God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (47 page)

For what it is worth, James I would turn out to be a relatively lenient monarch and his reign would see a marked reduction in the execution rate – 25 Jacobean ‘martyrs’ compared to an estimated 189 Elizabethans.
³⁵
For what it is worth. For those Catholics who had been drunk with hope at James’s accession and were now suffering the hangover, it is worth nothing. ‘A flash of lighting,’ Gerard explains, ‘giving for the time a pale light unto those that sit in darkness, doth afterwards leave them in more desolation.’
³⁶
There were some Catholics, however, like Robert Catesby, who had been sitting in the darkness for some time, waiting for his fellows to grow accustomed to the gloom. He was looking elsewhere for the lightning flash.

^fn1
Once a naval dockyard, Erith on the Thames Estuary was the ideal place, not only for a safe house, but also a smuggling operation. There may have been something to the limerick:

There are men in the village of Erith,

Whom nobody seeth or heareth,

And there looms on the marge

of the river a barge,

Which nobody roweth or steereth.

(Monkhouse,
Nonsense Rhymes
, 1902)

20

Desperate Attempts

Catesby looked first to Spain, for that is where his head was already turned. He wanted a Catholic England with a Catholic monarch, not a ‘false Scots urchin’ (the late Queen’s phrase), who might just put up with Catesby and his ilk (if ‘quiet and decently hidden’), but would never promote Catholicism in accordance with the papal breves.
¹
Catesby believed that Spain was most likely to deliver his vision and in 1602, the year before the Queen’s death, he and cousins Francis Tresham, Thomas Wintour and Lord Monteagle had begged financial and military aid from Philip III. Wintour had been the one to kiss the Spanish King’s hands and his access had been facilitated by a letter of recommendation from Henry Garnet to Joseph Creswell, the mission’s man in Madrid.

Wintour returned from the Continent with lots of promising, if procrastinating, noises: the Spanish would invade England in support of a Catholic claimant, but
mañana
. Then Elizabeth I had died, James I had succeeded and Philip III had sent official congratulations. An Anglo-Spanish ceasefire was declared and treaty negotiations followed. At this stage, Francis Tresham and his brother-in-law Monteagle turned into doves. They were ‘resolved to stand wholly for the King’ and wanted nothing more to do with the Spanish treason, as the various overtures to Philip would come to be known. Catesby, on the other hand, thought it worth pursuing. Within days of bringing Garnet and the sisters at White Webbs the first news of Queen Elizabeth’s death and the popular ‘applause’ to James’s accession, Catesby was sending another man to Spain to sound out Philip’s true intentions.
²

Unfortunately for Catesby the message from Spain really was peace not war. A soldier called Guy Fawkes pitched up at Philip’s court around the same time and was equally disheartened to get the same
response. Early in 1604 Catesby sent Wintour abroad for one last push, but it was no surprise when he returned at the end of April with ‘good words’, but a suspicion that ‘the deeds would not answer’. Wintour sailed home with Fawkes. He told him that he and some friends were ‘upon a resolution to do somewhat in England if the peace with Spain helped us not’.
³

The peace with Spain did not help them. Despite Philip III’s desire to secure toleration and Garnet’s hope that ‘some good will come out of it’, the Treaty of London, eventually signed in August 1604, made no mention of England’s Catholics. Catesby had been right to lose faith in Spain. The surprise, considering the defeat of his father’s American Dream two decades earlier, is that he had kept it for so long. ‘If the negotiations for toleration do not go well,’ Garnet reputedly warned Rome that August, ‘it will be impossible to keep the Catholics quiet. What can we do? The Jesuits will not be able to pacify them. The Pope must command all Catholics not to make a move.’
⁴

*

Guy Fawkes was a stranger in London, albeit one with strong xenophobic tendencies. He had not seen his native country for over a decade. ‘I can never yet hear of any man that knows him,’ King James later remarked. Ambrose Vaux would have known him, for they had served in the same regiment, but Ambrose was still in the Low Countries. Eliza, too, might have heard of him, since her old chaplain, Richard Cowling, had entreated a Venetian for ‘favour & friendship for my cousin germane Mr Guydo Fawkes’ at the turn of the century.
⁵
Catesby’s pals John and Christopher Wright certainly knew Guy Fawkes for they had been at school together in York. In May 1604, John and Guy were reunited in lodgings just off the Strand. Also present were Catesby, Wintour and Thomas Percy, John’s hot-headed brother-in-law who had made those hopeful trips to Holyrood on the eve of James’s accession and had since vowed vengeance. He had threatened to kill the King. ‘No Tom,’ Catesby had said, ‘thou shalt not adventure to small purpose, but if thou wilt be a traitor, thou shalt be to some great advantage.’ And he had told him that he was thinking of ‘a most sure way’, which Percy would ‘soon know’.

Having taken an oath of secrecy and then, in a separate room,
heard Mass and received communion, Percy and the others came to discover Catesby’s ‘sure way’. Wright and Wintour already knew the bare bones, having been entrusted with the secret earlier in the year. It was quite simple: they would ‘blow up the Parliament house with gunpowder’, for ‘in that place have they done us all the mischief and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment’. Wintour had been hesitant, but Catesby had persuaded him that ‘the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy’. The priest who administered the Mass at that May meeting in the Strand was Eliza Vaux’s chaplain, John Gerard, S.J. He had, apparently, not been privy to the earlier conversation in the other room.
⁶

Thus was the Gunpowder Plot hatched and reared. It evolved over time and adapted to circumstance. Percy had originally subleased a building next to the House of Lords from Henry Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton (the Warwickshire manor that Anne and Eleanor may have used as a safe house). They had planned to drive a shaft through the foundations, but when the lease for a ground-floor vault directly beneath the House of Lords came up, it seemed like divine providence. The gunpowder was initially stored at Catesby’s lodging in Lambeth – a sixth man, Robert Keyes, was recruited to guard it – but it was subsequently ferried over to Westminster in order ‘to have all our danger in one place’.

It was only confirmed in the autumn of 1604 that King James would be opening Parliament. The plotters assumed that his elder son, Prince Henry, would join him, but they were not sure about four-year-old Charles, so loose plans were made to capture him if necessary. Princess Elizabeth, who was nine and living at Combe Abbey near Coventry, would be proclaimed Queen. A rebel force gathered under the guise of a hunting party would take her to London and she would rule under the protectorate of an unspecified (or, at least, never disclosed) nobleman. Armour and weapons were stockpiled, and horses stabled, at key Midlands strongholds. Peers who were Catholic, or ‘Catholicly affected’, might be saved from the blow, but Catesby was vague about this when pressed and apparently held the ‘atheist’ Lords in such low regard that he thought ‘dead bodies would be better for the commonwealth than they’.

Proclamations were drafted in order to lure disaffected Englishmen into the rebellion. Religion would be downplayed and they would
march under the banner of ‘Liberty and Freedom from all manner of Slavery’. They would protest against wardships and monopolies and the union with the parasitic Scot. With the extinction of the political, spiritual and judicial elite and the paralysis of local government, ‘all the Catholics and discontented persons would take their parts and proclaim the Lady Elizabeth’.
⁷
That was the plan.

Parliament was adjourned on 7 July 1604 to reconvene in February. There was a further prorogation over Christmas due to plague. On 28 July 1605 ‘some dregs of the late contagion’ lingered, so the date was pushed back again. The new and final date for the State Opening of Parliament was Tuesday, 5 November 1605.
⁸

The delays were expensive and Catesby struggled to finance everything himself.
⁹
An August meeting in 1605 gave him the go-ahead to recruit a few men with deep pockets and fine horses. Their circle had already widened. Catesby’s retainer, Thomas Bates (who had once taken ‘a man child’ to Anne and Eleanor’s house in Warwickshire), had figured out what was going on and was formally entrusted with the secret towards the close of 1604. He was followed by John Wright’s brother Christopher, Thomas Wintour’s brother Robert, and John Grant of Norbrook in Warwickshire. Grant was married to the Wintours’ sister, Dorothy. At the end of January 1605, he had received the following letter from Tom Wintour:

If I may with my sister’s good leave, let me entreat you, brother, to come over Saturday next to us at Chastelton. I can assure you of kind welcome and your acquaintance with my cousin Catesby will nothing repent you. I could wish Doll here, but our life is monastical, without women.
¹⁰

Since Thomas had also asked John to ‘bring with you my
Ragion di Stato
’ (
Reason of State
) – a Jesuit work on the ethics of statecraft – it is clear that this was no ordinary weekend retreat.

Kinship ties were evident in the gunpowder ring, as they were in the wider recusant community. The Midlands connection was another strong bind. Most of the conspirators were gentlemen in their early thirties and the majority had wild pasts. They were frustrated men of action, ‘swordsmen’ the priests called them, and ‘they had not the
patience and longanimity to expect the Providence of God’.
¹¹
Each had his own reasons for becoming what would today be termed a terrorist, but as Gerard’s convert, Sir Everard Digby, warned Cecil:

If your Lordship and the State think it fit to run another course and deal severely with Catholics, give me leave to tell you what I fear will happen, which in brief will be massacres, rebellions and desperate attempts against the King and State. For it is a general received reason amongst Catholics that there is not that expecting and suffering course now to be run that was in the Queen’s time, who was the last of her line and last in expectance to run violent courses against Catholics.
¹²

‘Handsome’, ‘virile’, ‘affable and courteous’, Digby was one of the last men to join the plot.
¹³
He was recruited in October 1605, late enough to have become thoroughly disillusioned with James I. Another in the outer ring was the dandyish, horse-mad Ambrose Rookwood, sworn in on 29 September 1605. He was from Suffolk, but had spent much of the year in the Midlands. Fifteen days later, on 14 October 1605, Francis Tresham took the oath of secrecy.

The Vauxes knew many of the plotters, some very well indeed, but they did not qualify for recruitment on several grounds: income (not enough), blood (too blue), age (Eliza’s children were too young) and zeal (Ambrose was a bored and violent swordsman, but far too worldly for the ‘monastical’ plotters). Eleanor’s son, William Brooksby
alias
Mr Jennings, might have been involved peripherally. The man with ‘a bald head and a reddish beard’ was known to officials, but though he would probably see Catesby at White Webbs just a few days before the scheduled blow, he would not be named or pursued as a plotter.
¹⁴
No one thought to ask the women, not even those toughened viragos Anne, Eleanor and Eliza. Which is not to say that they did not know what was going on.

21

Quips and Quiddities

While the gunpowder lay heavy in its vault and Catesby planned his final phase of recruitment, a royal hunting party blasted through the Midlands and the Vaux sisters prepared for a pilgrimage. With hindsight, the build-up to the November Parliament was a strange time. Not for everyone, of course: John Chamberlain had nothing to report in April beyond the tedious cycle of ‘matches, marriages, christening, creations, knightings and suchlike, as if this world would last ever’.
¹
But for those looking for signs, they could be found. An eclipse of the moon on 19 September, and of the sun a fortnight later, seemed to ‘portend no good’.
²
Sick and sleepless Thomas Stanney, the Jesuit who had stayed with Garnet and the sisters in 1591, would stab a man after hallucinating phantom pursuivants and a town ‘all in armour betwixt Catholics and heretics’.
³

It seemed vaguely absurd that the King should stay at Harrowden Hall in August 1605, considering men who wanted to blow his heels to the sky would visit a few weeks later, but on the 12th of the month the royal hunting party rode in, and, after a night of Vaux hospitality, followed the horn and heralds out again. Earlier in the month the king had been at Lord Mordaunt’s house in Drayton, where the plotter Robert Keyes had married the governess and where another plotter, Thomas Wintour, and soon-to-be-recruited Ambrose Rookwood had called the day before. The lord of the manor had reputedly wanted to murder his royal guest ‘by way of a mask’, but a priest had ‘willed forbearance at that time because, said he, there is a course in hand that will cut up the very root & remove all impediments whatsoever can be alleged to hinder the cause’ – a variation, perhaps, on Tottenham turning French.
⁴