Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  With more hands, the work moved apace, but it was a long way from the rented house to the cellars of parliament. In March 1605, work came to a screeching halt when, according to Fawkes, ‘As they were working on the wall, they heard a rushing in the cellar as of the removing of coals, where upon we feared we had been discovered: and they sent me off to the [nearby] cellar, [where I found] the coal [was] selling and that the cellar was to be let.’ Amazingly, the cellar now up for rent had been their target all along.

  Thomas Percy was immediately sent to take a one-year lease on the storeroom and the men began shuttling in barrels of gunpowder from their warehouse across the Thames. At this point, they had already acquired twenty barrels and were in the process of buying more. To hide this growing mountain of explosives, they brought in cartloads of firewood, which were piled on top of the barrels. Mixed in with the wood and gunpowder were hundreds of iron bars, which would act like shrapnel when the gunpowder was eventually detonated.

  The hard work being almost over, the men could only wait till the opening of parliament in November. According to Fawkes, ‘About Easter, the Parliament being [in recess] till October next, we dispersed ourselves and I retired to the Low Countries by advice and direction of the rest . . . lest . . . by my longer stay I might have [aroused] suspicions . . .’. Presumably, one of Fawkes’ duties on the continent would be to alert English Catholics in exile to the coming unexpected change of government back home.

  In Fawkes’ absence, Percy and the others continued to ferry more powder, iron bars and wood from across the river and haul them into the cellar. Again, according to Fawkes’ account, ‘I returned about the beginning of September . . . and then receiving the keys again [from] Percy, we brought in more powder and billets to cover the same again, and so I went for a time into the country till the 30 of October’. As Fawkes nervously waited to be called back to London only days before the final, awful move some of the others began to have moral misgivings about what they planned to do.

  To cleanse their guilty consciences, Robert Catesby and Thomas Wintour confessed the entire affair to their priest, the Jesuit Father Greenway, and at least Catesby discussed it further with Father John Gerard who had given communion to the five original members of the plot more than a year earlier. At the same time as Catesby and Wintour were seeking absolution, Sir Everard Digby was unburdening his soul to Jesuit Superior Father Garnet. He needed to know if the Pope would approve of the death of so many innocent people in the name of the church; particularly considering that there were Catholics among the king’s ministers and in both houses of parliament. Francis Tresham went to his own priest with the same concerns, but in his case they were even more personal; William Parker who held the title of Lord Monteagle was a member of the House of Lords, a Catholic and Tresham’s cousin by marriage.

  On 18 October, Catesby, Wintour and Tresham met to discuss the possibility of warning a few, key Catholic members of the government not to attend the opening of parliament. The specific results of their meeting are not known, but they probably decided it would be too dangerous even to hint that something was amiss. Everyone agreed they would keep their peace and live with the consequences, but one of them was growing increasingly uncomfortable.

  Almost two weeks later, and only ten days before King James was scheduled to open parliament, Lord Monteagle had just sat down to dinner at his home in Hoxton when a letter arrived by special messenger. It read as follows: ‘My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care for your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance of this Parliament, for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time . . . and I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it, to whose protection I commend you.’ Not surprisingly the letter was unsigned.

  Monteagle was certainly no friend of the new king. He believed, and had said, that ‘the King is odious to all sorts’, but whatever the letter hinted at, it was obviously a lot bigger than political loyalties. Leaving his supper to go cold, Monteagle hurried to find Secretary of State Robert Cecil.

  Somehow, it only took hours for news of the letter to find its way to the ears of Catesby and Wintour. Immediately they accused Tresham of trying to warn his cousin, but he vehemently denied it. A week later the five leading conspirators agreed that since nothing seemed to have been done to heighten security around the houses of parliament, the whole thing must have been laughed off as a bad joke or had been lost in the government bureaucracy. But just to be on the safe side, all of them except Fawkes made plans to get out of London immediately, though Francis Tresham decided to remain in London at the last minute. Guy Fawkes had no choice but to stay behind and light the fuse at the appointed time. Once the government was dead, he was to make a break for the Low Countries and spread the word that Catholicism was about to be restored in England.

  Whether it actually took nine days for Robert Cecil to act, or whether he was simply biding his time to avoid scaring off the plotters remains uncertain, but on Monday afternoon, 4 November, his men went into action. Accompanied by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Monteagle and John Whyniard, Thomas Howard the Earl of Suffolk led a thorough search of the parliament buildings. When they reached an exterior door leading to a rented-out cellar, they encountered a tall, powerfully built man with bristling beard and hair who identified himself as John Johnson, a porter in the employ of a Mr Thomas Percy. Dutifully and calmly he unlocked the cellar door while the ministers carried out a perfunctory search of the cellars. Their search uncovered no more than a pile of timbers and brushwood. Later that afternoon the delegation met with Cecil and the king, describing their search and admitting they had found nothing. They did, however, say that the man Johnson had appeared to be ‘a very bad and desperate fellow’ who ‘seemed to be a man shrewd enough, but up to no good’. Everyone decided the cellar would have to be searched again and this time they should take a magistrate and soldiers with them.

  A few minutes before midnight, the men returned to the cellar, accompanied by Sir Thomas Knyvett, the magistrate of Westminster and a band of armed men. When they arrived, the man ‘Johnson’ was still there guarding the door. Knyvett ordered him to hand over the keys and ordered several of the guards to keep Johnson under close guard while they searched the rooms. Ploughing through the pile of logs and wood, it was only minutes before they found thirty-five barrels of gunpowder and hundreds of iron bars. Rushing back to where the guards were holding Johnson under restraint, Knyvett ordered a body search. In Johnson’s clothes they discovered a watch, a length of slow-burning match and the ‘touchwood’ he would need to light it. The man calling himself Johnson was placed under arrest and escorted to Whitehall Palace for a personal meeting with King James.

  By one o’clock in the morning on 5 November, a large group of government officials and soldiers had crowded into the king’s bedroom. With them was Guy Fawkes. Fawkes still insisted his name was Johnson, but now calmly admitted he had intended to blow up the House of Lords when the government assembled there to hear the king’s speech. His only regret, he said, was that he had obviously failed, because his intent was ‘To blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains . . .’, and if he had been given the opportunity he would have gladly blown up the men who had arrested him, the Houses of Parliament and himself with them. For all his bravado, he adamantly refused to name any of his fellow conspirators. Realising they weren’t going to get any more out of the man that night, Cecil ordered him to be taken to the Tower where he could think things over before being questioned in much greater depth in the morning.

  After spending the night in the miserably cramped cell known as ‘Little Ease’ – where a man could neither stand up straight nor lie down and stretch out – Fawkes was taken to the Council Chamber in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. He again insisted that his name was Johnson; he was a Catholic and had intended to blow up the king and parliament and only regretted that he ha
d not succeeded. Everything else he said was a lie, and everyone in the room knew it. It would now be up to the king to decide how rigorous the next round of questioning would be.

  Back in Whitehall, King James I was a very shaken, but determined, man. This was all too reminiscent of the death of his father, Lord Darnley, who had nearly been blown apart when James was still an infant. But no matter how personally frightening the plot was, the investigation had to be slow, thorough and carried out strictly according to the law. To oversee the investigation into what was already being called ‘the Gunpowder Plot’, James appointed Robert Cecil, the Earl of Nottingham, the Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Devon, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and the Earl of Northampton, the Lord Privy Seal. Cecil was obviously just as concerned as the king, but he already had suspicions that somewhere, somehow, the Jesuits were behind the whole thing. Cecil is quoted as having said ‘we cannot hope to have good government while large numbers of people go around obeying foreign rulers’. Implicit, but unsaid, was the fact that the ‘people’ indicated were Jesuit-leaning Catholics and the foreign ruler in question was the Pope.

  While the commission was organising itself, the king spent all of 6 November writing up a list of sixteen questions that he personally wanted answers to. The King’s questions were:

  (1) As [to who] he is, for I can never yet hear of any man that knows him.

  (2) Where he was born?

  (3) What were his parents’ names?

  (4) What age he is?

  (5) Where he hath lived?

  (6) How he hath lived and by what trade of life?

  (7) How he received the wounds (i.e. scars) on his breast?

  (8) If he was ever in service, with any other . . . person, and what they were, and [for] how long?

  (9) How came he in [that] person’s service, by what means and at what time?

  (10) What time did his master hire this house?

  (11) How soon after the possessing of it did he begin his devilish preparations?

  (12) When and where did he learn to speak French?

  (13) What gentlewoman’s letter it was that was found upon him?

  (14) Wherefore doth she give him another name in it than he gives to himself?

  (15) If he was ever a papist, and if so, who brought him up to it?

  (16) How was he converted, where, when and by whom [to] this course of his life . . . because I have diverse motives leading me to suspect that he hath remained long beyond the seas and, either is a priest, or hath long served some priest . . .

  Amended to the bottom of the list was a note expressly ordering that the prisoner be ‘put to the question’; a euphemism for torture. While English common law now expressly forbade the use of torture, it was permissible if specifically ordered by the monarch or the Privy Council. Considering the magnitude of the crime in question, James had no qualms about ordering its use to ferret out every bit of information and the names of everyone involved. The amendment read, in part, ‘if he will not other ways confess, the gentler tortures are to be first used unto him et sic per gradus ad mia tenditur (and so on by degrees proceeding to the worst), and so God speed your good work. James R’

  The man in charge of the Tower and any prisoners kept there was Sir William Waad, one of the most active, and least sympathetic, men to hold the job for many years. When he was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower in 1605, Waad was already sixty years old and had a long and distinguished career as diplomat, spy and investigator of Catholic plots dating from the days of Sir Francis Walsingham’s investigation into the Babington plot. Hard, efficient, crafty and unemotional, Waad was an expert at the game of alternately consoling and threatening his prisoners; and he never hesitated to back up the threats with action.

  When Waad assumed his post only months before the Gunpowder Plot was uncovered, he brought with him a small group of hand-picked interrogators under the assumption that his own men would be far more efficient at extracting information than the Yeoman Warders whose main job was protecting the Tower compound. With Waad by his side, Guy Fawkes was taken to face his first, official interrogation on the morning of 7 November. Not surprisingly, the Lord Chief Justice could get nothing new out of Fawkes, so Waad was given the list of questions from the king and told to put the prisoner to ‘the question’.

  Before the torture began, Fawkes was shown the terrifying array of implements which might be used on him should the need arise. The rack, iron gauntlets and the scavenger’s daughter, an iron neckband connected by a bar to knee shackles: when the device was tightened the victim’s head was pulled towards their knees, slowly dislocating their spine. Each one was held in front of his face to start breaking down his psychological resolve. It only took half an hour on the rack – his muscles and joints pulled and stretched till the ropes bit into his wrists and ankles, chafing them till blisters were raised and broke open – that a few truths began to emerge. First was his name – Guy, or Guido, Fawkes. Then, in an attempt to justify anything he might say, he confessed that God must have not approved of the plot or it would have succeeded, so it was only proper that he felt ashamed for his own part in it. But he swore he would never divulge the names of the others involved. Waad told him they already knew the names of some of his friends, and that tomorrow the two of them would visit the rack again, and together they would find out everything else there was to know.

  As he was returned to the cramped confines of Little Ease, Fawkes not only realised he would not be able to move enough to relieve the pain of the racking, but was informed of an aspect of ‘the question’ that took place outside the torture chamber. According to the rules of torture the prisoner ‘shall have three morsels of barley bread a day, and that he shall have the water next [to] the prison, so that it shall not be current (meaning stagnant water taken from the moat), and that he shall not eat the same day upon which he drinks, nor drink the same day upon which he eats; and he shall so continue till he die’. And so Guy Fawkes completed his first day of questioning.

  The next morning the racking lasted for two full hours. Before he finally broke down and confessed, Fawkes’ muscles and ligaments had been torn, his shoulders had been dislocated and both wrists and ankles were so torn that the ropes holding them were soaked with blood. Finally, he delivered the names of the four other men who were at the centre of the plot and, according to Waad’s notes, ‘He told us that since he undertook this action he did every day pray to God he might perform that which might be for the advancement of the Catholic Faith and the saving of his own soul.’ A written transcript of the confession was drawn up.

  The following day, 9 November, after being informed that some of his comrades had already been arrested, he told everything else he knew without further torture. A full, extended version of the confession was now prepared and read in part:

  I confesse, that a practice in general was first broken unto me, against his Majesty for relief of the Catholic cause, and not invented or propounded by myself. And this was first propounded unto me about Easter Last [when I had been] twelve months beyond the seas in the Low Countrys . . . by Thomas Wintour, who came there upon with me into England and there we imparted our purpose to three other Gentlemen more, namely, Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy and John Wright, who all five consulting together to the means how to execute the same . . .

  Nearly insensible with pain, Fawkes could hardly hold the quill to sign his name. After scratching out ‘Guido’ the pen fell from his hand. It was enough. The commission had the names of all the chief conspirators and all the information they needed to condemn them. Fawkes would spend the next forty-five days in Little Ease awaiting trial and the inevitable verdict.

  By the time Guy Fawkes was arrested in the small hours of 5 November the remaining plotters, with the exception of Tresham, had already left London. Still, it was only a matter of days before word of Fawkes’ arrest reached them. Even if they had not heard of Fawkes’ arrest, the lack of news concerning the fate of parliament would have alerted them that
something had gone terribly wrong. Nevertheless, Catesby was determined the plot would move forward in one form or another and pressed on to their appointed meeting place at Holbech House on the Worcestershire/Staffordshire border.

  When Catesby and several of the others arrived at Holbech with a fresh cartload of gunpowder, they found Everard Digby waiting to tell them he had enlisted nearly four dozen new recruits. In spite of the foiled plot against parliament, this was hopeful news. After delivering the message, Digby set off to round up the new forces. Unfortunately, Catesby’s load of gunpowder had become damp in the drizzling rain that had dogged their journey. Foolishly, the seven men now lodged at Holbech House decided the best way to dry the powder was to spread it out in front of a roaring fire. Once spread across the floor of the great hall the powder could not explode, but a flying spark from the fire ignited it, badly burning some of the men and nearly engulfing the house. It was taken as a very bad sign.

  By the next morning, 8 November, three of the company, Robert Wintour, Stephen Littleton and Hugh Owen had fled in panic, leaving only Robert Catesby, the Wright brothers, John and Christopher, and Thomas Percy to clean up the mess and decide what to do next. They did not have long to wait. Shortly before midday, the Sheriff of Worcester arrived with a large posse, surrounded the house and ordered the men to surrender. In the ensuing battle, Catesby, the Wrights and Percy were all fatally shot. With the core group now dead and Fawkes in the Tower, the remaining men, along with scores of other suspected Jesuit rabble-rousers, were rounded up and shipped off to the Tower.