Garnet, HENRY, is chiefly remembered for his connection with the Gunpowder Plot. He was born in 1555, and educated as a Protestant at Winchester College. A few years after leaving school he became a Roman Catholic, went abroad, and entered the Society of Jesus. He acquired among the Jesuits a considerable reputation for learning and piety. In 1586 he was sent upon the English mission, where for eighteen years he acted as provincial of the Jesuits. The indiscreet zeal with which he promoted certain Jesuit schemes for the advancement of their order brought him into odium with an influential section of the secular clergy; while his friendship and correspondence with the extreme partisans of the Spanish faction brought him under suspicion of treason. In the spring of 1605 he wrote to a Jesuit in Flanders in commendation of Guy Fawkes, when that conspirator went over to the Netherlands in order to solicit the co-operation of Sir William Stanley and others in the plot of that year. Garnet admitted that before this he had come to know, in a general way, of the projected treason, and that in July he heard the particulars, under the seal of confession (so he said), from another Jesuit, Greenway. At the time of the discovery of the plot he was present at the place of meeting appointed by the conspirators, and shortly afterwards was apprehended on suspicion at Hindlip. The chief grounds for inferring his complicity in the plot were derived from a secret conversation held by him in prison with a brother Jesuit, Oldcorn, overheard by spies set for the purpose by the government.
That Garnet knew the particulars of the murderous design months before its attempted execution was proved and admitted. That this knowledge was derived exclusively from the confessional rests upon his statement only. It would probably have gone less hard with the prisoner had not his judges been prejudiced against him, not indeed so much on account of his creed as for his extraordinary practice of equivocation when on his trial. He was condemned for misprision of treason, and executed May 3, 1606. In proof of his innocence the story of a miraculous straw, touched by his blood, and bearing a miniature portrait of the Jesuit, was circulated among Roman Catholics; and it is said that the mere sight of the straw made five hundred converts to his creed. Garnet was considered by his co-religionists generally as a martyr for the seal of confession, and as such was proposed, with the rest of the victims of the penal laws, for the honour of beatification; but it is remarkable that, while more than three hundred candidates obtained the title of Blessed or Venerable, the objections of the 'devil's advocate' in the case of Father Garnet were so cogent that the pope was induced to defer the introduction of his cause. See GUNPOWDER PLOT, and works cited there.