God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (50 page)

22

Strange and Unlooked for Letters

Around seven in the morning on Tuesday, 5 November 1605, Henry Tattnall passed two agitated young men near the turnstile of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. One was in ‘a greyish cloak’, the other ‘a tawnyish cloak with broad buttons’. Suspecting them of ‘some fray, or as cutpurses’, he ‘looked back towards them and they looked back also’ before rushing round the back of Grey’s Inn Fields towards Clerkenwell. ‘God’s Wounds,’ he had heard one exclaim, ‘we are wonderfully beset and all is marred.’
¹

Later in the day, at the Red Lion Inn on the fringe of Dunsmore Heath, Warwickshire, a servant tending to a large hunting party heard a man at an open window say, ‘I doubt we are all betrayed.’
²

The previous night, around midnight, ‘a very tall and desperate fellow’ had been found under the Parliament house with a watch, a match and thirty-six barrels of ‘corn powder decayed’. He was fully dressed, booted and spurred. He said his name was John Johnson; he was, of course, Guy Fawkes.
³

There had been an anonymous tip-off, a ‘dark and doubtful letter’ written in a disguised hand and foisted upon a servant of Lord Monteagle in a street by the house in Hoxton that he had received upon his marriage to Sir Thomas Tresham’s daughter. ‘As you tender your life,’ it warned, ‘devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament, for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time.’ Chilling words, followed by a wink to the nature of the vengeance to be wrought: ‘they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them.’
⁴
Ignoring the instruction to burn the letter, Monteagle took it to Salisbury, who took it to King James, who famously grasped its meaning, his own father having been the target of the Kirk o’ Field explosion
of 1567. ‘Do I not ken the smell of pouther, think ye?’ Sir Walter Scott would later have him ask.
⁵

‘The Monteagle Letter’ survives, but its authorship remains a mystery. Francis Tresham, who had been ‘exceeding earnest’ to warn his brother-in-law Monteagle of the blast, and who ‘had determined to frame a letter to Sir Thomas Lake’ with the aim of pinning the plot on the Puritans, is a frontrunner. But so too is Monteagle himself, who received all the credit for uncovering the plot and none of the calumny for his involvement, at the very least, in the Spanish treason. On a
cui bono
basis, Monteagle triumphs, yet Catesby and Wintour instantly suspected Tresham and were not wholly convinced by his denials. Over the years, other candidates have been mooted, including Anne Vaux and nearly every other plotter and affiliate of plotter who could write.
⁶

When the capital awoke to the news of ‘this last treason, that treason of treasons, the unparalleled arch-treason of the world’,
⁷
Catesby, Percy, Rookwood, Thomas Wintour and the Wright brothers were racing towards the Midlands and their rendezvous with Digby and his huntsmen. Percy and John Wright cast off their cloaks in their bid for speed. Ambrose Rookwood outstripped them all, riding thirty miles in two hours on one horse. Catesby’s mount lost a shoe at Dunstable and while it was being shod, Henry Huddlestone, who was also on the road from London and had ridden with Catesby and John Wright for about seventeen miles, waited with him. Only when Percy arrived did Catesby tell Huddlestone to ‘go home to his wife’. Dorothy Huddlestone was pregnant and staying at her cousin Vaux’s house in Irthlingborough, a few miles from Harrowden Hall. Huddlestone supped at Harrowden with Eliza Vaux, two priests called Singleton and Strange, and John Gerard, the Jesuit who had converted him over a decade earlier and deemed him ‘one of my most steadfast friends’.
⁸

When the plotters arrived at the Red Lion Inn in Dunchurch, a dishevelled but determined Catesby urged the would-be rebels to join him. Most of them melted into the darkness. The following day his servant and co-conspirator, Thomas Bates, rode to Coughton with news of the plot’s discovery and a letter from Digby begging Garnet’s forgiveness and blessing. The Jesuit superior ‘marvelled they would enter into so wicked actions and not be ruled by the advice of friends’. Digby seems to have been genuinely shocked by Garnet’s censure. As
Garnet, Bates and Tesimond conferred, Lady Digby entered the room. ‘What did she?’ Garnet later recalled, ‘Alas what but cry.’ Actually, she did rather more than that, sending four ‘great’ horses, ‘ready furnished for service’ to the rebels at Huddington. When Bates left Coughton for Huddington, it was not with Garnet, but with Tesimond, the confessor of Catesby and Thomas Wintour.
⁹

Moving from house to house, the rebels picked up supplies but haemorrhaged men. Sir Everard Digby peeled off with two servants at daybreak on Friday, 8 November, and was soon tracked to a dry ditch in a wood near Halesowen. With the sheriff’s two-hundred-strong posse on their heels, the plotters made their final stand at Holbeach House in Staffordshire. An accidental explosion the previous night – a spark from a fire igniting the gunpowder that they had spread out to dry – had badly burnt some of the men and shredded their nerves. Still, it was a defiant Catesby, kissing his gold crucifix and brandishing his sword, who charged out of the house at about eleven o’clock on the morning of 8 November. It is said that he was killed by the same bullet that mortally wounded Thomas Percy. The Wright brothers also died at Holbeach. Ambrose Rookwood, Thomas Wintour and John Grant were injured and dragged away for questioning.

Francis Tresham, who had stayed in London throughout the Midlands rising, was arrested on 12 November and examined several times. His death of strangury on 23 December denied him a trial. His severed head was sent up to Northampton for display. His body, which ‘smelt exceedingly’ even before death, was ‘tumbled into a hole without so much ceremony as the formality of a grave’.
¹⁰

White Webbs was searched on 11 November 1605. Catesby’s ‘great meetings’ there, ‘grievous to the gentlewoman his cousin’, had not gone unnoticed, but little remained in the house bar a skeleton staff, a case of pistols, two fowling pieces, ‘popish books and relics’ and a store of wine and sweetmeats. The house was a curiosity of ‘many doors, trapdoors and passages out of all sides.’ Three female servants and the caretaker, John Grissold, who gave his name as James Johnson (not to be confused with Fawkes’s ‘John Johnson’), were questioned about Garnet and recent visitors. Fourteen-year-old Jane Robinson confessed that a priest ‘apparelled like a gentleman’ had said Mass there about three months earlier.

Grissold was found to be ‘very perverse and obstinate’. He said ‘Mr Measy his master, a Berkshire man’ (Garnet was from Derbyshire), had taken the house ‘for his sister Mrs Perkins, widow’ (Anne the spinster). He spoke of a Mr Perkins, Skinner the lawyer, Jennings (probably William Brooksby), who played the bass viole, and Turner the lutenist. He was committed to a dungeon in the Gatehouse and, according to Garnet, racked into admitting that Catesby had made ‘merry’ with some friends at White Webbs for several days before the feast of All Saints. As far as Anne was concerned, Grissold’s most damaging statement was that she had directed him to ‘entertain her friends that came thither’.
¹¹

Salisbury’s surveyor, Thomas Wilson, who had conducted the search at White Webbs and later ‘conveyed away’ its contents, was determined to prevent it from becoming ‘a nest for such bad birds as it was before’.
¹²
He had a fondness for animal analogies. On 20 November 1605, he briefed Salisbury on his enquiries into ‘Mrs Perkins’s abode’. There had been a sighting at Hartley Court in Berkshire in early November, but nothing since. It was frustrating, he complained, ‘all of them use to change often one into another’s place, especially at times when they suspect search’, so that ‘such a man by such a description’ could never be found in the right place. ‘Such cunning,’ he concluded, ‘have foxes in changing burrows when they smell the wind that will bring the hunt towards them.’
¹³

The hunt was heading for Harrowden Hall. Eliza Vaux was in serious trouble. By the evening of 5 November, Salisbury was in possession of information from Lord Chief Justice Popham about ‘an expectation that Mrs Vaux had of something to be done’. Popham claimed to know it ‘by such a manner as I assure myself the matter is true’. Agnes Wenman’s meddlesome mother-in-law, Lady Tasborough, had been talking again about
that
letter. ‘Touching the contents of my cousin Vaux’s letter to me,’ Agnes would recall,

it was chiefly concerning her son’s marriage to my Lord of Suffolk’s daughter, and some challenging of unkindness for my husband’s not seeking her, he being so long in London, but she said the cause was for that those of her profession were now in disgrace. And she withal added: Notwithstanding pray, for Tottenham may turn French, or words to the like effect.
¹⁴

Lady Tasborough, who wasted no time denouncing Eliza, remembered it slightly differently:

The effect of that letter was that Mrs Vaux persuaded the Lady Wenman to be of good comfort and not to despair for that ere it were long she should see a remedy or toleration for religion or to such effect.
¹⁵

The words that were passed on to Salisbury in November were different again:

Contents of Mrs Vaux letter: fast and pray, that that may come to pass that we purpose, which if it do, we shall see Tottenham turned French.
¹⁶

Three versions of the same letter offering subtly different interpretations.

According to Eliza, when Agnes’s parents, Sir George and Lady Fermor, first told her that Lady Tasborough had said ‘there was treason in the letter’, she had merely ‘smiled’. Agnes told Eliza in August that ‘she kept the letter safely for both their discharges’.
¹⁷
Only in November did Eliza ask Agnes’s mother, Lady Fermor, to retrieve it. ‘My cousin [Eliza],’ wrote Lady Fermor to her daughter,

sendeth me word that your mother-in-law hath dealt very badly with her & yours, for she hath complained of a letter which my cousin Vaux writ something darkly to you about my Lord’s marriage. My cousin most earnestly desireth that you will send her the letter, or the copy thereof, as soon as you can.
¹⁸

If Eliza would have been content with a copy, perhaps she simply wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Or maybe she was feigning insouciance. Either way, Agnes replied that she had dealt with the letter ‘as those did letters which were not regarded’, that is, she ‘either burnt it or lost it’.
¹⁹

Eliza had to deal with other ‘strange & unlooked for letters’ that November, including one from her father, which she received at Harrowden on 9 November. The courier (appositely named Mr Race) was promised fourteen shillings for the round trip and waited for Eliza’s reply. She told him it was a wasted journey: ‘the letter needed
not to have been sent to her for that she was very free from those matters whereof her father had written to her.’ An hour and a half later she provided a more appropriate written response. She was clearly distressed, but if the few blots on the page are the result of her ‘hot, indignant tears’ as has been fancied, it is more than we can now tell. ‘Sir,’ she began,

I cannot but marvel at your strange & unlooked for letters. I wish yourself & all others should know I am as innocent & free from the ever knowing of that plot as whosoever is most free & do as much abhor the intention; & for any letters of mine, I wish that may be showed & the uttermost made against me, so confident am I of ever writing anything, which it was impossible I should, never knowing nor imagining as God doth best know & as it is plain enough to friends here, how easy so ever yourself be to believe the worst upon I know not what report.

Eliza was expecting the Earl of Northampton to confirm the ‘certainty’ of Lord Vaux’s hoped-for nuptials with Lady Elizabeth Howard. ‘To that end,’ she continued,

my son had a purpose to have come up to London himself on Thursday or Friday last if by chance Sir George Fermor & his Lady had not come to supper to us on Wednesday night & told us the first news of this pitiful & tragical intendment & then I thought not best to send him.
²⁰

Eliza was lying to her father. Sir George Fermor had not gone to Harrowden ‘by chance’, nor had he provided her with ‘the first news’ of the plot. Readers will remember that (at the close of Part Three) he was
summoned
to Harrowden on the morning of Wednesday, 6 November, and that upon his arrival, Eliza had said that she had intended to ask him to accompany her son to London, but that because of ‘some garboyl’ there, she had changed her mind. She told Sir George that she had just heard the news – at that stage an unspecified rumour – from a servant of hers, who had heard it from ‘Mr Markham’s man’.
²¹

This, too, was a lie, since Eliza had learned everything the previous evening when Henry Huddlestone, who had been riding with Catesby earlier in the day, came to Harrowden Hall for supper. Eliza and
Huddlestone would stick to their stories: they had not known about the plot until 6 November.
²²
It took four months and, Anne Vaux would allege, the ‘often racking and torturing’ of Thomas Strange, a Jesuit who had been at the Harrowden supper, for the truth to come out. On 13 March 1606, Strange would confess that ‘Henry Huddlestone brought the first news that ever I heard of the blowing up of the Parliament house to Harrowden’.
²³