The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (14 page)

Catholic historians and writers into the twentieth century have often presented the view that not only was the Monteagle letter a government device, but Salisbury himself was the arch-contriver of the entire plot and he somehow inveigled Catesby into it. Hilaire Belloc wrote ‘we have evidence that he was secretly received by Cecil, and we are justified in suspecting, but not in affirming, Cecil’s use of him; he could be used, as imperilled adventurers and double-dealing men often are by those in power, as an agent’. Well, yes he could, but is it likely? Dates become a problem here, because as Belloc himself noted the first date on which a conspiracy was alluded to in any surviving document as being surveyed by the government was April 1604 when Joseph Davi(e) s, a ‘discoverer’, contacted his superior Henry Wright, a part-time alchemist, who then wrote reporting the matter to Sir Thomas Challoner, a governor of Prince Henry with a line of access to Cecil. Nearly two years later Wright applied directly to Salisbury for a reward on account of his services ‘in discovering villanous practices’ which indicates that those he had been stalking had been exposed. More explicit still was a memorial presented later to James which was entitled ‘Touching Wright and his services performed in the damnable plot of the Powder treason’. The king was reminded in that that Challoner and Chief Justice Popham had a hand in the discovery of the plot which they had periodically communicated to his Majesty. The point about the dates is that in 1604 Cecil had an extra burden in carrying forward the treaty negotiations with Spain, when he led the British negotiating team at the Somerset House Conference, and he had too that year responsibility for the Anglo-Scottish commission on union. This last could have been a woefully ill-sorted non-event; that it was successfully completed was in no small part the result of Cecil’s careful working of the meetings. Would a heavily committed Secretary of State in his right mind also have set in motion a plot with a firebrand like Catesby to lead it? Viewed objectively (as far as possible) and in context, the idea is so bizarre that it is evident the proposers are frantically set on creating a black legend, with Salisbury set to emulate his Russian contemporary Czar Ivan IV (Grozny), whose furious, paranoid disposition came to rely on spies and terror.

Salisbury (he had become an earl in May 1605, so his elevation was not contingent on the ‘discovery’ of the plot) had come across plenty of froth about such things in his public career of over two decades. The challenge was to respond in a measured way, without instigating a reverse St Bartholomew’s massacre; French Catholics were forever accursed in English eyes on account of that dreadful frenzy of public killings.
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It was going to be, as Salisbury wisely anticipated, an extremely delicate matter to keep English horror and consternation within bounds once the plot was revealed. His own response to the letter was of course measured since it did not need to be anything else. All the sheriffs of counties who were due to relinquish their office on 5 November stayed on until the following January – another indication that by the end of October 1605 the government had arrived at a broad understanding of the purpose of the plot even if many details remained to be investigated. The letter was available from late October to underscore the possibility of being a Catholic and a supporter of James – unless, that is, your politics were Jesuit-inspired. The catastrophe of civil wars based on religion were difficult to ignore in their foreign manifestations, and neither James nor his chief minister had any intention of allowing such horror in Britain. This meant that the plot had to be seen as the work of fanatics of a peculiarly savage disposition, but all Catholics should not be tainted by it. It is even possible that by the mechanism of the Monteagle letter Salisbury hoped to save lives by jerking back the plotters to reality which they had left far behind for some fantastical realm of anarchic violence. Look! the government knows what you are about and if you stop now then you may save yourself as Monteagle has saved himself.

Indeed, Francis Tresham, most often declared to be the writer of the letter by those unwilling to consider Salisbury either cunning or benign, may have thought along the same lines. Catesby came to the view that Tresham was the culprit and he summoned him to an urgent meeting at White Webbs, along with Thomas Winter, who was told of the letter the day after it was delivered in such deliberate, one might almost say mannered, circumstances. Catesby and Winter were so incensed that the government had a line on them, and were so certain that Tresham had indirectly betrayed them that they seem to have decided
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that if they could confirm their suspicions they would kill Tresham on the spot – one man, many men, it made no difference to them. So if Tresham had flinched or faltered a dagger or sword thrust had been envisaged. But having protested strongly against their intention to kill innocent people, Tresham summoned the inner strength to divert their wrath with a transparency of expression that held off his potential assassins. He was not the author; he denied it again by implication shortly before he did die a natural death in the Tower, but admitted then his past intention to reveal the plot to Sir Thomas Lake, one of the clerks of the council.
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But then the reiterated denial may have been his last attempt to save his family from ruin. And if he had felt driven to warn Monteagle, why not Stourton as well, and why would he choose such a roundabout mode with its inevitable risks? A muttered warning could have done the deed. Perhaps it did since Stourton meant to absent himself from Parliament on 5 November. In this case, as in the death of Christopher Marlowe, it is wiser to choose the simpler option when trying to penetrate deep into the matter. The simpler option is again that the letter was manufactured by Salisbury to be sent to Monteagle to protect a source, and even bounce the plotters into action; the simplest that Tresham constantly lied. Moreover, something tangible like a letter was needed for James to ruminate over. Then he would have to conclude that there was a conspiracy against him (again), supported by a number of vehemently anti-Union activists. From about this point onwards Salisbury had a position of such superiority over the plotters that whatever they decided – to advance or retreat – they were bound to fail ignominiously.

So, on Saturday 26 October, Monteagle was at his Hoxton house, once a Tresham property, for the first time in several weeks. He was eating dinner with company when outside an unknown man ‘reasonable tall’ (so at least Catholic historians cannot claim this was Salisbury), handed over a letter to a servant relieved of duties so that he could linger to take the air and watch the day dim fast. The letter was taken in to Monteagle at table and whether because as a well-schooled young man he had been taught not to read at table, or because his fingers were soiled with food, or because he had a shrewd inkling what was in it, having broken the seal he handed the letter unread (for all that it is short) to another servant requiring him to read it aloud. No doubt its roguish obscurities meant there was consternation at the table and Monteagle could then convincingly claim that it needed to be handed over immediately to the authorities. So he rode in the dark to Whitehall where coincidentally he came upon a quartet of earls about to take a late supper: Salisbury, Worcester, Northampton and Suffolk – men upon whom James primarily depended for advice about English matters – or, more accurately, ‘to whom he entrusted English affairs while he hunted’. During the Essex revolt Monteagle had fallen into the Thames and nearly drowned; this time he unerringly found his way to the king’s chief minister and his three Catholic companion-colleagues. The element of contrivance in all this is obvious.

The letter bearer sought to speak privately to Salisbury and this was a neat hook in itself, for Northampton was a man with a burning need to know everything having for so long been excluded in Elizabeth’s time. Salisbury could therefore spread the burden of knowledge with due solemnity. The collective decision, no doubt made by Salisbury, was to wait for James to return from hunting at Royston. The king was at Ware on 30 October and reached Whitehall on the following day. Salisbury now had the ticklish problem of presentation to a man who displayed physical courage when in the saddle in pursuit of game. To overstate the threat laid himself open to rebuke as James chafed at the prospect; to underplay it was to miss out on the chance of consolidating policy. In the art of political presentation Salisbury was generally masterly and so the story was rejigged for recipients of state correspondence. Hence the modest differences between the account published in the King’s Book, the account sent to ambassadors and the Lord Deputy on Ireland; and that sent to Henri IV, whose ambassador Beaumont was implicated or supposed to be implicated. There is no certain evidence of his guilt, but he quit England very dramatically and aroused suspicion even in France, for Henri declined to receive him.

When Salisbury got the Monteagle letter (back) from its recipient, he complained to his colleagues that he had been warning the king of a papist plot ‘any time these three months’. Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, who was lord chamberlain and had responsibility for the arrangements for the new session of Parliament reflected somewhat anxiously that the chamber was surrounded by houses and various rooms to which attention would now have to be paid. But it is symptomatic of the sometimes paralysing deference of ministers to their monarch that nothing was done until James arrived. It is very hard now, given the easy larding of reports with compliments to James’s courage and sagacity, to judge how immediately angry and shocked he was by the ugly news. As his solemn councillors stood in silence (or did they still kneel as before the late queen who had a haughty liking for such rituals), he read the letter and concluded as he had to that the intention was to exceed in violence the infamous explosion at Kirk o’Field in February 1567 when his own father had been a victim.
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Did he ever reflect on the uncomfortable affinity between the Stuarts and combustion? In fact, for a time he seems to have borne the prospect rather stoically as if he did not quite believe that the country which had welcomed him with joyous relief could harbour enemies of Scots and the union. John Selden, the English jurist and statesman, later wrote that the plot was generally supposed to be aimed against it.

Those about the king heaped praise on him for penetrating the mystery of the letter. Yet even in this it is possible to detect a thin and deeply buried element of contempt. With their obsequious praise no doubt they soothed the perturbation of a pained king, but they boosted simultaneously his own rather exaggerated sense of self-worth and this probably made it more difficult than it would have been to curb his excesses in the next twenty years. Perhaps they took it to be an act of kindness on their part to offset the full horror of the proposed act of dark forces. James was the champion of Protestantism, destined to unite the British Isles and he believed quite genuinely in a league against him directly fomented by Satan.
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The uncovering of the plot in the coming weeks was then extended into months of effort nationwide because of new uncertainties, and it ushered in a period when the last vestiges of the Elizabethan era were shunted aside or just withered in desuetude. For some few this meant a dismal coda to their lives; Ralegh, for example, remained in the Tower until his last South American exploit and eventual execution. The gunpowder plot did give James a most striking opportunity to build an unchallengeable popularity, but he proved too inflexible.

The government had a few days in which to prepare for the crisis so enigmatically alluded to in the Monteagle letter. The plotters were under even greater pressure despite the heartening absence of names in it. None of them could be certain they were not under scrutiny, and if so, when their freedom might be abruptly curtailed. It must have taken an enormous effort of will to remain a unified family cluster, especially when one of their number was suspected of treachery. Tresham had quit London but returned on 30 October to join Catesby, Percy, Rookwood and Winter. Catesby employed Rookwood ‘for buying of necessities for him’, and at dinner soothed his subaltern by saying optimistically that nothing had yet been discovered.
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This was contradicted by the news reaching Thomas Winter, but as Rookwood’s young servant later testified, his master stayed in a house belonging to a Mr More outside Temple Bar. There he shared a bed (nothing unusual) with ‘a tall gent having a reddish beard’ – another resemblance between Catesby (it was he) and the late Earl of Essex. As for Fawkes, the inscrutable Yorkshireman, he went along to Westminster to check on the deteriorating (but still combustible) gunpowder. He was resolved to stay, committed to the momentous task for which he had been hired. He considered the plot just out of reach of scrutiny, and there was no evidence of any tampering with the explosive heap to make him think otherwise. He was not a man to desert his post.

Nor, according to his own account, was Thomas Winter, who seems to have got the news that the king and his councillors were consulting on the Monteagle letter from one of his lordship’s servants. On Sunday 3 November confirmation of this lowered the spirits of the plotters still further, and Winter went to meet Tresham that evening at the latter’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Walk. Tresham’s demeanour was so tormented that Winter was now convinced that he had betrayed the plotters, and he said as much when they met later. Some of them now looked wistfully at the possibility of an instant retreat to the continent, but the reluctance to accept that Tresham had betrayed them led the excitable and robust Thomas Percy to fix their fate. He called on them to wait to see what would happen over the next two days, and reminded them of the ship at anchor on the Thames at their command. At the first proof positive of danger they could hasten on board and drop down the river out of reach. Put with such impassioned conviction these arguments prevailed, but with a modification. Fawkes was to maintain his watch on the gunpowder; Percy and Winter would supervise the other necessary actions in the city, but Catesby and John Wright, who had lately removed from Plowland, his ancestral home in Yorkshire, to Twigmore in Lincolnshire, were to hasten north to put Digby and those about him on standby. Catesby’s planning was not as casual as has often been claimed, and the vast explosion was intended as the first galvanizing action in the greater scheme. On hearing it at some time between 7.00 am and 9.00 am the proclamation of kingship was to be read and all loyal Catholics were expected to unite and seize control. The desire was to continue the succession in its legitimate course, but with Prince Henry likely dead, this meant the five-year-old Prince Charles, or his sister Princess Elizabeth, then living at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire in the care of Lord Harington of Exton, or even their baby sister, the English born Princess Mary. S.R. Gardiner commented: ‘With the advantage of having an infant sovereign in their hands, with a little money and a few horses, these sanguine dreamers fancied that they would have the whole of England at their feet.’
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But their situation need not have been as risible as this; the plotters had wives to call upon to help nurture the baby and children; there was at the end no shortage of money, indeed, the plotters were riding around with large sums in gold; and they were extremely well provided with horses in the right places as it was later proved when they fled north. Still, they might have been challenged by Princess Elizabeth whose anger at what was planned shows her to have been a spirited child.