The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (25 page)

In London, the circles in which Shakespeare moved also meshed with those of the conspirators. This was the world of the Mermaid Tavern, where Catesby and his friends were inclined to dine and which was hosted by William Shakespeare’s ‘dearest friend’ (he witnessed a mortgage for him) William Johnson. This meshing had been true at least since the time of the Essex Rising, which had involved Shakespeare’s patron Lord Southampton, who went to prison for it, as well as Catesby, Jack Wright and Tom Wintour.

The figure of Sir Edward Bushell, who had worked for Essex as a Gentleman Usher, provided a further link – in this case a family one. Ned Bushell was a first cousin of the Wintours. As he admitted, the conspiracy included ‘many of my near kinsmen’: he would eventually become the guardian of young Wintour Grant, son to John Grant and Dorothy, which put him in control of Norbrook. But Bushell was also
connected by marriage to Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s daughter. Shakespeare’s familiarity with the environment of the Plotters both in London and in the country – and his own recusant antecedents – are certainly enough to explain his subsequent preoccupation with the alarming events of 1605, so many of which took place in ‘his country’.
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John Grant’s house at Norbrook had a further advantage since it was close to Warwick as well as Stratford. Horses – so-called ‘war-horses’ – would be an essential part of the coup. John Grant was to be in charge of their provision from the stable of Warwick Castle. War-horses of the continental type, strong, heavy ‘coursers’, about sixteen hands high, able to bear a man and his weaponry into battle, were rare in Tudor and post-Tudor England. The Spanish had blithely believed in their existence during the earlier invasion plans: but in fact the Tudors had tried in vain to breed this continental strain at home. The decent saddle horses of this time were Galloway ‘nags’ or native Exmoor ponies, a considerably smaller breed. When push came to shove – as it was expected to do – the ‘war-horses’ of Warwick Castle would be a valuable asset. The need for good horses of any type led directly to the induction of further conspirators later on in the year.

Finally, this natural focus on the midlands would, it was hoped, facilitate one of the plotters’ most important objectives. This was the kidnapping of the nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth.

The King’s daughter was housed at Coombe Abbey, near Coventry, not much more than ten miles north of Warwick and west of Ashby St Ledgers. Here, under the guardianship of Lord and Lady Harington, with her own considerable household, the Princess resided in state. If the little Prince Charles, with his frail physique, had disappointed the English courtiers, and Prince Henry, with his air of command, had enchanted them, Princess Elizabeth fulfilled the happiest expectations of what a young female royal should be like.

She was tall for her age, well bred and handsome according to a French ambassador who was eyeing her as a possible bride
for the French Dauphin. (The canonical age for marriage was twelve, but royal betrothals could and did take place from infancy onwards.) The previous year she had already proved herself capable of carrying out royal duties in nearby Coventry. Following a service in St Michael’s Church, the young Princess had sat solemnly beneath a canopy of state in St Mary’s Hall and eaten a solitary dinner, watched by the neighbouring dignitaries.
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The Princess was therefore far from being an unknown quantity to those who lived locally – as royalties might otherwise be in an age without newspapers. On the contrary, the conspirators knew that she could fulfil a ceremonial role despite her comparative youth.

The ceremonial role which the Powder Treason Plotters had in mind was that of titular Queen.
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The location of the King’s nubile daughter was a critical element in their plans, for her betrothal was an immediate practical possibility and her marriage could be visualised within years. The Princess was currently third in succession to the throne, following her two brothers. But from the start it seems to have been envisaged that Prince Henry would die alongside his father (he had after all been markedly in attendance at all the state ceremonies of the two-year-old reign). On the subject of the four-year-old Prince Charles, the thinking was rather more confused. This was probably due to the fact that he was a latecomer to the royal scene. This, with his notorious feebleness (he had only just learnt to walk) made it difficult to read the part he would play at the Opening of Parliament. In the end the Plotters appear to have settled for improvisation in this, as in many other details.

If the little Prince Charles went to Parliament, then he would perish there with the others. If he did not, then it was Thomas Percy who was deputed to grab him from his own separate household in London. The birth of Princess Mary on 9 April 1605 introduced another potential complication. Although fourth in the succession to the throne, following her elder sister, the new baby had in theory the great advantage of being born in England. Remembering the xenophobia of
Henry VIII’s will – foreign birth had been supposed to be a bar to the succession – there seems to have been some speculation about whether the ‘English’ Princess Mary was not a preferable candidate.
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The baby was given a sumptuous public christening at Greenwich on 5 May. Her tiny form was borne aloft under a canopy carried by eight barons. Her two godmothers were Lady Arbella Stuart and Dorothy Countess of Northumberland.
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But the talk about the baby, even the plans for the little Duke, do not seem to have had much reality, compared to the practical planning concerning the Princess Elizabeth.

In the total chaos which the ‘stroke at the root’ would inevitably bring about, the conspirators would need a viable figurehead and need him – or her – fast. No mere baby or small child would suffice. Princess Elizabeth, keeping her state in the midlands, was ideally placed for their purposes. As Catesby said, they intended to ‘proclaim her Queen’. Although a female ruler was never an especially desirable option, the memory of Queen Elizabeth, dead for a mere two years, sovereign for over forty, meant that it could scarcely be described as an unthinkable one. There was also the question of a consort, who might prove eventually to be the effective ruler: the Princess could be brought up as a Catholic in the future and married off to a Catholic bridegroom.
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(They were unaware – perhaps fortunately – that the Princess was completely unaffected by her mother’s romantic Catholicism and was already, at her young age, developing that keen Protestant piety which would mark her whole career.)

Such plans for a young girl did, however, pose the problem of an immediate overseer or governor. Once chaos had been brought about, a Protector would be needed urgently to restore order – and bring about those ‘alterations’ in religion which
were the whole purpose of the violent enterprise.
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Who was this Protector to be? The obvious answer was the Earl of Northumberland. At forty-one, he was a substantial and respected figure: the sort of man ‘who aspired, if not to reign, at least to govern’, in the words of the Venetian Ambassador.
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Northumberland was a Catholic sympathiser, and Thomas Percy, one of the chief conspirators, was both his kinsman and his employee. Compared to Northumberland, none of the overtly Catholic peers – not the outspoken Montague, not Stourton, not Mordaunt – because of their long-term depressed position as recusants, had the necessary stature. As for that untrustworthy Church Papist from the past, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, age was creeping up on him – he was sixty-five. His main Catholic activity these days was trying to persuade the King to have a splendid monument made to Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey (she was currently buried in Peterborough Cathedral in modest conditions which dissatisfied the aesthetic Earl).

It would certainly have made sense for the conspirators to reach a decision in Northumberland’s favour and, having made it, to alert him via Percy in some discreet fashion, if only to prevent his attendance at the fatal meeting of Parliament. Yet, curiously enough, the conspirators do not seem to have made any final decision on the subject. Once again there was an area of improvisation in their plans. Certainly, Northumberland’s behaviour around the crucial date in early November, which will be examined in detail in its proper place, gives no hint that he had been alerted to his glorious – or inglorious – destiny. Guy Fawkes never gave any information on the subject, presumably because he had none to give. Tom Wintour denied any knowledge of ‘a general head’.
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Father Tesimond’s explanation to Father Garnet, that the choice of the Protector was to be ‘resolved by the Lords that
should be saved’, is probably the true one. And who these would be no one of course knew for certain in advance. As Father Tesimond added: ‘They left all at random.’ This was indeed the line taken by Coke at the trial: the Protector was to be chosen after the ‘blow’ had taken place from among those nobles who had been ‘reserved’ by being warned not to attend Parliament – a clever line to take, since it left open the important question of who had been warned and who had not.
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In short, the same policy was pursued as with the members of the Royal Family: they would wait and see who survived, with Northumberland as the front-runner.

Under the circumstances, there was a certain unconscious irony in an allusion to Princess Elizabeth made by King James in the spring of 1605. Increasingly he was venting his spleen on the subject of the Papists, who had been ‘on probation’ since his accession. Now he was irritated by their refusal to recognise how truly well off they were under his rule. Why could they not show their gratitude by remaining a static, passive community? John Chamberlain heard that King James had ranted away along the lines that, if his sons ever became Catholics, he would prefer the crown to pass to his daughter. In the meantime the recusancy figures were rising. As the Venetian Ambassador reported in April, the government was now beginning to use ‘vigour and severity’ against the Catholics.
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Some English Catholics were still exploring the option of ‘buying’ toleration with hefty amounts of cash, possibly obtained from Spain, and came to talk to the envoy Tassis about it. Meanwhile Pope Clement VIII, who died in the spring after a seventeen-year Papacy, went to his grave still believing in the imminent conversion of King James to Catholicism. In part this was due to the diplomatic manoeuvres of a Scottish emissary in Rome, Sir James Lindsay, whether sincere or otherwise; in part it sprang from the soulful communications of Queen Anne, which were certainly sincere but not necessarily accurate.
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From the point of view of the conspirators, however, both hopes were equally unrealistic. ‘The nature
of the disease required so sharp a remedy,’ Catesby had told Tom Wintour, pointing to the need for terrorism. A year further on, plans to ‘do somewhat in England’ were at last taking practical shape.

Twenty-fifth of March, the date on which the new Plotters were admitted, was also the date on which a lease was secured on a so-called cellar, close by the house belonging to John Whynniard. This house itself, it must be emphasised, was right in the heart of the precinct of Westminster: and yet there was nothing particularly exceptional about that. The Palace of Westminster, at this date and for many years to come, was a warren of meeting-rooms, semi-private chambers, apartments – and commercial enterprises of all sorts.
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The antiquity of much of the structure helped to explain its ramshackle nature. There were taverns, wine-merchants, a baker’s shop in the same block as the Whynniard lodging, booths and shops everywhere. In short, modern notions of the security due to a seat of government should not be applied to the arrangements at Westminster then.

The Whynniard house in 1605 lay at right angles to the House of Lords, parallel to a short passageway known as Parliament Place. This led on to Parliament Stairs, which gave access to the river some forty yards away. There was also a large open space bordering on the Thames known as the Cotton Garden. One authority has compared the plan of the relevant buildings ‘for practical purposes’ to the letter H.
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If an H is envisaged, the House of Lords occupied the cross-bar on the upper floor, with a cellar beneath. The left-hand block consisted of the Prince’s Chamber, used as a robing-room for peers, on the same level as the House of Lords; Whynniard’s house, and the lodging of a porter, Gideon Gibbon, and his wife, lay below it. The right-hand block housed the Painted Chamber, used as a committee room, on the upper floor.

Most houses of the time had their own cellar for storing the
endless amount of firewood and coals required for even the most elementary heating and cooking. The cellar belonging to Whynniard’s house was directly below the House of Lords and it seems to have been part of the great mediaeval kitchen of the ancient palace. However, this area, which was to become ‘Guy Fawkes’ cellar’, where in the popular imagination he worked like a mole in the darkness, was actually on ground level. It might, therefore, be better described as a storehouse than a cellar. Over the years it had, not surprisingly, accumulated a great deal of detritus, masonry, bits of wood and so forth, which quite apart from its location made the ‘cellar’ an ideal repository for what the conspirators had in mind. It had the air of being dirty and untidy, and therefore uninteresting and innocuous.
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Just as the cellar was really more of a storehouse, the house, on the first floor, was so small that it was really more of an apartment. Certainly two men could not sleep there at the same time. Thus while Guy Fawkes, alias John Johnson, was ensconced there, Thomas Percy used his own accommodation in the Gray’s Inn Road. A convenient door from the lodging – which, it will be remembered, was leased in the first instance to Whynniard as Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe – led directly into the House of Lords at first-floor level. This meant that it could be used on occasion as a kind of robing-room, and even for committee meetings (the shifting employment of the rooms around the Palace of Westminster for various purposes demonstrates the casual nature of the way it was run).
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