God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (52 page)

According to a subsequent Government publication, the news of an imminent attack on Parliament was first revealed to it late on Saturday, 26 October. It so happened that Catesby’s cousin by marriage, Lord Mounteagle, was at his Hoxton house that evening, a house in London’s suburbs he seldom visited (this was the same Mounteagle who earlier had exclaimed that the time was ripe to rebel against James because he was ‘so odious to all’). A stranger approached his servant in the street with an anonymous letter.
*
Mounteagle had trouble deciphering the letter and asked his servant to read it out to him while he ate supper, so that everyone could hear. The letter’s meaning was unclear, so Mounteagle immediately took it to Robert Cecil. Cecil, looking through it, was ‘put in mind of divers advertisements…from beyond the seas…concerning some business the papists were in’, but he and his fellow Councillors, with noticeable sang-froid, decided to wait until the King returned from hunting before informing him. James returned from hunting on Thursday, 31 October. The afternoon of the following day, Friday, 1 November, Cecil showed him the letter. James, ‘who was always very fortunate in solving of riddles’, no sooner read the letter but divined the true meaning of it—that there was a plot to blow up Parliament—and ordered that the buildings be searched. A preliminary search, which did not take place until some three days later, on Monday, 4 November, revealed a suspicious quantity of firewood in one of the cellars. A second search, some time late on Monday/early on Tuesday, 5 November, revealed the gunpowder and Guy Fawkes, hiding in the shadows. This is what happened, said the Government.
³³

The exact details of the Gunpowder Plot have never been established. Any account of them must pick its way carefully between two extremes. On the one hand there is the version, favoured by the conspiracy theorists, that holds that the plot was a deliberate Government invention, designed to destroy English Catholicism. On the other hand there was the official version released subsequently by James’s Government, some of the less believable details of which have been outlined above.

This account holds that there was a genuine plot, led by Robert Catesby, to detonate a quantity of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords as Parliament met for its new session, but that the Government-authorized version of events, with all its omissions, elisions, and obfuscations, was a calculated means of making capital from Catesby’s crime. In which case, the nine-day gap between Robert Cecil first reading Mounteagle’s letter and Guy Fawkes’ arrest is crucial to any understanding of the events that followed—because it is inconceivable that Cecil, even assuming he was ignorant of the plot before 26 October, did nothing at all during this period (he, himself, would later admit that the gap had allowed the plot time ‘to ripen’).
³⁴

It is the breaks in the pattern of normality over these few days that attract attention. For example, on 31 October the new Spanish ambassador, Don Pedro de Zúñiga, wrote that he had just received an unexpected message from Robert Cecil, saying that if the Pope could guarantee Catholic loyalty to the State under pain of excommunication, then James would remit the penal laws, allowing Catholics to ‘live as they please’.
*
Assuming that Zúñiga passed this important piece of news on promptly (and, since his instructions were to do everything to further the cause of religious tolerance for English Catholics, then this is probable), then Cecil’s message to him was written
after
the discovery of the Mounteagle letter. So what did it mean? It could not mean that Cecil hoped the Pope would step in and save the day—there was no time for this and Cecil was more than capable of stopping a plot himself. It could have been statesman’s bluff, a way of making England’s Government appear reasonable in the face of soon-to-be-uncovered Catholic treachery; but the gains from this last were few. A more intriguing conjecture is this: if Cecil were still looking to neutralize the Catholic threat by finding a tidy legal answer to the Bloody Question, then the plot had given him a powerful new tool, outrage, with which to force the matter through. In which case, as with his previous dealings with the Appellants over an oath of allegiance, there was one group of Catholics that might usefully serve as a scapegoat to help him achieve this end: the Jesuits.
³⁵

While Cecil waited to act, the intelligence reports began rolling in. On 3 November, some thirty-six hours before Guy Fawkes’ capture, the informant John Bird was identifying a possible hideout for Garnet and Gerard, adding, ‘most like it is that they…have been the hatchers and plotters of this damnable stratagem’. Two days later, with Fawkes in custody
but refusing to name his accomplices
, Attorney General Sir Edward Coke was writing that Thomas Wintour’s connections had been sent for, to be questioned. That same day came Sir John Popham’s comments on Elizabeth Vaux’s letter and his observation that Gerard and Garnet were often at her house, and also a note from the informant George Southwicke, explaining that he had been hunting the plotters for eight days now (since 29 October) and he needed a warrant ‘for their apprehension’. The following day, Wednesday, 6 November, the King ordered that Fawkes be tortured.
³⁶

It took only a short while for the nation to wake up to its recent escape, helped in part by the Government placing all London ‘under arms’ on 5 November. One correspondent, writing on Thursday, 7 November, described how on Tuesday night the church bells had rung ‘and as great [a] store of bonfires [had been lit] as ever I think was seen’. His letter mingled shock with rumour: ‘some five or six Jesuits’, he wrote, had been arrested. Shock and rumour would characterize the public response to the plot, swiftly followed by righteous anger: ‘this most devilish treason’, wrote a second correspondent, this ‘most horrible and detestable treason’, wrote a third, this ‘abominable conspiracy so inhumanly contrived by the devil’, wrote the Scottish Council to James.
³⁷

On 7 November Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, informed Robert Cecil that though Fawkes was still not talking, he had now given a reason for his silence: an unbreakable oath of secrecy sealed by a holy ceremony. Little is unbreakable under torture: two days later Fawkes was ready to confess—but to Cecil alone. His testimony was worth the wait: ‘Gerard, the Jesuit,’ said Fawkes, ‘gave them the sacrament, to confirm their oath of secrecy’. Though Fawkes was insistent Gerard was unaware of the plot, the Jesuit’s name was now passed on to the informant George Southwicke to add to his newly issued arrest warrant. Fawkes had a second piece of information: the plotters had made use of Garnet’s lodgings, White Webbs, as a meeting place. A search of the house was ordered, but the pursuivants were disappointed: they found ‘popish books and relics’ and ‘many trapdoors and passages’, but no papers, no munitions and no Garnet.
³⁸

The search for Gerard, ordered on 10 November, was begun two days later. ‘I have used all possible expedition for my repair to Mrs Vaux, her house at Harrowden,’ wrote the man charged with it, William Tate, ‘whither I came with as much secrecy as could be on Tuesday, the 12th of this instant month, between twelve and one of the clock.’ Gerard takes up the story: ‘They were to search [Harrowden] scrupulously and if they failed to find me, stay on until they were recalled. Day and night guards were set at a distance of three miles round, with orders to arrest any passing stranger.’
³⁹

‘I was in my hiding-place,’ wrote Gerard. ‘I could sit down all right but there was hardly room to stand. However, I did not go hungry, for every night food was brought to me secretly. And…when the rigour of the search had relaxed slightly, my friends came at night and took me out and warmed me by a fire.’ Tate detailed the ‘unprofitable endeavours’ of the searchers: ‘I examined every corner,’ he explained to Cecil, ‘though there [was] no appearance to give the least suspicion.’ A few days into the search Elizabeth Vaux opened one of Harrowden’s hides for the pursuivants. ‘Her hope’, wrote Gerard, ‘was that they would think that, if a priest was in the house, he would be hiding there, and that they would then call off the search.’ ‘I entered and searched the same,’ wrote Tate, ‘and found it the most secret place that ever I saw, and so contrived that it was without all possibility to be discovered. There I found many Popish books…but no man in it.’ On Saturday, 16 November Tate left Harrowden for London, taking Elizabeth Vaux with him but leaving his servants to continue the search. It was not until 20 November that they finally abandoned the house: ‘they thought I could not possibly have been there all that time without being discovered’, explained Gerard.
⁴⁰

It must soon have become apparent to the Government how convenient it would be to make this a Jesuit-inspired conspiracy. The same day the plot was revealed to the nation the Council instructed London’s Lord Mayor to quash an ‘evil bruit’ that Spain was behind the attack. Four days later James went to Parliament, to give MPs his account of the plot’s discovery and to clear himself of any responsibility for it: the plotters’ actions could not have been a ‘work of revenge’, said James, because ‘I scarcely ever knew any of them’. James would not be blamed: under his ‘wise temperament’ and his ‘indulgent hand’, the papists, said the Government, had never had it so good. And Spain could not be blamed: the recent peace treaty and subsequent alliance made this diplomatically impossible, no matter the details now emerging about the Spanish Treason. So the plotters became, in the Government’s wording, ‘mad zealots’ and, just as all the dangerous conspiracies of Elizabeth’s reign had been ‘incited…by the Jesuits’, so this action, too, was laid at the Society’s door. A supporting cast of exiled—and reviled—Catholics, notably Hugh Owen and Sir William Stanley, was drafted in to flesh out the conspiracy, but the impetus for the plot, implied the Government, was the Jesuits’. This suited James, for by now his loathing of the order was well documented: ‘Puritan-papists’ was his description of its members.
⁴¹

The problem was that as each surviving suspect was examined—some of their number, including Catesby and Percy, had been killed during capture—not one of them implicated the Jesuits in the action. On 12 November Thomas Wintour was brought to the interrogation room for the first time, only to say that ‘they had no priest amongst them’; Francis Tresham, questioned specifically about Gerard and Garnet, declined ‘to say what [had] passed between them’; Elizabeth Vaux denied all knowledge of Gerard. So, with no one giving it the information it wanted the Government was forced to go hunting for itself. Thomas Wilson, Cecil’s secretary, dug up an out-of-date, inaccurate list ‘of the haunts and residence which Jesuits were wont to have…whereof haply there may be some use made at this present’. George Southwicke reported rumours from Norfolk that Gerard had said mass for the plotters. Sir Edward Coke fleshed this out hopefully, scribbling on the margin of Elizabeth Vaux’s confession, ‘Gerard the priest ministered the sacrament to all the traitors, etc., as well for execution as for secrecy’. Meanwhile, Everard Digby’s servants provided evidence about the pilgrimage to St Winifred’s Well and a mass said by Garnet for the Digbys at Coughton.
⁴²

On 4 December Cecil wrote to James’s Clerk of the Signet, Nicholas Faunt, voicing his frustration. It was, he said, logical to assume the plotters’ spiritual confessors knew of the conspiracy, ‘seeing all men that doubt resort to [a priest]…and all men use confession to obtain absolution’. But ‘most of these conspirators have wilfully forsworn that the priests knew anything in particular and obstinately refuse to be accusers of them, yea what torture ‘soever they be put to’. However, there had been a breakthrough: ‘you may tell his Majesty that if he please to read…what this day we have drawn from a voluntary and penitent examination, the point…shall be so well cleared…as he shall see all fall out to that end whereat his Majesty shoots’. The ‘penitent’ was Catesby’s servant, Thomas Bates.
⁴³

Bates had been privy to the plot. Through Catesby he had been introduced to Father Oswald Tesimond, alias Greenway (Tesimond, like all his fellow priests in hiding, used a false name), and to Tesimond, he testified, he had revealed his troubled conscience. ‘And Greenway, the priest, thereto said that he would take no notice thereof; but that he, the said examinate, should be secret in that which his master had imparted unto him, because it was for a good cause.’
⁴⁴

Behind the scenes the activity mounted. On 8 December William Waad reported back to Cecil that Tesimond had been a contemporary of Guy Fawkes and Jack Wright at the free school known as Le Horse Fayre, on the outskirts of York. Some time towards the end of the year a royal proclamation was drafted for the arrest of Gerard and Tesimond. Christmas and New Year came and went; in late December the Government received the bill for the ironwork, 23s. 6d., on which Catesby’s and Percy’s severed heads had been mounted; in January the first poems about the plot began to appear. On 13 January Thomas Bates was back in the interrogation room. Now he described bringing Catesby’s letter to Garnet on 6 November, its purpose, he said, ‘to crave [Garnet’s] advice what course they were to take in their proceedings’. He described the panicked conversation between Garnet and Tesimond, Garnet saying they were undone, Tesimond that ‘there was no tarrying’. He described Catesby’s request that Tesimond come to him and he described Tesimond’s answer, ‘that he would not forbear to go unto him, though it were to suffer a thousand deaths, but that it would overthrow the state of the whole society of the Jesuits’. He described taking Tesimond to Catesby at Huddington, where the pair talked for half an hour privately, before Tesimond rode away. Then came his final blow. By now the Government knew of Edward Baynham’s mission to Rome, though its understanding of his purpose there was rather different from Garnet’s; Guy Fawkes, for example, had testified that Baynham was in Rome to inform the Pope of the plot’s success, not ask his counsel—this Catesby had told him. Bates now added a further detail: according to him, Thomas Wintour had said that Baynham was in Rome, waiting only for Garnet’s letters before approaching the Pope with news of their triumph. Wintour himself would contradict this just a few days later, but it was too little, too late. On 15 January the Government decided it had enough information to proceed.
⁴⁵