The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (52 page)

The story of the straw-husk began with the usual desperate search for holy mementoes among those Catholics covertly
present, after the death of Father Garnet. One of these was a young man called John Wilkinson who had been asked by a fellow recusant, Mrs Griffin, a tailor’s wife, to procure her some kind of relic. Wilkinson was therefore standing right by the hangman as he deposited Garnet’s severed head in the usual straw-lined basket. All of a sudden an empty husk of corn stained with the priest’s blood ‘did leap… in a strange manner’ into his hand. Wilkinson gave the husk to Mrs Griffin, who put it in a crystal reliquary.
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There were two versions as to when the bloodstain revealed itself to bear ‘the proportion, features and countenance of a pale, wan dead man’s face’ perfectly resembling Father Garnet, with his eyes closed, beard bespotted with blood and a bloody circle round his neck. Father Gerard heard that the image had been perceived by Mrs Griffin with a mixture of fear and joy, after three or four days. Another story linked the husk to the equally miraculous whiteness of Father Garnet’s features, visible once his head was hoist on its pole by London Bridge. Although these heads were customarily parboiled (which made them black), Father Garnet’s pallor was so remarkable as to cause general wonder. It also attracted a crowd of spectators, to the extent that after six weeks the government had to order the face to be turned upwards away from the inspection of the curious. According to this second (anonymous) account it was at this point that the likeness appeared in the corn-husk.

The husk in its reliquary was a natural focus of devotion among the faithful – including Anne Vaux who was shown it in the course of the autumn – and curiosity among the rest. As a counterpoint to the comfort the husk gave to the bereaved Catholics, it caused the English government and its representatives abroad considerable irritation. Sir Thomas Edmondes complained about a reproduction of the image being circulated in Brussels, and the Archduke Albert managed to have a book on the subject of the straw-husk suppressed. Sir Charles Cornwallis, however, had less success with Philip III in Spain. He did not manage to get pictures of ‘Henry Garnet, an English man martyred in London’ censored, even though they
were specifically designed to show up the King of England as a tyrant.
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Zuñiga, the Spanish Ambassador in London, was in fact among those who inspected the straw-husk. He did so, as he told Philip III, ‘from curiosity’ after hearing about the husk from several sources, although he denied that he had paid for the privilege, being ‘never such an enemy to my money as to give it for straws’.
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In actual fact, the husk was probably concealed at the Spanish Embassy for a while, before being smuggled abroad. There it found a place among the relics in the possession of the Society of Jesus, before disappearing in the general turmoil of the French Revolution.

Like her sister-in-law Anne, Eliza Vaux of Harrowden maintained her fidelity to the recusant cause for the rest of her life. She was released from her house arrest in London in April 1606 after a series of protests at her condition, made with characteristic vigour. Free to live at Harrowden once more, she continued to harbour priests, Father Percy taking the place of Father Gerard as her chaplain. In 1611, however, she was arrested once again and Harrowden was ransacked, owing to a rumour (untrue) that Father Gerard had returned to England. The next year Eliza Vaux was indicted at the Old Bailey for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment in Newgate. In July 1613, she was released on grounds of ill-health; she died about twelve years later without ever deserting the Faith which she had proudly chosen, and admirably served.
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Eliza had done her best for the family of six children which had been her responsibility following the early death of her husband. The eldest, Mary, had married Sir George Symeon of Brightwell Baldwin in Oxfordshire in 1604; the youngest, Catherine, became the second wife of George Lord Abergavenny ten years later. The middle daughter, Joyce, became a nun in the recently founded Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, dying in 1667, outlived all the family. After the suppression of the order by the Pope, ‘Mother Joyce’ spent her declining years at Eye in Suffolk, living with her brother
Henry.
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Neither of Eliza’s younger sons, Henry and William, married. It was the marital career of Eliza’s eldest son Edward Lord Vaux which provided a strange, one might even say romantic, footnote, to the events of November 1605.

Edward’s projected marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard had been blighted by the discovery of the Powder Treason, and soon after Elizabeth had been married off to Lord Knollys, later the Earl of Banbury, forty years her senior. For a quarter of a century Edward himself did not marry. Then in 1632, he finally married his erstwhile sweetheart, Elizabeth Countess of Banbury, six weeks after the death of her aged husband.

Their love had evidently not been in abeyance all that length of time for Elizabeth, who bore no children to Lord Banbury for many years, gave birth to two sons in 1628 and 1630 respectively. These boys were widely supposed to be the offspring of Lord Vaux rather than Lord Banbury (who was by then over eighty). It was a view which Edward Vaux’s testament only encouraged. Being theoretically without issue, he left Harrowden to his wife Elizabeth on his death, in remainder to her elder son, Nicholas, second Earl of Banbury. Unfortunately – if not altogether surprisingly – Nicholas’ inheritance of the Banbury earldom was itself the subject of a long lawsuit, which, after Nicholas’ death, his own son and heir Charles continued with zest.
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The result was that Harrowden itself had to be sold in 1694, to meet the legal costs.
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So the house in which Edmund Campion and John Gerard had been hidden was replaced by the present structure by the new owner Thomas Watson-Wentworth in the early eighteenth century. It is surely legitimate to regard Edward Vaux and Elizabeth Howard as indirect victims of the Powder Treason, since, given their enduring passion for each other, they must surely have enjoyed a long and happy marriage had they been allowed to wed in November 1605.

The mothers, wives and children of the conspirators were not
coated with social ignominy, but they were, according to custom where traitors’ families were concerned, pursued with financial vengeance. Guy Fawkes of course left no descendants to suffer, no widow and no children. He died as he had lived since the distant days of his Yorkshire childhood, a soldier of fortune to outsiders, but to himself a latterday crusader, whose strongest allegiance was to the Church in whose honour he planned to wield his sword.

Robert Catesby’s mother Anne – deprived of a farewell as her son lurked in the fields by Ashby St Ledgers – was left trying to rescue something from the wreckage. She concentrated on holding on to her own marriage settlement from Sir William Catesby, for the benefit of her grandson, also named Robert. Lady Catesby was successful, as the settlement was not finally disturbed, despite the best efforts of the crown. But the younger Robert left no descendants, and, for better or worse, the direct Catesby line from the notorious conspirator died out.
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Lady Catesby’s sister, Muriel Lady Tresham, who had similarly mothered a traitor in Francis Tresham – or at any rate one whom the government treated as such – faced the same problem of trying to salvage the Tresham estate. Unlike Lady Catesby, Lady Tresham still had three unmarried daughters needing portions (eight of her eleven children had survived infancy, which was an astonishingly high proportion for the late sixteenth century). Then there was the need to maintain Francis’ widow Anne and her small children. Although, as has been noted, the entail upon male heirs saved the Tresham estate from the worst effects of the attainder – Francis Tresham had no son – all Lady Tresham’s gallant efforts were vitiated by the financial irresponsibility of Francis’ brother Sir Lewis Tresham (he acquired a baronetcy in 1611). In the shadow of the ‘Catholic Moses’, as Sir Thomas Tresham had been known, his sons had grown up reckless and selfish,
inheriting their father’s extravagance but not his moral strength, nor his grandeur. Already in difficulties before he inherited in 1605, Sir Lewis managed to complete the ruin of the family, and with the death of his son William in 1643 the Tresham baronetcy came to an end.
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Eliza Tresham, daughter of Francis, married Sir George Heneage of Lincolnshire. But her sister Lucy Tresham carried out her father’s ‘earnest desire’, expressed on his deathbed, that one of his girls should become a nun. Taking the name of Mother Winifred – an allusion, no doubt, to St Winifred of Holywell, to whom recusants had so much devotion – Lucy Tresham lived her life out in St Monica’s at Louvain, a new-founded convent in the Low Countries.
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While in one sense she was far away from the tumults of English Catholicism, in another sense she was only one among many women in these convents who had connections to the Gunpowder Plot.

There were already twenty-two English nuns, Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Ursula’s, Louvain, in 1606, the year in which its offshoot St Monica’s was founded. Father Garnet’s sisters, Margaret and Helen, who had been professed at St Ursula’s in the late 1590s, were among the first to move to St Monica’s. Alongside them, Lucy Tresham found herself enjoying what Father Garnet had called ‘that most secure and quiet haven of a religious life’, in a letter to his sister Margaret.
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Dorothea Rookwood, half-sister of Ambrose, was also there, and Mary Wintour, daughter of Robert and Gertrude, was professed in 1617.

One cannot help speculating about whether the subject of the Powder Treason was ever discussed in the convent refectory and, if so, in what terms. One can at least be sure that the most fervent prayers for the dead were offered on 3 May, the anniversary of Father Garnet’s death. There were further connections and, one may assume, further prayers for the dead. Mary Ward, founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was the niece of the Wright brothers, Jack and Christopher; Joyce Vaux and Susanna Rookwood, a further half-sister of Ambrose, were two of her earliest and closest associates.

The continued courageous and devout adherence to Catholicism was one thing that the families of the conspirators had in common after the event. Another daughter of Robert and Gertrude Wintour, Helena, was noted for her splendid gifts to the Jesuits,
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while a son, Sir John Wintour, was ‘a noted Papist’ in the English Civil War. It is not absolutely clear whether Kenelm and John Digby, the sons of Sir Everard, were raised as Catholics after his death, since sources vary. But certainly the dazzling Sir Kenelm Digby – writer, diplomat, naval commander, lover and finally husband of Venetia Stanley – would describe himself in a memoir as a Catholic by the time he reached twenty, when he was living in Spain. It is likely that his devout mother had ensured a kind of covert Catholic instruction and influence all along, even if forbidden by law to bring up her sons in her own religion.
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Even the six children of Lord Monteagle, who had professed his new Anglican loyalties to King James, followed the religion of their pious Tresham mother, who remained a recusant. His eldest son Henry Lord Morley (the title which Monteagle inherited from his father in 1618) was a Catholic peer in the reign of Charles I. Monteagle was not at first disposed to grant the request of his eldest daughter Frances Parker, who was physically handicapped, to become a nun. But he finally surrendered, ‘in respect that she was crooked, and therefore not fit for the world’. He gave her a handsome dowry of a thousand pounds.
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If the Catholic strain remained, the strain of dissidence and bravado appeared to vanish – with one exception. Ambrose Rookwood, great-grandson of the conspirator, was named for him – an ill-omened name, one might have thought, and so it proved. After the Restoration, Ambrose rose in the Stuart army to become a brigadier under James II. Unfortunately he preserved his Jacobite sympathies following the ejection of the
Catholic James from the throne in favour of his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary.

In 1696 Brigadier Rookwood was involved in a plot to assassinate King William. When one of his co-conspirators turned King’s evidence he was apprehended (in a well-known Jacobite ale-house) and taken to Newgate prison. After being tried for high treason, Ambrose Rookwood was put to death at Tyburn on 29 April 1696 – the second man of that name within the century to die for the ultimate offence. But Ambrose Rookwood the younger did not exhibit at the last quite the noble spirit of his ancestor; in a paper he delivered at the scaffold, he declared that he had only been obeying the orders of a superior officer.
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The Catholic peers who had been arrested at the time of the discovery of the Plot were subjected, like the conspirators’ families, to a process of political forgiveness – provided they paid up. Lord Montague, who should somehow have known better than to employ a young Yorkshireman called Guy Fawkes as his footman fifteen years previously, was one who had always spoken up fearlessly for ‘the ancient Faith’. At the moment of the Plot’s discovery, he was questioned on the subject by his father-in-law, the powerful and venerable Lord High Treasurer, the Earl of Dorset. Montague expressed his absolute horror at such an undertaking and still further shock at the very idea that he, Montague, could be involved. ‘I never knew what grief was until now,’ he told Dorset. Montague also asked his father-in-law’s advice on how he could get back into the King’s good graces without violating the integrity of his religious principles. The short answer was, of course, money. Montague paid a fine and he also underwent a spell of imprisonment. Thanks to Dorset’s influence, however, he escaped trial.
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