by Haynes, Alan
Of those who had just quit the house before the final assault, Digby was soon recaptured with two servants – possibly Thomas Bates and his son. The trio had taken horses and headed for the woods nearby where a dry declivity that they came across might have afforded them a temporary hiding place if their tracks had not been visible in the mud and leaf-mould. The cry went up that Digby had been found and he confirmed it with an abrupt ‘Here he is indeed’, edging his mount out and up trying to pass through the advance horsemen. Then he was confronted by a much larger cluster behind and he gave himself up. Those captured at Holbeach were then conveyed to London to the Tower, while John Winter, who seems to have escaped from Holbeach in the middle of the night, determined to throw himself upon the king’s mercy. His brother Robert and Stephen Littleton, however, remained at large, and the government later in the month put out a description of the two fugitives.
‘Robert Wynter [sic] is a man of meane stature rather low, than otherwise, square made, somewhat stooping, near forty years of age, his hair and beard browne, his beard not much, and his hair short.’
‘Stephen Littleton is a very tall man, swarthy of complexion, of browne coloured haire, no beard, or little, about 30 years of age.’
Humphrey Littleton, who had returned home directly from the gathering at Dunchurch, bribed one of his tenant farmers near Rowley Regis to hide his cousin and Robert Winter for a time, and subsequently they moved from one farmhouse to another during the coldest time of the year, eking out the modest fare offered them. Early on New Year’s Day (by our reckoning) they fetched up at Hagley, at the house of a family tenant – one Perkes. They gave him £30; his man £20 and his maid £17 as an earnest of their gratitude. Perkes put them in a barley-mow in his barn and they were given food and drink for the next nine days, concealed by winter straw piles. In the middle of the tenth night while they slept, a drunken poacher named Poynter took shelter in the barn and climbed onto the straw before lurching unexpectedly into their hollowed-out space. The two men seized him and with the aid of Perkes (to whom he was well known), the poacher was forcibly detained by them until the fifth day when he outwitted them and escaped. The news of this misfortune was taken to Humphrey Littleton at Hagley House and it was there that Perkes escorted the fugitives that night for the joy of food, drink, clean clothes and a bed. Such an effort in the house required compliant servants if it was to succeed for any time, and Littleton’s cook was the one who promptly betrayed his employer and unhappy wanderers. Soon they were resting uncomfortably in the Tower.
The town and country sweep by the government’s officials naturally extended to Francis Tresham’s county of Northamptonshire, where the sheriff was Sir Arthur Throckmorton. He was in London when the high drama broke on 5 November and he went quickly off to his territory for a muster of loyalists. He summoned his fellow justices of the peace, Sir Richard Chetwode and Sir William Samwell to meet him at Rushton, and the Tresham mansion was searched under their supervision. Then the party moved on to Mordaunt’s property at Drayton, and afterwards Throckmorton caught up with one of the unfortunate mothers, Lady Tresham, who had left London for Liveden. Throckmorton’s penultimate stop was Ashby St Legers to seize Catesby’s goods, and then came the rumpus at Harrowden, the home of Lord Vaux. Great hopes were entertained of finding Father John Gerard there and the house was investigated by at least three hundred men who pried and probed for two or three days while Anne Vaux and her young nephew vigorously denied all knowledge of the plot. As it happened, Gerard escaped and eventually crossed to Europe, while the pious lady of the house was taken to London for examination, as were many wives of conspirators.
The Tower of London became the hub of the investigation, but some preliminary work was done in the provinces with captives. On 8 November, still smarting from his wounds and burns, Ambrose Rookwood was taken before Sir Fulke Greville (snr), one of the great men of Warwickshire – Alcester became a family property. As Deputy Lieutenant of the county he had been alarmed by the raid on the stables in Warwick and he had roused the locality that something more than a robbery was afoot. Asked why he was abroad in the county Rookwood said he was going to Worcester to meet a man (one Ingram) who had sold him a hawk. When his servant William Johnson was asked the same question he recalled the hawk but got into a muddle about the town and said Hereford. Afterwards Greville wrote breezily to Salisbury that he hoped to be able to send him one of the horses left behind in the raid.7 Rookwood was interrogated in the Tower but it soon became evident that this hapless young man had little significant knowledge of the inner workings of the plot. Digby, less naive, probably struck the interrogators as a more likely source of real details and he was examined on two successive days, 19 and 20 November, at some length before the lords commissioners. Their problem for now was that so many violent, abrupt deaths had already happened their lines of enquiry about ‘the most cruel and detestable practice . . . that ever was conceived by the heart of man’ were severely reduced. Still, writing to the English ambassador to Spain, Sir Charles Cornwallis, Salisbury was both realistic and optimistic: ‘It is also thought fit that some martial man should presently repair down to those countries where those Robin Hoods are assembled, to encourage the good and to terrify the bad . . . although I am easily persuaded that this faggot will be burnt to ashes before he shall be twenty miles on his way.’ It was Cornwallis in high spirits who planned the first ever fireworks party to celebrate the failure but he called it off despite his initial impression that the Spanish king and court were shocked.
After 12 November (the day Tresham was arrested), the government’s officials were preparing for the arrival of more prisoners and prisoners’ wives. They were also making other arrests, such as those on 15 November of Lords Montagu and Mordaunt – neither of whom had intended to be in Parliament on the day. Northumberland was now quarantined in Lambeth Palace with Archbishop Bancroft, whose initial response to the discovery of the plot had been to panic, rushing to the safety of his residence to pen a hasty letter to Salisbury about a possible sighting of one of the conspirators. Evidence that unlike the Bye plot it was an exclusively Catholic effort, may have caused the archbishop a twinge of regret that no puritans had meddled. Even the dead were not overlooked, for a privy council order was sent to Staffordshire for the slain of Holbeach to be exhumed and quartered. By the time of the trials the heads of Catesby and Percy were ‘upon the side of the Parliament House’, and what was said to be Tresham’s (dead of a strangury – a dysfunction of the urinary system leading to acute retention – while in the Tower) was fixed to London Bridge. Thus the hated and condemned became sightless spectators of their own failure. Such a macabre proceeding as quartering of bodies had a particular purpose identified approvingly by an anonymous pamphleteer in the Low Countries some years before this: ‘The standing quarters in England show God’s blessing upon that nation, who dothe reveal them, and the justice of the country that doth punish them.’8 Deliverance from the plot in the view of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes was due to God alone and the English must recognize the intervention of their Saviour. In his first plot sermon the following year he did not hesitate to compare the deliverances of Britain within recent memory with the Passover of the Hebrews. Stern triumphalism was often the tone after the plot.9
One of the New Testament group at Westminster chosen to translate the Epistles for the so-called King James version of the Bible was Dr William Barlow. Dean of Chester and then Bishop of Rochester, with his mastery of language and rhetorical devices, he was a natural choice for the delivery of a Paul’s Cross sermon. It was calculated to be a chilling effort, and while references to Fawkes as more evil than Caligula, as ‘the devil of the vault’ and ‘Blood-sucker’, suggest the bishop was over-excited, no doubt it had an effect on his listeners. Indeed, in Macbeth there is the same sulphurous tone with the appearance too of demonic forces. Fawkes at this time was still alive, albeit faltering as he was subjected to torture. The notion that this item in the government’s armour
y was dealt out indiscriminately is quite wrong, and they obtained a useful amount of (so to speak) leverage by using it with care. Salisbury was well aware that torture can induce a man to say anything and that was not what was wanted. So many of the conspirators were now known by the others to be in the Tower, and each was so much afraid of what the others might have confessed, that they spoke freely when examined. Each feared that at any moment the rack might be employed on him. The government meanwhile decided to use Fawkes for a propaganda programme by working up his confessions for publication. It gave them an opportunity to sneak in a reference to contacts between Fawkes and Owen in the hope and intention of ruining an enemy exile of many years. Salisbury wrote to Sir Thomas Edmondes on 14 November to declare that Owen had been definitely incriminated by Fawkes. Edmondes might have put this about with confidence in Brussels since the news came from his superior, but it was actually untrue, because according to the surviving evidence Fawkes did not mention Owen until 20 January 1606.
The assertion did, however, get some much needed backing by the confession on 23 November of Thomas Winter, who had like Rookwood survived his injuries. Catholic historians and apologists have constantly denied the authenticity of this confession because the manuscript version at Hatfield, an autograph example, has a variant signature substituting the unique spelling Winter for the usual form of Wintour which he used. No one has ever made a solid and sensible suggestion about why a government-employed forger (say Thomas Phelippes) would deliberately make such an error in a crucial state document, and why Salisbury would let it pass. Winter had an injured shoulder and penning his name in a simpler form may have been easier. Whatever the reason for this tiny (albeit eye-catching) blemish, it was written without immediate duress and the text was incorporated into the portmanteau publication known as the King’s Book. This was a highly coloured official account of the treason, printed at the end of November, and ready for circulation early in December.10 For those outside the privileged cluster of councillors and courtiers it was powerful and essential reading just as the Secretary intended. It told enough about the plot to convince Londoners and direct their thinking on the matter. One reader hot to take it up seems to have been William Shakespeare and the little quarto set him to thinking about a Scottish play and the death of kings. When the conspirators were hauled to London the King’s Book noted how the people wished to see them ‘as the rarest sort of monsters; fools to laugh at them; women and children to wonder; all the common people to gaze –’. In Macbeth when Macduff has cornered the usurping king, he uses the same language as he taunts him:
Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o’ the time
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole (V. viii, 23–6)
The planned atrocity was widely regarded as so brutal in design and evil in its scope that a demonic element was certain; ‘night’s black agents’ gave it a wild impetus. The association of evil with darkness is a very old notion ‘but it became the universal thought of England in the winter of 1605–6’. Lancelot Andrewes: ‘In darkness they delighted, dark vaults, dark cellars, and darkness fell upon them for it’. In many contemporary prints this ‘foul and filthy air’ is pierced dramatically by a shaft of light from Heaven. Satanic meddling was not invented by James for polemical purposes, nor for the gratification of massaging his own vibrant sense of self-importance. It was an opinion fully shared by the principal judges of the Scottish bench and by privy councillors.11 It was a traditional view taken of earlier plotters like Bothwell and Gowrie, for James ‘regarded himself and his like as capital objects of dispute between the forces of evil and of good’. A letter from the privy council of Scotland sent to James in November confirms their state of mind: ‘Since the glad tidings came to us of your Majesty’s happy delivery from the abominable conspiracy so inhumanly contrived by the devil and his supporters against your royal person, the Queen and your Majesty’s children.’ On 26 November there was a Proclamation to the Fencibles of Scotland to be prepared to defend James, and it contains the following: ‘this detestable plot which without the concourse of all the devils and malignant spirits within the precinct of this universe, their supporters and deputies upon the face of the earth, could never have been excogitated.’
Despite the bristling sense of horror and terror – it was in a sense a grand succession crisis averted – and James in his twenty minutes 9 November speech to Parliament affirmed that ‘these wretches thought to have blown up in a manner the whole world of this island’, there was no pogrom aimed at the Catholic community. This is a fact that Catholic historians distressed by the ignoble purpose of Catesby and company always whizz over in silent disbelief. Restraints of law, albeit a little stretched, remained and James himself kept his head as far as the papist minority were concerned. When he did mildly broach the idea of sending Prince Henry to Scotland for safety, there was a collective sharp intake of English breath and some mutterings of censure.12 Salisbury’s view of the laws certainly remained unchanged as he told Nicolò Molin that year. It was logical, cool and disciplined: ‘their object [the laws] is undoubtedly to extinguish the Catholic religion in this Kingdom, because we do not think it fit, in a well-governed monarchy, to increase the number of persons who profess to depend on the will of other Princes as the Catholics do . . .’ When a Catholic wrote accusingly to Salisbury in 1606 ‘We know no other means left us in the world, since it is manifest that you serve but as a match, to give fire unto His Majesty . . . for intending all mischiefs against the poor distressed Catholics’, the earl responded that he was not an enemy of the faith itself. Nor importantly did he hold that all of them in England harboured vast reserves of treasonable thoughts. He observed ‘how little assistance was given to these late savage Papists’. He would avoid persecuting Catholics as such, but held his ground on everything else.
Nicolò Molin’s uncensored despatches are helpful in establishing the mood of the nation, on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown, after this great provocation.
The King is in terror; he does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms with only Scotchmen [sic] about him . . . Catholics fear heretics and vice versa . . . both are armed; foreigners live in terror of their houses being sacked by the mob which is convinced that some, if not all foreign princes, are at the bottom of the plot. The King and council have very prudently thought it advisable to quiet the popular feeling by issuing a proclamation in which they declare that no foreign Sovereign had any part in the conspiracy.
Whether they actually thought this is another matter and their effort to establish the evidence either way had to be undertaken with alacrity. While they did this probe it was certainly prudent to place guards about the residences of foreign diplomats to prevent outbreaks of public wrath, an effort that had the additional attraction of possibly stemming the seepage of evidence. At this time we know the French were regarded with a lively animosity. As Molin noted in the same despatch: ‘The conduct of the French ambassador is much criticised . . . because he would not wait for the letters the Queen was writing for France. He insisted on crossing on Monday [4 November] evening though the weather was bad . . . his passage was both troublesome and dangerous. They argue from this that the Ambassador, if he had not a share in the plot, at least had some knowledge of it . . .’13
The remarked failure of Henri IV to meet Beaumont is far from conclusive, but it is intriguing. And was there then a widely held view in French government circles that the whole plot was a fable, as one report from Paris robustly claimed? It seems unlikely, especially as the report emanated from Dudley Carleton, who was far from neutral in his news reports, unlike the estimable Molin (whose failing was gullibility).* Carleton’s training had been for public life and in 1603 while employed in Paris and not altogether happy there, he received letters from friends urging him to exploit the sound relationship he had established with the Earl of Northumb
erland. That he did so and successfully may have caused a wrench of displeasure later, but in 1603 he was pleased to be appointed comptroller of Percy’s household and a personal secretary. This meant that he was responsible for assigning the plotters the lease for the space wherein they stored their gunpowder. When he left the earl’s employ in March 1605 he worked for Lord Norris in Spain and then Paris, but his previous connection was part of the reason for his recall to London. John Chamberlain, his friend, could say that Carleton had a poor opinion of Thomas Percy, but a short spell of imprisonment and examination regarding Northumberland was inevitable. Carleton was released in December 1605 but still remained under surveillance for a time. In February 1606 he was to be found out in the Chilterns as he ruefully noted ‘in order to take away the scent of powder’. In fact, it took him very much longer than he would have hoped or expected, and it was not until 1610 that he was appointed to replace Sir Henry Wotton as ambassador to Venice.
* Robert Acton, a former Worcestershire landowner, had moved his family to Llandeilo in Camarthenshire to protect them from recusancy laws, and his lead had been followed by other Catholics. After the Gunpowder plot he omitted, or refused to take the Oath of Allegiance, a fact communicated to Salisbury by the Bishop of St David’s in 1611
* Sir Thomas Lawley, who was with Walsh, reported to Salisbury that ‘the rude people stripped the rest naked’
* Molin was knighted at Whitehall on 23 January 1601.
