On the Feast of the Invention, 3 May 1606, Father Henry Garnet was strapped to a hurdle and dragged to his place of execution. According to Protestant accounts he looked guilty and terrified. According to Catholic accounts, he looked innocent and serene. Rather irritatingly, at least for the assembled dignitaries, he refused to confess his treason, and further denied that he was merely equivocating. Then, rejoicing in the fact that he had ‘found my cross’ he embraced the opportunity to die a martyr's death. It was all rather unsatisfactory, and the fact that a group of suspected Catholic sympathisers ran up and pulled on his legs to make sure that he died whilst being hanged, and so did not suffer the peculiar agonies of being drawn, really quite ruined the day. By the time his heart was being torn out, and his body quartered, the crowds were drifting home, and those left were reported to have been murmuring rather ominously. Traitors, particularly Jesuit ones, were supposed to suffer rather more, their spectacular demise a matter of altogether greater celebration. And Garnet was no ordinary Jesuit. He was the Superior of the order of Jesuits in England.

God's ‘chosen people’, of whom Garnet was most definitely not one, imagined themselves living in an ‘age of terror’; terrorised primarily by men like Garnet, the imagined puppet-master of a vast, if shadowy network, of Jesuit insurgents dedicated to destroying Albion and all its hard-earned freedoms.