The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (26 page)

Thomas Percy’s excuse for needing this ‘cellar’ – so crucially positioned – was that his wife was coming up to London to join him. Mrs Susan Whynniard appears to have put up some resistance on behalf of a previous tenant, a certain Skinner, but in the end money talked: Percy got the lease for £4, with an
extra payment to Susan Whynniard. A Mrs Bright who had coals stored there was probably paid off too.
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Using the customary access from the river (with its easy crossing to Lambeth – and Catesby’s lodgings – on the opposite bank) a considerable quantity of gunpowder was now transported to the cellar over the next few months.

Guy Fawkes revealed that twenty barrels were brought in at first, and more added on 20 July to make a total of thirty-six. According to Fawkes, two other types of cask, hogsheads and firkins, were also used, with the firkins, the smallest containers, generally employed for transport. While there would be some divergence in the various other accounts of exactly how much gunpowder was transported and when – between two and ten thousand pounds has been estimated – the amount was generally agreed to be sufficient to blow up the House of Lords above the cellar sky high.
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The gunpowder was of course vital to the whole enterprise. As Catesby and his companions lived in an age when the deaths of tyrants (and of the innocent) were observable phenomena, they were also familiar with the subject of gunpowder, and explosions caused by gunpowder. Although the government had a theoretical monopoly, it meant very little in practical terms. Gunpowder was part of the equipment of every soldier: his pay was docked to pay for it, which encouraged him to try and make the money back by selling some under cover. The same was true of the home forces – the militia and trained bands. Similarly every merchant vessel had a substantial stock. Proclamations on the part of the government forbidding the selling-off of ordnance and munitions, including gunpowder, show how common the practice was.

In any case, the Council encouraged the home production of gunpowder in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. There were now powdermills at various sites, many of which were around
London, including Rotherhithe, Long Ditton in Essex, Leigh Place near Godstone, and Faversham. In 1599 powdermakers were ordered to sell to the government at a certain price, while any surplus could go to merchants elsewhere at threepence more in the pound. The diminution of warfare and the disbandment of troops in the context of the Anglo-Spanish peace meant that there was something like a glut. Access was all too easy, so that anyone with a knowledge of the system and money to spend could hope to acquire supplies. Furthermore, conditions of storage were alarmingly lax. Although powder was supposed to be kept in locked vaults, it was often to be found lying about, as official complaints to that effect also demonstrate.
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When two Justices of the Peace for Southwark had gone to search the London house of Magdalen Viscountess Montague in 1599, it was significant that they had been looking for gunpowder. They reported that it was supposed ‘to have been lately brought hither’, but although they searched ‘chamber, cellar, vaults’ diligently their efforts met with no success. (Either the gunpowder was well hidden – like the many priests this distinguished recusant habitually concealed – or the Justices were acting on false information.)
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The formula for gunpowder mixed together sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre, which by the end of the fifteenth century were, with added alcohol and water, being oven-dried and broken into small crumbs known as ‘corned-powder’. In this form gunpowder was used for the next four centuries. In many ways it was the ideal substance for explosive purposes. It was insensitive to shock, which meant that transport did not constitute a problem, but was extremely sensitive to flame.
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The Plotters might have been original in the daring and scope of their concept, but they were certainly not original in choosing gunpowder to carry out the ‘blow’. In 1585 five hundred of the besiegers of Antwerp had been killed by the use of an explosive-packed machine, invented by one
Giambelli. Then there were accelerated explosions, comparatively frequent, testifying to the lethal combustion which the material could cause. To give only one example, there was an enormous explosion on 27 April 1603 while the King was at Burghley. This took place at a powdermill at Radcliffe, near Nottingham, not many miles away. Thirteen people were slain, ‘blown in pieces’ by the gunpowder, which ‘did much hurt in divers places’.
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There was only one problem: gunpowder did, after a period of time, ‘decay’ – the word used. That is to say, its various substances separated and had to be mixed all over again. ‘Decayed’ gunpowder was useless. Or to put it another way, decayed gunpowder was quite harmless, and could be safely left in a situation where it might otherwise constitute an extraordinary threat to security.

While the logistics of the ‘blow’ were being worked out, foreign aid in the form of majestic Spanish coursers and well-trained foreign troops to supplement the slightly desperate cavalry which would be constituted by the English recusants was still the desired aim. Guy Fawkes went back to Flanders to swap being John Johnson for Guido again, where he tried to activate some kind of support in that familiar hotbed of Catholic intrigue and English espionage. About the same time, the grand old Earl of Nottingham set off for Spain to ratify the treaty. Approaching seventy, Nottingham (yet another Howard) had been married to Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin and close friend whose death had set off her own decline. However, age had not withered Nottingham, since he had quickly remarried into the new dynasty: a girl called Margaret Stewart, kinswoman of the new King. Unfortunately Guido and his colleagues did not share the same appreciation of diplomatic and dynastic realities as this great survivor.

At some point in this trip, Fawkes’ name was entered into the intelligence files of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. The King’s chief minister had of course an energetic network of spies everywhere, not only in Flanders but in Spain, Italy,
Denmark and Ireland. Furthermore, Salisbury was able to build on the famous Elizabethan network of Sir Francis Walsingham. The number of ‘false’ priests abroad – treacherous intriguers who either were or pretended to be priests – constituted a specially rich source of information, as Salisbury admitted to Sir Thomas Parry, the Ambassador in Paris. They were all too eager to ingratiate themselves with such a powerful patron. The rewards could include permission to return to England for one who actually was a priest or straightforward advancement for one who was not. In the autumn of 1605 George Southwick (described as ‘very honest’ – which perhaps from Salisbury’s point of view he was) returned to England in the company of some priests he had secretly denounced. The plan was that he should be captured with them, so as to avoid suspicion.
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After the official – and dramatic – discovery of the Plot, there would be no lack of informants to put themselves forward and claim, as did one Thomas Coe, that he had provided Salisbury with ‘the primary intelligence of these late dangerous treasons’. Not all these claims hold water: Southwick for example was still busy filing his reports about recusant misdeeds on the morning of 5 November, with a manifest ignorance of what was to come.
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The person who seems to have pointed the finger of suspicion at Guido Fawkes – and even he did not guess at the precise truth – was a spy called Captain William Turner.

Turner was not a particularly beguiling character. He was heartily disliked by the man on the spot, Sir Thomas Edmondes, Ambassador to Brussels, who considered him to be a ‘light and dissolute’ rascal, someone who would say anything to get into Salisbury’s good books. Rascal or not, Turner certainly had a wide experience of the world, having been a soldier for fourteen years, in Ireland and France as well as the Low Countries. His earliest reports on the Jesuits had been in 1598. Now he filed a report, implicating Hugh Owen (always a good name to conjure with where the English government was concerned) in a planned invasion by émigrés and Spanish, to take place in July 1605.
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There was, however, no mention of the conspiracy which would become the Powder Treason. Moreover, when Turner went on to Paris in October and passed papers to the English Ambassador there, Sir Thomas Parry, about ‘disaffected [English] subjects’ he still knew nothing of the projected ‘blow’. Parry, however, took his time in passing all this on. Turner’s report on the dangerous state of the stable door did not reach England until 28 November, over three weeks after the horse had bolted. In essence, Turner’s information belonged to a diffused pattern of invasion reports, rather than anything more concrete.
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Nevertheless, Turner had picked up something, even if he had not picked up everything. In a report on 21 April, he related how Guy Fawkes – who was of course a well-known figure in the Flemish mercenary world – would be brought to England by Father Greenway (the alias of Father Tesimond). Here he would be introduced to ‘Mr Catesby’, who would put him in touch with other ‘honourable friends of the nobility and others who would have arms and horses in readiness’ for this July sortie.
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There are clear omissions here. Invasion reports had been two a penny for some time – as, for that matter, had unfulfilled plans for such an invasion, including those of Wintour and Fawkes himself. Apart from the specific lethal nature of the Powder Treason (which we must believe Turner would have relished to reveal, had he known it) Guy Fawkes’ alias of John Johnson is missing, which is an important point when we consider that he was not about to leave for England, but had been installed as Johnson in a Westminster lodging for nearly a year. Yet Turner had established Guy Fawkes, if not John Johnson, as a man to be watched and he had connected his name to Catesby’s – already known as one of the Essex troublemakers – and to that of Greenway/Tesimond. This information must have taken its place in the huge mesh of other reports which Salisbury received, even if its significance was not immediately realised.

Turner’s alarm about a July invasion-that-never-was leads on to the far more crucial question of who knew about the
Powder Treason in England. For it was in England, where the conspiracy was actually being hatched, that betrayal was infinitely more likely to take place.

Who knew? First of all, there were the servants, that ever present body of the ‘inferior sort’, in the Privy Council’s dismissive phrase, which nevertheless all through history has had unrivalled opportunities for keyhole knowledge. The hierarchical nature of society meant that servants nearly always followed the views of their masters with fanatical loyalty, since they would probably be casually condemned for them anyway (witness the number of servants, like Robert Grissold of Lancaster, who died with their masters, the priests). Then there was that other body, the faithful Catholic gentlewomen of recusant England, the women already trusted with the lives of their pastors, the wives and close relations of the conspirators. There must be a strong presumption that, in whispers conducted in corners, in veiled allusions in innocent domestic correspondence, the news spread.

At Easter 1605, a very odd incident had taken place involving Eliza Vaux which was never satisfactorily explained.
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(It goes without saying that the conspirators’ wives, notably the admirable Gertrude Talbot Wintour of Huddington, would deny having any scrap of foreknowledge, but with a family’s future at stake such a denial may not have represented the whole truth; what a wife knows privately about her husband’s plans is in any case unquantifiable.) Eliza Vaux herself was at this time properly concerned with her duty to marry off her eldest son Edward, 4th Baron Vaux of Harrowden, who was seventeen. Lord Northampton, who took on the duty of arranging a suitably worldly match, selected Lady Elizabeth Howard, one of the numerous daughters from the brood of his nephew the Earl of Suffolk and the avaricious but beautiful Catherine.

Lady Elizabeth Howard was on paper an excellent choice. She was well connected due to her parents’ position at court and, like all the Howard girls, she was extremely pretty. It is clear from what happened afterwards that the young Edward
Vaux fell deeply in love with her. Unfortunately the advantageous marriage hung fire, and Eliza Vaux, getting increasingly impatient at the delay, correctly assessed the reason. It was because she and her son were both considered to be ‘obstinate Papists’.

Eliza had a close woman friend, Agnes Lady Wenman, who was the daughter of Sir George Fermor of Easton Neston, not so far away from Harrowden, and yet another cousin of the family (her grandmother had been a Vaux). Since her marriage Agnes Wenman had lived at Thame Park, near Oxford. Eliza Vaux expected to get a sympathetic hearing from Agnes on the subject of the delayed match, not least because she had influenced her friend in the direction of Catholicism during Sir Richard Wenman’s absence in the Low Countries, or, as that gentleman preferred to put it, Eliza Vaux had ‘corrupted his wife in religion’. Father John Gerard himself taught Lady Wenman how to meditate, and she began to spend up to two hours a day in spiritual reading. At Easter – 31 March – Eliza Vaux indiscreetly confided to Agnes Wenman in a letter that she expected the marriage would soon take place after all, since something extraordinary was going to take place.
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‘Fast and pray,’ wrote Eliza Vaux, or words to that effect, ‘that that may come to pass that we purpose, which if it do, we shall see Tottenham turned French.’ (This was contemporary slang for some kind of miraculous event.) What Eliza Vaux did not expect was that this letter would be opened in Agnes Wenman’s absence by her mother-in-law Lady Tasborough. The latter, who interpreted the reference as being to the arrival of Catholic toleration, showed the letter to Sir Richard. Even though he remembered the phrase slightly differently – ‘She did hope and look that shortly Tottenham would turn French’ – the hint of conspiracy was salted away in his mind. The letter itself vanished before November, leaving Eliza to take refuge in the traditional excuse of a blank memory. She claimed she had no recollection of the phrase or what she meant by it.
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