The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (22 page)

But Owen did provide the necessary introduction to Guido Fawkes. Guido’s name had already been supplied by Catesby as ‘a confidant [discreet] gentleman’ suitable for their business, but Wintour had evidently not yet encountered him. Fawkes’ name could have been mentioned to Catesby by anyone in recusant circles, including his schoolfellow, Catesby’s friend and ally, Jack Wright; he would have been recommended as a staunch and courageous soldier. Although the English government, who feared and detested Hugh Owen, tried to pretend later that he had been directly involved in the Plot, there was at this point no plot. Owen, an expert on the Flanders scene after so many years, simply put Wintour in touch with Fawkes; Stanley (who had been Fawkes’ superior) also commended him. An advantage of introducing Guido into this secret plot was that, while his name was known, his face was not, as he had not been in England for many years.

Tom Wintour’s first encounter with Guido was the satisfactory part of his trip abroad. They were after all two people of a similar outlook, contemporaries, men of action, who had both experienced first hand the dilatoriness of the Spanish and the empty nature of their promises. Wintour told Guido that if the peace with Spain really gave no assistance to the beleaguered Catholics, ‘we were upon a resolution to do somewhat in England’, although as yet there were no firm plans. Finally the two men sailed back together, landing on or about 25 April.
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Together they went to find Catesby in his Lambeth lodging, on the south bank of the river. Wintour broke the news that, although the Constable had spoken ‘good words’, Wintour very much doubted whether his deeds would match them. In this way, Catesby could consider himself thrown back on his original, radically violent plan. Four conspirators were now in place.

The fifth member of the inner caucus, Thomas Percy, joined them a few weeks afterwards. Percy, like Guido, was immediately attracted by the idea of taking some action in England
itself. Percy was a vigorous character and he had shown already in Scotland his wish to be part of the solution to his co-religionists’ woes. He was also working for Northumberland, ‘one of the great Peers of the kingdom’ as Tassis described him.
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Furthermore, there was a family connection to bind him to the conspirators: not only was Percy Jack Wright’s brother-in-law but it seems that his young daughter (by Martha Wright) had been betrothed to Robert Catesby’s eight-year-old son the previous year.

‘Shall we always, gentlemen, talk and never do anything?’ were Percy’s first words. Whatever his moral failings as an individual, he spoke for so many in that frustrated cry. It was in this way that the 20 May meeting at the Duck and Drake was convened. All the Plotters – Catesby, Wintour, Wright, Guido and Percy – swore an oath of secrecy upon a prayer book in a room ‘where no other body was’. Afterwards, since it was a Sunday, Father John Gerard celebrated Mass in another room, in ignorance of what had taken place. The five men all took the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

At the time this Mass merely seemed like a silent personal endorsement of what had been decided earlier. Guido, Catesby and Wintour were, of course, conspicuous by the frequency with which they went to the Sacraments, at a time when recourse to them was not necessarily made all that often. Father Gerard and Catesby were friends. One of their links was Eliza Vaux, the Dowager of Harrowden Hall, who was the priest’s chief protector in the country and an important part of Catesby’s family network, Catesby himself being a frequent visitor to Harrowden. The presence of Catesby and his companions at the Mass was not exceptional, nor, for that matter, was Father Gerard’s presence in London.

London, said to be the largest city in Europe, was at this date a vast sprawling conurbation of teeming tenements and slums, as well as palaces and mansions. The population had swollen so alarmingly in the course of the previous century that King James himself observed that ‘soon London will be all England’. Under the circumstances, recusants often stood a
better chance of preserving their anonymity here among the ‘dark dens for every mischief worker’ (including priests) than in the isolated state of a country house, which gave servants the chance of prolonged inspection leading to betrayal.
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But there was no question of Father Gerard being let in to the secret of the oath which had just been sworn.

Much later the coincidence of the oath and the Mass, including the taking of the Sacrament, would become a big stick with which the government beat the hated English Jesuits. Lancelot Andrewes, in an official sermon on the subject, described how the plot was ‘undertaken with a holy Oath, bound with the holy Sacrament’. It was a favourite slur that Catholic confessors gave absolution for crimes in advance, thus using their sacramental authority to legitimise a crime. In the case of Father Gerard it was suggested that he had purposefully sanctified the enterprise of destruction which lay ahead. But Tom Wintour was quite clear in his confession that the priest knew nothing. Even Guido, while admitting to the oath and receiving the Sacrament upon it, ‘withal he added that the priest who gave him the sacrament knew nothing of it’. In a subsequent examination, Guido specifically exculpated Gerard.
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The only conspirator who implicated the Jesuits at his interrogation was Catesby’s wretched servant Thomas Bates, who, being small fry, had some expectation of saving himself if he gave the government what they wanted: ‘the considerable hope of life which they held before him’. Even Bates retracted his charge on the eve of his death, when he was conscious that he was about to appear before what Father Gerard called ‘that dreadful tribunal’ of God’s own judgement.
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Eliza Vaux declared eloquently that she would pawn her whole estate – ‘yea, and her life also’ – in order to answer for Father Gerard’s innocence.
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She was of course quite as passionately partisan as the government. More cogent therefore is the surviving correspondence of the Jesuits with Rome in the summer of 1604. The Plotters had decided on ‘so sharp a remedy’, but the English Jesuits were in contrast manifestly holding on to their previous hopes of liberalisation in the wake
of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty. As Father Garnet expressed it, in the high summer of 1604 ‘no one with any prudence or judgement’ found the idea of peace ‘displeasing’. But he added in cipher that, if the expected moves for toleration did not go well, it might be impossible to keep some of the Catholics quiet.
⁹

Father Garnet spent a great deal of 1604 in travels throughout England which have been recorded (others of his peregrinations remain unknown to this day because of the constant need for secrecy). At Easter, for example, he was reported to have said Mass at Twigmoor, the house of Jack Wright in Lincolnshire, which was a notorious haunt of seminarians. In the following November, he was at White Webbs, with Anne Vaux as hostess, when the Jesuits made their annual renewal of their vows on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady. This may have been the musical occasion cited earlier, witnessed by a Frenchman, when Father Garnet, with his fine voice, sang and William Byrd played. The Jesuit Superior was therefore all too well qualified to make his anxious prediction about the instability of certain lay people. ‘The Pope must command all Catholics not to make a move,’ Father Garnet pleaded to his Superior in Rome.
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It was a point to which he would return with increasing desperation over the next twelve months.

Although still without a detailed plan, one of the Plotters now received a lucky promotion. On 9 June Thomas Percy was appointed a Gentleman Pensioner – one of fifty special bodyguards – by his kinsman and patron the Earl of Northumberland, who commanded them.
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This meant that Percy had an unassailable reason to establish himself with a London base. The conspirators were moving closer to some kind of proper organisation. A small dwelling in the precincts of Westminster – more of an apartment than a house – was chosen.
*
In May 1604 the house belonged to John Whynniard, by right of his office as Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe, but it was leased to a distinguished recusant, the antiquarian Henry
Ferrers, who owned Baddesley Clinton, that house in Warwickshire where Anne Vaux had formerly entertained the Jesuits. Here Guido was installed as a kind of caretaker, passing himself off as one John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy.

Gentlemen Pensioners were supposed, as a matter of the law, to swear the Oath of Supremacy, which sincere Catholics found so uncomfortable to take because, by implication, it denied the spiritual authority of the Pope. But Lord Northumberland did not impose the oath upon his cousin Percy, whom he supposed to be a Catholic. It was a gesture, rather like Father Gerard’s coincidental celebration of Mass, which was to have most unfortunate consequences for Northumberland himself. In the hectic atmosphere of post-Plot accusations, the omission, as we shall see, was construed in a sinister light. But in the summer of 1604, when the Plot was in its very earliest stages, Northumberland was doing no more than behaving in his usual generous manner towards Percy.

As that summer wore on, events did nothing to persuade the conspirators to abandon their lethal project. Until Parliament was formally adjourned on 7 July, to meet again on 7 February 1605, anti-Catholic legislation continued to go through. Priests were put to death including Father John Sugar, who, with his servant Robert Grissold, was executed at Lancaster shortly after the adjournment of Parliament. The priest died heroically, confident of his soul’s salvation as his body was cut into pieces. Pointing to the sun he remarked, ‘I shall shortly be above yon fellow,’ and later, ‘I shall have a sharp dinner, yet I trust in Jesus Christ I shall have a most sweet supper.’
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The persecution was not likely to abate, for in mid-September King James issued a commission to Lord Ellesmere to preside over a committee of Privy Councillors ‘to exterminate’ Jesuits, other priests and ‘divers other corrupt persons employed under the colour of religion’ to withdraw his subjects from their allegiance. As to the laymen, by the end of the year
the recusant fines were back in full force, and would shortly net three thousand pounds. ‘Ancient’ recusants complained of the new severity, but without success. It may well be that arrears of the fines already remitted were also sought, bringing an additional hardship (and injustice). Although the point has been debated, at least one leading recusant, Sir Thomas Tresham, was charged with paying arrears. His accounts reveal that the charge was made, following a year of paying nothing, thanks to the ‘relief of 1603. In fact the so-called relief cost Sir Thomas nearly £200 in bribes; that was the amount which he had dispensed that summer as a sweetener, in order to secure ‘the pardon concerning recusancy money’ – of which
£
120 had gone to Sir Edward Coke.
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Even the long-awaited visit of the Constable of Castile in August was nothing more than a ceremonial interlude of banquets and processions which left behind an Anglo-Spanish Treaty – but absolutely no promise of toleration. Papists who listened to this magnificent peace being proclaimed at Cheapside by a herald on 19 August may have wondered at the secret agenda which lay behind it. But there was none. It was simply the conclusion of years of fighting between nations, a conclusion which suited the great men concerned. Owen and Stanley in Flanders had been right when they warned Tom Wintour that the peace was too precious to all parties to be disturbed by any other enterprise.

The conspirators (with the exception of Guido) left London some time after their initial pact. The adjournment of the government from the targeted ‘Parliament House’ gave them, as they thought, until early February to get their plans in place. They went to the country, to those various family houses which made up a stately map of recusancy. They left, having decided on a course of action which would cause them, in the late twentieth century, to be described as terrorists. The words terrorist and terrorism were not then in use. Nevertheless the Gunpowder Plot does satisfy a modern definition of terrorism: ‘the weapon of the weak, pretending to be strong’.
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Like the Irish men and women involved in the Dublin uprising of 1916, they saw themselves as a small band, whose actions would lead to great change.
*
The Plotters also believed that they had left no peaceable and quiet way untried, as Catesby put it to Wintour. In face of continuous persecution, theirs was the violence of last resort. Furthermore, they took on board what Bakunin, the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, would call ‘the propaganda of the deed’.
†
That is to say, the blowing up of Parliament by gunpowder was to be a deliberately sensational and indeed outrageous action. In this way not only the government but the outside world would be alerted to sufferings which were in themselves outrageous.

Of course Elizabethan and Jacobean state justice itself was conducted along these same lines. When the public gazed with morbid fascination at the disembowelment of living Catholic priests, they were supposed to draw the conclusion that the victims must have deserved such cruel treatment. In other words, the crime which
had
taken place must have fitted the appalling punishment which
was
taking place. Catesby’s showman instinct to blow up the place where all the mischief had taken place had something of the same propagandist logic.

Violent opposition in the historical period under consideration was conducted not by terrorism but by tyrannicide, both methods being justified by their proponents by doctrines of the right to resistance. The demerits (or merits) of tyrannicide had been debated for centuries. It is important to realise that, in the course of the debate, tyrannicide – to bring about the overthrow of an existing government – had never been condemned outright by the Catholic Church. On the contrary, there was a
long tradition of discussion about whether an evil ruler could be removed. (That begged the question, naturally, of exactly what constituted an evil ruler.) In the thirteenth century St Thomas Aquinas, the doctrinal Father of the Church, had held that the overthrow of a tyrannical government was not necessarily an act of sedition, unless the community concerned suffered more from the overthrow than from the previous tyranny. In the sixteenth century, not only Catholics but Protestant Huguenots discussed it in their polemical literature. The discussion spilled from theology into art, where the bloodthirsty description of (holy) Judith slaying (unholy and tyrannical) Holofernes was a significantly popular one.
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