by Nick Holland
The succession had been complicated further when two obvious candidates, Lady Catherine Grey and Lady Mary Grey, died in 1568 and 1578 respectively. They were the granddaughters of Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor, a bloodline which had earlier proved fatal for their elder sister Lady Jane Grey who as a teenager was placed on the throne against her will and then rapidly removed from it and executed. As Jane stood next to the executioner’s block by the Tower of London she called out, ‘Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same’.13 Jane was a chilling reminder to all who had a claim to the succession, however tenuous, of where it could lead.
The plots around Mary Queen of Scots, and the later promotion of the Spanish infanta Isabella, galvanised the leading Protestant courtiers into action. Seeing how precarious was their position, and that of English Protestantism, they had to find a suitable candidate of their own. There was only one man they could turn to: James VI of Scotland.
James was a great-grandchild of Margaret Tudor,14 sister to King Henry VIII, through his father Henry Stuart. James’s succession was problematic not because of his bloodline, but because it appeared that he had been specifically prohibited from becoming king by the will of Henry VIII which declared that all descendants of his sister Margaret would be barred from the throne as they were of foreign (Scottish) birth.15 There was also the problem that Elizabeth detested James, calling him a ‘false Scots urchin’,16 but as Elizabeth’s own succession from Mary had shown, personal feelings could easily be ignored when required.
As the seventeenth century dawned, Elizabeth’s chief courtier Robert Cecil knew that the succession could not be far away. Always both a pragmatist and a survivor, he started to correspond secretly with James VI of Scotland from 1601, ensuring that he would retain his favour once he ascended to the English throne.17 Cecil wasn’t the only one to embark upon diplomacy with James, as the Earl of Northumberland was also in correspondence with Scotland’s king.
Northumberland hoped to convince the man who would surely be the next English monarch to be more tolerant towards Catholics than Elizabeth had been, and for this purpose he sent an envoy to have three meetings with James at Holyrood. The man chosen was a distant relative who had become a trusted and useful aide to him: the future conspirator and possible Scotton acquaintance of Guy Fawkes, Thomas Percy.18
James’s longevity as Scottish king is testament to his political astuteness if nothing else, at a time when one false move could see even kings or queens swiftly disposed of. Whatever his true feelings were, he showed great civility towards Thomas Percy, and while not being fully committed on any subject he did enough to convince Percy that he supported tolerance towards Catholics, even if he wouldn’t legalise open Catholic worship.
Thomas Percy was elated at the conversations he had with the King, and the news spread throughout the Catholic community. Whether by ‘Chinese whispers’ or by Percy’s own exuberance, the half promises and suggestions of the King became amplified. We have only to read the testimony of Father Tesimond to hear what English Catholics expected from the man who was to become their new ruler:
He made Mr Thomas [Percy] very generous promises to favour Catholics actively, and not merely to free them from the bondage and persecution in which they were then living. Indeed, he would admit them to every kind of honour and office in the state without making any difference between them and the Protestants. At last he would take them under his complete protection. The King promised all this and much more than I write here. Not only that, but in order to make himself more acceptable to the Catholics, the King pledged his word as a prince; he took Percy by the hand when he swore to carry out all that he had promised.19
Whether he shook Percy’s hand or not, James certainly didn’t put anything in writing. Nevertheless, Catholics began to look forward to his presumed succession – particularly as it was popularly believed that his wife Anne of Denmark had secretly converted to Catholicism.20 Senior figures at the Vatican even believed that James himself, following the example of his wife, might one day convert to the old faith, but in this they were to be sorely disappointed.
Queen Elizabeth I died on 24 March 1603 from blood poisoning. Cecil and the other courtiers were well prepared, and immediately sent envoys to Scotland to declare King James VI of Scotland also King James I of England.
James left Edinburgh on 5 April, and used his journey to London to visit English nobles and see important areas of his new country. One of his longest sojourns was in York, and the streets were filled with loyal subjects and the sound of celebrations. One of York’s sons, however, was not there to witness the arrival of his new king, one with whom his story would become inextricably bound – Guy Fawkes was preparing for a journey to Spain,21 but he would soon return to the land of his birth with his sense of injustice, and his anger, burning more fiercely than ever before.
Not all Catholics believed King James’s supposed plans for tolerance, and although he did initially put an end to the fines for recusancy, friendly relations with Catholics did not last long. If anything, the persecutions soon grew in severity along with the fines. The new king also brought Scotland and England together in a new union, and sealed peace at last with Spain. This was the deadly combination that led directly to the events of November 1605.
The milk of human kindness towards the monarch had soured, Catholics now found their hopes crushed, and the minds of some began to turn to action – to treason. Father Tesimond, a witness to the later events and known to many of the people involved in them, saw the actions to come as inevitable:
The Catholics of England had arrived at the nadir of their miseries. There was no more hope for them. Not from the King, who had forgotten his promises and changed his mind now he was secure in his new kingdom. He showed himself rather their open enemy, and the enemy of their beliefs... Finding the King so easily persuaded to harm Catholics, or more exactly, so ready to persecute them, his ministers made every effort to bring the persecution to perfection... Kindled within them [the Catholic plotters] was a just desire, as it seemed to them, of retribution. They burned to liberate themselves and their friends from this cruel servitude and oppression. But at last they found a remedy for these evils which was no less lacking in pity and humanity than the very authors of such evil. Led by anger and desperation, they decided to open a way to new and better hopes by the utter destruction of their enemies.22
Chapter 11
The Spanish Treason
O eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life! no life, but lively form of death
O world! no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confus’d and fill’d with murder and misdeeds!
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Guy Fawkes was a courageous and proficient soldier, but he also impressed his superiors with his intellect and intelligence, and in 1603, as the new king prepared to take his place on the English throne, he was sent away from the frontline of Flanders to the courts of the Spanish king. Guy’s mission was to persuade King Philip III to support an invasion of England – it was to become known as ‘the Spanish treason’.
The initial attitude of the Catholic community to James I was mixed. Optimists believed the stories that had circulated since his audiences with Thomas Percy – that he would be a tolerant king who would allow them to practise their faith unhindered, free of punitive fines and the threat of imprisonment.
Even some of England’s Jesuit priests, living every day with the fear of capture and execution, looked ahead to a brighter future. Father Henry Garnet was Superior, or leader, of the Jesuits in England, and even though he was, as always, in hiding, he wrote to King James, via the intermediary of a courtier, to explain that he and other Catholics wished to be ‘dear and not unnatural subjects of the Crown’.1 The conciliatory approach that Garnet took did him little good, as he was executed in May 1606.2
Other Catholics however, particularly the more militant members of the fait
h who remained in self-imposed exile abroad, took a more pessimistic view. Time would prove them right, even though at first James did repeal fines for recusancy.3
Among the chief Catholic agitators on the continent was Guy’s former commander Sir William Stanley. By the time of James’s accession to the throne of England, Stanley had spent more than a decade alternating his time as a soldier with visits to the Spanish court. These visits always had but one aim – to encourage the raising of another Armada and the invasion of England; but while the Spanish made encouraging noises they stopped short of giving him financial or military backing. Eventually Stanley became a nuisance figure whose visits were far from welcome. In truth, Stanley had never been the most popular figure among the Spanish authorities, for even though he had surrendered Deventer to the Spanish forces in 1587, King Philip II later said that while he approved of the act he despised the traitor.
Chief plotters alongside Stanley at this time were Hugh Owen and Father William Baldwin,4 and as it became apparent that Stanley was making little headway in persuading Spain to support an attack on England, they began to use other envoys instead. One such man was Thomas James. A successful merchant in England, he left his trade and wealth behind to help the Catholic cause overseas. A close ally of Father Robert Persons, the English Jesuit leader in Rome, he arrived at the Spanish court in early 1602 to plead unsuccessfully for an invasion of England. He then remained in Madrid as the English Secretary to King Philip III.5
Philip III succeeded his father as King of Spain in 1598, aged 20, and the likes of Stanley and Thomas James soon found that he was less warlike than his father had been. While Philip II launched the Armada against England and took Calais from the French, among many other exploits, Philip III would eventually seal peace deals with England and with the Protestants of the Netherlands.
Another man sent to speak to Philip III on behalf of the English Catholics, this time by the Flanders triumvirate of Stanley, Owen and Baldwin with the collusion of leading Catholics in England, was Thomas Wintour, who would later become an integral part of the gunpowder plot alongside Guy Fawkes. Wintour shared the same desperation and anger that galvanised the other plotters, and like many of the plotters he shared family connections. In Wintour’s case, his own brother Robert was another conspirator, as was his brother-in-law John Grant. He was also a cousin of Robert Catesby, and shared an uncle with Jack and Kit Wright in the form of the executed priest Francis Ingleby.
Thomas Wintour arrived in Spain in 1601, using the alias of Timothy Browne,6 carrying a letter of introduction from Father Garnet in England to Father Joseph Creswell, who was Superior of the Jesuits in Spain. Creswell often acted as a facilitator for English Catholics wanting to see the Spanish king, and so it went on this occasion.
Wintour, while again pressing the case for an invasion of England, also sought financial help for English Catholics who had been involved in the Essex rebellion against Queen Elizabeth and had now been met with punitive fines (men like Robert Catesby who, along with Baron Monteagle and Francis Tresham, was one of the English contingent who sent Wintour on the mission to Spain7).
Wintour was granted meetings with some of Philip III’s chief courtiers, including the Duke of Lerma and the Count of Miranda, who held the Spanish purse strings, and finally with the King himself at the grand San Lorenzo de El Escorial palace in Madrid. The meetings seemed to be an unqualified success, at first, as the men, on behalf of the King, promised to supply Wintour with 100,000 escudos, or approximately £25,000 – a huge sum. King Philip also seemed, for the first time, to indicate that he was prepared to launch an invasion of England, saying that he himself would set foot in England.8 Wintour, as revealed in his post-gunpowder plot confession,9 encouraged the King in this enterprise by saying he could supply the Spanish army with up to 1,500 horses should they land in England – the transporting of horses from Spain to England being seen as a major difficulty in the launching of a successful invasion.
By late 1602, Thomas Wintour was back in England having passed on the good news from Spain, but the money from Madrid was not forthcoming, and some militant Catholics in England and the Low Countries began to worry that Philip now had his heart set on a more peaceful resolution to the decades-long conflict with England.
With Thomas James still in Spain, another surreptitious envoy was sent to convince the Spanish king to honour his earlier pledges. This man is named in official Spanish documents as Anthony Dutton, but it seems that as with Wintour, who had travelled as Timothy Browne, an alias was being used. This was a necessary precaution for those who planned on returning to England after Spain, to avoid the scrutiny of Robert Cecil’s spies.
It is thanks to Guy Fawkes that we know the real identity of Anthony Dutton, for in his confession of 25 November 1605 Guy revealed, ‘Christopher Wright had been in Spain about two months before this examinant [Fawkes] arrived there, who was likewise employed by Baldwin, Owen and Sir William Stanley’.10
This ties in with the date of Dutton’s listed arrival in Spain of 15 May 1603, so there can be little doubt that Dutton was an alias being used by Kit Wright, and he will be referred to by his real name henceforth. Wright’s port of call was Valladolid in north west Spain, at this time the country’s capital. After seeing Creswell, he wasted no time in arranging a meeting with King Philip and his counsellors.
Wright had brought with him more detailed plans for the invasion mooted by Thomas Wintour a year earlier, and he also made clear that he and many other English Catholics had now reached a state of desperation. Wright declared that this was the last embassy they could send to Spain, and they needed to know whether they would receive funds from King Philip, and how Spain planned to proceed. This information, Kit Wright explained, would tell them whether they could carry out important plans, or whether they would have to leave them undone for ever.11
Wright had thrown himself upon the mercy of the Spanish court, begging it to help him and the Catholics of England before their new king, James I, made conditions even worse. Like so many emissaries before him however, he was listened to respectfully and then largely ignored. During his negotiations, Kit had spoken of another man who was being sent and who would bring things that he couldn’t – and in the summer of 1603 he too arrived at the Spanish court: Guy Fawkes.
Guy and Kit had first met at St. Peter’s School in York, but now found themselves together again nearly one thousand miles to the south. The ruddy-cheeked son of the ecclesiastical lawyer had now become a battle-scarred veteran of the religious wars, and a man deemed worthy to speak to the world’s most powerful secular leader, Philip, King of Spain and head of the Holy Roman Empire.
These meetings that took place between 1601 and 1603, the Spanish Treason involving Thomas James, Thomas Wintour, Kit Wright and Guy Fawkes, show the extent to which there was a joined up community of dissident English Catholics, stretching from England itself, passing through Flanders, and having its spiritual home in Rome. Kit Wright clearly knew of Thomas Wintour’s earlier meeting with the King and his advisors, and he also knew that Guy was being sent after him from the Low Countries, demonstrating a Europe-wide Catholic intelligence network. While these four men were chosen to be representatives of the cause, it is clear that the strings were being pulled by others: Father Persons in Rome, Baldwin, Owen and Stanley in Flanders, and the likes of Catesby in England – often with the subtle encouragement of Catholic nobles such as the Lords Mordaunt, Montague, and Monteagle.
Just what was it that Guy was bringing to Spain that Kit Wright couldn’t? Firstly, there was the prestige of having fought valiantly for the Spanish army. Far from being a money-oriented mercenary, he had wholly embraced the Spanish cause, even adopting the name of Guido rather than his given name Guy. Indeed, although Guy had been given leave from the army to make his diplomatic journey, he was being considered for further promotion at this time.
Guy also possessed a skill that Kit Wright didn’t: he was an excellent linguist, speaking both
French and Spanish fluently. It’s easy to get the wrong impression of Guy: to think that he was little more than a soldier, a man to light the fuse. In reality, Guy was intellectually able, and a natural leader of men. It speaks volumes for his abilities that out of all the English Catholics serving in Flanders at the time, many of them from far more exalted backgrounds, it was Guy Fawkes that Baldwin, Owen and Stanley chose to send to the King of Spain.
While Kit had brought news from England, Guy brought intelligence and information from Flanders, and he also presented the King with two new documents: a petition on behalf of England’s Catholics that had earlier been given to James I by Father Thomas Hill,12 an act that saw him imprisoned, and a letter in Guy’s own handwriting detailing what would happen to England’s Catholics if no action were taken against James.13
Guy’s statement was angry, vitriolic, and vehemently anti-Scottish, but it was also prescient given that James had only been on the throne for a matter of months. At the time Guy wrote his letter many were still hopeful that James would be tolerant towards Catholics, but Guy saw through the new king’s façade. James was a man who desired, in Guy’s words, ‘in a short time to have all of the Papist sect driven out of England... Many have heard him say at table that the Pope is Anti-Christ which he wished to prove to anyone who believed the opposite’.14
Whereas Kit Wright had been diplomatic and almost pitiful in his requests to the Spanish court, Guy was driven, forceful, compelling. Unfortunately for both men, and for those who had sent them, they had arrived at completely the wrong time in history. The accession of James to the English throne, and the more peaceable nature of Philip III compared to his father, had seen a rapid outbreak of diplomacy. In Rome, Pope Clement VIII had decreed that English Catholics should seek a peaceful resolution to their grievances, and he also encouraged peace talks between Spain and England.