The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History)

by Haynes, Alan

  The hopeless conjunction of exile and acute distress in poverty could lead men into wild schemes. Perhaps coiners and counterfeiters could do something to assist. Along the loop of this illegal activity which worried the privy council in London, we find a sometime spy and playwright, Christopher Marlowe, in Flushing at the beginning of 1592 with a goldsmith and a former Catholic priest who should have been able to link them up with the exiles. I believe Marlowe and company were sent there on a mission by Burghley, and if we step back a little we may see why. In 1589 Marlowe and his friend the poet Thomas Watson had spent some time in Newgate prison after an affray in which a man died. They had been detained with one John Poole, a Catholic with family connections to the Stanleys. By marriage to Mary Stanley he had become brother-in-law to Sir William whom he defended at length when drawn out by another government spy; Poole was also well informed on the matter of counterfeiting and who was to know if Sir William had benefited from this as he grumpily reiterated that he had been defrauded by Ralegh. As Stanley planned his Alderney venture, the Earl of Essex was not very far away from there campaigning in Normandy to assist Henri of Navarre in his struggle against the Catholic league led by the Duc de Mayenne. With Essex went a clutch of Catholic maverick soldiers and freebooters who seized the opportunity to join him and so quit the country unhindered. And once abroad they deserted to Stanley who was then in action near Nijmegen. Among those who did this was the Welsh Catholic Richard Williams, the ringleader of the raid on Winchester cathedral which had cost the Church dear, and once there Williams was quickly within the orbit of the dangerous Captain Jacques with whom he was reportedly ‘very great’.7

  The burglary had been carried out in company with Captains Dyer and Duffield, as well as Edward Bushell, grandson of a Throckmorton, his mother a Winter and his cousins Sheldons, Treshams and Catesbys. At this time Bushell was retainer in the household of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, cousin of Sir William Stanley, who had made the case to Robert Persons for his relative to be regarded as a suitable pretender to the English crown. According to testimony given later by Henry Young to the government, Williams claimed they had seized plate and money amounting to some £1,800 – the plate being turned into coin. This was necessarily a substantial effort that drew in ‘divers gentlemen that saw the plate coined into money and had shares therein’. Somewhat improbably all this was undertaken in the chamber at Gray’s Inn of Sir Griffin Markham, who ‘belonged to the raffish section of Court converts’.8 Like so many of these ill-directed swordsmen he spent his time ‘gaming, haunting the lords of opposition and adventuring in foreign wars’. A cousin of Babington and Richard Williams, it became hard to exclude Markham from conspiracy. As for Dyer and Duffield – both fit the latter description of Markham. There was a Captain Robert Dyer in Stanley’s regiment, and early in 1592 Henry Duffield was reported to Burghley as ‘a discontented man, and bitter in invectives against the State’. It was said that Duffield was plotting a raid on the queen’s fleet at Chatham.

  The highly successful raid on the queen’s church at Winchester meanwhile suggested another get-rich-quick opportunity to Williams and his gang. He confessed later that they came to London with the equipment they had used on the church ready to stage a raid on Whitehall Palace to seize royal jewels and plate. The haul would likely have been enormous because Elizabeth regularly added to her collection and did not lightly dispose of the choicest items. Whatever the ‘engine’ was that they used, it made sufficient noise for one of the raiders to panic. When the others declined to stop he caused a commotion and Captain Dyer wanted to kill him on the spot. Instead he wounded him ‘very shrewdly’ and the victim of the hurt was then carried into St George’s Fields where he was ordered to keep silent or they would finish him off and bury him on the spot. Whatever evidence was found of this failed effort there is every reason to suppose that an astonished and mortified government set about secret attempts to trace the emboldened thieves with their cathedral loot. Indeed, for Burghley and his son Robert Cecil who was increasingly engaged in government work at a high level, to have allowed a sum with a modern equivalent of perhaps £900,000 to pass unhindered into the pockets of the queen’s sworn enemies would have been an unthinkable dereliction. Their clear duty was to go after it and the culprits because of the potential damage it could do if it reached the English Catholic exiles – and how else did Captain Jacques find the money for his black satin suit and his servant?

  One Irishman whom Burghley and his son regarded with increasing irritation and some justified suspicion was Michael Moody.9 The ex-jailbird, who had spent some time in the Tower for planning to kill Elizabeth by putting gunpowder under her bed, was now a spy working for all sides in the Low Countries ‘resolute to dispatch any enterprise for money’. Late in 1591 he was warned not to visit Flushing so often, evidently because the Cecils wanted some working space for Marlowe, Gilbert the goldsmith and Baines, sometime priest and spy. My view is that they were sent to try to trace the Winchester haul in its latest form, and to spook the exiled plotters who were regrouping for another attempt on Elizabeth’s life. Gifford Gilbert remains something of an unknown quantity in the equation, but we can be sure he was selected for a purpose; who better to spot clipping or counterfeiting? Or if the exiles required assistance in converting the rest of their haul into coin he was available, although in England such activity was equated with treason – which put him on an equal footing with the exiles. Evidently Gilbert made some coins, English currency and a Dutch shilling in pewter, probably with a silver wash, that got into circulation, and almost immediately these modest items sent Baines (late in 1591 or early in 1592) on a little mission to betray the effort to the English governor of Flushing, Sir Robert Sidney, younger brother of the late courtier–soldier. The ex-seminarian betrayed a man who had once famously derided the Catholic Church in his play Dr Faustus, and he did it precipitately in order to protect possible Catholic contacts among the exiles. He cloaked his intention rather neatly by saying that Marlowe was preparing to go over ‘to the enemy or to Rome’ – a fine catch-all phrase that would commit Sidney to do something. So the accused were indeed arrested and kept under English restraint, rather than handed over to the town’s officials, before being interrogated. Marlowe then made a simple counter-accusation against Baines (he had to say something), and easily managed to confuse Sidney who always felt somewhat adrift in the world of spies and counter-spies. Marlowe’s intention not to blow his own cover is evident from his suppression of the name of his employer (Burghley; a fact that Baines had evidently guessed), and by his citing as references the names of Lord Strange and the Earl of Northumberland. Any spy in Sidney’s household for the exiles would have been excited to hear this since it signalled as Marlowe intended, where his sympathies lay, as Sir William was keenly supporting his kinsman’s claim to the English throne. The testimony of Baines lacked specificity, but it suggests now that Marlowe had indeed made contacts with the Catholic exiles before the mission was aborted. The playwright, Gilbert and one Evan Flud (a Henry Flud and a John Flud were respectively captain and lieutenant in Stanley’s regiment), were sent back to England under arrest, and Marlowe was interviewed by Burghley at the end of January 1592. I doubt if the old Lord Treasurer gave his agent very much of a welcome, though just before Marlowe’s sudden death in May 1593 he may have been considering using him again. It was not until immediately after this tragic event that Sir William Stanley’s plot to kill Elizabeth was thwarted, and it was then nipped so closely that it has not even acquired a name for identification.

  But the exiles were rarely deflected for long from preparing for treason, and so it was with Richard Williams and Edmund Yorke, nephew of Captain Rowland Yorke, whose company of lancers had been disbanded in 1588 after the failure of the Armada. In 1594 Williams and Yorke were sent by Father William Holt and the indefatigable Stanley to do what all other plotters had failed to do. To secure admittance to England both men intended to renounce publicly their service with
the enemy, but they had not reckoned on their companion, Henry Young, turning queen’s evidence the moment they were taken. He had himself been well known to Marlowe, and once Williams and Yorke were in custody they too made confessions that almost did for Edward Bushell.10 His employer, Lord Strange, so wistfully regarded by the exiles, had spurned all efforts to woo him into treachery and he now became the Earl of Derby. But in April, swiftly and shockingly, he died, so that many suspected either witchcraft, or poisoning before the Williams/Yorke treason was fully prepared. The confession made by Williams implicated Bushell’s cousin, the wealthy Worcestershire landowner Ralph Sheldon, who proved adept at skirting the loaded question – such as, did he harbour Catholic priests in his house? Since he had not lost Elizabeth’s favour Sheldon emerged from this uncomfortable period. As for Bushell, he seems to have served the widowed Lady Derby for a time (rather than the new earl), before shifting to Essex’s household where eventually he became a gentleman-usher. No wonder the Essex revolt in 1601 had a curious slant given to it by the minority of disaffected religious malcontents who took part, men for whom a whiff of treason was as addictive as tobacco. As for the gunpowder plot – it was their last sensational effort, coloured by all that had gone before over some twenty years.

  For Ned Bushell insurrection seems to have been a gentleman’s diversion, an adult’s luxury of dangerous play that kept him in England. He held back from the sale of his property. Not so Guy Fawkes, born into a prominent Yorkshire Protestant family, whose name today is inextricably part of the gunpowder plot and is celebrated by children of all ages with dangerous play. Fawkes sold his modest inheritance, his mother Edith having remarried, before leaving for a prolonged exile and a necessarily somewhat precarious mercenary existence in the Spanish service, after enlisting in 1593. Born in April 1570, in a small Petergate cottage within sight of York Minster, he was the son of Edward Fawkes, proctor and advocate of the consistory court at York according to one source, although he may have followed his own father into the post of Registrar of the Exchequer Court of the Archbishop. Initially stationed in France, Guy had moved (probably after 1596) to Stanley’s regiment which had itself been through a number of vicissitudes. No sooner had the sceptical Philip II died in 1598 of a portmanteau of diseases, than Stanley, Fawkes and Thomas Winter (of whom more later) tried to win the approval of Philip III for a revival of a Stanley scheme for the invasion of England. In brief, it required the Spanish to seize control of Milford Haven so that their fleet commanded the passage to Ireland which would also serve as a useful base. Spanish troops would march from Llandovery to Builth and Brecon before dividing into Herefordshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire – counties most populated with Catholic gentry. Stanley, Owen, Father Holt and Richard Stanihurst (who had once thought to procure the assassination of Antonio Perez by one of Stanley’s Irish captains, Oliver Eustace), drew up a report on the military resources of the exiles ‘in the event that Your Majesty has the intention of proceeding further in the claiming of the realm of England and Ireland for the Infanta’. The report also put the case for better pay and more recruits.

  Fawkes was a champion of the Jesuits, as was Hugh Owen, who also proved to be a dedicated adversary of two generations of Elizabethan spy masters. He tangled with Walsingham and Burghley, and then with Robert Cecil who developed a profound antipathy towards him. Owen came from a Welsh gentry family, one of the sons of Owen ap Gruffydd of Plas Du, near Pwllheli, and his wife Margaret, daughter of Fulke Salusbury of Llanwrst.11 Hugh and his brother Robert (who also figures sporadically in the annals of the emigrés) were probably educated in the household of Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, who became a leading supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots. In his wake was Hugh Owen, who found himself working with his master in the Ridolfi plot. Indeed, he was given the essential task of arranging relays of horses for her and providing an escort abroad. By October 1571 Burghley had warrants out for Owen’s arrest and after a period of sanctuary with various sympathizers in north-west Shropshire he fled abroad permanently. His brother Robert had already gone before him, entering the college of Douai and paying his own expenses. Hugh, however, had no inclination to join the priesthood and certainly never became a Jesuit, such as was once erroneously suggested by a great historian. Nor for that matter did he become a professional soldier as Fawkes would, although in 1572 Owen was in Spain before quitting Madrid to return to the Spanish Netherlands. With him he took the promise of a pension – it proved hard to convert into actual coins – and the possibility of employment as a field messenger to be available wherever there was fighting. It was on one of these errands that he and Persons were very nearly captured by English soldiers issuing from Mechlin. By this time (in the 1580s) Owen was readily favoured by the leading general of the Spanish in the field, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma. So it was in the period 1584–6 that Persons, Cardinal Allen and Owen formed the trio to whom Philip II assigned the dealings with Parma over the very last attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots. As we have noted, the so-called Babington plot led not only to the destruction of Babington and his confederates, but ultimately to the execution of Mary, and an end to her self-serving presence in England at last.

  Hugh Owen’s lodgings à l’image S. Michel in the Brussels cheese market (a spot that must have been rather repugnant to Stanley) became the headquarters of the counter-espionage efforts servicing successive archdukes.12 Parma’s successors as governors of the Spanish Netherlands, Ernst and Albrecht (Albert – captain general as well of the army), who married the Infanta Isabella, also came to regard the Welshman as indispensable; ‘ruling all courses for England’ was the view of the time. About him was a cabal of like-minded men including William Myddleton, another Welshman, who had left behind his business in London to move to Flanders; Richard Verstegen, antiquary and printer who had quit England to go back to the place of his forebears, and had a house of his own that became (much to the irritation of Persons) a comfortable meeting-place and a central mailing address; Charles Bailly (Bayley), tortured for involvement in the Ridolfi plot; and more remotely Robert Owen, who liaised with English Catholic exiles over the border in France. The letters between the two Owen brothers (tricked out with bits of Welsh for close secrets) were addressed to Dr John Davison, professor of laws, whose rooms at Cambrai College, Paris, made another convenient postal bureau. He acted as the forwarding agent for items despatched from England, France, Spain, Flanders and Rome. He stood too as banker for the exiles when necessary. On one occasion he lent £50 to Father John Gerard when the Jesuit visited him in company with Everard Digby who was to be lured into the gunpowder plot in its last days. Digby was wealthy enough even then to be regarded as a prime catch by Robert Catesby. As for Hugh Owen – there is little doubt he was conversant with the plot.

  THREE

  The Failed Plots

  There was an ephemeral and clumsy part-rehearsal for the gunpowder plot a full two years before that strange and lurid episode. The Bye plot (or ‘Surprise’ treason) had, of course, different leaders and a different locale. The intention was to capture James on Midsummer night 1603, in order to force from him certain concessions – notably the religious toleration that he found so poisonous a concept. William Watson and William Clarke were two secular priests, both fiercely anti-Jesuit. Watson had been sent into Scotland to visit James on behalf of English Catholics before the death of Elizabeth, a journey paid for by Sir Griffin Markham, and later he indignantly represented that James had then given them (through Watson) a most solemn promise of toleration. Now he had achieved his goal of the throne it was said he had jettisoned such notions, a proceeding that enraged the priests so that Watson threw himself into conspiracy, assuring all who listened that seizing the king was lawful as he was not yet crowned. Those approached were asked to take an oath of secrecy which ended: ‘this oath is voluntarily taken by me in simple and plain terms, without all equivocation and deceit, and religiously to be kept, I attest, so help me God and holy doom.
’ The curiosity of this is that the oath itself was equivocal, as it has recently been pointed out. It bound the swearer ‘not to reveal anything . . . without advice and consent of twelve of the chief thereof’, but since there were never more than a handful of chief contrivers as Watson admitted, the terms of the oath were bogus. Counting the gunpowder plotters also presents a problem, but it is generally accounted to be Robert Catesby and twelve others.

  The two priests travelled hither and thither amongst Catholic county families, calling upon them to come forward in the name of their religion and in defence of their property. Watson’s economy with the truth was further instanced by Anthony Copley, one of his accomplices, when under examination in July 1603. In order to draw in ‘associates of the better sort’ and those who were nervous of involvement, the oath presenters intimated that the episode was to be no more than a supplication to James ‘for an assuage of our grievance’. Then having taken the oath the more active and boldest individuals were to be told of the deep plan to seize James. If there was an agent provocateur nudging Watson then Copley himself would be a suitable candidate. A volatile man, a hater of Jesuits, he was the brother-in-law of John Gage, whose family were to be found in some numbers at Wormsley, Herefordshire. In the same county Watson’s views had an influence on Roger Cadwallader.