Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  When code-breaker Thomas Phelippse translated these lines, he could not resist drawing a little gallows in the margin of the letter. The implication was clear. Mary Stuart had just hanged herself. As damning as all this was, Walsingham was still not happy. The Scottish queen had not specifically endorsed Elizabeth’s murder. She was clearly involved in the plot, and was obviously guilty of breaking the Bond of Association, but would it be enough to make Queen Elizabeth change her approach after nearly two decades of protecting Mary? While Walsingham pondered his next move, the courts had decided the fate of Babington and his fellow conspirators.

  Of the sixteen arrested, fourteen (excluding Gifford and Harrison) had been convicted of treason and sentenced to death. According to the law, the Queen had to sign the traitors’ death warrants. The warrant not only stated the time and place of their death, but also the manner in which they were to be executed. Had they been noblemen, they might have got away with the block, but they were not and faced the worst execution imaginable – being hanged, drawn and quartered. Their sentence read as follows: ‘You shall be led hence to remain [at the Tower] until the day of execution. And from there you shall be drawn on a hurdle through the open streets to the place of execution, there to be hanged and cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes. Then your head to be stricken off from your body and your body shall be divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the [Queen’s] pleasure. And may God have mercy on your soul.’

  Surprising though it may seem, medieval executioners were adept enough at their craft to keep the hapless victim not only alive, but also conscious throughout the grisly procedures. The almost unspeakable act of castration was to demonstrate to the public that traitors would not be allowed to breed more traitors.

  On 20 September 1586 Babington and six of his companions were taken from the Tower to Lincoln’s Inn Field. The remaining eight were to follow the next day. Almost as bad as the executions themselves was the fact that the remaining victims were forced to watch their companions go through the horrifying ordeal before their turn came. The first to go was Father Ballard. As he was hanged, revived, stripped naked, tied to a ladder and raised so that the crowd of spectators had a clear view of the proceedings to come, Babington shouted that the plot to murder Queen Elizabeth had been ‘a deed lawful and meritorious’. An eyewitness recalled Babington’s reaction to Ballard’s torture. ‘Babington looked on with an undaunted countenance, steadily gazing on that variety of tortures which he himself, in a moment [was] to pass through. . . . When the executioner began his tremendous work on Babington, the spirit of this haughty and heroic man cried out amidst the agony, “Parce mihi, Domine Jesu”‘ (Spare me Lord Jesus).

  Although hanging, drawing and quartering had been in use for centuries, because this was the first time in Elizabeth’s long reign that it had been used, it is unlikely that the Queen actually understood how barbaric it was. On hearing the details of the executions and the public’s horrified reaction, she ordered that the remaining eight conspirators should simply be hanged. There would never be another public dismemberment in the realm of England.

  Even with Babington and his men out of the way, Walsingham was uneasy. They had only been a symptom of a much larger disease; one that could only be cured by removing Mary Stuart’s head. Mary had obviously been complicit in the plot, but he needed enough proof to convince Elizabeth that she was too dangerous to remain alive. He found the solution in her letter to Babington. Beneath her signature, Walsingham had his forger insert a brief paragraph that made it look as though, at the last minute, Mary had decided to approve of Babington’s plan to murder Elizabeth. The forged postscript read ‘I would be glad to know the names of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment, for it may be I shall be able, upon knowledge of the parties, to give you some further advice necessary to be followed therein, as also from time to time particularly how to proceed . . .’. The paragraph closed with, ‘Let the great plot proceed.’ Now, with Mary apparently complicit in the conspiracy to commit regicide, Walsingham went to the queen.

  Elizabeth was furious. For eighteen years she had done everything she could to keep her scheming, plotting cousin from the block, but the woman simply would not let go. Elizabeth could no longer avoid the problem. Mary Queen of Scots, cousin to the English throne, would be tried for high treason. When told that Mary would be moved from Dudley Castle to Fotheringay Castle to await trial, Elizabeth knew the end was near. Under her breath she muttered, ‘Jesu, that dreadful place’. Even now, however, Elizabeth tried to give Mary a way out. In a last letter to her cousin, she wrote ‘You have in various ways and manners attempted to take my life and bring my kingdom to destruction by bloodshed. These treasons will be proved to you and all made manifest. It is my will that you answer the nobles and peers of the kingdom as if I were myself present. Act plainly without reserve and you will sooner be able to obtain favour of me.’

  Mary’s trial was an unprecedented affair. Never in history had any court tried the legitimate and reigning monarch of another country. Mary tried to use this fact in her favour, insisting that as a foreigner she was not subject to the laws of England and the court had no jurisdiction over her. Next, she insisted that since the judges were not monarchs themselves, they were not her ‘peers’ and therefore not qualified to sit in judgement on her. It was a clever tactic, but it didn’t work. On 14–15 October 1586, Mary was tried as a common traitor.

  Eventually, she did admit of her complicity in the plot to free herself, but repeatedly denied that she approved of the murder of Elizabeth – a fact that she stated three times in the two-day trial. Significantly, Mary’s letter with the forged postscript was never produced at the trial. In truth, none of it mattered now. Mary had plotted and schemed too long and too often to walk away. When Elizabeth signed the death warrant, she muttered ‘ne feriare feri’ (strike lest thou be stricken). On 8 February 1587 Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. She was forty-four years old and had spent nearly half her life in captivity.

  But when Elizabeth herself died in 1603, it would be Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, who would take the English crown. As James VI of Scotland and James I of England, he united the two kingdoms under a single crown. A feat that dozens of monarchs had tried to accomplish by force finally happened by an accident of birth.

  PART III

  Turmoil and Treason

  9

  GUNPOWDER, TREASON AND PLOT

  Guy ‘Guido’ Fawkes 1604–5

  Following the Catholic conspiracies centred on Mary Queen of Scots, religious bigotry and hatred bubbled to the surface all over England. All Catholics were viewed with suspicion and assumed to be agents of a foreign power (the Pope) bent on the destruction of England and its monarchy. Queen Elizabeth’s strength of character generally kept the hatred in check, but following her death in 1603 the violence crept into the open. Gangs of Protestant thugs destroyed Catholic homes searching for rosaries, holy relics and ‘priest holes’ where the dreaded Jesuits might be hiding. Any of these fanatical Protestants who were caught were prosecuted and imprisoned, but the law was half-hearted in its efforts to track them down, and this laxity only encouraged them. Sooner or later the situation was bound to come to a head, and when it did the results were nearly catastrophic.

  Scotland’s King James VI was beset with problems from the moment he accepted the crown left vacant by the death of Queen Elizabeth. Scottish Presbyterians, Roman Catholics and the Church of England alike hounded him to designate an ‘official’ religion. Although he had little time for the straight-laced, puritanical Presbyterians, he was far more afraid of the Catholics, even though theirs was the church of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. Too many plots had been hatched by her and her followers against the English crown for James to trust any of them, particularly now that he was king.

  Owing to his
family’s violent history, James had a virtual paranoia of assassination and political upheaval. His mother had been beheaded, his grandfather had been shot dead and the Scottish lairds had attempted to blow up his father, Lord Darnley. Desperate to keep all of his subjects happy, James began negotiating a peace with staunchly Catholic Spain and commissioned an English translation of the Bible that would accommodate all the various Christian sects.

  Judging by James’s private correspondence with his Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, it is obvious that he genuinely wanted to remain on good terms with all his subjects, no matter what their religious beliefs may have been. The only exception to this ecumenical view was the Jesuits. Both James and Cecil saw them as fanatics bent on stirring up anti-government and anti-Protestant sentiments on every possible occasion. In a memorandum, Cecil referred to them as ‘absolute seducers of the people from temporal obedience and consequent persuaders to rebellion’. In reaction to the Jesuit ‘problem’ King James initiated the Hampton Court Conference designed to impose harsher penalties on any Jesuit priest caught in England as well as anyone remotely associated with them. These apparently conflicting attitudes towards the Church of Rome led King James to be referred to as the ‘wisest fool in Christendom’. It was not the most positive judgement a new reign could hope for.

  In March 1604, only weeks after the Hampton Court Conference got under way, three English gentlemen met at the home of John Wright in the London suburb of Lambeth. The three were Wright himself, Robert Catesby and Thomas Wintour. The only things they had in common were high social position, the fact that they were all in their early thirties, and the firm belief that they were being persecuted because of their devotion to and practice of Catholicism.

  Catesby was Wintour’s cousin and a close friend of Wright; he was also an inveterate plotter who had been involved in the Duke of Essex’s abortive rebellion against Queen Elizabeth some years earlier. Now he had come to the conclusion that despite King James’s assurances that honest Catholics were in no danger, the situation was sure to get worse unless devoted Catholics took matters into their own hands. Later, one of the group recalled that Catesby ‘bethought him of a way at one instant to deliver us from all our bonds and without any foreign help to replant the Catholic religion [in England]’. As the three men talked on into the night, Catesby insisted that the only solution to the spiralling crisis was to eliminate the royal family, all the ministers of state and the entire parliament – and do it all at a single blow. With the government dead, they could seize the king’s young daughter, Princess Elizabeth, declare her queen and raise a general revolt against all the Protestant sects.

  Obviously, such an audacious, brutal and seemingly impractical plot did not sit well with Wintour and Wright. But Catesby convinced them that their cause would be justified in the eyes of God and therefore worth any risk and any cost. The others were finally persuaded to agree. But three men could not possibly carry out such a plan alone. They would need help and the assistance of people with the right technical expertise. Catesby had a friend named Thomas Percy, who was both brave and a good Catholic and would make a fine addition to the group, but he did not have the specific skills they would need. After much thought, Thom Wintour said he might know just the man they needed, but he was on the continent. First they would have to locate him and then persuade him to join them. His name was Guy Fawkes.

  Fawkes had been born near York into a Protestant family in April 1570. His father was a notary to the York ecclesiastical court and the consistory court of the local archbishop. It was a respectable, conservative background. So too, apparently, was the rest of Fawkes’ early life. At the age of twenty he married Maria Pulleyn and a year later she gave them a son. Fawkes’ inheritance of 4 acres of farmland and a barn was respectable, though modest. But somewhere along the line something had changed. Shortly after the birth of his son, Guy Fawkes sold his land, left his wife and infant son and went to the Low Countries to join a group of exiled English Catholic mercenaries fighting there in the pay of the Spanish king.

  At twenty-two Fawkes was already a tall, powerfully built man with thick reddish-brown hair and beard. By all accounts, he was also a natural soldier, being described as a man ‘of excellent good natural parts, very resolute and universally learned’. Apparently well liked both personally and for his fighting abilities, Guy Fawkes – who now called himself Guido – was ‘thought by all the most distinguished in the Archduke’s camp for nobility and exemplary temperance, of mild cheerful demeanour, an enemy of broils and disputes, a faithful friend, and remarkable for his punctual attendance upon religious observance’. As a result, he gained ‘considerable fame among soldiers’; he also gained advancement from common foot soldier to a ‘miner’, where he received extensive training in tunnelling, munitions and explosives.

  After serving in the Low Countries for a decade, Fawkes resigned his commission to go to Spain with the intention of ‘enlighten[ing] King Philip II concerning the true position of the Romanists in England’. What he actually wanted was to persuade King Philip to finance a Catholic uprising to depose King James. Philip may or may not have met Fawkes personally, but after more than a year in Spain, Fawkes realised his mission was going nowhere. He had, however, run into an old school friend from York, Christopher Wright, who happened to be the brother of another boyhood friend (and Catesby’s co-conspirator) John Wright. Together they discussed politics and religion, the sad state of affairs in England and what could be done about it. Undoubtedly, Fawkes told Wright about his abortive plan to get the Spanish to back a Catholic uprising in England, but whether or not Wright divulged any of his brother’s plans is unclear. What is certain is that soon after Fawkes returned to England he received word – probably through one of the Wright brothers – that a man named Thomas Wintour wanted to see him.

  In May 1604, roughly two months after Catesby, Wintour and Wright had first met, they met again in a private room at the Duck and Drake Inn in the fashionable Strand district of London. Catesby had brought along Thomas Percy and Wintour had brought Fawkes. Before divulging the exact nature of the plot to overthrow the government, Catesby swore the men to secrecy. To solemnise their vow of silence, they heard mass and were given communion by a Jesuit priest named Father John Gerard. This done, Catesby began laying out the details of one of the most bizarre and improbable plots in English history.

  There was only one day in the year when the royal family, the chief government ministers and both houses of parliament were assembled in the same place at the same time – the State Opening of Parliament, traditionally held on 5 November. But King James was still putting together his government and would not convene his first parliament until November 1605; still more than twenty months away. Because this would be the king’s first official public speech, the House of Lords would be packed with government officials of every rank. The only people not in attendance would be the king’s two youngest children, Duke Charles and Princess Elizabeth.

  According to Catesby’s plan, if enough barrels of gunpowder could be stashed in the cellars directly below the House of Lords, they could blow the entire government sky-high at a single sweep. Before anyone knew what had happened, the plotters would be well on their way to kidnapping Duke Charles and Princess Elizabeth. Charles would probably be killed and Elizabeth placed on the throne by Catesby and his men. Obviously, there would be no mention that the princess’s rescuers had been responsible for murdering the entire government. It was the perfect coup d’état.

  As the men listened, open-mouthed, to the audacious plan, Catesby explained that he knew there was a nearly unused cellar directly beneath the House of Lords. All the men had to do was rent a house in the neighbourhood and dig a tunnel beneath the houses separating their location from the room beneath parliament. Fawkes’ experience as a miner and explosives expert would ensure that the tunnel was dug properly and the gunpowder placed so as to do as much damage as possible.

  Since the area around parliament
was a warren of twisting alleyways and narrow streets filled with churches, public meeting rooms, taverns, wine merchants and brothels, their movements should go completely unnoticed.

  Amazingly, no one backed out of the conspiracy and the group proceeded to the next step; renting a house near the parliament building in the name of Thomas Percy. Under the fictitious name of John Johnson, Fawkes pretended to be Percy’s servant and assumed the responsibility of watching the premises, guarding it against unwanted visitors. According to Fawkes’ later confession, ‘we lay in the house and had shot and powder, being resolved to die in that place before we should yield or be taken’.

  Around the end of September, Fawkes was told to begin preparations for work on the mine, but their activity was delayed for more than two months because the Commissioners for the Union between England and Scotland were meeting next door and any strange noises might alert the authorities. Finally, in early December, the men began tunnelling. But even at the best of times it was slow going, particularly for those in the group who were not used to hard physical labour. Things only got worse at the end of the second week when, according to Fawkes, ‘we came to the very foundation of the Wall of the House, which was about three yards thick and [we] found it a matter of great difficulty’. Obviously more hands were needed if the work was going to be completed in less than a year.

  Into the plot were brought Catesby’s servant, Thomas Bates, John Wright’s brother Christopher (who had initially contacted Fawkes in Spain) and Thom Wintour’s brother Robert. Catesby also brought in his cousin Francis Tresham, and the Wintour brothers conscripted their brother-in-law John Grant. To their number they also added Sir Everard Digby, Robert Keys, Hugh Owen and Ambrose Rookwood. With the exception of Fawkes and Bates, all the new members were related to the original five either by blood or marriage.