The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (8 page)

Rational men, men hitherto of discretion, began to fume at James for shifting policy, but then in both Scotland and England policy demanded that he should in the main stick to the religion of his tutors rather than that of his mother. One of those who felt particularly aggrieved was Thomas Percy, who seems to have had an over-measure in his personality of Percy eccentricity. The physical markers of companion mental instability were there – surges of wild energy subsiding into sloth; insomnia and a skin disorder so acute ‘he could not endure any shirt but of the finest holland or cambric’. Percy had shifted to Catholicism at about the same time as Robert Catesby, and fired with the emphatic enthusiasm of a proselyte had gone privately in 1603 to James at Holyrood as messenger for the Earl of Northumberland, hoping to draw from the king a promise of favour to the Catholics on his accession. It was reported that Thomas Percy had been assured of an accommodation that would allow them to worship discreetly and have their grievances amended. James afterwards would only deny this and given the recorded quaintness of his spoken English the possibilities for misunderstanding on both sides were very great. Probably he gave what he considered an airy (and suitably vague) assurance, and some colour may have been given to Percy’s confidence by his own appointment to a coveted vacancy in the gentlemen pensioners in ordinary, a privileged royal bodyguard. With the outbreak of persecution Percy felt horribly like a dupe and presented a remonstrance to James to which no reply was given. His broad contempt for Scots easily encompassed the Stuart, and it was an unsettlingly potent view collectively held in England by a majority.
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As yet the simultaneous stirrings in the country had only parochial meanings, but given the atmosphere of ill-directed animosity in collision with repression, Robert Catesby who was to lead the gunpowder plotters identified an opportunity already hopelessly fluffed by the Bye plotters. What he settled upon was on a far more destructive and grandiose scale. How he tried to destroy the English government, the Anglo-Scottish royal family and the laws of the land, and why he failed, forms the next section of this book.

S
haped to counter the full tide of the influence of the Counter-Reformation, the religious policies of late Elizabethan England guaranteed conflict. The regime of Burghley and his fellow councillors was successful in putting down discontent, but it required violent counter-measures against dissidents of varying persuasions. Those who escaped abroad were sometimes jammed together, young men in the seminaries, restless and angry, capable of ill-judged mayhem when given the chance. To clamp down on any such efforts the great men of the privy council began to recognize the utility of intelligence operations, and as each plot against Elizabeth was uncovered, however fantastical, like the Squire’s plot, the rhetoric of denunciation by the discoverers grew more heightened and venomous. The treasons involved men from a variety of backgrounds whose combative inclinations were ill-sorted, unsteady and often lacking sense. Tense energy could also be distorted by cupshot camaraderie since London was crammed with taverns and ordinaries where men might meet in hired rooms. An estimate of the frequency of taverns has suggested an average of one to every eighteen houses. The taverns could be very large and the Bear in Westminster and the Angel near the Tower both had twenty-one rooms. Ordinaries were originally eating houses and there were various grades. In the twelvepenny ordinary the men of fashion took their meals and later played cards or dice. Even wealthy residents in London like Anthony Babington kept company in such places and met his fellow conspirators in them because ‘there were innkeepers who catered for the numerous Catholic gentry’.

Drunkenness was an accepted habit of the day; affrays in the street were common. On the night of 18 March 1600 the unenviably nicknamed ‘Pox’ Baynham (Sir Edmund Baynham), one of a number of young rips who swarmed around the Earl of Essex, led such an affray in the Mermaid. At midnight they ‘cast off their cloaks and upper garments’, drew rapiers and daggers and marched through the streets until they came upon the bemused watch. After a scuffle (and no recorded injuries, or injuries worth recording perhaps) they were overcome and locked in the Counter prison to sober up. Baynham was in a belligerent mood and when the story reached Elizabeth (who must have wearied of these performances) she set the case before the star chamber, ‘for the more and exemplar punishment of so great and outrageous disorder’. The rioters at first denied the charges, but when brought before the court on 6 July ‘confessed their faults and submitted themselves to the court and proved that all was done in the drink and heat’. Each man was fined £200 and imprisoned, but Baynham was evidently free to join the Essex revolt, an even more ‘outrageous disorder’. His plea this time was ignorance and the sentence death, but once again he was pardoned (in August 1601) after paying Ralegh a large sum. Yet as the leader of the so-called ‘damned crew’, Baynham had learned nothing about civic decorum, and when Elizabeth died he was briefly sent to the Marshalsea prison by the privy council for declaring that James VI was a schismatic ‘and that he would not acknowledge him as King’.

After Essex had led his followers in the miserable skirmish that ended his career, some sixty-six gentlemen were imprisoned and fifteen of them were suspected Catholics. Sir Griffin Markham was among them and fetched up in the Fleet; Robert Catesby, who was wounded, was sent to the Tower and might have been executed then had not Elizabeth been moved to save a very personable young man from a premature death. Instead she substituted a heavy fine of 4,000 marks (getting on for £3,000), and Catesby had the mortification of seeing 1,200 marks of his bestowed on Francis Bacon who was always short of money. To raise such a very large sum Catesby was forced to sell Chastleton, his manor in Oxfordshire, and for this employed the good offices of his friend Thomas Percy, steward or agent to the Earl of Northumberland. When Catesby left the Tower he still had his head, but no inclination to use it for sober reflection, and his immoderate actions and vexatious losses caused no loss of esteem for him among certain of his contemporaries. It was noted by John Gerard that Catesby was ‘respected in all companies of such as are counted there swordsmen or men of action, that few were in the opinions of most men preferred before him and he increased much his acquaintance and friends.’ The gunpowder plot was Catesby’s conspiracy and this has led certain Catholic writers on the period to view him with morbid suspicion. Hilaire Belloc sternly called him ‘a doubtful character’ and wondered if he had betrayed his own cause to the government.
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More recently Father Francis Edwards, SJ, has suggested something along the same lines, and colours it with the thought that having been obliged to sell Chastleton and live with his mother at Ashby St Legers, he would not have been inclined to embark on a new episode that, if it failed, threatened total ruin.
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Edwards also cites a deathbed confession by one George Bartlet, apparently a servant of Catesby, that his master went to Salisbury House several nights before the discovery ‘and was always brought privately in at a back door’. This is thin stuff, too remote from many details available in other sources of a dynamic enthusiast.

Robert Catesby was born in 1573; tradition has it at Bushwood Hall, near Lapworth, some eleven miles from Stratford-upon-Avon.
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It was the favoured residence of his devout Catholic father, Sir William Catesby, always in trouble as a noted recusant. Robert was the only surviving son of Sir William and Lady Anne, the daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton Court. They sent him for a time to Gloucester Hall (now Worcester College) Oxford, favoured by the recusant gentry who took their sons away after residence of a year or two in order to escape the obligations of the oath of supremacy. There is a suggestion that the young man may have gone on to Douai before marrying the Protestant Catherine Leigh, daughter of the influential Protestant Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh, in 1592. The Chastleton parish register has an entry for their son Robert who was baptized on 11 November 1595. While his wife lived she seems to have prompted good behaviour in her husband, a steadying influence that was sadly lost by her death after the birth of their second son. The boy Robert was a mere child of eight when he was betrothed to a daughter of Thomas Percy, an arrangement which strengthened an old friendship, but which might have been curtailed if Catherine Catesby had lived longer. The death of old Sir William Catesby in 1598 took away the remaining person who might have tempered his son’s headstrong disposition. When Chastleton was sold and he lived with his widowed mother in her inherited house there were quarrels as he sold reversionary property, since he had not only the huge post-Essex revolt fine to pay, but was funding Jesuit missionaries and other priests. He was now deeply in with the other religious malcontents, having meditated a powder plot to get rid of Elizabeth. In the circumstances Catesby did what seemed best to him to advance the cause of militant Catholicism. In doing so he swept aside the nervous reflections of many by his physical presence and the gusty force of his character. Even his mother failed to curb him despite her perturbations – but when does a man afire (symbolized in his constant choice of red clothes) ever listen with attention to ‘wise’ counsel from a powerless woman, even one who had known him longer and perhaps better than anyone? He loved her and she loved him with all his manifest faults, but however she strove she could not save him from himself – his other self than son. Was he in ignoring her allowing himself the unspoken privilege of punishing her for some fault unknown to us, or a sin, as he saw it, in her own past conduct? Had she perhaps thought to remarry immediately after the death of Sir William, so arousing bemused distress touched with rage in her only son Robin? Remarriage would have set her estate and income out of her son’s grasp and likely precipitated the collapse of all his well-resourced pre-plot clandestine efforts. Somewhere here is the teasingly vague but insistent sense that Catesby and his mother provided inspiration for Hamlet and Gertrude, in the same way that the parochial story of Brian Annesley, gentleman pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, and his daughters may have been the seed for genius to create at length the universal tragedy of
King Lear.

Perhaps in about June 1603 Catesby was not entirely surprised when Thomas Percy visited Ashby St Legers, plunged into his friend’s presence and began to rage against James’s perfidy. (What did Lady Anne make of this?) Over the porch at the manor there is still an ancient half-timbered room called the ‘Plot Room’, and this may perhaps have been the place where Percy declared he would kill the king with his own hands. Catesby in the moment responded to this coolly: ‘No, no, Tom, thou shalt not venture to small purpose, but if thou wilt be a traitor thou shalt be to some great advantage.’ As Percy took interest and subsided, Catesby added: ‘I am thinking of a most sure way and I will soon let thee know what it is.’ This is the first definite hint of the inception of the conspiracy which was evidently not yet in its final form. He agreed with Percy that the king was far removed in his actions from what they had hoped, but he still needed to consult with a friend of less raw judgment and impetuosity. At Allhallowtide (31 October) Catesby sent a messenger to the brothers Thomas and Robert Winter at Huddington, asking that they meet him in London; the cousins needed to talk. Robert Winter, the elder of the two, simply declined and probably dissuaded Thomas, who later wrote: ‘I desired him to excuse me; for I found myself not very well disposed; and which had happened to me never before, returned the messenger without my company. Shortly, I received another letter, in any wise to come.’ Robert Catesby could be an importunate relation.

Thomas Winter had for years been concerned to join plans for Catholic relief, and had a reputation for being careful and considerate. He had been a soldier in the Low Countries and was also ‘a reasonable good scholar’ with a knowledge of several languages. He may have been converted to Catholicism then, and in 1600 he made a pilgrimage to Rome for the Holy Year celebrations. In 1602 he went to Spain in company with Father Greenway (the alias of Father Oswald Tesimond who had been at school with Guy Fawkes). They went as the agents of Father Garnet, first cousins Robert Catesby and Francis Tresham, on a mission funded by Tresham’s cousin, Lord Monteagle, who employed Winter as his secretary. The introductions to the Spanish were done by the Jesuit Father Cresswell, ex-rector of the English College in Rome and now charged to supervise English Jesuits in Spain.
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It was at his Madrid house that Winter met a relation-by-marriage, Christopher Wright and Guy Fawkes himself. He had fought for the archdukes in the siege of Calais, but subsequently found it difficult to make a living as a mercenary. It was Cresswell who urged the visitors’ case to Spanish officials and there was a promise of financial aid plus military support from Stanley’s regiment in an invasion to coincide with a rising in England. Elizabeth’s death spoilt this plot so it might be described as her final act of policy on behalf of her country. Philip III preferred the chances of a stable peace with James, and the lack of unity at home and abroad settled any prospect of the English Catholics managing to snatch definitely advantageous terms for themselves before James trundled into England. This woeful failure on their part was what eventually brought the pro-Spanish exiles so close into the counsels of the gunpowder plotters once their relief at Elizabeth’s death had subsided into gloomy ruminations on the future. In the meantime it was Father Watson and the ‘seculars’ who attempted to seize the king and the initiative that summer of 1603.

When the messenger from Catesby arrived urging him to visit, being no fool Thomas Winter surely suspected some enterprise more serious than cards or hunting. Winter was a man of the world and his generous attachment to his cousin did not blind him to Catesby’s principal personality defect – a soaring optimism yoked to unrestrained ambition. When the second summons arrived for Winter he overcame his reluctance and went. ‘At the second summons I presently came up and found him with Mr John Wright at Lambeth where he broke with me how necessary it was not to forsake our country, for he knew I had a resolution to go over [i.e. to the Spanish Netherlands], but to deliver her from the servitude in which she remained, or at least to assist her with my utmost endeavours.’ This pressure to stay ruffled Winter a little and he replied that he had ‘hazarded his life upon far lighter terms, and now would not refuse any good occasion wherein he might do service to the Catholic Cause; but for himself he knew no mean probable to succeed.’ Not much to encourage his listeners in such plain speaking, especially with its hint of rebuke for Wright’s notorious readiness to draw sword at any opportunity. Clearly Catesby wanted Wright there as an engaged witness and Winter’s response showed that he had noted the intention of snaring him in a scheme. So Catesby was forced to drop his sidelong approach and made a quick, confident appeal. ‘He had thought of a way to deliver them from all their bonds and without any foreign help to replant again the Catholic religion.’ There was a pause charged with some anticipation of what was to come. Catesby and Wright scrutinized their silent guest and then the former uttered the crucial sentence of this encounter – the intention was to blow up the Parliament house with gunpowder. Winter’s first spontaneous response was a gasp of amazement rather than horror. He stared at Catesby who added ‘In that place have they done us all the mischief and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.’
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