The Real Guy Fawkes

by Nick Holland

  The university system of England in Tudor times was very different to that of today: for starters, there were only two universities – Oxford and Cambridge. Attendance was possible from the age of 14 for those who could afford the fees, or who had a wealthy patron, and the only subjects taught were divinity and the classics.

  Guy wouldn’t have found his class or upbringing a bar to entry at Cambridge, but he would have found it impossible to graduate on grounds of religion. All students were required to swear an Oath of Supremacy pledging allegiance to Queen Elizabeth before they could receive their degree, and for that reason many Catholic scholars compromised by completing their course and then leaving without taking the oath and graduating. This was the path that Thomas Percy took at Cambridge University3 and that Robert Catesby took at Oxford University4 and it may be that Guy had planned to do the same before finding employment once more at Cowdray House.

  Guy may also have spent time in London, a city that grew enormously during the latter half of the sixteenth century, and one that would have been an obvious port of call for a young man looking to progress in the world. King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries had freed up land for housing,5 and by 1600 the population of London was around a quarter of a million, a fivefold increase on what it had been just fifty years earlier.

  London was a city Guy Fawkes would come to know well in 1605, in his guise as John Johnson, but it could be that he first encountered it in 1593 or 1594. He would have found it a city of contrasts, and one out of step with his increasingly pious nature. Scattered throughout the city, in areas like the Strand and along the north bank of the river Thames, were huge houses that served as the city residences of noble families, but nearby were cramped and crowded streets infested with rats, and where crime was common.

  It was also a city with a growing number of inns to serve its thirsty and expanding population, and by the time that Guy was in the capital it was also home to a burgeoning new art form – the theatre. Playhouses could be found across London, offering entertainment to all social classes. A rather different form of entertainment was provided by the stews, the brothels and bawdy houses that were rife with customers and often rife with disease. These were primarily found in the growing borough of Southwark, on the south side of the Thames and therefore officially beyond the jurisdiction of the City of London authorities.6

  Life in London could be dangerous for many reasons: there was always the risk of fire, or drowning with only one bridge across the Thames and small boats and barges used to ferry people across the river. Disease was rampant, with poor sanitation and densely packed streets creating a perfect breeding ground for cholera, tuberculosis, the plague, and the sweating sickness.

  At dusk in the winter months, and at eight in the evening during the summer, bells such as the ones at St. Mary-le-Bow rang out across the city, signalling that the city gates were about to close, effectively creating a curfew.7 Darkness was particularly dangerous in Elizabethan London, but even in daylight hours you never knew who was watching you or who was listening to your conversation.

  As a Catholic, and one without the protection that a title could sometimes afford, Guy had to be wary wherever he went. Margaret Clitherow was just one example of how betrayal could bring about disaster, and death, without a moment’s warning. In her case it was a Flemish pupil who under pressure had betrayed her secret to the authorities,8 but in others it could be a neighbour who had been suspicious of comings and goings from a house, or even a relative who wanted to gain revenge or an inheritance. The incentives for reporting a priest, or one of their enablers, could be great, and this created an atmosphere of danger and mistrust.

  If the risks were high in York, they were far greater in London for it was the centre of a complex world of spies, double agents and subterfuge that grew up around Elizabeth’s court. Given her family history it is hardly surprising that Queen Elizabeth was paranoid about plots and accusations. To counter this she oversaw the creation of a great network, a web that stretched to every corner of her realm and at whose centre sat the great spider Walsingham, spinning and spinning, forever spinning and forever feasting upon flies.

  Sir Francis Walsingham was the most powerful spymaster of the Queen’s reign. Fiercely loyal, he would ensure that he saw and heard everything, and then fed it all back to his mistress. Not for nothing was the Queen painted with ears decorating her voluminous royal dress, but it was Walsingham and his successors who whispered into those ears.

  Walsingham occupied increasingly senior positions under the Queen, and by 1578 he had become Lord Privy Seal, Chancellor of the Order of the Garter, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Principal Secretary of State.9 He was intelligent and ambitious, but most of all he was zealously anti-Catholic. Walsingham and his inner circle would hire promising graduates from Oxford and Cambridge who seemed ideologically sound, or recruit people from noble families. Using these agents he would spy upon people, predominantly Catholics, at home and abroad.

  While there was a very real threat to the Queen and to Protestantism at home, there was danger from overseas as well. The wars of religion then raging across France and the Low Countries, what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, was a fight between Protestantism and Catholicism, and at the heart of it all was England’s great rival Spain. Many English Catholics left for the continent to fight on the Spanish side, as indeed did Guy Fawkes, but even on the continent they were not safe from the spies of Walsingham and his successors.

  Sir Francis Walsingham died in 1590, and his role as spymaster, not to mention chief courtier, was taken firstly by Sir William Cecil and then by his son Sir Robert Cecil, who maintained his power and position after Elizabeth’s successor James had advanced to the throne.

  These men did not hesitate to act unscrupulously to achieve what they felt was best for the Queen and for their country. One example of this was the eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Walsingham was more than aware of the support Mary held among the Catholic community, and yet despite his urgings Queen Elizabeth showed little inclination to execute her cousin-once-removed. Walsingham decided to take the matter into his own hands. There can be little doubt that his fingerprints were all over the Babington Plot of 1586,10 and the letters that Mary thought she was sending in secret to conspirators planning to place her upon the throne, were actually being delivered directly to Walsingham. When presented with news that Mary was encouraging a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, the Queen had little choice but to finally order her execution. This use of agent provocateurs proved helpful to Walsingham and the Cecils on a number of occasions, and many scholars have pondered whether the gunpowder plot itself was provoked by agents of Sir Robert Cecil.11

  Carrot and stick were both useful tools in the enlistment of spies. Those who were threatened with life-destroying fines, imprisonment, or worse, could sometimes be enticed into becoming a double agent, supposedly carrying out their activities as before but in reality feeding back information to their spymaster or acting to entrap those who had previously been their friends.

  Even Catholic priests weren’t immune to these enticements. Walsingham, and the Cecils after him, had a network of ‘false priests’. Some of them were not priests at all, but men carefully trained in how to act as one. Others were Catholic priests who had fled England, or entered seminaries on the continent, but who had now agreed to forsake their religion and implicate others in return for a pardon and the opportunity to re-enter England. One such man was Father George Southwick. In the autumn of 1605 he and a group of other priests were making a surreptitious journey to England; upon landing they would disperse and then begin their preaching. The other priests were unaware that Southwick had already betrayed them to a certain death. All the men were arrested as soon as they arrived in England, and after a suitable length of time had passed to allay suspicion, Southwick was freed to continue spying for Cecil.12

  Being denounced by a spy would frequently result in torture and then execution, b
ut being a spy brought its own dangers too. Wary of threats from the other side, or perhaps aware of greater rewards, some Elizabethan and Jacobean spies switched to become double agents, before occasionally switching back again to confuse things even further. Others walked a dangerous tightrope by supplying information to both sides, the government and Catholics simultaneously.

  Having access to the upper reaches of society made you a potential target for recruitment or monitoring. Leading playwrights such as Ben Jonson,13 who fell foul of the authorities on more than one occasion, could have been linked to Catholic agents – we shall see how he met the gunpowder plotters as their plans neared fruition. William Shakespeare himself had connections to the Catholic community and would surely have known spies, even if he wasn’t one himself, but he would also have had the example of Christopher Marlowe to remind him how dangerous life as a spy could be.

  The late sixteenth century saw a brilliant flourishing of English drama, and at its zenith were Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe. Marlowe was the brilliant young man behind plays like Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine, and Edward II, but he also had a complex personal life and was not a man who complied with the norms of his time. He was openly homosexual, and, more dangerously, openly atheist. Even more dangerously, he was working as a spy for Sir William Cecil.

  Marlowe was to be found among the English garrison at Flushing, in Flanders, in the early 1590s, and it is believed that he was one of the chief intelligence gatherers there. Unfortunately, his volatile lifestyle created more headaches for his spymasters than his information was worth. He was back in London by May 1593, when a series of atheist tracts were posted across the city bearing the signature ‘Tamburlaine’. This was obviously far too clumsy to be Marlowe’s work, but he found a warrant issued for his arrest alongside his fellow playwright Thomas Kyd.14

  Marlowe never came to trial, as he was killed on 30 May 1593 at or near an inn in Deptford in east London. It was believed for many centuries that he was killed as the result of a drunken brawl, possibly over a man, but that supposition and the findings of the official inquest15 are now widely discredited. Some say that he was killed because he was a secret Catholic, some that he was assassinated because he had outlived his usefulness as a spy, and some that he was killed by a powerful man, possibly Sir Walter Ralegh, who was worried that Marlowe was going to implicate him in a plot. It has even been speculated that the death of Marlowe was faked and that he was sent abroad to protect him from those he had informed against (we shall see how this has an echo in rumours surrounding the plotter Francis Tresham), but this seems unlikely. While the exact cause of Christopher Marlowe’s death may never be known, it seems highly likely that his former spymaster Cecil had some involvement in it.

  The complex, confusing and dangerous world that Guy Fawkes was moving into saw ruthless spies and agents operating on both sides, but most of the Catholic espionage was being planned, by necessity, from across the sea. Chief among the Catholic agitators and spy chiefs were the militant Jesuit priest Father William Baldwin, the turncoat soldier Sir William Stanley, and the man who became known as the ‘Welsh Intelligencer’,16 Hugh Owen. Born in the 1530s he had managed to escape England after being implicated in the Ridolfi plot of 1571, after which he spent more than three decades masterminding and encouraging Catholic plots, often with the support of the Spanish court who paid him a salary.

  Hugh Owen was the number one target for Walsingham and the Cecils, and yet he always evaded their grasp. This triumvirate of Owen, Baldwin and Stanley would also become well known to Guy Fawkes as he made his way across the sea to Flanders to serve the Catholic cause from within the Spanish army.

  Chapter 9

  A Man Highly Skilled in Matters of War

  So when thou hast, as I

  Commanded thee, done blabbing –

  Although to give the lie

  Deserves no less than stabbing –

  Stab at thee he that will,

  No stab the soul can kill

  Walter Ralegh, The Lie

  In 1593, after leaving service at Cowdray House for a second time, Guy Fawkes set sail from England alongside his friend and distant cousin Richard Collinge, who was later ordained as a Jesuit priest.1 Collinge was making the journey to further his spiritual education, Guy was going to wage war.

  Guy Fawkes was now 23 years of age and his life was not turning out how his parents imagined it when they first looked down at the wailing face of their newborn child. Not for Guy was the life of an ecclesiastical lawyer, or even that of a gentleman farmer or respectable husband. Guy had turned his back on the faith he had been born into, and in doing so abandoned completely the path that had once stretched out before him.

  Guy had loved and lost, he had found employment and been dismissed, and he had excelled at his studies without having any opportunity to use them for his advancement. Above all else, Guy had found a new faith which had become the cornerstone of everything he did in his life, and it was growing in strength day by day. It was this faith that made him sell his land and leave Yorkshire behind, probably it was his increased militancy that saw him adjudged as too dangerous to remain in service as a gentleman waiter, and it was his increasing anger at the injustices he saw all around him that made him take his fateful next step – Guy was never a man to lie down and submit, he was a man who preferred to risk all and charge in.

  The late sixteenth century was a violent time, with civil unrest and uprisings occurring at frequent intervals. It is likely that Guy would have learned to fight while a schoolboy in York, both with his fists and with a sword. Carrying a sword was a sign of wealth, of position and prestige, but if you carried one, you had to know how to use it.

  Guy’s school friend Jack Wright certainly did, as did Thomas Percy who Guy may also have known in his youth. Wright and his brother-in-law Percy considered themselves among the best swordsmen of their generation, and when they heard of other acclaimed swordsmen they would travel to meet them and participate in pre-arranged duels. Wright and Percy fought across the country, always without protective equipment.

  Jack Wright’s prowess with a sword2 is testimony not only to his ability and bravery, it also suggests that a fencing master was employed by St. Peter’s School in York to teach their pupils the art of the rapier. As Guy progressed through his school days, his disaffection with life and society in general growing, he would have relished these sword-fighting classes, praying that one day he would be able to put his abilities to the test in a real arena. That opportunity presented itself to Guy in the middle of the 1590s.

  We know that Guy eventually found his way to Flanders,3 as did many English Catholics of the time, but it seems likely that he spent some time in France, and possibly Italy, first. One indication of this was that he was so proficient in French that his interrogators, on the orders of King James,4 asked him where he learned to speak the language. Guy replied that he learned to speak French in England, and on his last journey beyond the seas,5 but it is probable that he mastered the language during an initial sojourn in France in 1593 or 1594.

  The last decades of the sixteenth century saw an escalation in the ‘wars of religion’ that had commenced as a result of Luther’s reformation: it wasn’t only in England that Catholics and Protestants found it impossible to live in peace with each other.

  The dominant force in Europe at the time was the Habsburg Empire, led by the Holy Roman Emperor. Originating in Switzerland in the thirteenth century, the Habsburg dynasty soon ruled nations across Europe. In 1521, the empire effectively split itself in two, when Holy Roman Emperor Charles V6 gave the Austrian lands of the Empire to his brother Ferdinand I. Even so, throughout the sixteenth century and beyond it remained essentially an empire controlled from Spain.

  One hotly disputed region of the Empire was called the Spanish Netherlands, also known as the Low Countries, and an area that encompasses much of the Netherlands, Belgium and north eastern France using today’s boundaries. In 1568 a conflict that beca
me known as the Eighty Years War erupted, between the Calvinist Protestant forces of the north and Catholic forces loyal to Spanish rule in the south.

  In the latter half of the sixteenth century, this conflict became particularly attractive to English Catholics. Not only would they have a chance to fight for a cause they believed in, they would also be free to pursue their religion openly and free of the persecutions of home. Fighting wars was a dangerous occupation, of course, but remaining in England could be equally dangerous, and expensive.

  It was these attractions that brought Guy Fawkes to Flanders, the Catholic stronghold of the Spanish Netherlands, sometime in 1594. Guy is often referred to as a mercenary, but while it is true that he was being paid to fight for a foreign country, Spain, he was not a mercenary in the modern sense of the word: Guy did not switch his loyalties depending upon who offered him the greatest rewards, and he never fought against what he believed in. For Guy, the bloody and often chaotic battles he took part in during his years as a soldier were part of his duty to the Catholic church, and any killing his actions caused would be justified by the service he was performing for God: he later used the same reasoning when preparing to light a fuse in a Westminster cellar in November 1605.