchyard. The debate over the straw fit neatly into an already popular genre of anti-Catholic literature, in which Protestant writers argued against the actions, theology, and political actions of the Church, including against the validity of relics broadly. Garnet soon became a common figure in anti-Catholic publications. These texts aimed to establish three key, anti-hagiographical points regarding the priest. First, that Garnet was executed justly for treason and not for his faith; second, that the miracles attributed to Garnet were either fraudulent or the work of the devil; and third, that the true definition of English martyrdom included political obedience. These first two aims directly counter two of the post-Tridentine requirements for the Catholic canonization of martyrs.

One London publisher and bookseller, Nathaniel Butter, provides a prime example of the range of anti-hagiographical sentiments aimed at Garnet in the texts sold around St. Paul’s because of the length and impact of his publishing career, though numerous publishers produced works that portrayed Garnet as a treasonous false saint. Butter is best remembered for publishing the first edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Butter was a quintessential London stationer, having inherited the trade from his stepfather and labelled by contemporaries as “true Paules bred”.15 He was also a pioneer of English newsprint, with over 41% of his known publications being news-tracts (Rostenberg 1957, p. 25). The newsprint section of Butter’s business began in the 1620’s, when his catalogue began to include the novel product of corantos, or inexpensive reprints of Dutch and Italian news. His early adoption of the coranto shows that his network expanded beyond English shores and introduced him to foreign Protestant thinkers and concerns. Indeed, Butter’s dedication to newsprint reflects his personal investment in the Protestant cause. Such was his personal commitment to anti-Catholicism that when the privy council moved to suppress the corantos in 1632, on account of complaints from ambassadors of Catholic nations, Butter merely pivoted to producing national histories embedded with similar anti-Catholic sentiments (Baron 2004).

In 1606, Butter was only two years into his independent career and had already demonstrated a keen taste for the lurid and controversial topics that sold well in popular print. He sold pamphlets containing attacks on Garnet and his straw relic for over thirty years ranging from satirical verse to more serious theological discussions. The six extant works include two by Richard Sheldon, two by Joseph Hall, and one each by Sir Edward Hoby and Henoch Clapham, and were published between 1608 and 1640. These works all argue against Catholicism broadly, and take aim at multiple targets within the Church, of which Garnet is just one. However, his continued appearance in this body of literature over decades, and the similarities in these six portrayals, demonstrate how Protestant writers formed common motifs around Garnet and shaped his legacy in conflict with a nascent Catholic hagiography.

Butter’s earliest publication in which Garnet appears, was a 1608 dialectic pamphlet by Henoch Clapham, then vicar of Northbourne. Clapham had, like Garnet, spent time abroad, though in his case as the pastor of an English-speaking Protestant congregation in Flanders (Bayne 1885). In Errour on the left hand, through a frozen securitie, Clapham presents a dialogue between the conformist and separatist sects of England for the benefit of an undecided interlocuter. Catholicism, personified in the character Romanista, argues for the righteousness of regicide through Garnet’s example: “for as the Apostle saith, the sword is not carried for naught. O father Garnet, father Garnet, how glorious is thy martyrdome, and how miraculously shineth thy physnomy vpon a strawe!” In response, the Malcontent, representing the undecided, dismisses the relic using its materiality by saying, “Do you thinke it came by miracle? I heard a Preacher in Lōdon say, that it was a miracle not worth a strawe” (Clapham 1608, p. 15). The year 1608 was a pivotal year for Garnet memorialization with the publication of the influential Wilson and Worthington catalogues of English Catholic martyrs that, controversially, included Garnet and fellow accused. These catalogues, written by English priests residing on the continent, sparked controversy for both Protestant observers and the Catholic community about the definition of martyrdom and whether Garnet’s death was due to his faith or true treasonous misjudgment.16 For English Protestant writers, it emphasized the need to educate the public on the correct definition of holy martyrdom and the political danger posed by memorializing Garnet as a martyr.

The danger of false martyrs is at the center of another of Butter’s early publications, 1612’s anti-Catholic The motiues of Richard Sheldon pr. for his iust, voluntary, and free renouncing of communion with the Bishop of Rome, Paul the 5. and his Church. In this pamphlet, Richard Sheldon, a member of the Church of England clergy and himself a convert from Catholicism, outlines his reasons for converting to the Church of England but returns repeatedly to Garnet and his relic as a quintessential example of the spiritual and physical dangers of the papacy. He began with two quotes from the Book of Revelations, 17:6 and 18:4, that together form a warning about the intoxicating potential of martyrs’ blood:

I saw the woman drunke, with the blood of Saints, and with the blood of the Martyrs of Iesus; and I admired when I saw her, with great admiration.

Goe out of her my people, that you be not partakers of her Sinnes; nor receiue of her punishments.

(Sheldon 1612, 1r)

When Sheldon addresses Garnet’s straw directly, it echoes this warning about spiritual greed and the dangers of false belief. He terms the straw “pseudoprodigious” and “mendacious” and claims that the origin of the relic story lay with “a notorious dicing and carding priest”.17 Though modern scholars dispute to what extent the English populace was truly concerned with the material excesses of the Catholic clergy, the pervasiveness of gambling, wantonness, and greed among the clergy was often cited by English Protestants as a major motivation for breaking with the Catholic Church and the dissolution of the chantries (Duffy 1992, pp. 448–77).

Sheldon’s description of Catholic renderings of Garnet’s straw gives some hints as to where he may have received his origin story for the relic and how the story traveled through transnational religious networks. His description deviates from the most common image, exemplified by the frontispiece to Eudaemon-Joannis’s pamphlet, by describing Garnet’s portrait as having “a star in the forehead (to associate him perhaps with the twelue starres of the Apocalips, signifying eyther the twelue Patriarkes or the twelue Apos-es”.18 Most extant copies of the straw image from both Catholic and Protestant publications show a Greek cross on Garnet’s forehead, not a star. It is possible that a different version of the image showing a star also circulated, or that Sheldon misread the tiny cross on a blurred copy, or that he deliberately changed the cross to a star in order to make his allusion to the Book of Revelations and its worshippers of The Beast, a title often applied to the English Catholics. Two other engravings depicting Garnet’s straw held in the collections of the British Museum offer another explanation, as they do show a star, or emanating light, over the cross. One of these, however, dated to between 1610 and 1632, explicitly labels the mark on Garnet’s forehead a cross (“cruce in fronte”) in its caption (Unknown n.d.). These two images were printed in Flanders and Germany, so it is also likely that Sheldon is referencing a version produced there rather than an English one, reflecting the intellectual network joining Northern European and English Protestants (Raphael 1610).

Butter published another of Sheldon’s works in 1616, the anti-Jesuit A suruey of the miracles of the Church of Rome, prouing them to be antichristian. As evidenced by the title, in this work Sheldon examined Catholic miracle stories, including Garnet’s straw. Here Sheldon expands Garnet’s role in the Plot from an equivocator guilty of sins of omission to “chiefe Powder-plot Architect” and “Arch Traitour” (Sheldon 1616, pp. 181–82, 317). He also changes his portrayal of the relic from a deliberate forgery to evidence of the power that Rome and the Society of Jesus had over the Catholic faithful. After describing the confusion around the straw’s form, and the disagreement even among English Catholics about whether there truly was a portrait in the spilled blood, he detailed the relic’s removal to Flanders and how its image was cemented in the continental exile community: “The strawye face was carried ouer into Flaunders, where it so mounted in clearenesse, that at Mountes and elsewhere, some shes Painteresses looking in their monasteries through […] Ignatian spectacles haue drawn the face most gloriously”.19 Removing the straw from England did not end the English discourse around its validity. Instead, its movement to the continental exile community inflamed Protestant anxieties about the strength of the transnational Catholic network and the ability of foreign actors to incite political violence in England through this network.

Though Sheldon does dispute the Catholic veneration of saints and martyrs in this work, primarily based on the lack of sufficient documentation for many canonized saints, he does not directly address Catholic portrayals of Garnet as a martyr or potential saint.20 Instead, he asserts that the Gunpowder Plot was a political, not religious, act and that its aim was the destruction of the political order. He compares the attempt on James I to the most infamous (and secular) political assassination, writing, “they intended (if the heauens had not letted them) to haue blown vp our Cesar, his progeny, and all his worthies”.21 Although Sheldon rejects the Catholic veneration of saints, in this passage he also argues implicitly that even by the Catholic definition, Garnet could not be considered a legitimate saint or martyr. If Garnet acted for political, rather than doctrinal, purposes, then his death did not qualify him for canonization. Just ten years after Garnet’s execution, Protestant anti-hagiographical writing had moved to both expand his role in the Plot and therefore the political nature of his actions, and portray the straw relic as transnational conspiracy rather than a true miracle.

Clergy were not the only group participating in this anti-hagiographical effort. In 1615, Butter published Edward Hoby’s A curry-combe for a coxe-combe. Hoby, a member of Parliament and Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, was engaged in a yearslong literary debate with the English Catholic missionary John Floyd, of which A curry-combe was only one volley. Like Sheldon, Hoby addresses the impossibility of miracles attested to by Catholics. As part of a dialogue between Hoby’s literary stand-in, a stableboy, and a Floyd stand-in, he dismisses Garnet’s relic as an impossibility: “In all your runnagate trauels, knew you euer a Hobby to begette a foale on a Mare? and yet I must say it is more probable, then that your Phoenix Garnet should begette a face on a Straw” (Hoby 1615, p. 208). Hoby’s dismissal rests on two points. First, as a false martyr Garnet could not enact a miracle any more than a hobby-horse could sire a foal. Second, as was put forth by the increasingly influential Calvinist school, the age of miracles had passed and so any contemporary miracle was false.22 As works like A curry-combe show, anti-hagiographical literature targeting Garnet was bound up in larger efforts to educate the English public on Protestant theology.

Butter continued to produce and sell pamphlets that used Garnet and his straw to represent treason and political violence long after the immediate fervor had subsided, attesting to the enduring public interest in the case and Garnet’s potency as a political symbol and potential saint. One tract by the English bishop and satirist Joseph Hall, published in 1625, broadens its view beyond Garnet’s straw to other miraculous accounts. In one passage, Hall attempts to secularize a story that oil had sprung forth from the site of Garnet’s execution, turning the image of martyr’s blood from one of resistance to one of political obedience:

Ye neuer see Iustice painted without a sword; when that sword glitters with vse, it is well with the publique; woe be to the Nation where it rusts. There can be no more acceptable sacrifice than the bloud of the flagitious. Immediately after Garnets execution, Father Dauid at Ypre, in a publike Sermon declared the miracles showne thereat; Amongst the rest, that a spring of oyle brake forth suddenly in the place where that Saint was martyred; In stead of a lie, let it be a parable; The bloud of Traitors shed by the sword of Iustice, is a well of oyle to fatten, and refresh the Common-wealth.

(Hall 1625, p. 540)

Unlike some of his fellow writers, whose discussion of why and how the accounts of Garnet’s miracles are fraudulent is much lengthier, Hall took an ambivalent perspective on the veracity of these miracles. Instead, he turns to the definition of Protestant martyrdom coalescing in the seventeenth century. Garnet’s blood is powerful, but as he is a traitor and not a true martyr, the blood becomes instead fuel “to fatten, and refresh the Common-wealth” and polish for the sword of Justice.

In 1640, Butter also published Hall’s treatise on Christian moderation at the end of his career and on the eve of the English Civil War. By this point, it seemed that the miracle of Garnet’s straw no longer needed to be refuted in detail. Instead, Hall turned his attention fully to the political facets of Garnet’s execution, writing, “It is possible to see a Campian at Tiburne, or a Garnets head upon a pole; Treasonable practises, not meere Religion, are guilty of these executions” (Hall 1640, p. 143). Garnet’s actions go beyond heresy, Hall explains, as even with heretics the Protestant doctrine of moderation requires that the faithful strive to return them to the fold, for “as it is in actuall offences, that not our sinne, but our unrepentance damnes us”.23 With the violence of the Civil War on the horizon, Hall uses Garnet not as an example of false Catholic doctrine, but as a wider warning against division and rebellion. Later in the treatise, he makes a potential allusion to Garnet’s straw, writing “for whereas anger is a kindling of the blood about the heart, how unfit is it that it should be set on fire with every straw?”24 Although the immediate interest in and investigation into Garnet’s martyrdom and relic had cooled, he continued to be powerful emblem of political dissidence for English Protestants.

4. The Straw-Saint’s Enduring Legacy

Like so many other artifacts from the English Catholic exile communities, Garnet’s straw was lost during the French Revolution and has never resurfaced.25 However, despite its removal from England and the multiple and contradictory stories of its origins, it remained a recurring symbol of Catholic treason and duplicity in English print. As evidenced by another pamphlet from 1689, by the future Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake, the circulation of Garnet’s image on the Catholic continent continued to rankle English authorities. As he reported, “St. Amour, a Doctour of Sorbon, found his Pictures commonly sold at Rome, in the year 1651” (Wake 1689, p. 65). Wake also discusses the position of Garnet in Catholic memory, and uses this legacy as evidence for the continued risk of Catholic rebellion: “…it is affirmed by one who liv’d among them, that [Garnet] and Campion are beatified by the Pope, which is the next degree to Canonization, and that every one of them is painted in the Jesuites Churches, with the Title of Blessed Father” (Ibid). A 1681 anti-Catholic sermon preached at St. Paul’s by the reverend Gilbert Burnet contains a similar complaint, with Burnet pronouncing that Garnet was “reckoned among the Martyrs in the Catalogues set out by the Jesuites: and under the pictures and prints made for Garnet he is called the true Martyr of Christ…” (Burnet 1681, p. 12). Further research into the evolution of Garnet’s position in early modern English discourse after the Civil War remains to be conducted, but it is clear that he remained a symbol for the dangers of regicide and the use of violence by non-state political actors.

Though Catholics in England and abroad attempted to position Garnet as a martyr and a potential candidate for sainthood, he was never canonized or beatified. While there were multiple factors that influenced this decision—including the general decrease in canonizations after Trent, the growing unpopularity of the Jesuits that would peak in the eighteenth century, and the lack of Catholic officials in England to investigate the claims of Garnet’s miracles—the greatest impediment was how firmly the title of “traitor” was appended to his name despite the lack of evidence for his actual involvement in the Plot.26 The immediate and sustained printing of anti-hagiographical works in London and their effect on public opinion were essential to producing and maintaining this enduring reputation, a reputation that made it impossible for the Church to assert that Garnet was a loyalist who had died only for his faith. Many of these anti-hagiographical pamphlets were produced specifically for sale in and around St. Paul’s Cathedral, the site of Garnet’s death. This geographic confluence meant that Protestant publishers could intervene directly in the memorialization of Garnet. While Nathaniel Butter was a particularly prolific and dedicated publisher and seller of anti-Catholic tracts that painted Garnet as the “arch-traitor”, many other sellers located around St. Paul’s also participated in the trade. These works focused on the validity of the miraculous straw relic and Catholic claims that Garnet was executed for his faith rather than for true participation in treason, both issues that would be used as evidence in a hypothetical future canonization process. The endurance of Garnet and his straw as symbols for treason in English print is a testament to how powerfully Protestant writers, such as the examples in Nathaniel Butter’s catalogue, shaped his image and legacy in both local and transnational memory.