The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  Father Tesimond, writing in the wake of the terrible retribution which Catesby had brought down upon the whole Catholic world, still dwelt nostalgically upon his erstwhile friend, because of the love that he inspired as well as his generosity and sweetness. Obviously Catesby’s handsome appearance was part of his glamour. He was six foot tall and ‘more than ordinarily well proportioned’, bearing himself splendidly.21 In short, for many people this fine figure of a man represented the contemporary male ideal.

  Robert Catesby was probably born at Lapworth in Warwickshire. That was the main place of residence of his father, Sir William Catesby, although he also had properties around Ashby St Ledgers, in Northamptonshire. The Catesbys had a long pedigree, and one ancestor had already made his mark on English memories. Robert was sixth in descent from that Sir William Catesby who was the ‘Cat’ in the satirical rhyme constructed round the three supporters of Richard III (whose crest was a hog or boar):

  The Cat, the Rat and Lovell our Dog

  Rule all England under the Hog.

  But the ‘Cat’ had backed the wrong side and was put to death following Richard’s defeat at Bosworth Field.

  Robert’s father could also be said to have backed the wrong side since he suffered long imprisonment for his Catholic Faith. He married Anne Throckmorton from Coughton, also in Warwickshire, to whom he was already connected by his mother’s second marriage to a Throckmorton. There were the usual liberal helpings of recusant blood on both sides, including Vaux. But the crucial link, from the point of view of their son Robert, was the Tresham one. It has already been mentioned that Catesby and the Wintour brothers were related; and Tom Wintour in particular bore ‘a great love’ for his cousin ‘Robin’. But Robin and Francis Tresham, as the sons of two sisters, were even closer. Quite apart from other consanguinities, they had been brought up from childhood together.22

  On the one hand this brought Robin into the orbit of his authoritarian but generous uncle Sir Thomas Tresham, who had helped bail him out of the Essex crisis in 1601; it also emphasised his closeness to members of the Vaux family such as Anne. On the other hand, it put the weaker, less stable Francis under the influence of the magnetic Robin. As with the Wintour brothers, where Robert followed his younger brother Thomas, it was generally agreed that Francis Tresham was dominated by Robin Catesby rather than the other way around. Since Francis was several years older than his cousin, this pattern, inculcated in childhood, would seem to be the first example of Robin Catesby’s natural ability to command.

  Catesby should have been a rich man. The fact that by 1604 he was a poor one was due to his own recklessness at the time of the Essex conspiracy. In youth he had made all the right moves (or they had been made for him). After early life in Warwickshire he may have been educated for a while at Douai in the Netherlands, the new English Jesuit College for young Catholic men. But he certainly spent time at Oxford University, at Gloucester Hall (now Worcester College). He left, however, without taking his degree, presumably in order to avoid swearing the Oath of Supremacy.23

  At this point, however, whatever his earlier ambivalence, Catesby moved resolutely down the worldly path. At the age of nineteen, he married a wealthy girl from a Protestant family, Catherine Leigh of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. At one stroke he liberated himself in official eyes from the recusant taint and also secured her prodigious dowry (by contemporary standards) of two thousand pounds a year. By Catherine, Catesby had two sons. William died in infancy while the other, Robert, was baptised in November 1595 in the Protestant church at Chastleton, Oxfordshire. Here the young Catesbys lived on a property inherited from his grandmother.24

  Fifteen-ninety-eight was a crucial year of change for Catesby. His father died, leaving his mother with the Ashby St Ledgers properties for her lifetime, while Robin continued to live at Chastleton. Then Catesby’s young Protestant wife Catherine also died after only six years of marriage. To this loss has been attributed Catesby’s return to the Catholicism of his forefathers: to the Church in its fanatical form.25 Given the timing, it seems a reasonable supposition, even if the depths of despair he experienced at the tragedy (or guilt at his own earlier lapse into apparent Protestantism) cannot be known. For the rest of his short, terrifyingly hazardous life, Robin Catesby was noted for his religious dedication.

  His involvement with Essex, in which Catesby publicly wielded his sword in the vain hope of ameliorating the Catholic lot, resulted in a hefty fine of four thousand marks (approximately three thousand pounds). Sir Thomas Tresham did assist, but Robin Catesby himself was obliged to sell Chastleton to a local wool merchant from Witney called Jones. His name had been noted as a rebel, and what was more a Catholic rebel. As a result, Robin Catesby was probably among those recusants briefly imprisoned in advance of the death of Queen Elizabeth. In the new reign, Catesby’s country home was with his widowed mother at Ashby St Ledgers, a property in which he had more than a passing interest since it would revert to him on her death.*

  By April 1604, Catesby’s mentality was that of the crusader who does not hesitate to employ the sword in the cause of values which he considers are spiritual. At the same time, his was not the straightforward unexamined piety of, for example, the soldier Guy Fawkes. Catesby had a passion for theology, for testing his actions and arguments against the precepts of the Church rather than acting first and hoping for justification afterwards. He was a man who wanted to go to work – destructive work – with his eyes open to the moral consequences of what he was doing. How ironic, then, that it was exactly this honourable analytical trait of Catesby’s which would cause the most damage to the English priesthood in the whole sad saga of the Gunpowder Plot.

  Father Thomas Strange was a Jesuit who came back to England in 1603 and fell under Catesby’s spell at the house of Anne Vaux. He was an affable fellow, in his late twenties, who had been born in Gloucestershire, and liked ‘using the tennis court and sometime having music in his lodging’, gentlemanly tastes which made it easy for a priest to pass in polite society without discovery. He began writing a religious manual, ‘a compendium of all the sciences’, on Palm Sunday (1 April) 1604 and finished it appropriately enough on 23 May, the eve of the feast of St Robert. It was dedicated to Catesby, his ‘most distinguished and beloved’ friend: vir ornatissime atque charissime.26 The priest would have been horrified if he had known the schemes which were beginning to obsess his distinguished and beloved friend at roughly the same period and as a result of which the affable Father Strange would be utterly ruined in mind and body.

  Catesby, the second Phaeton, bringer of darkness, was on his way.

  * When, in 1610, the antiquarian Thomas Lyte presented the King with ‘a most royally ennobled genealogy’, which tactfully started with Brute, he got the famous Lyte Jewel, containing a miniature of James by Nicholas Hilliard, as a reward.

  * A comparison might be made to Adam von Trott, one of the plotters to blow up Hitler in 1944, who also exercised an extraordinary personal influence on his contemporaries.

  * This makes sense of the traditional claim that Catesby and others plotted the Powder Treason in the half-timbered Tudor gatehouse which leads to the great mellow brick pile which is Ashby St Ledgers itself (still in private hands). The pretty twelfth-century church beside it, with its Catesby brasses, can however be visited. Chastleton in Oxfordshire is now National Trust property.

  PART THREE

  That Furious and Fiery Course

  These things were the spurs that set those gentlemen upon that furious and fiery course which they afterwards fell into.

  FATHER JOHN GERARD

  A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  So Sharp a Remedy

  He [Catesby] told me the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy, and asked me if I would give my consent. I told him Yes, in this or what else soever, if he resolved upon it, I would venture my life…

  Confession of Thomas Wintour, 1605

  Sunday 20 May 1604 w
as the fateful date. On this day a meeting was held between Robin Catesby, Tom Wintour, Jack Wright, Thomas Percy and Guido Fawkes. Although the band of conspirators would eventually amount to an ill-omened thirteen, these five were regarded as the prime movers of the plot that followed, with Catesby as their inspirational leader and Wintour as adjutant. This meeting, which kick-started the Powder Treason into life, was held at an inn called the Duck and Drake, in the fashionable Strand district, where Tom Wintour stayed when he was in London.

  The background to this meeting is as follows.*1 Catesby first sent for Wintour, who was in Worcestershire with his brother Robert, in late February. Tom Wintour was however ill, and could not at first answer Catesby’s summons. When he did arrive at Catesby’s house in Lambeth he found his cousin together with the swordsman Jack Wright: he may have wished he had stayed at secluded tranquil Huddington instead of answering Catesby’s summons.

  The proposition put by Catesby was simple and it was blood-curdling. A scheme would be devised to blow up ‘the Parliament House with gunpowder’ in order to destroy the King and his existing government. Catesby justified his choice of Parliament for this deliberate holocaust with equally shocking simplicity. ‘In that place’, he said, ‘have they done us all the mischief’; perhaps God had designed that place for their punishment.

  When he first heard of Catesby’s deadly plan, which he called ‘a stroke at the root’, Wintour demurred. If the stroke succeeded it would certainly bring about ‘new alterations’ in religion, but, if it failed, the scandal surrounding Catholicism would be so great in England that not only their enemies but also their friends would with good reason condemn them. This was an eminently sensible judgement. Unfortunately Wintour did not hold to it. The Catesby spell continued to work on him. Wintour was won over.

  When Catesby told his cousin that ‘the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy’ and asked Wintour if he would give his consent, Wintour agreed. ‘I told him Yes, in this or what else soever, if he resolved upon it, I would venture my life…’

  Catesby still had not quite given up on the idea of foreign help, that pipedream which had obsessed the English Catholics for so long. In order to leave ‘no peaceable and quiet way untried’ Tom went back to the continent yet again, where the Constable of Castile was holding court before sailing for England. The Constable was, as it happened, a great deal more interested in the affairs of Flanders than in those of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty he was supposed to be concluding (he would not actually arrive in England until August). When the Constable did meet Wintour, he was friendly rather than forthcoming. As for Hugh Owen and Sir William Stanley, they poured cold water on the idea of Spain providing assistance, or for that matter the Archdukes ruling Flanders, Albert and Isabella: ‘all these parts were so desirous of peace with England’.2

  But Owen did provide the necessary introduction to Guido Fawkes. Guido’s name had already been supplied by Catesby as ‘a confidant [discreet] gentleman’ suitable for their business, but Wintour had evidently not yet encountered him. Fawkes’ name could have been mentioned to Catesby by anyone in recusant circles, including his schoolfellow, Catesby’s friend and ally, Jack Wright; he would have been recommended as a staunch and courageous soldier. Although the English government, who feared and detested Hugh Owen, tried to pretend later that he had been directly involved in the Plot, there was at this point no plot. Owen, an expert on the Flanders scene after so many years, simply put Wintour in touch with Fawkes; Stanley (who had been Fawkes’ superior) also commended him. An advantage of introducing Guido into this secret plot was that, while his name was known, his face was not, as he had not been in England for many years.

  Tom Wintour’s first encounter with Guido was the satisfactory part of his trip abroad. They were after all two people of a similar outlook, contemporaries, men of action, who had both experienced first hand the dilatoriness of the Spanish and the empty nature of their promises. Wintour told Guido that if the peace with Spain really gave no assistance to the beleaguered Catholics, ‘we were upon a resolution to do somewhat in England’, although as yet there were no firm plans. Finally the two men sailed back together, landing on or about 25 April.3 Together they went to find Catesby in his Lambeth lodging, on the south bank of the river. Wintour broke the news that, although the Constable had spoken ‘good words’, Wintour very much doubted whether his deeds would match them. In this way, Catesby could consider himself thrown back on his original, radically violent plan. Four conspirators were now in place.

  The fifth member of the inner caucus, Thomas Percy, joined them a few weeks afterwards. Percy, like Guido, was immediately attracted by the idea of taking some action in England itself. Percy was a vigorous character and he had shown already in Scotland his wish to be part of the solution to his co-religionists’ woes. He was also working for Northumberland, ‘one of the great Peers of the kingdom’ as Tassis described him.4 Furthermore, there was a family connection to bind him to the conspirators: not only was Percy Jack Wright’s brother-in-law but it seems that his young daughter (by Martha Wright) had been betrothed to Robert Catesby’s eight-year-old son the previous year.

  ‘Shall we always, gentlemen, talk and never do anything?’ were Percy’s first words. Whatever his moral failings as an individual, he spoke for so many in that frustrated cry. It was in this way that the 20 May meeting at the Duck and Drake was convened. All the Plotters – Catesby, Wintour, Wright, Guido and Percy – swore an oath of secrecy upon a prayer book in a room ‘where no other body was’. Afterwards, since it was a Sunday, Father John Gerard celebrated Mass in another room, in ignorance of what had taken place. The five men all took the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

  At the time this Mass merely seemed like a silent personal endorsement of what had been decided earlier. Guido, Catesby and Wintour were, of course, conspicuous by the frequency with which they went to the Sacraments, at a time when recourse to them was not necessarily made all that often. Father Gerard and Catesby were friends. One of their links was Eliza Vaux, the Dowager of Harrowden Hall, who was the priest’s chief protector in the country and an important part of Catesby’s family network, Catesby himself being a frequent visitor to Harrowden. The presence of Catesby and his companions at the Mass was not exceptional, nor, for that matter, was Father Gerard’s presence in London.

  London, said to be the largest city in Europe, was at this date a vast sprawling conurbation of teeming tenements and slums, as well as palaces and mansions. The population had swollen so alarmingly in the course of the previous century that King James himself observed that ‘soon London will be all England’. Under the circumstances, recusants often stood a better chance of preserving their anonymity here among the ‘dark dens for every mischief worker’ (including priests) than in the isolated state of a country house, which gave servants the chance of prolonged inspection leading to betrayal.5 But there was no question of Father Gerard being let in to the secret of the oath which had just been sworn.

  Much later the coincidence of the oath and the Mass, including the taking of the Sacrament, would become a big stick with which the government beat the hated English Jesuits. Lancelot Andrewes, in an official sermon on the subject, described how the plot was ‘undertaken with a holy Oath, bound with the holy Sacrament’. It was a favourite slur that Catholic confessors gave absolution for crimes in advance, thus using their sacramental authority to legitimise a crime. In the case of Father Gerard it was suggested that he had purposefully sanctified the enterprise of destruction which lay ahead. But Tom Wintour was quite clear in his confession that the priest knew nothing. Even Guido, while admitting to the oath and receiving the Sacrament upon it, ‘withal he added that the priest who gave him the sacrament knew nothing of it’. In a subsequent examination, Guido specifically exculpated Gerard.6 The only conspirator who implicated the Jesuits at his interrogation was Catesby’s wretched servant Thomas Bates, who, being small fry, had some expectation of saving himself if he gave the government
what they wanted: ‘the considerable hope of life which they held before him’. Even Bates retracted his charge on the eve of his death, when he was conscious that he was about to appear before what Father Gerard called ‘that dreadful tribunal’ of God’s own judgement.7

  Eliza Vaux declared eloquently that she would pawn her whole estate – ‘yea, and her life also’ – in order to answer for Father Gerard’s innocence.8 She was of course quite as passionately partisan as the government. More cogent therefore is the surviving correspondence of the Jesuits with Rome in the summer of 1604. The Plotters had decided on ‘so sharp a remedy’, but the English Jesuits were in contrast manifestly holding on to their previous hopes of liberalisation in the wake of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty. As Father Garnet expressed it, in the high summer of 1604 ‘no one with any prudence or judgement’ found the idea of peace ‘displeasing’. But he added in cipher that, if the expected moves for toleration did not go well, it might be impossible to keep some of the Catholics quiet.9

  Father Garnet spent a great deal of 1604 in travels throughout England which have been recorded (others of his peregrinations remain unknown to this day because of the constant need for secrecy). At Easter, for example, he was reported to have said Mass at Twigmoor, the house of Jack Wright in Lincolnshire, which was a notorious haunt of seminarians. In the following November, he was at White Webbs, with Anne Vaux as hostess, when the Jesuits made their annual renewal of their vows on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady. This may have been the musical occasion cited earlier, witnessed by a Frenchman, when Father Garnet, with his fine voice, sang and William Byrd played. The Jesuit Superior was therefore all too well qualified to make his anxious prediction about the instability of certain lay people. ‘The Pope must command all Catholics not to make a move,’ Father Garnet pleaded to his Superior in Rome.10 It was a point to which he would return with increasing desperation over the next twelve months.