When the capital awoke to the news of ‘this last treason, that treason of treasons, the unparalleled arch-treason of the world’,7 Catesby, Percy, Rookwood, Thomas Wintour and the Wright brothers were racing towards the Midlands and their rendezvous with Digby and his huntsmen. Percy and John Wright cast off their cloaks in their bid for speed. Ambrose Rookwood outstripped them all, riding thirty miles in two hours on one horse. Catesby’s mount lost a shoe at Dunstable and while it was being shod, Henry Huddlestone, who was also on the road from London and had ridden with Catesby and John Wright for about seventeen miles, waited with him. Only when Percy arrived did Catesby tell Huddlestone to ‘go home to his wife’. Dorothy Huddlestone was pregnant and staying at her cousin Vaux’s house in Irthlingborough, a few miles from Harrowden Hall. Huddlestone supped at Harrowden with Eliza Vaux, two priests called Singleton and Strange, and John Gerard, the Jesuit who had converted him over a decade earlier and deemed him ‘one of my most steadfast friends’.8
When the plotters arrived at the Red Lion Inn in Dunchurch, a dishevelled but determined Catesby urged the would-be rebels to join him. Most of them melted into the darkness. The following day his servant and co-conspirator, Thomas Bates, rode to Coughton with news of the plot’s discovery and a letter from Digby begging Garnet’s forgiveness and blessing. The Jesuit superior ‘marvelled they would enter into so wicked actions and not be ruled by the advice of friends’. Digby seems to have been genuinely shocked by Garnet’s censure. As Garnet, Bates and Tesimond conferred, Lady Digby entered the room. ‘What did she?’ Garnet later recalled, ‘Alas what but cry.’ Actually, she did rather more than that, sending four ‘great’ horses, ‘ready furnished for service’ to the rebels at Huddington. When Bates left Coughton for Huddington, it was not with Garnet, but with Tesimond, the confessor of Catesby and Thomas Wintour.9
Moving from house to house, the rebels picked up supplies but haemorrhaged men. Sir Everard Digby peeled off with two servants at daybreak on Friday, 8 November, and was soon tracked to a dry ditch in a wood near Halesowen. With the sheriff’s two-hundred-strong posse on their heels, the plotters made their final stand at Holbeach House in Staffordshire. An accidental explosion the previous night – a spark from a fire igniting the gunpowder that they had spread out to dry – had badly burnt some of the men and shredded their nerves. Still, it was a defiant Catesby, kissing his gold crucifix and brandishing his sword, who charged out of the house at about eleven o’clock on the morning of 8 November. It is said that he was killed by the same bullet that mortally wounded Thomas Percy. The Wright brothers also died at Holbeach. Ambrose Rookwood, Thomas Wintour and John Grant were injured and dragged away for questioning.
Francis Tresham, who had stayed in London throughout the Midlands rising, was arrested on 12 November and examined several times. His death of strangury on 23 December denied him a trial. His severed head was sent up to Northampton for display. His body, which ‘smelt exceedingly’ even before death, was ‘tumbled into a hole without so much ceremony as the formality of a grave’.10
White Webbs was searched on 11 November 1605. Catesby’s ‘great meetings’ there, ‘grievous to the gentlewoman his cousin’, had not gone unnoticed, but little remained in the house bar a skeleton staff, a case of pistols, two fowling pieces, ‘popish books and relics’ and a store of wine and sweetmeats. The house was a curiosity of ‘many doors, trapdoors and passages out of all sides.’ Three female servants and the caretaker, John Grissold, who gave his name as James Johnson (not to be confused with Fawkes’s ‘John Johnson’), were questioned about Garnet and recent visitors. Fourteen-year-old Jane Robinson confessed that a priest ‘apparelled like a gentleman’ had said Mass there about three months earlier.
Grissold was found to be ‘very perverse and obstinate’. He said ‘Mr Measy his master, a Berkshire man’ (Garnet was from Derbyshire), had taken the house ‘for his sister Mrs Perkins, widow’ (Anne the spinster). He spoke of a Mr Perkins, Skinner the lawyer, Jennings (probably William Brooksby), who played the bass viole, and Turner the lutenist. He was committed to a dungeon in the Gatehouse and, according to Garnet, racked into admitting that Catesby had made ‘merry’ with some friends at White Webbs for several days before the feast of All Saints. As far as Anne was concerned, Grissold’s most damaging statement was that she had directed him to ‘entertain her friends that came thither’.11
Salisbury’s surveyor, Thomas Wilson, who had conducted the search at White Webbs and later ‘conveyed away’ its contents, was determined to prevent it from becoming ‘a nest for such bad birds as it was before’.12 He had a fondness for animal analogies. On 20 November 1605, he briefed Salisbury on his enquiries into ‘Mrs Perkins’s abode’. There had been a sighting at Hartley Court in Berkshire in early November, but nothing since. It was frustrating, he complained, ‘all of them use to change often one into another’s place, especially at times when they suspect search’, so that ‘such a man by such a description’ could never be found in the right place. ‘Such cunning,’ he concluded, ‘have foxes in changing burrows when they smell the wind that will bring the hunt towards them.’13
The hunt was heading for Harrowden Hall. Eliza Vaux was in serious trouble. By the evening of 5 November, Salisbury was in possession of information from Lord Chief Justice Popham about ‘an expectation that Mrs Vaux had of something to be done’. Popham claimed to know it ‘by such a manner as I assure myself the matter is true’. Agnes Wenman’s meddlesome mother-in-law, Lady Tasborough, had been talking again about that letter. ‘Touching the contents of my cousin Vaux’s letter to me,’ Agnes would recall,
it was chiefly concerning her son’s marriage to my Lord of Suffolk’s daughter, and some challenging of unkindness for my husband’s not seeking her, he being so long in London, but she said the cause was for that those of her profession were now in disgrace. And she withal added: Notwithstanding pray, for Tottenham may turn French, or words to the like effect.14
Lady Tasborough, who wasted no time denouncing Eliza, remembered it slightly differently:
The effect of that letter was that Mrs Vaux persuaded the Lady Wenman to be of good comfort and not to despair for that ere it were long she should see a remedy or toleration for religion or to such effect.15
The words that were passed on to Salisbury in November were different again:
Contents of Mrs Vaux letter: fast and pray, that that may come to pass that we purpose, which if it do, we shall see Tottenham turned French.16
Three versions of the same letter offering subtly different interpretations.
According to Eliza, when Agnes’s parents, Sir George and Lady Fermor, first told her that Lady Tasborough had said ‘there was treason in the letter’, she had merely ‘smiled’. Agnes told Eliza in August that ‘she kept the letter safely for both their discharges’.17 Only in November did Eliza ask Agnes’s mother, Lady Fermor, to retrieve it. ‘My cousin [Eliza],’ wrote Lady Fermor to her daughter,
sendeth me word that your mother-in-law hath dealt very badly with her & yours, for she hath complained of a letter which my cousin Vaux writ something darkly to you about my Lord’s marriage. My cousin most earnestly desireth that you will send her the letter, or the copy thereof, as soon as you can.18
If Eliza would have been content with a copy, perhaps she simply wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Or maybe she was feigning insouciance. Either way, Agnes replied that she had dealt with the letter ‘as those did letters which were not regarded’, that is, she ‘either burnt it or lost it’.19
Eliza had to deal with other ‘strange & unlooked for letters’ that November, including one from her father, which she received at Harrowden on 9 November. The courier (appositely named Mr Race) was promised fourteen shillings for the round trip and waited for Eliza’s reply. She told him it was a wasted journey: ‘the letter needed not to have been sent to her for that she was very free from those matters whereof her father had written to her.’ An hour and a half later she provided a
more appropriate written response. She was clearly distressed, but if the few blots on the page are the result of her ‘hot, indignant tears’ as has been fancied, it is more than we can now tell. ‘Sir,’ she began,
I cannot but marvel at your strange & unlooked for letters. I wish yourself & all others should know I am as innocent & free from the ever knowing of that plot as whosoever is most free & do as much abhor the intention; & for any letters of mine, I wish that may be showed & the uttermost made against me, so confident am I of ever writing anything, which it was impossible I should, never knowing nor imagining as God doth best know & as it is plain enough to friends here, how easy so ever yourself be to believe the worst upon I know not what report.
Eliza was expecting the Earl of Northampton to confirm the ‘certainty’ of Lord Vaux’s hoped-for nuptials with Lady Elizabeth Howard. ‘To that end,’ she continued,
my son had a purpose to have come up to London himself on Thursday or Friday last if by chance Sir George Fermor & his Lady had not come to supper to us on Wednesday night & told us the first news of this pitiful & tragical intendment & then I thought not best to send him.20
Eliza was lying to her father. Sir George Fermor had not gone to Harrowden ‘by chance’, nor had he provided her with ‘the first news’ of the plot. Readers will remember that (at the close of Part Three) he was summoned to Harrowden on the morning of Wednesday, 6 November, and that upon his arrival, Eliza had said that she had intended to ask him to accompany her son to London, but that because of ‘some garboyl’ there, she had changed her mind. She told Sir George that she had just heard the news – at that stage an unspecified rumour – from a servant of hers, who had heard it from ‘Mr Markham’s man’.21
This, too, was a lie, since Eliza had learned everything the previous evening when Henry Huddlestone, who had been riding with Catesby earlier in the day, came to Harrowden Hall for supper. Eliza and Huddlestone would stick to their stories: they had not known about the plot until 6 November.22 It took four months and, Anne Vaux would allege, the ‘often racking and torturing’ of Thomas Strange, a Jesuit who had been at the Harrowden supper, for the truth to come out. On 13 March 1606, Strange would confess that ‘Henry Huddlestone brought the first news that ever I heard of the blowing up of the Parliament house to Harrowden’.23
John Gerard and another priest, Singleton, had also supped at Harrowden on 5 November and two days later, Strange, Singleton, Huddlestone, his servant William Thornbury, a Lancashire recusant called Matthew Batty and two other servants left Harrowden for Warwickshire. According to Gerard, both Strange and Singleton ‘wanted to go and stay with Father Garnet’. Sir Richard Verney, the Sheriff of Warwickshire, who picked them up at Kenilworth, suspected them ‘for the late conspiracy and insurrection’.24
In the small world of the shires, Verney happened to be an affiliate of Eliza Vaux. His nephew, Sir George Simeon, had recently married Eliza’s daughter Mary. He was the kind of contact that Eliza used to good effect. Though a Protestant, he was no hard-liner, having once employed the Catholic musician John Bolt and recently, so Eliza heard, let one of Lady Digby’s men go free. ‘As you have often wished some fit occasion to show your good will unto me,’ Eliza reminded Verney on 12 November, ‘so now, if it please you, there is that to be done which may exceedingly pleasure me.’
Eliza was concerned about two gentlemen and a servant in Verney’s custody. ‘The younger gentleman,’ she wrote of Father Strange, ‘your niece Mary will rather give you her portion than have him come in question.’ He was wealthy too, or at least his family was, ‘and the very report that he were stayed in this fashion would kill his mother, whose only child he is’. This was a none-too-subtle bribe, but it also reminded Verney that his prisoner was valued as a person as well as a priest.fn1 And there could be little doubt that the two ‘gentlemen’ were priests. Eliza’s pretence was flimsy. ‘I will not now name them,’ she wrote ‘because I hear they go but as serving men & under that name you may please to let them have your pass home into Lancashire.’ She dropped a few more bribes and a vow of requited kindness and then, just to make sure that Verney had the right men, she described them: ‘The one which I chiefly respect’ – Father Strange – was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had ‘a clear complexion’, brown hair ‘and cut somewhat near, not much hair of his face’. The other – Father Singleton – was a redhead with ‘a much redder beard’ and ‘much hair on both’. Their man – Matthew Batty – was about forty and ‘very tall’, with brown hair and beard. ‘What names they give themselves I know not,’ she continued, ‘and therefore do not name them, but I assure myself this description is enough, & that you will deal worthily.’25
Whether it was panic, naïvety, or the confidence born of past favours, Eliza had totally misread the situation. ‘A word to a true friend is enough,’ she concluded, but it simply wasn’t, not in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. According to Gerard’s harsh assessment, Verney behaved ‘more like a Puritan as he is than a kinsman as he should be’, but it was as Sheriff of Warwickshire that Verney hurriedly forwarded Eliza’s letter to London at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, 13 November.fn2 The Earl of Salisbury perused its contents and jotted down some thoughts:
L. Vaux at Mrs.
Grants
14 horses by Singleton
Gerret
Ogle.26
Dorothy Grant (wife and sister of plotters) lived at Norbrook, Warwickshire, where the rebels had gone to collect arms on 6 November. The St Winifred pilgrims had stayed there on their way to and from the well in September, but no one would testify that Eliza or her son, Lord Vaux, were in the party. The note ‘14 horses’ might suggest a suspected contribution to the rebellion. ‘Gerret’ is surely John Gerard whose name was often spelled that way. ‘Ogle’ is a mystery to me, not helped by the fact that it was a name sometimes written as Oakley. Witness, in 1595: ‘at Little Ogle, 8 miles distance from Rowell in Northamptonshire, lieth Mr Bentley, who hath a priest in his house continually and commonly a seminary priest, whom his wife calleth her chicken.’27 The Bentleys of Little Oakley were kinsmen of the Vauxes. In the November round-up of Midlands rebels were the brothers Thomas and Edward Okeley, both servants of the plotter Robert Wintour. The Earl of Northumberland, who was sent to the Tower for complicity in the plot, had a man called Ogle.28 These are just some possibilities.
It seems likely that the Vauxes of Harrowden were suspected of more than foreknowledge of the Gunpowder Plot. Writing in December, the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, thought it ‘very probable’ that Huddlestone had been sent to Harrowden on 5 November ‘to give warning as well for conveying away of letters etc. and of Gerard the priest’. Two days later, Huddlestone’s departure for Warwickshire, leaving his pregnant wife behind with Eliza, seemed to Coke to have been ‘by appointment into open rebellion’.
‘Note the number of her horses,’ Coke added, and ‘Note Gerard the priest ministered the sacrament to all the traitors etc., as well for execution as for secrecy, and Gerard had continual access to Mrs Vaux.’29
The revelation that Gerard had given communion to the original five plotters straight after their private oath of secrecy in May 1604 had come from Guy Fawkes four days after his arrest. However, he maintained, even under torture, that Gerard had not known about the conspiracy. Still, the Jesuit was a wanted man and it was not uncommon knowledge that Eliza’s house was ‘the chiefest place’ of his ‘access’. Indeed, on 5 November Lord Chief Justice Popham had informed Salisbury that it was also Garnet’s ‘and therefore like she may know somewhat’.30
On 12 November 1605, the day that Eliza petitioned Verney for the release of his prisoners, Lady Fermor of Easton Neston also wrote a letter. It was to her daughter, Agnes, in Oxfordshire and in addition to passing on Eliza’s request for the swift return of her Tottenham missive, it related some news of the shire. Easton Neston, very near Towcester on Watling Street, was well placed to pick up news (perhaps one of the reasons why Eliza had chosen Sir George F
ermor as her pretended channel of information). Lady Fermor’s letter to her daughter conveys the anxious aftermath of the plot for those recusant women of the Midlands who knew so many of the men involved. Writing ‘in haste’ thus:
I trust in God now Percy & Catesby are dead (who they say were the chief conspirators) we shall be more at quiet. Tom Hoult saw them both laid in one grave without any cloth about them. Many are still called in question. Sir Everard Digby is in Hereford jail; Mr Huddlestone in Warwick jail; Bates is in Warwick, but his wife & daughter & son are in Northampton jail. I trust in God they stand all sound at Harrowden: yet my cousin Tate is commanded to be in House with them till the Council’s pleasure be farther known, as I hear … Our Lord bless us & send us peace in Christ our Lord … pray for your father & friends.31
Lady Fermor’s source was reliable. As she bid her daughter good night, some twenty miles away at Harrowden a ring of torchlight encircled the home of Eliza Vaux.
fn1 Thomas Strange, S.J., was a convert of John Gerard. He was described by Henry Huddlestone as ‘a gentleman-like man using the tennis court and sometime having music in his lodging’. The previous year he had written a book, ‘a compendium of all the sciences’, which he dedicated to Robert Catesby, his ‘most distinguished and beloved’ friend. (BL Royal MS 12 E. X; Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot, p. 93; Gerard, Autobiography, pp. 173, 248; PRO SP 14/16, f. 55v)
fn2 Gerard would, no doubt, have been delighted to learn that Verney did not receive his expected remuneration for the many arrests he made in November. Writing to Salisbury on 2 June 1606, he complained that his duty performed ‘in the time of this late rebellion in Warwickshire’ had been rewarded with ‘hard measure and usage’. He reminded Salisbury of his ‘extraordinary charge’ and diligence in confiscating the goods of traitors, ‘all being beforehand conveyed, either under water, or hid in the ground, or removed into far and remote places.’ (CP, 116, f. 81)
God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Page 36