When Father Henry Garnet, S.J., defended the use of equivocation and mental reservation under oath during his 1607 trial on charges of treason for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot (5 November 1605), he initiated a widespread public debate in England. According to the Catholic doctrine of equivocation, an individual could purposely use ambiguous or misleading speech when forced to swear what he believed to be an unjust oath; the doctrine of mental reservation held that a person could reserve part of a proposition in his mind in order to reverse the meaning of spoken words. In response to intense questioning from Edward Coke, the Attorney General, Garnet acknowledged that the indiscriminate use of such practices would ”cause great mischief in human society.” But as the supervisor of the Jesuits, a religious order prohibited in England, Garnet insisted that equivocation and mental reservation were central to the success of his missionary activities: ”in cases of necessary defense,” he explained to Coke, ”or for avoiding any injury or loss, or for obtaining any considerable advantage, without danger to any other person … equivocation is lawful.”1

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