The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  A few months later, a seventh conspirator was recruited. This was Catesby’s servant Thomas Bates, who according to his confession joined the Plotters in early December 1604. Bates must surely have had his suspicions about a Plot already. He was not a menial, since he was allowed his own armour and his own servant at Ashby St Ledgers. Bates, born at Lapworth, was more of a retainer, part of Catesby’s ‘family’ or intimate household; and he was known to be absolutely devoted to his master.29 Bates’ own family consisted of an independent-minded wife called Martha. (The conspirators’ wives constituted a remarkable group: but then they were part of the larger, resolute and often intrepid body of Catholic women.)

  However, Bates’ confession is one of the more unreliable pieces of evidence surrounding the events of the Plot. His lower social standing was relevant here for it meant that he could be subject to special pressures from the authorities. On the one hand he might – conceivably – hope to get off where the other more senior Plotters could not, or be induced to believe that such a chance existed. On the other, the ultimate threat of torture was routinely seen as a matter of social hierarchy: people without proper rank in the estimation of the governing class were much more likely to be subject to it than their superiors. Nor should too much attention be paid to Bates’ so-called revelations concerning the priests, including Father Tesimond.

  In the context it is unsurprising to find Bates claiming to confess his sin in advance to Tesimond (that persistent Protestant smear on Catholics and the Sacrament of penance). In Bates’ official version he was not only absolved but encouraged by Tesimond with the words ‘that it was no offence at all, but justifiable and good’. What Bates probably did say under duress was much less incriminating: ‘he thought Father Tesimond knew something about this plot but he could not be certain’.30 Bates of course recanted at the last and apologised to those he had traduced.

  At the time, Bates’ recruitment made every sense in view of his close, dependent relationship to Catesby. He was a practical man, his loyalty could be taken for granted and so could his silence. The circumstances where this might no longer be true – twelve months ahead – were, perhaps fortunately, beyond the conspirators’ imagining. In any case, their plans were shortly to meet with a startling reversal, as it must have seemed at the time.

  This reversal took the form of a postponement of Parliament, and in the event would be creatively used by the Plotters to elaborate and expand their plans. Nevertheless the announcement on Christmas Eve that Parliament would not after all sit again in early February, owing to renewed fears of the plague in London, must have come as a shock. The new date was 3 October 1605. That left many months of secrecy and planning ahead – months in which more help, either at home or abroad or both, might be recruited. Alternatively, of course, these were months in which news of the conspiracy might leak out, first in the secret recusant world, and then by degrees elsewhere through spies or covert governmental well-wishers high and low.

  The prosecution in its account of the conspiracy had the Plotters involved in an amazing and daring venture at this period. This was the digging out of a mine beneath the Palace of Westminster, which was intended to convey the gunpowder from the cellar of the Whynniard house within Westminster to a cavity under the House of Lords. The digging was supposed to have been begun on 11 December and abandoned as impractical on 25 March, because the foundation walls were in places eleven feet thick.

  This mine was most likely a mythical invention, used by the government to spice up the official account of the narrowly averted danger.* For one thing, no traces of this famous mine were ever found – nor have any traces of it ever been found since. If dug, it was quite brilliantly shored up. The sheer logistics of digging out such a subterranean passage would have been horrendous – particularly since none of the conspirators had any mining experience or knowledge and no move was ever made to import an experienced tunneller from the mining communities that had existed in England since ancient times. Catesby and Percy were both exceptionally tall men: Tesimond in his Narrative was astonished that they had been able to stoop to the work. Furthermore, the mind boggles at the problems of disposal within the busy Palace of Westminster. Some of the stones would have been enormous (far too big to lose in the little garden next door) and, if the Thames was used, it must be remembered that the river was at this date the main highway of a capital city.31

  None of these obvious questions about the working of the mine was answered in any way by the prosecution. Nor was a real attempt made to do so. Sir Edward Coke, prosecuting, by admitting that the mine was ‘neither found nor suspected’ by the government until the danger was past, was able to tell a tall tale without risk of contradiction. It is notable that Guy Fawkes did not mention the subject at all until his fifth interrogation. By this time, he had been put to the torture and was in no position to quibble about such unimportant details as a mine which had played no part in the action and had subsequently vanished into the ground from whence it came. Even so, someone thought it necessary to add – in handwriting other than Fawkes’ own – a clarifying detail to his deposition. It was a mine leading ‘to the cellar under the Upper House of Parliament’.32 The wretched Guido obviously did not know the precise notional whereabouts of the phantom mine.

  Why did the government bother? The answer must lie in the special sinister element which is introduced by the very idea of a subterranean tunnel occupied by wicked men, working away in the darkness like moles beneath the feet of the righteous. It is noticeable that in government propaganda the mine of itself made an excellent focus for shock, horror. ‘Lord, what a wind, what a fire, what a motion and commotion of earth and air would there have been!’ exclaimed Coke. The conspirators were regularly termed the ‘Miners’ in debate in Parliament. Its members had only to look down to be reminded of the great peril which had once threatened them all. One of their number, Sir Roger Wilbraham, wrote in his diary of ‘hellish practices under the earth’, while the playwright Thomas Dekker would wax eloquent on the subject of Lucifer’s devilish assistant, the Mouldwarp: ‘Vaults are his delight.’33

  New Year 1605 was celebrated by the court with enthusiasm, all unknowing of the Plot which – mine or no mine – was being devised to blow so many of their number to smithereens. The proliferation of the Royal Family had been further emphasised by the arrival of Prince Charles from Scotland in October to join his brother and sister. The puny little boy was greeted glumly at first by the English courtiers, who hesitated to apply for his household in case he died and the household vanished.34 But things looked up when he was created Duke of York at Twelfth Night. Besides, Queen Anne was visibly pregnant and would in fact bear her fourth (surviving) child in April.

  The subject matter of the ‘entertainment’ which crowned the Twelfth Night revelries had an unconscious aptness. Written by Ben Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones, this was entitled The Masque of Blackness. Queen Anne and her ladies, representing ‘the daughters of Niger’, were conventionally swathed in azure and silver, decorated with pearls. But they blacked up their faces, and their arms up to the elbow, something which made the task of the French Ambassador in kissing the royal hand somewhat tricky.35 A year which began with darkness as its official theme could not, perhaps, have been expected to pass without catastrophe threatening to engulf it.

  * This narrative is pieced together from the various contemporary accounts, although there is scarcely any piece of surviving evidence concerning the Gunpowder Plot which has not, by one authority or another, been considered dubious. This is hardly surprising in an episode which included interrogation after torture, as well as government revisionism after the event. As for the Plotters, obviously they did not always tell the truth, whether to protect themselves, their associates or their families.

  * The topography of this dwelling and that of ‘the Parliament House’ itself will be considered later.

  * Paul Wilkinson, in Terrorism and the Liberal State, points out that the Dublin Rising
, by a ‘small band of dreamers’, although ostensibly a failure at the time, alerted the world to the cause of Irish national freedom and led to the foundation of the Irish Free State: ‘Violence can act as a dramatic revelation and catalyst not only for the destruction of the established regime, but also for the forging of a new political community’ (p. 86).

  † The Oxford English Dictionary suggests a nineteenth-century origin for the word terrorist: ‘Anyone who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation; specially applied to members of the extreme revolutionary societies in Russia.’

  * There have been few periods of history when this has not been true. Leaders killed since the Second World War include President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Rabin of Israel. Attempts have been made on the lives of numerous leaders including Fidel Castro, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As to the killing of the innocent, since the Second World War (when the bombing of Dresden and its civilian population caused a controversy not yet extinguished) the bombing of Baghdad, with its civilians, in the Gulf War has aroused similar questions.

  * The principle of double-effect remains in place today in Catholic theology. The example of Dresden bombed in the Second World War was cited earlier. According to the double-effect principle, the bombing of a legitimate (industrial/military) target which incidentally causes unplanned civilian deaths would be in a different moral category from the deliberate bombing of the civilian population to strike terror and lower enemy morale.

  * Much ink was spilt in the late nineteenth century over the question of the mine, part of the ongoing controversy as to whether there really was a Gunpowder Plot, between the historians S. R. Gardiner and Father John Gerard (sic). Gardiner, who was a Pro-Plotter, defended its existence and Gerard, who was a No-Plotter, attacked it as part of the general picture of governmental fabrication; perhaps more ink was spilt than the subject deserved, since it is perfectly possible to have the Plot without the improbable mine. (Gardiner, Plot, pp. 34–5, 63–5, 41–2; Gerard, What Plot?, pp. 58ff.).

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pernicious Gunpowder

  The world has no instrument or means so pernicious as gunpowder, and capable of effecting such mischief.

  THOMAS BARLOW

  The Gunpowder Treason, 1679

  Twenty-fifth of March, known as Lady Day in honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, was the date on which the new year started officially in the contemporary calendar.* It was a time of new beginnings, and on 25 March 1605 the Powder Treason took on a new dimension. It was considerably enlarged when Robert Wintour, John Grant and Kit Wright were let in to the secret. All three made strategic sense, continuing the feeling of family which pervaded the whole Plot. Not only was Robert Wintour of Huddington the elder brother of Thomas, but John Grant of Norbrook had married their sister Dorothy, and Kit Wright was the brother of Catesby’s close ally Jack.

  John Grant, like Jack Wright, was a man of few words, with a general air of melancholy. But, unlike the famous swordsman Wright, Grant was something of an intellectual who studied Latin and other foreign languages for pleasure. Beneath the melancholy surface, however, and the air of scholarly withdrawal lay an exceptionally resolute character. Grant refused, for example, to be browbeaten by the local poursuivants, and defied them so often and so forcibly that they began to flinch from searching Norbrook (despite the fact that the house was more often than not sheltering Catholic priests). It was a steadfastness, based on a belief in God’s blessing on what he did, which John Grant ‘obstinately’ maintained to the very last.1

  Crucial to John Grant’s admission, beyond his Wintour marriage and his own strength of purpose, was the geographical position of Norbrook. Grant’s house, near Snitterfield in Warwickshire, a few miles north of Stratford-upon-Avon, was excellently situated from the conspirators’ point of view. First, it belonged in the great arc of Plotters’ houses which now spread like a fan across the midlands of England: from Harrowden and Ashby St Ledgers near Northampton to Huddington and Hindlip by Worcester – not too far from the Welsh Marches, wilder terrain which offered a prospect of escape. It was vital to be able to evade searches by fleeing to a safe – or at least recusant – house. In the past priests had often been saved by making their way under cover of darkness to a neighbouring refuge until the search was over, and then returning when the coast was clear. One of Salisbury’s intelligencers referred to such elusive prey as having the cunning of foxes: ‘changing burrows when they smell the wind that will bring the hunt towards them’.2 The town which lay at the centre of this recusant map was Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Grant’s house, Norbrook, was not far from Lapworth, the house where Catesby had been born and brought up, which now belonged to Jack Wright.3 Then there was the Throckmorton house, Coughton Court, a few miles to the west, owned by Catesby’s uncle Thomas but equally for rent if necessary since the Throckmorton fortunes were heavily depleted by recusancy. Baddesley Clinton lay to the east.

  In order to understand how the midlands of England could constitute, with luck, a kind of sanctuary for recusants, it is necessary to project the imagination back to Shakespeare’s country (and Shakespeare’s native Forest of Arden) and away from the idea of an area dominated by the huge proliferating mass of today’s Birmingham, England’s second city. If Birmingham is removed from the mental map,* it will be seen that gentlemen could hunt (and plot) in this area, priests could take part in gentlemanly pursuits such as falconry, women could conduct their great households, including these priests as musicians or tutors, just so long as local loyalties remained on their side.

  The reference to Shakespeare’s country is an appropriate one. We shall find the Gunpowder Plot providing inspiration in a series of intricate ways for one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays – Macbeth – and that again is not a coincidence. Stratford, celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthplace, was also the focus of his family’s life. The playwright’s father received a copy of The Spiritual Testament of St Charles Borromeo from Father Edmund Campion at Sir William Catesby’s Lapworth house. Shakespeare’s mother, from the recusant family of Arden, had property at Norbrook where John Grant lived and Shakespeare himself bought property at New Place in the centre of Stratford, in July 1605, in anticipation of his eventual retirement back to his birthplace.4

  In London, the circles in which Shakespeare moved also meshed with those of the conspirators. This was the world of the Mermaid Tavern, where Catesby and his friends were inclined to dine and which was hosted by William Shakespeare’s ‘dearest friend’ (he witnessed a mortgage for him) William Johnson. This meshing had been true at least since the time of the Essex Rising, which had involved Shakespeare’s patron Lord Southampton, who went to prison for it, as well as Catesby, Jack Wright and Tom Wintour.

  The figure of Sir Edward Bushell, who had worked for Essex as a Gentleman Usher, provided a further link – in this case a family one. Ned Bushell was a first cousin of the Wintours. As he admitted, the conspiracy included ‘many of my near kinsmen’: he would eventually become the guardian of young Wintour Grant, son to John Grant and Dorothy, which put him in control of Norbrook. But Bushell was also connected by marriage to Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s daughter. Shakespeare’s familiarity with the environment of the Plotters both in London and in the country – and his own recusant antecedents – are certainly enough to explain his subsequent preoccupation with the alarming events of 1605, so many of which took place in ‘his country’.5

  John Grant’s house at Norbrook had a further advantage since it was close to Warwick as well as Stratford. Horses – so-called ‘war-horses’ – would be an essential part of the coup. John Grant was to be in charge of their provision from the stable of Warwick Castle. War-horses of the continental type, strong, heavy ‘coursers’, about sixteen hands high, able to bear a man and his weaponry into battle, were rare in Tudor and post-Tudor England. The Spanish had blithely believed in their existence
during the earlier invasion plans: but in fact the Tudors had tried in vain to breed this continental strain at home. The decent saddle horses of this time were Galloway ‘nags’ or native Exmoor ponies, a considerably smaller breed. When push came to shove – as it was expected to do – the ‘war-horses’ of Warwick Castle would be a valuable asset. The need for good horses of any type led directly to the induction of further conspirators later on in the year.

  Finally, this natural focus on the midlands would, it was hoped, facilitate one of the plotters’ most important objectives. This was the kidnapping of the nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth.

  The King’s daughter was housed at Coombe Abbey, near Coventry, not much more than ten miles north of Warwick and west of Ashby St Ledgers. Here, under the guardianship of Lord and Lady Harington, with her own considerable household, the Princess resided in state. If the little Prince Charles, with his frail physique, had disappointed the English courtiers, and Prince Henry, with his air of command, had enchanted them, Princess Elizabeth fulfilled the happiest expectations of what a young female royal should be like.

  She was tall for her age, well bred and handsome according to a French ambassador who was eyeing her as a possible bride for the French Dauphin. (The canonical age for marriage was twelve, but royal betrothals could and did take place from infancy onwards.) The previous year she had already proved herself capable of carrying out royal duties in nearby Coventry. Following a service in St Michael’s Church, the young Princess had sat solemnly beneath a canopy of state in St Mary’s Hall and eaten a solitary dinner, watched by the neighbouring dignitaries.6 The Princess was therefore far from being an unknown quantity to those who lived locally – as royalties might otherwise be in an age without newspapers. On the contrary, the conspirators knew that she could fulfil a ceremonial role despite her comparative youth.