The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (29 page)

The ladies of this 1605 pilgrimage made the last part of the journey, as was customary, barefoot. The priest whom they found in charge was a remarkable man in his own right. John Bennett, who had trained at Douai, had arrived in Holywell nearly thirty years before. He had been imprisoned in 1582 for three years, and banished thereafter (the actual sentence was death but it was presumably commuted due to local feeling in his favour). In spite of his banishment, however, Father Bennett managed to get back to Holywell in 1587, operating there under a series of aliases for the rest of his life. In total, he served the chapel for nearly fifty years. Once again, the loyalty of the Welsh people to the pastor they loved must have protected him.
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26

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The way back from the pilgrimage turned out to be distressing and disquieting in equal parts. At Rushton Hall, Father Garnet and Anne Vaux found a house of mourning. Sir Thomas Tresham, the august, self-willed and devout patriarch, had died on 11 September, after a long sickness. His widow Muriel was still keeping to her chamber, according to custom. Francis Tresham reported that his father’s last hours had been spent in great suffering, ‘tossing and tumbling from one side and from one bed to another’, and said that he himself would rather choose a ‘death the pain whereof could not continue half an hour’ than to die in such an agonising manner as his father.
²⁷
Francis meant death by hanging. Before the year was out, Francis Tresham would discover that very few get to choose the manner of their own death, and he would not be among them.

The death of Sir Thomas at this precise moment had a profound effect on the development of the Powder Treason as it introduced Francis Tresham into the equation in quite a different light. Theoretically, the thirty-seven-year-old Francis was now a man of substance, with properties (and responsibilities, including his widowed mother, unmarried sisters and financially reckless brother Lewis). Unfortunately, Sir Thomas, the Catholic Moses, once colossally rich, had left enormous debts. These debts – including those where Francis had been bound up with him in a bond – provided a further cause for bitterness for his son.
²⁸
Francis Tresham was now in the position of a man who has long awaited his inheritance, and at the last
minute finds that the overflowing cup is poisoned. Furthermore, the Tresham family entail of 1584 meant that Francis was only a life tenant of a greater part of the estate, which at the time seemed yet another disaster.

The best of Francis Tresham was in his steadfast relationship with his wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Tufton of Hothfield in Kent. This devoted and resourceful woman – as events would prove her to be – had borne two daughters in the previous five years, Lucy and Eliza; no doubt the male child necessary for the family entail would soon follow. In all other respects, Francis Tresham’s character was generally considered unsatisfactory in recusant circles. The priests did not rate his Catholicism very highly: he had none of the passionate – if fanatical – piety of a Catesby or a Guy Fawkes. He was clever enough, but ‘not much to be trusted’, in the words of Father Tesimond. At the same time Francis Tresham knew how to look after himself. An example of this was his reaction to the accession of King James. On a visit to his brother-in-law Lord Monteagle, he was frank with Tom Wintour (who was acting as Monteagle’s secretary): henceforth he was resolved ‘to stand wholly for the King’. All former plots were done with and he asked Wintour ‘to have no speech with him of Spain’.
²⁹

Nevertheless Francis Tresham’s new affluence – at least he had access to horses and could borrow money – meant that he could not be altogether ignored by the Plotters as a potential supporter. Besides, Robin Catesby had been accustomed to dominating his wayward cousin since their shared boyhood and he had a blithe confidence in the unchanging nature of their relationship.

Leaving Rushton in mourning Father Garnet and Anne Vaux went on to Gayhurst, the seat of their fellow pilgrim, the glamorous Sir Everard Digby. Here was a young man whom everyone adored and everyone trusted. He was only twenty-four, but had already been married to his heiress wife Mary Mulshaw (who brought with her Gayhurst) for nearly ten years. Theirs was an ideally happy match: she was ‘the best wife to me that ever man enjoyed’, he would say later, while he himself
was by common repute ‘the goodliest man in the whole court’.
³⁰
His handsome face, athletic figure and height – he was over six foot tall – had indeed caught the eye of the King when he knighted Digby on 23 April 1603. Everard Digby was not politically ambitious – why should he be? He was wealthy, beloved by his wife and, being passionately interested in every kind of field sport, had quite enough to occupy his time. He had his horses (he was an expert horseman), his gun-dogs and his falcons. He was also a Catholic convert, whose life had come to be defined by his recusancy, but at this point it was the kind of religion of which Father Garnet would have approved: acquiescing in the status quo, trusting in God to bring about the conversion of England in His own good time.

Everard and Mary Digby had both been converted by Father John Gerard – but separately. It was a measure of the secrecy which obtained that for some time Mary Digby had absolutely no idea that the elegant gentleman hunting by day, playing card-games by night – who was introduced to her by a neighbour – was in fact a priest. ‘The man lives like a courtier,’ she exclaimed in astonishment when she learnt the truth, ‘he never trips in his terms.’ Then Everard Digby became seriously ill, which gave Father Gerard the opportunity to catch him too ‘in St Peter’s net’. Gerard and Digby became extremely close, ‘calling each other ‘‘brother’’ when we wrote and spoke’, and Father Gerard acted as godfather to Digby’s first son.
³¹
Meanwhile the Digbys installed a secret chapel and sacristy at Gayhurst.

At hospitable and easy-going Gayhurst, Anne Vaux came to Father Garnet and expressed her extreme disquiet about what she had noted in the course of their recent journey. The suspicions of this shrewd and observant woman, whose life had been lived centrally in the recusant world for over twenty years, had been aroused by what she had seen. She was disturbed that there were so many fine horses being collected in the various stables of her cousins and relations. Anne Vaux, much perturbed, told Father Garnet that she ‘feared these wild heads had something in hand’. She begged him, for God’s sake, to talk to Robin Catesby.
³²

A little later Father Garnet felt able to reassure her. There was nothing to concern her unduly. Her cousin Robin was actually aiming to obtain a military commission under the Archduke Albert in Flanders, which in the wake of the Anglo-Spanish peace was no longer an illegal venture. Catesby even showed Anne Vaux a letter of recommendation for this enterprise written for him by Father Garnet – a document, we may believe, that Father Garnet must have penned with exquisite if unspoken relief, believing that this was the shape things were now taking. But of course this relief was quite unjustified. The risk of the destruction of the King and Royal Family, which on the other side encompassed not only the conspirators themselves, but their relatives, the Catholic community as a whole and above all their fugitive pastors, was as great as ever.

Although there is some conflict of evidence about when Guido Fawkes returned from the continent, slipping back into his personality of John Johnson, he was certainly in London again by late August, as the King went back to his hunting and the pilgrims set forth for St Winifred’s Well. At this point Fawkes and Wintour discovered that the gunpowder in the so-called cellar, which had been there for some time, had ‘decayed’ – that is, the elements had separated. So the conspirators transported more gunpowder and more firewood, as a cover and to conceal it. During the summer also John Grant seems to have installed a quantity of weaponry at Norbrook, including muskets and powder.

The rising tempo of the conspirators’ plans was further demonstrated at a secret meeting at Bath in August, at which Catesby, Percy, Tom Wintour and possibly some others were present. An important decision was taken that, ‘the company being yet but few’, Catesby should be given the authority ‘to call in whom he thought best’.
³³
It was a decision which was perhaps inevitable, given the wildly ambitious nature of their terrorist project, but it only increased the further risk of the plan – the risk of discovery.

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The consequences of the seal of the confessional, where a priest must not divulge what he has learnt even to save an innocent person/people, have always been seen as having great dramatic potential; of the various works in which it has been put to use, the most notable is the film
I Confess
(1953), with Montgomery Clift as a priest who hears the confession of a murderer and is subsequently himself accused of the crime; he cannot clear himself by breaking the seal of the confessional.

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They are literally innumerable; Owen was a genius at his work and it is likely that some of his hiding-places still remain uncharted today (discoveries were made both in the late nineteenth century and in the twentieth). It is remarkable that Father Richard Blount, who spent forty years in England (and for twenty-one years was Superior of the Jesuits) had some hiding-places whose whereabouts are still unknown (Morris,
Troubles,
ist, p. 192).

*
These trademarks help to establish which of the surviving hiding-places in England are the work of Nicholas Owen. In addition to those named above, holes at Sawston Hall, near Cambridge (the home of the recusant Huddlestone family), Baddesley Clinton and Huddington Court are generally rated as his work; Owen was also most probably responsible for the surviving hiding-places at Coughton and Coldham Hall.

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In the late nineteenth century, the shrine and St Winifred herself inspired the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As sure as what is more sure, sure as that spring primroses Shall new-dapple next year, sure as tomorrow morning, Amongst come-back-again things, things with a revival, things with a recovery, Thy name…

It is pleasing to report that Hopkins’ prophecy has come true; St Winifred’s shrine, today owned by Cadw (Welsh Heritage), is still a centre of devotion and pilgrimage, maintaining its unbroken record. The shrine is open all the year round, but the ‘Well Season’ is less spartan than it was in Father Gerard’s day, lasting only from Whit Sunday, through the 22 June feast, till the end of September. There are grateful inscriptions in the chapel such as ‘TW’ for ‘Thanks Winifred’. A pilgrimage on the part of James II and his second (Catholic) wife Mary of Modena in August 1686 was believed – for better or for worse – to be responsible for the birth of their son James Edward, known to history as the ‘Old Pretender’, after fifteen childless years of marriage.
(Hopkins,
p. 165; Br Stephan de Kerdrel, O.P.M., Franciscan Friary, Pantasaph, and Fr D. B. Lordan, St Winefride’s, Holywell, to the author; David,
passim
.)

CHAPTER TEN

Dark and Doubtful Letter

            The means was by a dark and doubtful letter…

SIR EDWARD COKE
1606

T
here was a double eclipse in the early autumn of 1605 – a lunar eclipse on 19 September followed by an eclipse of the sun in early October. Such celestial phenomena were traditionally held to ‘portend no good’. The sequence of these astronomical events with the political cataclysm of the Powder Treason was remarked on afterwards. Shakespeare probably commemorated the coincidence in
King Lear
*
when he had Gloucester express a series of gloomy predictions as a result of the late eclipses of the sun and moon: ‘friendships fall off, brothers divide…in countries, discord; in palaces, treason…’ Second of October, the date of the solar eclipse, was just over a month before Parliament was to reassemble in the Palace of Westminster. But there would be not much more than three weeks before the first betrayal occurred, and friendship fell off, as brothers divided. The means by which this took place was described later – with perfect truth – as ‘a dark and doubtful letter’.
¹

In the early autumn, Robert Catesby recruited three more
conspirators, as he had been deputed to do. At Michaelmas – 29 September – he let the young, wealthy and staunchly Catholic Ambrose Rookwood into the secret. It is sometimes suggested that Rookwood had been enlisted earlier, but this is improbable, given that Thomas Percy, as late as November, had no idea that Rookwood was part of the group.
²
Rookwood had of course already supplied gunpowder the previous year, apparently for Flanders, and he may therefore have had his own suspicions about the ‘private endeavour’; similarly, his wife’s relationship to Keyes (and Keyes’ wife Christiana) left open the possibility of rumours having spread on the distaff side. This is unverifiable, but what is clear is that Rookwood immediately became an enthusiastic member of the conspiracy.