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

by Haynes, Alan

  In his thoughtful and detailed article on the Plot and the poetic seekers after myth, Richard Hardin makes a point well worth repeating, and it is that Wallace, Heering, Vicars and Goad (leaving aside Milton and Hawes (b. 1950)) were not mere hacks and tale-tellers, but men of learning who hoped to give a boost to their careers by levering themselves above their contemporaries (and rivals). Dr Herring was a member of the London College of Medicine and one of those who praised the work of John Gerard, the barber-surgeon and naturalist. John Vicars, although an orphan, had the good fortune to be raised at Christ’s Hospital where he returned to teach (as an usher) after an Oxford course of study.21 Also part of the intellectual community that seized upon the event was John Ross, lawyer at the Inner Temple, and possibly an aide to Sir Edward Coke, the attorney-general who presented the case for the prosecution at the trial of the plotters. The Britannica, sive de Regibus Veteris Britanniae was published in Frankfurt in 1607, but evidently written by Ross before December 1606 was the poem he added to it of 439 lines, Apostophe and Praesens Tempus, thus ending a book of Latin verses on the Kings in Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the poem the swelling notion of Guy Fawkes as a mythical figure is pitched into the historical event. The last King of the Britons Cadwallader emerges from the nether world to tell Alethia the nymph of the wondrous sight to which he has been given access. Somehow a living person has penetrated hell to seek aid for the Plot, and it is Catesby; very unusually we are treated to a description that is likely quite accurate since it avoids grotesque exaggeration: ‘a man of pale countenance’ (all that tunnelling), ‘hair down to his shoulders, uneven teeth, unusually thin-bearded, body tall yet slender, promising its strength not in itself but in the use of arms . . . one not readily inclined to speak, yet bold’.

  This rare display of specificity suggests that Ross had a proximity to the plotters and their plan beyond any poet other than Ben Jonson, who had dined with them a month before the planned treason. As for Fawkes, Ross declines to personalize him, opting instead for something rawly impersonal so that after his capture ‘he came to court to be gazed at like a monster... he never changed his expression but was the same toward everyone wherever he went . . . He was so brazen-faced, iron-willed, and adamant-hearted that he would not soften in any way, nor could anyone goad him out of his alarming boldness’. Catesby and Garnet are surpassed as fiends by this unearthly monster, whose right to human compassion is utterly negated.

  In his youthful imagining Edward Hawes had made Perry and Catesby into Bosch-like skulls, but they retained human characteristics, motives and personal histories, even souls. Such aspects of men are lost to Fawkes as the history of 5 November itself begins to lose its churning fluidity. The Latin poet William Gager wrote in 1608 of Fawkes as ‘hardened with iron and rock, now threatening horrors and almost breathing fire from his eyes and jaws.’ The ‘almost’ is intriguing since it surely suggests an unwillingness of Gager to believe every aspect of his own characterization of man become monster. The shift towards the demonizing of Fawkes actually began, it seems, around the end of January 1606. At the beginning of the month, even before the trial of the plotters, the text called The devil of the vault (possibly by John Heath) names as the brutal principals Percy and Catesby, but makes no mention of Fawkes. Yet, by the end of the month a report of the Westminster executions puts the spotlight on him as ‘the great Devill of all’. A.P’s translation of Herring in 1610 makes Fawkes a ‘night walking goblin’. The poets jab at the plotters, and the incensed public allows the slippage of Percy and Catesby from their primary roles to fix on the one man who remains silent as to his motive even under torture. They die quickly and away from the centrality of the proposed action; Fawkes, the gritty Yorkshireman and hater of Scots, the Catholic who had fought in Spain’s armies at Nieuport and the siege of Calais, slumps into the central position, pushing aside Digby, whose treatment at the hands of the poets is inconsistent. There is no mention of him by Ross, and the reason may be his friendship with the Digby family. Vicars and Thomas Campion do rehearse the alleged plan of Digby to kidnap Princess Elizabeth from her surrogate family in the Midlands, but Gager and Hawes make no mention of Digby and he is also excluded from Jonson’s play Catiline, again because the Catholic playwright was a friend of the Catholic plotter who came so late into the matter. In some part Digby’s rank protected him from the mass scrutiny of the poets, if not the public humiliation of his execution.

  Another writer on the plot, and a little later in his work, was Phineas Fletcher, cousin of the playwright John Fletcher. Locustae, vel Pietas Jesuitica was written about 1611, but not published until 1627 – a year after Milton’s writing of In Quintum Novembris. Both seem to have looked at Paraeus, and Fletcher expanded the subject beyond the general outline of Wallace. One of his inventions brings together in Rome a satanic emissary and the Pope. However, the notion that Locustae was a source for Milton is clearly wrong as the chronology of their writing and publication reveals.

  As for Paradise Lost – resemblances between Milton’s epic and the plot poems do exist, though nothing very full-bodied, so that, for example, the comment on Satan disguising himself to deceive Uriel (PL 3.681) is not unlike Fawkes’s adoption of clerical attire for disguise, as found in Herring (translated Vicars).

  Appendix I

  THE GUNPOWDER COMMEMORATIVE PAINTING IN NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD

  This picture curiosity which derides the plotters showing Justitia passing through a triumphal arch, and lauds the royal family, remains comparatively little known despite the article by G. Wickham Legg. An error in this was corrected in 1986 by Professor Höltgen when he pointed out that a somewhat fleshy blond figure is a personification of Divine Bounty: Bonitas Divina, not a clumsy and ambiguous rendering of God.1 Most recently work has been done on the picture by Ralph Weller, in his research for a study of the picture’s donor, Dr Richard Haydocke (1569–1642/3).2 Although Haydocke was himself a painter and engraver, as well as a physician and translator, the work in question was executed by John Percivall. He came from a family of minor artists working in Salisbury in the first half of the seventeenth century. The town commissioned several copies of original portraits of Charles I and his queen, as well as of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, for many years Salisbury’s High Steward, and Percivall very likely worked from portraits in Wilton House where the Percivall family had worked as gilders.

  The gunpowder painting is also a copy of an allegorical engraving done for the seventh anniversary of the plot in 1612. Because Prince Henry died on 6 November that year, the print was swiftly withdrawn from sale, when only a very few copies had been bought by courtiers such as Pembroke. Nearly seventy years later, at the time of the commotion caused by Titus Oates, the anti-Catholic engraving was reissued by Richard Northcott of Cornhill. From a unique copy, formerly in the collection of the Marquess of Bute, and now in the Huntington Library, California, it is possible to see that the print varies from the painting in only three ways:

  (a) Most of the inscriptions and mottoes in the painting are in Latin, while the versions in the print are in English.

  (b) The tablet on the extreme right of the picture celebrates in Latin in the painting Haydocke’s connection with his former college. In the print there is a snatch of verse in English and a quotation from Psalms.

  (c) At the foot of the painting are nine stanzas in Latin and a Latin scriptural quotation within a roundel. The print has ten stanzas of English verse.

  The other variation was in size – the painting being almost exactly twice the size of the engraving (3ft 4½ in × 2ft 8½ in against 19½ in × 14 in). As Ralph Weller noted in a private letter, an experienced engraver like Haydocke would have found it a simple task to ‘square up’ the canvas and define the general outline of the picture for Percivall by doubling dimensions taken from the print’s first issues.

  Some work still remains to be done on the musical notation in the painting, and a start on this has been made by a graduate student of New Colle
ge, Timothy Morris. For the origins of the music I suggested a crypto-Catholic composer, but as he pointed out in a private letter, the open book in the top right of the painting shows a Magnificat, and this suggests an Anglican, not a Catholic, origin ‘since evensong had become the principal focus of Protestant musicians’ attention’. He suggested too that the music came either from Oxford or Cambridge, or possibly the Chapel Royal, which had always had the privilege (like the universities) of using Latin for its services.

  One composer candidate can be proposed, though not yet securely proven; it is Thomas Weelkes (born c. 1576). No recusant, he lived in Chichester with his wife and young son, and at the cathedral he had a senior position in the music-making, being a singer, organist and master of the choristers. After the plot he had composed a verse anthem with the text taken from Psalm 21 ‘Oh Lord, how joyful is the King’ used thereafter in the annual services of thanksgiving.

  Appendix II

  THE SWORDS OF THE GENTLEMEN

  On Wednesday 6 November 1605 a London cutler, John Cradock, made a statement to the embattled Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham. In it Cradock outlined how he had been initially employed by the plotter Ambrose Rookwood to do work embellishing a special sword. During the summer of that year the wealthy young man had commissioned him to put a Spanish blade into a sword hilt that was itself unusual because it showed the story of the Passion of Christ in ornamental plaques. Cradock described these as ‘richly engraved’ – the meaning then being that they were low relief items. Since swords (rapiers) were worn by all gentlemen in public such insistent imagery was likely to cause comment when it was noted and was ‘a potentially dangerous statement of faith’.1 Rookwood evidently had an appetite for conspicuous display, and just a few days before the ‘dire combustion’ he changed his mind about the handle or grip. Cradock was told to remove it and replace it with a gold one before joining it to the hilt. The finished sword was then discreetly delivered to Rookwood at his London lodgings on the Sunday night at 11 o’clock. A further delivery of a less grandly decorated sword was then made to Thomas Winter, staying at an inn in the Strand just beyond the well-known premises of Mr Patrick. Winter had paid £12 10s. four months before on commissioning the work. Thomas Percy had also ordered one at slightly less cost, paying 10s. down towards the final price of £7, but he never got to collect it and Cradock held the sword at his premises. As expert consultant on these purchases Christopher Wright, one of the leading swordsmen of the day, went to the shop to give an appraisal of the blade length and so on. Rookwood was clearly wealthy, and could afford to indulge an expensive whim, spending £19 10s. – the price noted by Popham in a letter to Salisbury written before the interrogation of the cutler. The additional work may have boosted the price beyond the £20 mark; a princely sum at that time for a sword, as the other examples cited by Claude Blair indicate.2

  So Rookwood had a sword which in its decoration was laden with Catholic symbolism. It is doubtful if it or the others prepared were ever used, even in the final stand at Holbeach, since by then the plotters had a great stock of utilitarian weaponry to hand. When they were killed (like Thomas Percy and Christopher Wright) items of value about their bodies were apparently looted for private gain. When the plotters were injured and captured (like Rookwood and Winter) such things should have been seized and accounted for by their captors for presentation to the authorities in London. An item as rich as Rookwood’s sword was evidently too great a temptation to someone in the raiding party. Perhaps the sheriff of Worcestershire saw it as his reward for a dangerous mission accomplished. Indeed, given the notable quality of the weapons, it is not entirely surprising that they were filched, but it is curious (and unsatisfactory) that as time passed, and presumably the swords were handed down through families, that they did not eventually surface in known collections. Were they perhaps broken up during the Civil War?

  Today the Swiss National Museum in Zurich has the only sword (LM3675) that uniquely conforms to the description given by Cradock of his work.3 This fine weapon, however, has an Ottoman blade and so cannot be assigned to Rookwood. The source of the scenes on the plaques, all reflecting Christ’s suffering from the Betrayal to the Crucifixion, has not yet been identified, but perhaps the artist was Wierix who later engraved a portrait medallion of Fr. Henry Garnet. Since John Cradock, cutler, had not been paid in full for the sword set up for Thomas Percy, he was probably allowed to keep it. Cradock was himself a Catholic and it may be that he held on to the sword before later allowing it to pass by sale or gift into fraternal Catholic hands – like Sir Charles or Sir Allan Percy. How it came so much later into Swiss hands remains a mystery since the family anecdote is clearly wrong. Cradock himself remains, too, something of a mystery because the early records of the London Cutlers’ Company are incomplete. Given that the plotters were so often in the Strand, it is no surprise that they went to him since he was living, according to the poor-rate books of the parish of St Clement Dane, at Temple Bar in the Strand. He remained there, probably as a working cutler rather than simply a retailer, until 1610 when he seems to have retired to the nearby parish of St Giles in the Field. His will, undated but proved in 1623, shows him to have been a well-off property owner despite his recusant status.4

  Abbreviations Used

  APC

  Acts of the Privy Council

  BIHR

  Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

  BL

  British Library

  CHR

  Catholic Historical Review

  CRS

  Catholic Record Society

  CSPD

  Calendar of State Papers, Domestic

  CSPV

  Calendar of State Papers, Venetian

  EHR

  English History Review

  ELH

  English Literary History

  ELR

  English Literary Renaissance

  HT

  History Today

  JBS

  Journal of British Studies

  JMRS

  Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

  JRA

  Journal of the Royal Artillery

  MLR

  Modern Language Review

  N & Q

  Notes and Queries

  NCE

  New Civil Engineer

  NPP

  Northamptonshire Past and Present

  P & P

  Past and Present

  PMLA

  Publications of the Modern Language Association

  PRO

  Public Record Office

  RES

  Review of English Studies

  RH

  Recusant History

  RHS

  Royal Historical Society

  RUS

  Rice University Studies

  Sh Q

  Shakespeare Quarterly

  Sh S

  Shakespeare Studies

  TAPS

  Transactions of the American Philosophical Society

  TBMI

  Transactions of the Birmingham and Midland Institute

  TMBS

  Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society

  TRHS

  Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

  TSC

  The Seventeenth Century

  WR

  World Review

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  1 A.J. Slavin, ‘The Precarious Balance’ (Borzoi History of England, 1973), p. 286.

  2 Ibid.

  3 C.P.H. Wilson, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Gunpowder Plot’, TMBS, 1972, p. 268.

  4 L. Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England (1990), p. 99.

  5 Ibid., p. 101.

  6 A.L. Rowse, Eminent Elizabethans (1983), pp. 42–73.

  7 H. Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), Historical Essays (1957), pp. 42–73.

  8 Solt, op. cit., p. 105.

  9 B.W. Beckingsale, Burghley: Tudor Statesman (1967), p. 154.
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  10 D. Cressy, ‘Binding the Nation: the Bonds of Association, 1584 and 1696’; in D.J. Gurth and J.W. McKenna (eds), Tudor Rule and Revolution, Essays for G.R. Elton (1982).

  11 A. Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services (1992), pp. 54–82.

  12 D. Mathew, The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe (1933), p. 64.

  13 Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. 109.

  14 L. Guiney, Recusant Poets (1938), p. 305.

  15 Ibid., p. 310.

  16 M. Axton, ‘The Queen’s Two Bodies; Drama and the Elizabethan Succession’, RHS, 1977, p. 92.

  17 Guiney, op. cit., p. 310.

  18 Ibid., p. 312.

  19 Quoted M. Carrafiello, ‘Robert Persons’ Climate of Resistance and the Gunpowder Plot’, TSC, 1988, p. 123.