The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (13 page)

Garnet meanwhile had Anne Vaux begging him to avert any mischief. He was aware of the signs himself, having observed Digby increase his stable of quality horses and Nicholas Owen start work on the device of a revolving floor into secret rooms and passages. With Catesby around both Garnet and Anne Vaux were uncomfortable at Gothurst, and as Digby arranged to rent the Throckmorton house at Coughton, Garnet promised to go there and celebrate Allhallowtide. Owen had worked there too but later demolition for alterations seems to have removed some of his handiwork. Probably Garnet had left Gothurst before the arrival of Guy Fawkes for whom Catesby had sent. The weather even pitched in to make things a little more troublesome with storms that tore at trees, rattled shutters and spooked horses. But the ride to Gothurst seemed essential, for Digby had promised £1,500 to support the plot after Thomas Percy had failed to pay the rent due at Michaelmas on the properties at Westminster. Fawkes was summoned therefore to take charge of any money and on his return to London, acting in his role as Percy’s trusted servant John Johnson, he paid Henry Ferrers what was owed. He thought too about purchasing a topping-up supply of gunpowder, but there was another critical use for money. It was needed to hire the ship that would take him abroad after he had fired the powder train and ridden to Greenwich. He had been hired for his specific skills in blasting and was not required to take part in the rising that was intended.

Money, money, money! Still more was needed, Catesby knew it and the richest man known to the core of plotters was Francis Tresham of Rushton (Northants). His father, the very public Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham, proclaimer of the king’s accession in his county, had died in September, leaving his son a rent roll of more than £3,000 a year at a time of heavily touted Catholic impoverishment. Sir Thomas probably died with some trepidation about his son, hitherto ‘a wild unstayed man’, now in his late thirties, whose mother Muriel had been a Throckmorton. Having fallen in with his cousins, Baynham and the Wright brothers in the Essex revolt, he had had to pay off court favourites to escape the wrath of the government. He had helped Christopher Wright go on his Spanish mission and had discussed armed revolt with his brother-in-law Monteagle, when they saw Garnet with Catesby at Fremland in July. Now married and conspicuously richer it seems very likely that his aggressive inclinations had been modified by the delightful bulk of his inheritance. Tresham’s highly significant interview with Catesby took place on the afternoon of Monday 14 October at the Clerkenwell house of Lord Stourton, another brother-in-law. According to the account given later by Tresham he said: ‘It would not be a means to advance our religion but to overthrow it, for the odiousness of the fact would be such as that would make the whole Kingdom to turn their fury upon such as were taken for Catholics, and not to spare man or woman so affected.’ He developed then an interesting line of argument that if the then rulers of the kingdom were removed in such a cataclysmic act, the power remaining would fall into the hands of the Puritans and their ministers who would be supported by the Dutch.
¹⁰
‘The act seemed unto me to be very damnable.’ Catesby bluntly made retort ‘that the necessity of Catholics enforced them to try dangerous courses’. It was, of course, a necessity that had just been put on hold for Tresham. He tried another approach, endeavouring to persuade Catesby to defer until the end of the Parliament to see how Catholics fared under new laws. Go off to the Spanish Netherlands, he suggested, take your fellow plotters and take £100 to seal the matter. Yet in a perplexing addition he promised to give Catesby £2,000 at a later date, saying ‘You know Robin that nothing but a bad cause can make me a coward.’

Meanwhile, there was a virtually simultaneous meeting of other plotters at the Bell Inn, Daventry, as the innkeeper, Matthew Young, later testified. Guy Fawkes arrived, having ridden from his rarely visited home county, and he ordered meals for a predicted group of six. Presently Thomas Winter arrived with one of his servants, and Bates and Kit Wright came from nearby Ashby St Legers. They expected John Wright as well, but when he failed to turn up Bates asked the innkeeper if there was anyone about to ride with a message to Lapworth. The commission fell to one William Rogers, the local blacksmith who did the outing by moonlight and returned with John Wright by seven o’clock the next morning. Thomas Winter immediately took him aside to show him an important letter he had just received (it must have been from Catesby) to inform him of Tresham’s admittance to the plot – a step taken entirely on the initiative of the gentleman in red. There was a half-hour discussion before the group breakfasted together and departed.

The unsatisfactory induction of Tresham to the cause had led him to quit London at speed for his Northamptonshire home. At the great house there was a flurry of activity as within a few days he discharged his servants, hid family papers (which were not rediscovered until 1838), and shut up the house and required his mother and sisters to remove with him back to London. In company again with Catesby he seems to have reiterated that his support of the plot would be only financial. By now the sworn plotters were in, or making towards London, save for Thomas Percy and Digby who was selling cattle and sheep at Gothurst. Garnet and Anne Vaux were both at White Webbs for a few days, though the house had been more or less annexed by the conspirators and the atmosphere would have been tense. Probably both of them flinched for slightly different reasons when on 18 October Tresham (Anne’s favourite cousin) turned up there for a meeting with Catesby, Thomas Winter and Fawkes.

Then the most compelling question was how could Catholic peers be excluded from a massacre of their enemies. Uneasy that pity could still topple his plot, Catesby took a shrewd calculated risk in allowing a general discussion to develop because the simple notion of warning the especially favoured was deemed too loose. Thomas Percy naturally had a special care for the Earl of Northumberland, of whom there was some talk that he might be made Protector to conduct the government during a minority. Apparently it was Percy’s task, following the explosion, to use his free access to court to kidnap the five-year-old Prince Charles. The Scottish nursemaid of the boy later gave written testimony that during October Percy showed a notable interest in her charge. Everyone was eager to warn young Thomas Howard, recently restored to his ancient title of Earl of Arundel. Catesby’s contribution on him was to make the grotesque suggestion that the boy should receive a minor wound to keep him in his house and bed. Everyone was eager to save Lords Vaux and Montagu, and Tresham was vehement on behalf of his two brothers-in-law, Monteagle and Stourton. With Robert Keyes he spoke too on behalf of Lord Mordaunt which led a derisive Catesby to declare that ‘he would not for the chamber full of diamonds acquaint him with the secret, for that he knew he could not keep it.’ Besides, Mordaunt was expected to stay away out of choice rather than sit robed in the House of Lords while Protestant peers were with James at a service in Westminster Abbey. Catesby’s bold and brutal rider to all this was that ‘the innocent must perish with the guilty, sooner than ruin the chances of success’.

On 23 October a clutch of conspirators again dined at the Irish Boy, and the following day an even larger gathering took place at the Mitre tavern in Bread Street, which ran from West Cheapside south to the river. There a watchful and discreet customer eavesdropped on the conversation and reported after the destruction of the plot ‘there met at dinner . . . the Lord Mordaunt [so the plot itself evidently did not figure in the talk], Sir Josceline Percy, Sir William Monson, Sir Mark Ive, Mr Robert Catesby, Dr Taylor belonging to the Archdukes’ ambassador, Mr Pickering, esq of Northants, Mr Hakluyt, and Spero Pettingar.’* The reason the government was concentrating its attention on watching those in touch with the archdukes was that it was hoping to learn something about the proposed English troop of Catesby and Sir Charles Percy.
¹¹
Writing to Sir Thomas Lake who was with the king at Royston, Salisbury wrote in a confident mood: ‘let his Majesty know that I dare boldly say no shower nor storm shall mar our harvest, except it should come from the middle region.’ The last phrase could very well refer to the Spanish Netherlands rather than the English Midlands because the Secretary intended to make service with the archdukes virtually synonymous with treason.

One of those in service was Peter Philips (born
c
. 1561) who on November 5 was in Brussels attending Mass at the private chapel of Archduke Albert. Like his countryman William Byrd, the retiring, almost invisible long term member of the English Chapel Royal, Philips was a life Catholic, but unlike Byrd he was self-exiled abroad from the 1580s, and was now archducal chaplain and organist.**

* John Donne characterized the skill of Phelippes as ‘the art of decipherment and finding some treeason in any intercepted letter’.

* Arrested at the time of the plot, he was repeatedly examined in the Tower and held there until 1611.

* There is a fine, rarely seen, portrait of Digby in a private collection.

* Spero Pettingar remains a mystery although there is a letter dated April 20, 1599, written in Dublin by Henry Cuffe and addressed to Edward Reynolds, secretary to the Earl of Essex (
d
. 1601), which in passing mentions him. So who was Pettingar and what did he do to work his way into the confidence of the ultra-cautious Catesby?

** And where was William Byrd on the fateful day? Not in London, of course, but most likely at home in Stondon Massey, deep in rural Essex.

T
he cryptic letter to William Parker, Lord Monteagle, can be seen in two ways today just as it was when it was penned. First, that it was a genuine effort by a writer deeply concerned for Monteagle’s safety to prevent his lordship’s untimely death. Second, that it was a ruse of some sort to help deconstruct a plot that a watchful government suspected was underway, but about which it had too few details. Whichever view is taken, and there may be one or two delicate variations of both, it will be useful to sketch the character and career of the man who received it. Monteagle was the eldest son of Edward Parker, tenth Baron Morley and possessed a solidly Catholic background. His paternal grandfather had gone abroad in the late 1560s to join English Catholic exiles. His mother was a Stanley, daughter and heiress of the third Baron Monteagle, and it was from her he held his title; his wife was Elizabeth Tresham. With a cluster of friends Monteagle had been at the infamous performance of Richard II, in early February 1601 given as a clumsy curtain-raiser to the Essex revolt. Like Catesby and his brother-in-law Francis Tresham, he had been lucky to escape with a fine, but unlike the former he did not remain fired up with anger, although he was under house arrest at Bethnal Green and restrictions on his movements banned him from entering London for a time.

At length he had moved back into some degree of favour and had been among the group of gentlemen who had secured the Tower for the newly proclaimed king. In his employ as a secretary was Thomas Winter, so Monteagle heard the views of opposition even if he remained aloof by choice. He retreated from confessional politics and set about rebuilding his personal circumstances by dutiful effort. Hence Catesby had excluded him from the plot in all stages, though Monteagle declared his great personal esteem for its leader whom he held ‘the only sun that must ripen our harvest’. For a time he reflected on the possibilities of service with the archdukes, like his friend Sir Charles Percy. But by 1605 Monteagle was sufficiently favoured at court to be selected as one of the commissioners for the prorogation of 3 October – very much a mark of distinction. Even Salisbury felt a greater confidence in him now and earlier in the year had supported him in a lawsuit against the Earl of Hertford. A few weeks before the delivery of the letter James personally asked Henri IV for the release of Monteagle’s brother from prison in Calais, a request granted only with real reluctance. So Monteagle was slowly consolidating at last a comfortable insider’s place in Jacobean society, although he had not entirely thrown over his residual contacts with the plotters. This meant he mingled with them easily and they may have individually or collectively been unguarded in his company. So there is at least a possibility that Monteagle revealed the story of the plot (as it was known to him) to the government before the despatch of the infamous letter. Whatever the case he was applauded and rewarded by a grateful king and government.

Conspiracy theorists over the years have battled over the anonymity of the letter and many names have been attached to it with varying levels of plausibility or implausibility. Some years ago in a previous book I suggested that Thomas Phelippes had been put to write it for Salisbury, the most powerful man in the government, since he needed urgently to curry favour with him.
¹
I do not think it besmirches the name of Salisbury to bend in the direction of the view that late in the day he understood the ramifications of the evidence of plotting and was desperate to head it off by some contrivance. Directing it to Monteagle with his many Catholic contacts and links to the plotters was a generous act and yet characteristic of Salisbury’s pleasure in secret dealings too. In fact the contents of the letter are much less important than the letter as artefact – it was an attention-seeking object that allowed (encouraged) Monteagle to present it to the government in a very public manner. Moreover, since it was a gem of allusion and did not name anyone, Monteagle could present it without risking too much Catholic opprobrium. Indeed, he was praised by loyal Catholics or sometime Catholics like Ben Jonson, who wrote a verse encomium. Two further minor points lend some weight to the view that the letter was a government plant. On 9 November in drafting a letter to English ambassadors, Salisbury let slip that the Monteagle letter had been ‘in a hand disguised’. A Catholic historian, Father Francis Edwards, declares that he could only know this if he penned the letter himself.
²
Secondly, the letter was written on paper from the Spanish Netherlands where both Salisbury and Thomas Phelippes had many active contacts. Given Salisbury’s generally acknowledged subtlety in such matters it seems likely that he would have devolved the task of writing the letter to the most gifted man in the field of forgery. Or, as Mark Nicholls observed, the obviousness of the disguising may be meant to plant the thought that no one then could penetrate to the true identity of the writer; so don’t bother.