The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (41 page)

Putting Bates’ testimony with that of Francis Tresham on 29 November which linked Father Garnet with the earlier Spanish Treason of 1602, Salisbury was rapidly developing the case he wanted against the Jesuits, one which specifically connected them to the recent treason. (As Catholic priests, their presence in England was of course already contrary to the law.)

Then in December there was an unexpected complication. Francis Tresham, held in the Tower of London, went into a rapid physical decline. The condition he was suffering from, known as strangury, was caused by an acute and painful inflammation of the urinary tract. This was no sudden out-of-the-blue attack. The condition had evidently been with Tresham some time before the current crisis, since he already had a doctor in charge of him. This was a distinguished man, Dr Richard Foster, who had recently been President of the College of Physicians. Tresham preferred him to the regular Tower doctor, Dr Matthew Gwinne, because Foster knew all about his case.
⁴¹

By mid-December Tresham was being described by Sir William Waad as ‘worse and worse’. Indeed, Waad wondered gloomily whether Tresham would survive long enough to meet the death he deserved. In addition to Foster, three more doctors were being called, and a woman – a nurse – was also admitted to attend him. Tresham already had his own man in attendance, one William Vavasour, who acted more as a confidential assistant than as a servant, as was Thomas Bates to Robert Catesby. Vavasour was supposed to be an illegitimate son of the late philoprogenitive Sir Thomas, and thus Francis Tresham’s half-brother.
⁴²
This would have made sense of their intimacy by the standards of the time, when the ‘base born’ were often provided with just this kind of family employment. (Rumours that Thomas Percy was an illegitimate half-brother of Northumberland were in fact untrue, but demonstrate how frequently contemporary patronage had its roots in this kind of relationship.)

While Waad squabbled pettishly with the Lord Mayor of London about who was in charge of what (the latter had the irksome habit of parading about ‘the greatest part of the Tower’ with a ceremonial sword carried in front of him to assert his authority), Francis Tresham groaned in his cell. Anne Tresham, another gallantly supportive wife, joined him two days before the end came. But it was in fact left to Vavasour to take down Francis Tresham’s deathbed confession, since
Anne was by this time too upset. Vavasour also wrote an affecting account of his master’s last hours.
*
43

Tresham died slowly, agonisingly and inexorably. This wayward, treacherous and perhaps ultimately self-hating character was however, like many such, intending to do better in the next world than in the one he would shortly leave. Above all, he wanted to make restitution to Father Garnet for implicating him in the Spanish Treason of 1602. In the statement he dictated to Vavasour – ‘because he could not write himself, being so weak’ – Tresham referred to Garnet (under the name of Mr Whalley) as someone whose safety he respected and tendered as much as his own, adding ‘many words’ on ‘the virtues and worthiness of the man’. Tresham desired that his former confession might be called in and that ‘this [new one] may stand for truth’. He then pledged ‘his Salvation’ that he had in fact no idea whether Tom Wintour had had any letter of recommendation from Garnet for his visit to Spain ‘about the latter end of the Queen’s days… for he did not see Mr Whalley [Garnet] at that time, nor had seen him in fifteen or sixteen year before…’.
⁴⁴

This was a vital piece of exculpation – how vital would not be totally clear, of course, so long as Father Garnet remained securely in hiding. (He had gone to ground at Hindlip at the beginning of December.) It is, though, proof that Tresham, even as he was dying, understood the value of what he had said and that he specifically commanded a copy of the document to be got to Garnet even before it reached Salisbury. As Vavasour wrote: this was ‘my Master’s special desire’. But it did not happen. Anne Tresham was prostrate with grief after her husband’s death, and in her own words ‘altogether unfit’, while Vavasour himself was held prisoner.
⁴⁵
So Garnet was never to know exactly what Tresham had said. The omission is
understandable, given the desperate circumstances in which they were all living; but in this world of governmental manipulation such a failure of communication was to prove extremely dangerous.

The rest of Tresham’s deathbed confession repeated the protestations of virtual ignorance and thus practical innocence which had occupied him on 13 November. He had, after all, his two little daughters’ future to protect. He commended Lucy and Eliza to his brother Lewis as Christ had commended his mother to St John. He never, however, referred to the Monteagle Letter at any point, which makes it virtually certain that Tresham did not write it. He would hardly have failed to claim the credit for it at a time when Monteagle, for his contribution, was being hailed as the saviour of his country.

When Tresham refused to add to his statement, in answer to the questions of the hovering Waad, saying that he had nothing heavy on his conscience, the Lieutenant of the Tower went away angry. Significantly, the son’s obsession with the father continued to the last. Francis observed, as he read
De Imitatione Christi,
that he hoped to make a better death than old Sir Thomas, who had died tossing and turning only three months before.

Francis Tresham did make a holy death: if not the short half-hour of agony which he had wished for himself.
⁴⁶
The Litany and Prayer of the Virgin Mary and St John were said around his bedside by Anne Tresham and William Vavasour as Francis gradually became too weak to join in. Vavasour was asked to remind him to call upon the Name of Jesus (a Catholic devotion) at ten o’clock, but when Vavasour went to wake him Tresham looked ‘ghastly’, did not recognise Vavasour and tried to shake him off. About midnight, more Litanies, the Confiteor and the Mea Culpa were recited; at two o’clock in the morning on 23 December, Francis Tresham died.

Thereafter the government tried to treat the dead man as a traitor, despite the fact that he had never been indicted as such, in order to confiscate Tresham’s goods and lands, along
with those of the other conspirators. Ironically enough, the entail in the male line made by Sir Thomas in 1584, which had proved such a burden to Francis in his lifetime, now turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as did the fact that Francis left only daughters. Since Francis Tresham proved to be a mere life tenant in much of the estate, a great deal of it was able to pass to his brother Lewis. As for his mortal remains, we must assume that Francis Tresham, like Catesby and Percy, was indifferent to the fact that his decapitated head was posted up in Northampton, since he died, by government standards, impenitent. His headless body was tumbled into ‘a hole’ on Tower Hill.
⁴⁷

Unfortunately, Francis Tresham left a further legacy, one which would justify the words of Shakespeare
in Julius Caesar,
a play first performed about five years earlier:

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones…

*
This, the King’s preeminent point, makes it clear that it was the fact of the terrorist plan being both random in its effect and inexorable in its execution which was found specially shocking, in exactly the same way as it is found shocking today about terrorist activities, which are usually pointed out to be cowardly as well as wicked.

*
This ghoulish practice was not special to the dead Gunpowder Plotters; the heads and limbs of traitors were commonly so displayed; these relics might survive
in situ
for a considerable time as an awful warning of the perils of betraying the state.

*
The monument – still extant today – begins with a tribute to King James (‘most renowned for piety, justice, prudence, learning, courage, clemency and the other Royal virtues…’), then names the Councillors who helped uncover the Plot, before listing the Plotters themselves, including Sir William Stanley, Hugh Owen and Father William Baldwin (see plate section). But the Council Chamber where it lies cannot literally have been the site of the interrogations, since it was carved out of the Great Hall only in 1607. (Parnell,
Tower,
p. 61.)

*
As for King James’ personal attitude to torture, it should be borne in mind, given his Scottish Lord Chancellor’s words, that the practice certainly did not come to him as an English novelty; he had grown up with its use.

*
The fact that the majority of the principal Plotters – Catesby, Percy and the Wright brothers – died at Holbeach House on 8 November meant that their version of the conspiracy would never be known; this complicated its unravelling for the government in 1605, and has continued to complicate it for historians ever since.

†
There is the etched name ‘Ambrose Rookwoode’ still to be seen in the upper Martin Tower (R.C.H., p. 83b (no. 12)).

*
This inscription is still extant, although it is currently (1996) covered by a panel to allow for an exhibition connected to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (R.C.H., p. 82b (no. 15); information to the author from Yeoman Warder B. Harrison.).

*
This account by Vavasour is of special importance since it lay for three hundred years unknown to, and thus untouched by, the government – among the muniments at Deene Park, the home of Thomas Brudenell; he had married one of Francis’ numerous sisters, Mary, in the summer of 1605 and would assist his mother-in-law Muriel Lady Tresham in her administrative duties after Francis’ death, so the document’s presence at Deene makes sense (Wake, p. 31).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

These Wretches

[The Powder Treason] shameth Caligula, Erostratus, Nero and Domitian, who were but each of them fly-killers to these wretches.

LORD HARINGTON
6 January 1606

I
n the new year of 1606, the popular mood concerning the recent Powder Treason was one of mingled revulsion and relief, but also that secret delight which the contemplation of horrors narrowly averted inevitably produces. The opening of a poem appearing on 3 January, entitled
The Devil of the Vault,
captures this particular mood of gleeful shuddering:
*

So dreadful, foul, chimera-like
My subject must appear:
The Heaven amaz’d and hell disturbed
The earth shall quake with fear.
¹

But the King himself was not gleeful: he was sour and angry. The courage and statesmanship he had shown in his speech to Parliament of 9 November had given way to something a good deal less attractive and a good deal more vengeful. With time, the memory of his kindnesses to the Catholics – the ungrateful Catholics – was beginning to loom large in his
own mind, while the important distinction between the guilty and the innocent Papists was beginning to blur. To the Venetian Ambassador, Niccolò Molin, he ranted for an hour on the subject of ‘this perfidious and cursed doctrine of Rome’ which produced English subjects who believed they could plot against their lawful Prince. James told Molin that the Catholics threatened to ‘dethrone him and take his life’ unless he gave them liberty of conscience. In consequence of their behaviour: ‘I shall, most certainly, be obliged to stain my hands with their blood,’ although, with his reputation as a merciful sovereign to maintain, he added: ‘sorely against my will.’
²

The blood with which the government was hoping to stain the King’s hands – in addition to that of the Plotters – was Jesuit blood. By 15 January, it was decided that enough material had been accrued to proceed against certain priests. The official proclamation listed Father Garnet, Father Gerard and Father Greenway (Tesimond) and issued the usual meticulous descriptions employed in these circumstances. Father Garnet, for example, was said to be a man ‘of middling stature, full faced, fat of body, of complexion fair, his forehead high on each side, with a little thin hair coming down… the hair of his head and beard grizzled’. His age was reckoned to be between fifty and sixty (life in hiding had aged Father Garnet: born late in 1555, he was only just fifty). At least his gait was said to be ‘upright and comely’ for a man who was so weak.
³
This proclamation marked a radical and ironic shift in the direction of the prosecution. From now on, with tragic irony, the names of the Jesuits headed the list of conspirators in the Plot which they had so desperately attempted to circumvent.