The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (23 page)

The furthest position on such an overthrow was that taken by the Spanish Jesuit Mariana in
De Rege et Regis Institutione,
published in 1599. Written in the form of a dialogue, Mariana answered the question ‘Whether it may be permissible to oppose a tyrant?’ in the affirmative. There could be ‘no doubt’ that the people were able to call a king to account, since there was a contractual element in their relationship. Ideally a public meeting should be held, but if that proved impossible a tyrant might be destroyed by ‘anyone who is inclined to heed the prayers of the people’, and the assassin ‘can hardly be said to have acted wrongly’ by serving as an instrument of justice.
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This notorious passage aroused the frenzy of Protestants, and was the basis of accusations about ‘Queen-killing’ and ‘King-killing’ Jesuit policy in the English state trials of 1606. All one can say with certainty is that on the edges of Catholic political thinking what one authority has called ‘an ultimate right of tyrannicide’ was reserved for the oppressed, based on an idea of a broken contract. (It is an ultimate right which has after all been reserved by many of those who see themselves as oppressed throughout history.) Against this ultimate theoretical right, at the turn of the sixteenth century lay the heavy weight of practice, under which lawful governments could in fact expect the obedience of their citizens, whatever their religious persuasion. This was a point of view expressed vividly by Erasmus in 1530 in a book designed for the instruction of the
young. ‘Even if the Turk (heaven forbid!) should rule over us,’ he wrote, ‘we would be committing a sin if we were to deny him the respect due to Caesar.’
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The distinction between a lawful and an unlawful ruler was crucial. After that, debate could still rage over what constituted such a ruler (debates which may be compared to modern arguments about what constitutes a democratically elected government in considering the legality of the coup which overturns it). However, to many English Catholics, led by priests such as Father Garnet, there was a vital difference between Queen Elizabeth and King James. The former had been a bastard by Catholic rules, had usurped the throne rightly belonging to the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, and had been subject to a bull of excommunication by the Pope. None of these blemishes marred King James. He was legitimate and he was not a usurper, having inherited the throne as next in blood. Above all he had never been excommunicated – thanks to that cleverness with which he handled the Papacy while still in Scotland. What was more, since James had never been a Catholic, he could hardly be accused of apostasy. Father Garnet himself would make a careful distinction between King James and the Catholic backsliders, those who reneged on the religion into which they had been born.
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Thus the Plotters were going against the profoundly held loyalties of many of their co-religionists when they decided to remove ‘a king who had succeeded lawfully to his kingdom’. And yet there was enough in the contemporary Catholic political literature on the overthrowing of tyrants – which they had probably not read themselves, but had simply imbibed at second or third hand – to convince men of their particular temperament, frustrated men (‘Shall we always talk and do nothing?’ Percy had asked), that their course was virtuous.
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It was Father Tesimond who commented that such gentlemen as these would not have staked their whole future on a conspiracy ‘if they had not been convinced in their utmost consciences that they could do so without offence to God’. The conspirators ordered for their endeavour special swords of
Spanish steel, their blades richly engraved with scenes from the life of Jesus Christ; these swords would bear the legend, ‘The Passion of Christ’.
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In their own estimation, these men were not assassins; they were fighters in a holy cause (which they found to be an absolutely different concept).

For all the wild language of horror after the Plot’s discovery – one Biblical comparison was made to the ‘Passover’ massacre of the first-born of Egypt – both the killing of rulers and the killing of the innocent were endemic in the times in which Catesby and his companions lived.
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But if the Plotters’ consciences were at ease with the killing of rulers, there is evidence that they were greatly anguished over the killing of the innocent. Blowing up the King was one thing, and the Royal Family – his wife and heirs – another. But the extinction of the Parliament house by gunpowder at the Opening would inevitably result in many more deaths than that.

It was the possible deaths of Catholic peers which aroused this fierce anxiety. These conspirators were terrorists, but it is too simple a view of human nature to suppose that they were immunised from all weakness or regret. Father Garnet later described Catesby’s split mind. On the one hand he planned to save ‘all the noble men whom he did respect’ and on the other he was determined not to spare his own son if he were there ‘rather than in any sort the secret should be discovered’. For these men to envisage the deaths of co-religionists who had borne the heat and burden of the day might prove to be ‘cruel necessity’. But it could never be a light decision.

In general, Parliament had been responsible for anti-Catholic legislation: hence the choice of the site for the explosion. The prospect of the death of Robert Cecil, a member of the House
of Lords since the granting of his first peerage in May 1603, could no doubt be accepted with equanimity. But was the devout young Lord Montague to die? He had spoken up bravely on behalf of ‘the religion of our fathers’ in the House of Lords this very summer in a bitter attack on the Act against recusants, and as a result had spent four days in the Fleet prison.
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Was he to be sacrificed? Then there were the two prominent peers who were married to the daughters of Sir Thomas Tresham (Catesby’s first cousins). Lord Stourton, husband of Frances, was some twenty years older than Catesby, but the men were close friends. Lord Monteagle, husband of Elizabeth, belonged to the Catesby generation – he was born in 1575 – and he had been involved like Catesby, Jack Wright and Tom Wintour in the Essex Rising. Wintour now acted as his secretary.

In the light of what happened later, there is a question mark, to say the least of it, over Monteagle’s subsequent commitment to Catholicism. He had in fact privately made a grovelling submission to Cecil while in the Tower in April 1601. He had also described himself as a born-again Protestant in a letter to the King, in order to establish his right as Lord Monteagle (it was a title that came through his mother) so that he could sit in the House of Lords in the lifetime of his father, Lord Morley.
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But these kinds of ambiguities and compromises were far from uncommon at the time, especially at court, where Monteagle had an appointment in the household of Queen Anne.

In the summer of 1604 Monteagle would have been seen as a member of the recusant family ring, not only through his Tresham marriage, but through his brother-in-law Thomas Habington (his sister Mary’s husband). Habington had been involved in one of the plots to free Mary Queen of Scots and had spent six years in the Tower as a result. In the recent Parliamentary election, Habington had been among the prominent Worcestershire recusants who supported a Catholic candidate, Sir Edward Harewell. Although it was not yet technically illegal for a Catholic to sit in Parliament if he swore the Oath of Supremacy, an armed guard on the gates of Worcester
against Harewell’s supporters had proved an effective if brutal deterrent.
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Habington’s house, Hindlip, like neighbouring Huddington, was another important recusant centre, a maze of hiding-places where priests could linger – it was hoped – for months with impunity.

Was Monteagle, was Stourton, to die? And finally, what of the great Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Percy’s patron?

On such an agonising question as the death of the innocent the doctrine of the Catholic Church was far more clearly established than over the murky question of tyrannicide. It was a matter of what was called ‘double-effect’. A single action might have two quite separate effects. There were, however, three conditions which had to be fulfilled for the double-effect principle to operate. First of all, the good effect had to be disproportionately important compared to the bad effect; secondly, the bad – harmful – effect had to be involuntary, rather than in any way desired; thirdly, both good and bad effects had to be so closely linked as to be brought about more or less simultaneously
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The Powder Treason, as planned by Catesby, easily fulfilled the second and third conditions of the double-effect principle. No ‘innocent’ deaths were desired – absolutely to the contrary – and yet they would certainly be brought about simultaneously with those of the ‘guilty’ in the general combustion. The question of the fulfilment of the first condition – was the enterprise of sufficient worth to ‘countervail’ these innocent deaths? – entirely depended, as in all terrorist actions, on the standpoint of the individuals involved. Nevertheless, the theological clarity of the issue did not prevent each new conspirator, as he joined the band, from suffering the same doubts and anguish.

The Plotters returned to London in early October. Around this time, a sixth conspirator, Robert Keyes, was admitted to their
ranks. They needed someone to take charge of Catesby’s house in Lambeth, where it was intended that the gunpowder and other necessary stores such as firewood should be kept for the time being. Keyes was nearly forty in 1604, a ‘trusty and honest man’, tall and red-bearded; he too, like Guy Fawkes, could be relied on to show courage
in extremis.
His father had been the Protestant Rector of Staveley in North Derbyshire, but Keyes had clearly always favoured the religion of his mother, who came from the well-known recusant family of Tyrrwhitt in Lincolnshire.
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From the point of view of the Powder Treason, it was important that Keyes’ first cousin, the beautiful Elizabeth Tyrrwhitt, was married to a wealthy young Catholic with money and horses to spare, Ambrose Rookwood of Coldham Hall in Suffolk. This golden couple was thus brought within the general orbit of the conspirators. In the autumn of 1604 it was Ambrose Rookwood who was asked to acquire some gunpowder by Catesby and bring it to the Lambeth house. At this point, the acquisition of the gunpowder was presented as merely being for the use of the English regiment in Spanish service in Flanders, no longer of course an illegal operation, thanks to the Anglo-Spanish Treaty.
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Keyes was not particularly well off. His wife Christiana, a widow when he married her, was a clever woman who acted as governess to the children of Lord Mordaunt at Drayton in Northamptonshire. Keyes received horses and other amenities in return for his wife’s teaching services. Mordaunt was another prominent Catholic peer and his safety in Parliament would obviously be a matter of much concern to Keyes. As for Drayton, Cecil described the great house as ‘a receptacle of most dangerous persons’, meaning ‘the foreign seminaries’ he believed to flock there. Nevertheless King James was happy to stay at Drayton for the hunting near by, good sport glossing over a multitude of Popish sins: an example of the doublethink which existed in court circles on the subject of grand Papists.
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A few months later, a seventh conspirator was recruited. This
was Catesby’s servant Thomas Bates, who according to his confession joined the Plotters in early December 1604. Bates must surely have had his suspicions about a Plot already. He was not a menial, since he was allowed his own armour and his own servant at Ashby St Ledgers. Bates, born at Lapworth, was more of a retainer, part of Catesby’s ‘family’ or intimate household; and he was known to be absolutely devoted to his master.
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Bates’ own family consisted of an independent-minded wife called Martha. (The conspirators’ wives constituted a remarkable group: but then they were part of the larger, resolute and often intrepid body of Catholic women.)

However, Bates’ confession is one of the more unreliable pieces of evidence surrounding the events of the Plot. His lower social standing was relevant here for it meant that he could be subject to special pressures from the authorities. On the one hand he might – conceivably – hope to get off where the other more senior Plotters could not, or be induced to believe that such a chance existed. On the other, the ultimate threat of torture was routinely seen as a matter of social hierarchy: people without proper rank in the estimation of the governing class were much more likely to be subject to it than their superiors. Nor should too much attention be paid to Bates’ so-called revelations concerning the priests, including Father Tesimond.

In the context it is unsurprising to find Bates claiming to confess his sin in advance to Tesimond (that persistent Protestant smear on Catholics and the Sacrament of penance). In Bates’ official version he was not only absolved but encouraged by Tesimond with the words ‘that it was no offence at all, but justifiable and good’. What Bates probably did say under duress was much less incriminating: ‘he thought Father Tesimond knew something about this plot but he could not be certain’.
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Bates of course recanted at the last and apologised to those he had traduced.

At the time, Bates’ recruitment made every sense in view of his close, dependent relationship to Catesby. He was a practical man, his loyalty could be taken for granted and so could his
silence. The circumstances where this might no longer be true – twelve months ahead – were, perhaps fortunately, beyond the conspirators’ imagining. In any case, their plans were shortly to meet with a startling reversal, as it must have seemed at the time.