The Henson Journals

[208]

Monday, October 30th, 1922.

Two years ago I was enthroned in Durham Cathedral. The clouds have gathered in the interval, & the outlook is more doubtful now than it was then. And I have lost most of such enthusiasm as I had, & all the hope.

I spent the morning in reading Gardiner on the Gunpowder Plot with a view to working some reference thereto into the Balliol sermon next Sunday, November 5th. The subject of my "equivocation" is illustrated well enough by the history of Garnet, and I might lead my argument to the practical application, "To thine own self be true", but the recent controversies about Major have tied the notion of equivocation to the specific case of clerical subscription, and that is a subject which it is neither judicious nor edifying to raise.

In the afternoon I walked with Colonel Darwin in the Park: and on my return went through the correspondence with Clayton who returned from Sunderland.

At 7 p.m. I distributed prizes to the Secondary School Boys ^& Girls^ in the Town Hall at Spennymoor, and made a speech. There is something crude and unfriendly about the people in that place, but they gave me a good reception, listened with politeness to a rather long speech, & applauded loudly at the end. I returned to the Castle on the conclusion of my oration, & spent the remainder of the evening with my guests. The weather, gusty and uncertain, changed at nightfall, becoming wet & relatively warm.

[209]

"The popular feeling was right in fixing upon equivocation as more demoralising than downright lying, because a person who in self–defence tells a falsehood, knowing it to be such, is far less likely to deceive habitually than one who deceives with words so framed as to enable him to imagine that he is in reality telling no falsehood at all."

S. R. Gardiner. History I. 281.

The most respectable figure of those who died as traitors convicted of a share in 'Gunpowder Plot' was the Jesuit Garnet, whose precise concern in the conspiracy will perhaps always be debatable. That he had knowledge of the Plot appears to be certain: how far he personally approved of it seems to be doubtful. Dr Gardiner thinks that he was speaking the "exact truth" when "on the scaffold he persisted in his denial that he had any positive information of the plot except in confession", but he seems to have made little if any effort to dissuade the conspirators from their infamous crime, and he left them with the impression that they had his goodwill, if not his explicit approval. In any case he was known to hold a doctrine of equivocation which could not but imply so grave a measure of moral confusion as to make him an unsafe guide for anybody, and this circumstance weighed heavily against him at his trial: and he certainly gave much evidence that was demonstrably false.

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