The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (32 page)

There is reason to believe that Tresham’s warning fell upon fertile ground where his brother-in-law was concerned. A loving letter from Monteagle to Catesby, which is generally dated September 1605, has been supposed to make some allusion to the impending conspiracy. ‘If all creatures born under the moon’s sphere cannot endure without the elements of air and fire,’ he wrote, ‘in what languishment have we led our life since we departed from the dear Robin whose conversation gave us such warmth as we needed no other heat to maintain our healths?’ Monteagle went on to bid Catesby to make an appearance at Bath, ‘and let no watery nymphs divert you, who can better live with the air and better forbear the fire of your spirit and vigour than we’. If the precise meaning of this flowery communication remains hidden, the ominous repetition of words such as ‘warmth’, heat’ and ‘fire’ in a missive to Catesby at this juncture is surely suspicious. It indicates that Monteagle probably knew far more in the months leading up to the Powder Treason – long before the mysterious letter appeared – than he would afterwards ever admit.
²⁶

Returning to Tresham’s part in warning Monteagle, he must have been aware that a verbal communication stood much less chance of being exposed than a written one. For Tresham could easily predict that he would be suspected afterwards, as indeed he was. This is the second piece of evidence which points away from Francis Tresham as author of the Monteagle Letter (even if he was ultimately responsible for the betrayal of the Plot), the first being Catesby’s conviction that he was innocent.

The third piece of evidence, the most cogent of all, is the fact that Tresham never boasted of his loyal/disloyal achievement on his deathbed. Since he was at this point hell-bent on securing the maximum advantage for his descendants, it is inconceivable that he would not have mentioned the celebrated
letter if he had actually penned it. As it was, Tresham could not even get away with falsifying the record, since the actual author – or at any rate the actual begetter – of the Monteagle Letter was alive and well, petted by the government: his brother-in-law Monteagle himself.

The Monteagle Letter, then, was a fake and not only Monteagle but Salisbury knew it was a fake. It was brought into being for a special purpose. Nothing else makes any sense of Salisbury’s extraordinary urbanity – one might even call it complacency – in the days following. There was certainly no sense of impending danger in his conduct, such as might have been expected if the letter had presented him with a genuine mystery.

It is no wonder that Salisbury remained so calm. There was nothing astonishing to him, in principle, about the Powder Treason. As he said himself, he had already heard of a ‘stir’ from his sources. Now he had been presented with another piece – an important piece – in the puzzle. He did not as yet know everything, for the information which had come to Salisbury from Tresham via Monteagle was limited. Not every detail about the conspirators themselves had been passed on; nor had the connection with the sinister Flanders-based Guy Fawkes yet been made. Furthermore Salisbury must have been troubled by the lack of clues to the identity of the prospective Protector to the young Queen-to-be Elizabeth (Tresham could not have passed this on because it had not been decided). He needed to know what great noble at the court was secretly plotting against his sovereign. This lack alone would have provided Salisbury with a strong motive for letting the Plot develop instead of blasting it apart immediately. It must have been a vital factor in his otherwise mysterious delay in making arrests.

What Salisbury did know about, on or just before 26 October, was the nature of the ‘blow’ which was to be struck at the House of Lords. Let us be clear: Salisbury did not manufacture the Powder Treason out of thin air for the very good reason that he had no need to do so. The conspiracy already
existed, belonging to that long tradition of Catholic activism, plans for foreign invasion and the rest, with the aim of securing toleration. It was a violent conspiracy involving Catholic fanatics.

But this was Salisbury, the crafty statesman
par excellence,
as his past history showed: the man who had masterminded among other things King James’ accession to the British throne. From his point of view, it was his positive duty, as a patriotic royal servant, to promote as much counter-espionage and provocative action as he could successfully inspire: it was all in the cause of public safety. Nor was Salisbury unique in this. The history of the late-Elizabethan plots (like many modern conspiracies) is chequered with so many agents and counter-agents that the truth of them is often impossible to unravel. Thus Monteagle’s whispered warning gave Salisbury an opportunity to do what he did best. It was not an opportunity that he intended to miss.

The next move was to involve the King. Whoever thought up the dramatic ruse of the anonymous letter with its mysterious warning was aiming it specifically at one man. For most people (then as now) it was not even a particularly convincing story: and yet it was calculated to intrigue King James by playing upon two of his most marked characteristics, his intellectual vanity and his concern for his own safety. The precise authorship of the strategy cannot be known with certainty. It may have been Monteagle, hence the lavish official gratitude expressed in the preamble to his grant. This stated that by his perspicacity over the letter ‘we had the first
and only
means to discover that most wicked and barbarous plot’. (The italicised words were inserted afterwards, presumably to distract attention from the government’s prior knowledge of the treason which would have robbed it of much of its horror in the public imagination.) Or it may have been Salisbury, who knew so well how to manipulate his royal master.
²⁷

This matters less than the fact that the Monteagle Letter, obscure and ill-written as it might be, was in no sense a genuine document but was part of a plan of entrapment.
Thanks to information received, Salisbury could now sit calmly for the next ten days waiting, in his own words (which for once were perfectly sincere), for the plot ‘to ripen’.

This ten-day period was also the time when the conspirators had their last chance to save themselves. Tom Wintour said afterwards that he had tried to persuade Catesby to abandon the Powder Treason, when Monteagle’s servant Thomas Ward broke the news of the letter. But Catesby, like Phaeton, characteristically reckless (or foolhardy or fanatical), refused to listen.
²⁸
He was by now at White Webbs, along with the Wright brothers. Taking the line that the letter was far too vague to constitute a serious danger in itself – which in a sense was true – Catesby decided that they must press on. On Tuesday 29 October, Mary Lady Digby moved ahead of her husband to Coughton Court in Warwickshire, in order to celebrate the great Feast of All Saints on the Friday. Father Garnet, Father Tesimond, Little John, Anne Vaux and her sister Eleanor Brooksby went with her. Sir Everard remained a few extra days at Gayhurst before setting out for his ‘hunting party’ in the neighbourhood.

On the Wednesday, 30 October, Guy Fawkes inspected the cellar in Westminster and satisfied himself that the gunpowder was in place (he did not check whether it was ‘decayed’, since with Wintour he had recently replaced any damaged gunpowder with new material). The next day Ambrose Rookwood travelled down from Clopton and joined his wife’s cousin Robert Keyes at his London lodging. Thomas Percy was on his way back to London.

None of these men knew that the conspirators, who had been the hunters, were now the hunted.

*
King Lear
was performed at court on 26 December 1606 when the Powder Treason, and the terrible threat it had constituted to the state, had been allowed to fade from no one’s memory
(King Lear
(Muir), p. xviii).

*
Coldham Hall is still in private hands. Although considerably altered since the Rookwood days, it nevertheless still contains the three hiding-places in all likelihood constructed by Nicholas Owen; the attic-room which was the chapel is also extant. † State prisoners would do much to avoid outright condemnation for treason for the sake of their innocent dependants after their death; a conviction for treason meant that all their property and goods would be forfeit, which was not necessarily so in the case of lesser crimes.

*
Since the actual feast-day was on 18 October, the celebration had been postponed a few days – presumably to allow for a Sunday Mass as well for those who had to make a secret journey of some distance.

*
Maybe Catesby had done a little more than this, more than Montague subsequently admitted: this account was proffered to the government by a reluctant Montague after the discovery of the plot, when the heat was turned on him, as one of the leading Catholic peers. He may have discreetly edited it, in the absence of Catesby to contradict him.

*
Given here in modernised spelling and punctuation.

*
The Monteagle Letter is still to be seen in the Public Record Office; it is reproduced in the plate section.

PART FOUR

Discovery – By God or the Devil

The devil, and not God, was the discoverer.

GUY FAWKES

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr Fawkes Is Taken

Catesby sent for me into the fields… So I went to him, who told me that Mr Fawkes was taken and the whole plot discovered.

 CONFESSION OF ROBERT WINTOUR
1606

S
alisbury put the Monteagle letter in front of his royal master on Friday 1 November. The King had returned from hunting the previous day, but Salisbury evidently felt no need to quicken his pace and waited until the afternoon to give it to him. The King was alone in his gallery at Whitehall. Salisbury handed him the letter without comment and let the King read it in silence. Having read the letter once, James took ‘a little pause’, then he re-read it all through.
*
1

Salisbury said that the letter must have been written ‘by a fool’. This was a deliberate ploy, Salisbury explained afterwards. He wanted to be sure to get his master’s true reaction. Salisbury drew particular attention to the phrase ‘the danger is passed as soon as you have burnt the letter’, which, he said, he found quite meaningless. It was his sagacious master – so experienced in the ways of conspiracies in both England and Scotland – who puzzled out the answer. James believed that something to do with ‘powder’ was being suggested – in other words an explosion.

At this point, one might have thought that Salisbury – a sincerely concerned Salisbury – would have dropped his pretence of bafflement. If he had been in genuine ignorance about the meaning of the anonymous letter, surely this was the occasion to reveal at the very least the intelligence reports he had been receiving over the past year about Catholic unrest. But still Salisbury thought it best to ‘dissemble’ to the King; he did not tell James that there was already ‘just cause’ for apprehension about the Catholics’ future behaviour. The King’s fine questing intellect was to be allowed to flourish in a vacuum; its triumph when it pointed brilliantly to the solution would be all the greater. This at least was the gist of Salisbury’s explanation afterwards to the King.

One may suppose that the true explanation was rather different; Salisbury was still in the dark about many details of the Plot, especially about the involvement, if any, of the leading nobles. He wished to lead his master to discover it more or less single-handed (with a little help from Monteagle), but he did not wish to embroil him in the murkier details of Salisbury’s counter-plotting. Above all, Salisbury had no wish to arouse in King James those ever lurking fears for his personal safety which might have led to him insisting on springing the trap too soon. Thus Salisbury carefully managed the elaborate ritual of his consultation with the King.