The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  Tom Wintour’s confession was supposedly signed by him on 23 November. He added to it further details of the so-called Spanish Treason on 26 November.29 Wintour’s account became the basis for most other subsequent narratives, including that of Father Tesimond himself. This was not only because the confession was published at length, but also because Wintour, uniquely among the survivors, had been in on the Powder Treason since the beginning. Guido, battered and tortured as he might be, could still not provide the full details of those early days with Catesby, the season before he himself was recruited.

  It is, however, a document which cannot be taken purely at its face value. This is because Wintour’s signature at the bottom – ‘Thomas Winter’ (sic) – is quite impossible to reconcile with any signature that had been made by him in the past. The version ‘Wintour’ was the one invariably used by him – whereas the version ‘Winter’ (or ‘Wynter’) was generally used by the government.30 There is a further difficulty posed by the signature, which, whatever its spelling, is not noticeably shaky. Yet this was the alleged signature of a man who had been seriously wounded in the shoulder, losing the use of his right arm, less than a fortnight previously. Nor does Waad’s report to Salisbury on 21 November inspire confidence: ‘Winter’ (sic) now found his hand so strong that he would write down after dinner what he had already declared to Salisbury verbally; the prisoner would then add ‘what he shall further remember’. The implication is that Tom Wintour by now was remembering what he was told to remember.31

  Wintour, since his confession was so vital, may well have been exposed to the awesome sight of the rack. But perhaps, wounded and helpless as he was, it was not necessary. The implicit threat of his situation – the despair of the prisoner cut off in the darkness described by Lord Dunfermline – may have been enough for the government to produce from him the confession they wanted. At all events, a surviving draft marked in Coke’s handwriting shows how carefully the text was monitored: wording has been altered in places, and underlined in others. The main drift of these markings is to hammer home the involvement of the Jesuits, especially Gerard, and of course the guilt of Owen.32

  Then there was the question of the famous mine under the House of Lords, which had not been mentioned in Guido’s first confession, but featured, by a strange coincidence, in both the confessions which were published. It was suggested earlier that this mine – for which no independent corroboration exists and of which no trace remains – was a myth promulgated by the government. Its importance in the King’s Book was as an artistic effect intended to emphasise the sheer horror of what had happened – or rather, what had nearly happened. Having elaborated the kind of confession they wanted from Wintour – both for evidence and for publication purposes – it is scarcely surprising that the government then went further and appended his signature to it. Wintour was completely in their power: the forged signature – by ‘that villain Waad’ yet again? – was only the culmination of the process.

  If the Council had not got all the information it wanted about the priests, it had also not succeeded in probing that worrying matter of the future Protector’s identity. The Earl of Northumberland was not, of course, tortured or even threatened with torture. He was a great man, not an obscure recusant. He was, however, subjected to intensive questioning by the King among others. James was preoccupied with the idea that Northumberland had had his horoscope – and that of the royal children – drawn up: casting the horoscope of a reigning monarch was always seen as a threatening and thus treasonable activity. Northumberland’s problem, as he himself would point out to the King a few years later, was that he could not prove a negative. On 15 November, in front of the Council, he had argued that he should be presumed innocent on the grounds of his lifestyle, which was ‘unambitious and given to private pleasures, such as gardening and building’.33 Unfortunately this touching picture was not the whole image of the man.

  It was Northumberland who had acted as the Catholics’ advocate in the previous reign, something the Earl might loftily dismiss as ‘an old Scotch story’, but others did not forget so easily. It was Northumberland who had employed Thomas Percy (a dead man who could tell no tales, even to exonerate his patron) and it was Northumberland who had been visited by Percy at Syon on 4 November, before the latter went back to Essex House, Northumberland’s London home. Against this, Northumberland, denying over and over again any complicity in the Plot, could only point to the practical arrangements he had made to attend Parliament on 5 November. Even Salisbury admitted to Edmondes: ‘it cannot be cast [charged] that he was absent’.34

  It was not enough. Northumberland remained in the Tower, although he lived in comfort compared to the prisoners in their dungeons below.35 Nevertheless he was not a free man. Assuming that he was innocent, Northumberland, like the Plotters’ wives, was among the numerous tangential victims of the Powder Treason.

  The rest of the prisoners held in connection with the Plot – with one key exception – did not provide the government with anything very much in the way of fresh information. Men like Ambrose Rookwood and Sir Everard Digby had been brought into the conspiracy too late to have much detailed knowledge.* Rookwood’s main contribution beyond attesting to his enduring feelings for Catesby, whom he ‘loved more than his own soul’, was to state that he had been promised that the Catholic lords would be spared.†36

  As for Digby, he suffered from the delusion, pathetic under the circumstances, that he could explain everything to King James if only he could meet him face to face, and put the Catholic case.37 Of course the once petted darling of the court was not allowed this luxury. One can hardly blame King James for not wishing to entertain further a young man who had recently planned to murder him and his family in such a ruthless fashion. Nevertheless Digby’s conduct either raises a doubt about the full extent of his implication, or suggests that Digby was astonishingly naive and trusting of his sovereign’s forgiveness.

  Digby had been involved in the conspiracy a mere fortnight before its discovery. It is possible that he learnt the full dreadful nature of what had been planned for the Parliament House only at Dunchurch when the London conspirators arrived to disband the meeting, by which time the Plot had already failed. Digby was not the kind of man to desert his friends at this juncture, and so he pressed on with them (although his reaction to the servant at the inn – ‘there is no remedy’ – suggests he did so with a heavy heart). But he did of course leave Holbeach, when the cause was evidently lost, to surrender himself to the authorities, and he was the only major conspirator to do so.

  Denied an interview with the King, Digby took refuge in a kind of Christian defiance, as family papers discovered after his son’s death revealed. ‘If I had thought there had been the least sin in the Plot,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have been of it for all the world, and no other cause drew me to hazard my life but zeal to God’s religion.’ As for the reaction of the Pope and the English priesthood, he had been assured that they would not hinder any ‘stirs’ (risings) that should be undertaken ‘for the Catholic good’.38 Apart from writing, he occupied himself, like Rookwood, with carving an inscription in his cell at the Broad Arrow Tower.*

  The key confession which forged the link between priests and Plot so much desired by Salisbury was that of Thomas Bates on 4 December.39 This confession constituted something of a breakthrough, because Bates directly implicated Father Tesimond (something he would apologise for at the last). This false witness was born almost certainly as a result of his being threatened with torture on the one hand and promised a pardon on the other: that is certainly what Father Tesimond himself believed, accepting in effect Bates’ ultimate apology. But by then it was of course too late to save the Powder Treason from its transformation into the Case of the Conspiring Jesuits.

  Bates, unfortunately, was in all too good a position to give the kind of testimony which would be lethal in the hands of an agile prosecutor. In his capacity as Catesby’s servant, he had been present at so many of th
e crucial scenes of the conspiracy. His great loyalty had been to his master, but now Catesby was dead, and he at least was beyond the government’s vengeance. Thus, in a subsequent examination of 13 January 1606, Bates was able to describe the mission he had made to Father Garnet at Coughton on 7 November, on Catesby’s instructions, to break the devastating news of the Plotters’ flight. He could report the fatal exchange between the two priests, Father Garnet and Father Tesimond, and that exclamation – all too accurate, as it turned out – ‘we are all undone!’ It was Bates who had ridden with Father Tesimond to Huddington, before Tesimond went to the Habingtons at Hindlip. Bates also spoke of a meeting between three priests, Garnet, Gerard and Tesimond, at Harrowden, some time in mid-October.40

  Putting Bates’ testimony with that of Francis Tresham on 29 November which linked Father Garnet with the earlier Spanish Treason of 1602, Salisbury was rapidly developing the case he wanted against the Jesuits, one which specifically connected them to the recent treason. (As Catholic priests, their presence in England was of course already contrary to the law.)

  Then in December there was an unexpected complication. Francis Tresham, held in the Tower of London, went into a rapid physical decline. The condition he was suffering from, known as strangury, was caused by an acute and painful inflammation of the urinary tract. This was no sudden out-of-the-blue attack. The condition had evidently been with Tresham some time before the current crisis, since he already had a doctor in charge of him. This was a distinguished man, Dr Richard Foster, who had recently been President of the College of Physicians. Tresham preferred him to the regular Tower doctor, Dr Matthew Gwinne, because Foster knew all about his case.41

  By mid-December Tresham was being described by Sir William Waad as ‘worse and worse’. Indeed, Waad wondered gloomily whether Tresham would survive long enough to meet the death he deserved. In addition to Foster, three more doctors were being called, and a woman – a nurse – was also admitted to attend him. Tresham already had his own man in attendance, one William Vavasour, who acted more as a confidential assistant than as a servant, as was Thomas Bates to Robert Catesby. Vavasour was supposed to be an illegitimate son of the late philoprogenitive Sir Thomas, and thus Francis Tresham’s half-brother.42 This would have made sense of their intimacy by the standards of the time, when the ‘base born’ were often provided with just this kind of family employment. (Rumours that Thomas Percy was an illegitimate half-brother of Northumberland were in fact untrue, but demonstrate how frequently contemporary patronage had its roots in this kind of relationship.)

  While Waad squabbled pettishly with the Lord Mayor of London about who was in charge of what (the latter had the irksome habit of parading about ‘the greatest part of the Tower’ with a ceremonial sword carried in front of him to assert his authority), Francis Tresham groaned in his cell. Anne Tresham, another gallantly supportive wife, joined him two days before the end came. But it was in fact left to Vavasour to take down Francis Tresham’s deathbed confession, since Anne was by this time too upset. Vavasour also wrote an affecting account of his master’s last hours.*43

  Tresham died slowly, agonisingly and inexorably. This wayward, treacherous and perhaps ultimately self-hating character was however, like many such, intending to do better in the next world than in the one he would shortly leave. Above all, he wanted to make restitution to Father Garnet for implicating him in the Spanish Treason of 1602. In the statement he dictated to Vavasour – ‘because he could not write himself, being so weak’ – Tresham referred to Garnet (under the name of Mr Whalley) as someone whose safety he respected and tendered as much as his own, adding ‘many words’ on ‘the virtues and worthiness of the man’. Tresham desired that his former confession might be called in and that ‘this [new one] may stand for truth’. He then pledged ‘his Salvation’ that he had in fact no idea whether Tom Wintour had had any letter of recommendation from Garnet for his visit to Spain ‘about the latter end of the Queen’s days… for he did not see Mr Whalley [Garnet] at that time, nor had seen him in fifteen or sixteen year before…’.44

  This was a vital piece of exculpation – how vital would not be totally clear, of course, so long as Father Garnet remained securely in hiding. (He had gone to ground at Hindlip at the beginning of December.) It is, though, proof that Tresham, even as he was dying, understood the value of what he had said and that he specifically commanded a copy of the document to be got to Garnet even before it reached Salisbury. As Vavasour wrote: this was ‘my Master’s special desire’. But it did not happen. Anne Tresham was prostrate with grief after her husband’s death, and in her own words ‘altogether unfit’, while Vavasour himself was held prisoner.45 So Garnet was never to know exactly what Tresham had said. The omission is understandable, given the desperate circumstances in which they were all living; but in this world of governmental manipulation such a failure of communication was to prove extremely dangerous.

  The rest of Tresham’s deathbed confession repeated the protestations of virtual ignorance and thus practical innocence which had occupied him on 13 November. He had, after all, his two little daughters’ future to protect. He commended Lucy and Eliza to his brother Lewis as Christ had commended his mother to St John. He never, however, referred to the Monteagle Letter at any point, which makes it virtually certain that Tresham did not write it. He would hardly have failed to claim the credit for it at a time when Monteagle, for his contribution, was being hailed as the saviour of his country.

  When Tresham refused to add to his statement, in answer to the questions of the hovering Waad, saying that he had nothing heavy on his conscience, the Lieutenant of the Tower went away angry. Significantly, the son’s obsession with the father continued to the last. Francis observed, as he read De Imitatione Christi, that he hoped to make a better death than old Sir Thomas, who had died tossing and turning only three months before.

  Francis Tresham did make a holy death: if not the short half-hour of agony which he had wished for himself.46 The Litany and Prayer of the Virgin Mary and St John were said around his bedside by Anne Tresham and William Vavasour as Francis gradually became too weak to join in. Vavasour was asked to remind him to call upon the Name of Jesus (a Catholic devotion) at ten o’clock, but when Vavasour went to wake him Tresham looked ‘ghastly’, did not recognise Vavasour and tried to shake him off. About midnight, more Litanies, the Confiteor and the Mea Culpa were recited; at two o’clock in the morning on 23 December, Francis Tresham died.

  Thereafter the government tried to treat the dead man as a traitor, despite the fact that he had never been indicted as such, in order to confiscate Tresham’s goods and lands, along with those of the other conspirators. Ironically enough, the entail in the male line made by Sir Thomas in 1584, which had proved such a burden to Francis in his lifetime, now turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as did the fact that Francis left only daughters. Since Francis Tresham proved to be a mere life tenant in much of the estate, a great deal of it was able to pass to his brother Lewis. As for his mortal remains, we must assume that Francis Tresham, like Catesby and Percy, was indifferent to the fact that his decapitated head was posted up in Northampton, since he died, by government standards, impenitent. His headless body was tumbled into ‘a hole’ on Tower Hill.47

  Unfortunately, Francis Tresham left a further legacy, one which would justify the words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, a play first performed about five years earlier:

  The evil that men do lives after them,

  The good is oft interred with their bones…

  *This, the King’s preeminent point, makes it clear that it was the fact of the terrorist plan being both random in its effect and inexorable in its execution which was found specially shocking, in exactly the same way as it is found shocking today about terrorist activities, which are usually pointed out to be cowardly as well as wicked.

  *This ghoulish practice was not special to the dead Gunpowder Plotters; the heads and limbs of traitors were commonly so displayed; the
se relics might survive in situ for a considerable time as an awful warning of the perils of betraying the state.

  *The monument – still extant today – begins with a tribute to King James (‘most renowned for piety, justice, prudence, learning, courage, clemency and the other Royal virtues…’), then names the Councillors who helped uncover the Plot, before listing the Plotters themselves, including Sir William Stanley, Hugh Owen and Father William Baldwin (see plate section). But the Council Chamber where it lies cannot literally have been the site of the interrogations, since it was carved out of the Great Hall only in 1607. (Parnell, Tower, p. 61.)

  *As for King James’ personal attitude to torture, it should be borne in mind, given his Scottish Lord Chancellor’s words, that the practice certainly did not come to him as an English novelty; he had grown up with its use.

  *The fact that the majority of the principal Plotters – Catesby, Percy and the Wright brothers – died at Holbeach House on 8 November meant that their version of the conspiracy would never be known; this complicated its unravelling for the government in 1605, and has continued to complicate it for historians ever since.

  † There is the etched name ‘Ambrose Rookwoode’ still to be seen in the upper Martin Tower (R.C.H., p. 83b (no. 12)).

  *This inscription is still extant, although it is currently (1996) covered by a panel to allow for an exhibition connected to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (R.C.H., p. 82b (no. 15); information to the author from Yeoman Warder B. Harrison.).

  *This account by Vavasour is of special importance since it lay for three hundred years unknown to, and thus untouched by, the government – among the muniments at Deene Park, the home of Thomas Brudenell; he had married one of Francis’ numerous sisters, Mary, in the summer of 1605 and would assist his mother-in-law Muriel Lady Tresham in her administrative duties after Francis’ death, so the document’s presence at Deene makes sense (Wake, p. 31).