The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (31 page)

At the same time, Ben Jonson was developing a useful client/patron relationship with Salisbury and had greeted the latter’s elevation to an earldom in May with some obsequious verses:

What need has thou of me, or of my Muse
Whose actions so themselves do celebrate?

After the discovery of the plot, Ben Jonson, as we shall see, laboured hard to remove the taint of his association with the conspirators by aiding the Council.
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He was by no means the only recusant-sympathiser to do so. But the question of who knew what on these occasions would never be fully resolved, in view of the catastrophe which enveloped the major players. Then on Saturday 26 October, apparently thanks to an obscure and ill-written letter delivered under cover of night to Lord Monteagle, everything changed.

The text of this ‘dark and doubtful letter’, as it would be later termed, was as follows:
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My Lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise
you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament; for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. And think not slightly of this advertisement, but retire yourself into your country [county] where you may expect the event in safety. For though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament; and yet they shall not see who hurts them. This counsel is not to be condemned because it may do you good and can do you no harm; for the danger is passed as soon as you have burnt the letter. And I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it, to whose holy protection I commend you.
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Unlike many controversial manuscripts – for example, the so-called Casket Letters, which thirty years earlier were used to condemn Mary Queen of Scots – the document itself has not vanished from sight.
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Its survival in its original form has not, however, prevented the Monteagle Letter from being argued over fiercely for, in effect, the last four hundred years. Candidates for its authorship have included almost all the main players in the drama of the Gunpowder Plot.
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The official account, as related by King James, was mysterious enough.
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Monteagle was at this point in his house at Hoxton, in the northern suburbs of London, a house which had come to him at the time of his marriage to Sir Thomas Tresham’s daughter. About seven in the evening, his servant, named Thomas Ward, was accosted in the street by a stranger – ‘a man of reasonable tall personage’ – and given a letter to place before his master. At first Monteagle found the letter difficult to read and called for help to make it out. Once it had been deciphered he found himself in a quandary. Was it ‘some foolish devised pasquil’ (piece of nonsense) intended to stop him doing his duty at the coming Parliament? Or was it something more serious, a heavy warning? In spite of the lateness of
the hour and the darkness of the night, Monteagle decided to take his problem to Salisbury, at his house in Whitehall.

Salisbury, by his own account, took the whole matter seriously from the start. He had after all already been fed those rumours about the Papists’ intentions to deliver the King a petition for toleration, and probably back it up with force. They were to be like ‘sturdy beggars’ who begged for alms with one hand outstretched, while carrying a stone in the other in case of refusal. Nevertheless he did not choose to alert the King, busy at his usual ‘hunting exercise’ near Royston in Cambridgeshire. James was not expected back until the Thursday – 31 October – before the solemn Opening of Parliament. In the King’s absence, Salisbury did tell the other members of the Council, including the Catholic Lord Worcester and the Church Papist Lord Northampton, about the warning that had been received. But he did not at this point take any steps to keep the King himself in touch.

It was on the surface a surprising decision. One possible explanation would be the King’s own instructions not to bother him with trifles while away hunting. So Salisbury was content to wait until his master’s return, in order to consult him and benefit from his celebrated good judgement in clearing up and solving ‘doubtful mysteries’. Another explanation, mentioned casually afterwards by Salisbury, was that waiting would afford more time for the plot ‘to ripen’. A third explanation might be, of course, that Salisbury with the Monteagle Letter between his fingers now felt confident of commanding the situation.

Meanwhile, amid the network of the conspirators, matters were proceeding in a way which was neither placid nor yet leisurely. It so happened that Thomas Ward, Monteagle’s servant, had close family connections with his fellow Yorkshire Catholics, the Wright brothers. Kit Wright’s wife, Margaret Ward, may actually have been Thomas Ward’s sister, but in any case recusant Wards and recusant Wrights were tightly interwoven (Ursula Wright the younger, sister of the conspirators, had also married a Ward).
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While Monteagle went to see Salisbury
in London, Thomas Ward availed himself of the information which had come the way of his master and sent a vital message to Catesby, then at White Webbs, about the betrayal.

Ironically enough, Catesby had been talking to Anne Vaux about joining the King out hunting at Royston the next day, which, if a serious project, was an extraordinary example of nerve. However, the conversation between the cousins, the one suspicious, the other blandly determined to keep her off the scent, is more likely to have been a diversion on Catesby’s part. Now Catesby knew that somewhere in their midst was a traitor. His immediate reaction, shared with Tom Wintour, was that this traitor must be his cousin, Francis Tresham.
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This instinctive response concerning Tresham, the twelfth conspirator recruited so very recently, is crucial in assessing the affair of the Monteagle Letter. First, it demonstrates the way Tresham was esteemed among his contemporaries, even those who loved him: he was a man who might betray them, even those he loved. Secondly, it means that a great deal of weight must be attached to the fact that Tresham now managed to convince both his cousins Robin Catesby and Tom Wintour that he was not guilty.

Catesby and Wintour bearded Tresham, saying they would ‘hang him’ unless he exonerated himself. Tresham then swore his innocence ‘with such oaths and emphatic assertions’ that the pair of conspirators were convinced. Tresham reiterated his denial concerning the letter the next day – although he did urge them to abandon their plan and flee. Tresham has always been a popular choice of villain (or saviour) in the perennial historical guessing game of who wrote the Monteagle Letter: but there is surely some foolishness in disregarding the judgement of his lifelong intimates.

This exoneration by Catesby and Wintour is in fact only one of three pieces of evidence which point away from Tresham as the actual author; the two others will be considered in due course. Before that, however, the letter itself must be scrutinised.

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Why and for what purpose did the Monteagle Letter come into existence? It is a useful maxim that these two questions should always be asked when examining any primary source.
²⁰
Where this byzantine letter is concerned, there are two separate – and radically different – purposes for which it might have been written. The first, although still constituting a betrayal of sorts, as shall be explained later, is fairly straightforward. The letter was exactly what it purported to be: a genuine warning from a well-wisher to Lord Monteagle. His informant knew the outlines of the Plot – ‘a terrible blow this Parliament’ – but did not know enough (or was too frightened) to give details beyond a conceivable, if far-fetched, hint on the subject of fire in the penultimate sentence: ‘the danger is passed as soon as you have burnt the letter’.

Prime suspect as the author of such a well-meant if risky communication must be Monteagle’s sister Mary Habington of Hindlip or someone acting on her behalf. There was an eighteenth-century tradition in the county of Worcestershire that she had done so personally to save her brother, which may represent oral confidences handed down from generation to generation. Equally, Mary Habington might have passed the news – ‘dark hints of the business’, garnered along the recusant network – to a priest. It has been suggested that Father Edward Oldcorne might have written the letter or once again caused it to be written. Anne Vaux herself is another candidate.
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This seems unlikely not so much because the handwriting is totally at variance from her own (she too could have employed a scribe) as because she had already followed a different procedure over these rumours: she had consulted with her revered Father Garnet.

If the Monteagle Letter was written in good faith to save the man to whom it was addressed, it was nevertheless a betrayal, for no one could have supposed that Monteagle would keep this news to himself. (Nor, of course, did he.) The young, ambitious peer had already demonstrated his wish to get on in the Jacobean court, and, on both a worldly and a human level, he was unlikely to quit London for the country – ‘to expect
[await] the event in safety’ – as instructed, leaving his fellow peers and his sovereign to perish. Therefore this secret well-wisher must also have intended to scuttle the Plot before it started. The whole conspiracy would be aborted, with no one blown up, no one kidnapped, no one even harmed on the government’s side, while among the Catholics no one would be hunted down, no one killed. Since the recusant community, especially the priesthood, was trembling with apprehension at what the reckless among them might do, not only Mary Habington but any priest would have had a strong motive to halt things there.

All this is to take the Monteagle Letter at its face value. But there is, to be blunt, something very fishy about the whole episode which makes it difficult, if not outright impossible, to accept this straightforward explanation. One is bound to ask why a sister needed to use an anonymous letter, delivered at dusk, to warn her brother not to attend Parliament. It is true that Mary Habington was heavily pregnant at the time (she would in fact give birth to a son at Hindlip on 5 November) but there were many discreet ways of delivering the necessary information. It seems extraordinary that anyone should need to use such a melodramatic method on a matter of such vital importance to both the individual and the state. It was not only melodramatic, it was also clumsy, since the style was vague to the point of obscurity.

It seems far more plausible to see the Monteagle Letter as certainly ‘dark and doubtful’ but also deliberately concocted. This is where, in order to unravel the truth about the authorship of the letter, one must ask another question, famously posed by Cicero, but since become a staple enquiry of crime-detection:
Cui bono?
To whose profit? Who benefited from the disclosure of the Monteagle Letter?

Francis Tresham did not benefit but in the end suffered a miserable fate. Nor for that matter did Thomas Percy benefit, another man generally felt to be capable of double-dealing at the time. Percy’s wife was owed money by Monteagle, on which the latter paid £50 interest yearly. This might have
provided a motive for Percy to seek the debtor’s ‘preservation’ (Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower, suspected Percy, for this reason).
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But if Percy wrote any letter he would have written it, surely, to his patron Northumberland, and no such letter was ever found, rummage as the government might. There was, however, a clear beneficiary, after the event, and that was the hero of the hour: Monteagle himself.

It was Monteagle who was saluted with fervour after the event: ‘saviour of my country, thee alone’ wrote Ben Jonson. It was Monteagle, too, who received a financial reward – lands worth £200 a year and an income of £500 – as an acknowledgement of the part he had played in averting a national peril.
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All this gratitude – not only the lyrical but also the financial, for Monteagle was not a rich man – must have come sweetly to one who had, only a few years previously, been imprisoned for his part in the Essex Rising.

Contemporary suspicions of Monteagle’s role were not slow to develop. Cynical observers spotted Monteagle’s need to dissociate himself from the Plotters, who included his closest friends and relatives. A fortnight after the discovery of the Plot, Sir Edward Hoby wrote to Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels: ‘Such as are apt to interpret all things to the worst, will not believe other [than] that Monteagle might in policy cause this letter to be sent.’
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The ‘discovery’ of the letter, at one stroke, prevented Monteagle from being suspected as a villain, and transformed him into a hero.

Mischeefes Mysterie,
that political poem which denounced Father Garnet for his connivance in the treason, suggested that it was ‘heaven’s finger’ which directed Monteagle’s attention to the letter ‘as the best means to have this fact detected’.
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Whether Monteagle wrote the letter himself or (as seems more prudent) got another to do so, there was certainly nothing miraculous about the process. Someone had let Monteagle into the secret of the Powder Treason. Who was his source? In this case the obvious suspect, Francis Tresham, is surely the right one. Although Tresham did not use the means of an anonymous letter, he did warn his brother-in-law. After all, Tresham
did not need to
write
to his brother-in-law. The kind of confidence he had to make was far better delivered face to face, since it was not so much a warning as a betrayal of what was about to take place.