The Real Guy Fawkes

by Nick Holland

  Cowdray House is situated near Midhurst in West Sussex, and it still draws tourists today to gaze upon it with a mixture of awe and sadness. Cowdray House is not what it once was, not a large and lively hub, a courtly centre of Sussex culture and life; it is a ruin of a building, but a wonderful ruin.

  In 1778, restoration was being undertaken on Cowdray House in preparation for the marriage of the 8th Viscount Montague, but a workman left a candle unextinguished at night. By the morning, much of the building was destroyed, including the north wing that had housed a horde of priceless paintings by Renaissance masters, as well as artefacts and relics from Battle Abbey. Within two weeks the 8th Viscount had died, drowned on the Rhine Falls, and the line and title of Viscount Montague came to an end. Whether by accident or design, the curse had been fulfilled.

  There was little sign of the curse’s efficacy during the time of Sir Anthony Browne, the first Viscount. The fact that Sir Anthony was so honoured by Queen Mary gives a clue to his character and beliefs, and they differed greatly from those of his father and half-uncle who had preceded him at Cowdray. From the man who had put down the Pilgrimage of Grace, Cowdray House had now passed into the hands of a man who was an ardent Catholic, and one who would surround himself with Catholic gentlemen and retainers – one of whom was Guy Fawkes.

  In April 1591, Guy had turned 21 years of age, and had formally inherited his father’s lands, even though he had died intestate thirteen years earlier. This represented a considerable elevation in the world for Guy, and an end to any immediate money worries, but it also brought with it questions and choices – just what was Guy going to do with his life? As a recusant he would be unable to enter the law, and so a career working his new lands as a farmer was a possibility, but there was a problem there too.

  The anti-Catholic legislations of 1581 and 1585 stated that recusants like Guy now had to pay twenty pounds a month in fines, a vast sum of money. Those unwilling or unable to pay could have all their private property confiscated along with two thirds of their lands.6 Guy must have realised that while he was now a landowner, unless he acted swiftly it would soon be snatched away from him.

  Guy’s course of action was one that many landowning recusants before him had chosen – he leased his land so that it could not be confiscated. The man who rented Guy’s lands was a tailor from York called Christopher Lumley, and the lease between them was concluded in October 1591, and witnessed by Denis Bainbridge, George Hobson, John Jackson and Christopher Hodgson.7 We can assume that Lumley must have been an acquaintance of Guy or his stepfather, or both, and with the lease he was given control of lands in York and Clifton.

  Guy still had some lands left, and he spent the following months deciding what to do with them, and what to do with his life. In August 1592 we come across Christopher Lumley again, and this time he is witnessing a document in which Guy sells all of his remaining lands to a York spinster named Anna Skipsey for the sum of twenty-nine pounds thirteen shillings and four pence.8 Comparing monetary values of the late sixteenth century with those of today is a difficult task; money went much further in those pre-consumerist days, but taking the bare inflationary rises this equates to a base figure of £7,377 in 2015 terms. Perhaps a more realistic way to measure modern worth would be to also take into consideration the income index of per-capita GDP in the intervening years, and this gives an equivalent value of £264,700.9

  As Guy’s father Edward had died intestate his wife Edith also had a claim to this land, but she and her husband Denis had signed away their right to it in what was called a quit deed.10 This shows their affection for Guy: they were giving up their legal claim to a considerable sum, and it also demonstrates that they must have known of his decision to leave Yorkshire.

  The selling of his estate severed all Guy’s economic ties with the county of his birth, and it was also a sign that he had decided to start a new life, perhaps inspired by a recent traumatic event such as the death of a wife and child. Opportunities for a recusant like Guy would have been severely limited when compared to those of a Protestant with a similar social background, but he found employment and a home over 250 miles to the south of Scotton: in Cowdray House.

  By 1572, Guy Fawkes had found service as a footman for Anthony Browne, Lord Montague, and his wife Magdalen. A job as a waiter upon tables was not below a lower middle-class man like Guy. It offered the possibility of rising through the household to a position of some power within the estate, for those who were interested in such advancement. But Guy had a different reason for working at Cowdray House.

  There were many manors and stately homes across England at this time, so it seems reasonable to ask why Guy chose one almost as far from his Yorkshire roots as it was possible to get, when there were countless others that were much closer? The second Marquis, also called Anthony Browne, later claimed that Guy was given the job by a cousin of his called Spencer, who was Steward of Cowdray House.11

  The steward was the most senior position within the household, so his recommendations would certainly have carried weight, but there is no direct record of a steward called Spencer at Cowdray House or of the Fawkes family having any connections to a family called Spencer. As many of the records of this time are now lost, and given that family ties could be so complex, this in itself doesn’t prove that it wasn’t the case, but there was another reason that Guy would be attracted to Cowdray – it was a well-known centre of Catholicism.

  While ordinary Catholics had to be very careful about how they practised their religion in the late sixteenth century, much of the Catholic nobility was more upfront. There were stately houses across the country known for their Catholic sympathies – houses belonging to families like the Vaux family, the Throckmortons, the Dacres. While the Catholicism of these families was well known, as long as it was practised surreptitiously, and as long as the individuals concerned showed loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, then their activities were often turned a blind eye to. If, on the other hand, they became too militant in their Catholicism, or their activities threatened the state in any way, then the penalties would be severe and frequently deadly.

  We have already seen a prime example of this in the case of the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux. While possibly not a Catholic himself, it was known that he had Catholic sympathies and employed people of that religion. He rose to great power within Elizabeth’s court, becoming the rival to Sir Robert Cecil as the true power behind the throne. It was a dangerous game, for while Essex had breeding, charm and good looks on his side, Cecil had the guile and intellect to crush him as he did so many others. By 1601 Essex, urged on by many leading Catholics, had decided to take control of the court and remove Cecil – it was even thought that he planned to make himself king. The rebellion failed and Essex lost his head, as did many of his co-conspirators.12 Some on the fringes of the rebellion were imprisoned and then fined but had their lives spared; men like Robert Catesby, who lived to fight another day.13

  The first Viscount Montague would have been all too aware of how precarious life could be for someone like him under the rule of Queen Elizabeth, especially as he had risen to eminence under her predecessor and half-sister Queen Mary. As a sign of this favour, Mary had chosen Montague to act as her envoy and visit Pope Julius III in Rome in 1555 to begin negotiations aimed at returning the Church of England to Catholicism.14

  Unfortunately for Montague, although it was a relief to the Protestant population, Queen Mary’s reign was short,15 and after her death Queen Elizabeth quickly dismantled her religious reforms and reversed the party being persecuted. Montague, who had become closely associated with Queen Mary, must have feared the worst, but more than most Catholic courtiers he displayed the ability to survive the dangerous balancing act that was Tudor politics.

  While nobody, least of all Elizabeth, doubted his Catholicism, he did attend Protestant services on occasion and took every opportunity to display his fidelity to the Queen, to show that this loyalty to his monarch came before his loyalty to hi
s faith. This was famously demonstrated in 1588 as the Spanish Armada neared. While many Catholics were quietly ready to support an invasion, the 60-year-old Viscount Montague raised troops and pledged to fight for Queen Elizabeth.16

  Montague was passing the loyalty test, but the Queen was to challenge it again when she paid a personal visit to Cowdray House during her progression of 1591, just months before Guy Fawkes entered service there. Elizabeth made a number of such ‘progressions’ during her long reign; they were journeys across England that would allow her to meet her subjects, thus fuelling the hero worship, the cult of Gloriana, that was growing around her.

  During these travels she would make extended stays at the homes of chosen courtiers and nobles. The Queen stayed at Cowdray House from 14 to 21 August 1591, a week that must have been telling on the Viscount. Not only because it would have involved vast expense on his part, thanks to the great feasts and revels that were organised in Elizabeth’s honour,17 but also because there was little doubt that she and her retinue would also have been looking for signs of Catholicism being practised within the house.

  Montague and his staff would have been all too aware of what had happened thirteen years previously, when Queen Elizabeth had alighted at Euston Hall in Suffolk, home to the Rookwood family, during her 1578 progress. One of the Queen’s retainers went to look for an item of plate that was missing, and while doing so found a hidden image of the Virgin Mary. This was brought into the presence of the Queen and ‘treated with the greatest possible indignities’.18 It was evidence that Euston Hall was being used for Catholic worship, and Edward Rookwood was arrested and imprisoned. He was incarcerated for ten years, and his family was almost bankrupted. This vindictive and humiliating act would not be forgotten by his young cousin Ambrose Rookwood, who would later be stirred into action19.

  Edward Rookwood had been used as an example, so that Montague and other Catholic members of the gentry and nobility knew that their freedom was always hanging by a slender thread. Montague had a lot to be worried about, for there were few homes in the whole of England that were more overtly Catholic than Cowdray House.

  When Guy Fawkes arrived into service in the house in 1592, he would have found himself amidst a large and almost exclusively Catholic workforce. Montague’s wife Magdalen was the driving force behind this, and she had a grand yet secret chapel built within Cowdray House that witnessed masses being held on at least a weekly basis. One contemporary, the chaplain Smith, recalled,

  Such was the number of Catholics resident in the house, and the multitude of note of such as repaired thither, that even the heretics, to the eternal glory of the name of Lady Magdalen, gave it the title of Little Rome.20

  It is likely that Cowdray House was also home to many priests, all of whom would have faced certain death if captured. The celebrated Jesuit priest, and poet, Father Robert Southwell, used it as his regular base during the 1590s, and so it is possible that he, in the company of other priests, was secreted in the house throughout the visit of Queen Elizabeth. The house had at least one priest hole – an area in which priests could survive undetected for days at a time if necessary – and probably several had been created on the orders of Lady Magdalen.

  Guy’s time at Cowdray House would have given him a hitherto undreamed of freedom to practise his Catholic faith, and to attend mass in the company of some of the leading priests of the day, and yet his stay at Cowdray had a sudden interruption.

  For some reason unknown, the first Viscount Montague was unhappy at Guy’s conduct and sacked him after only four months of service. And there was another twist: the Viscount died just a few months later. The title passed to his grandson, an 18-year-old who also bore the name Anthony Browne, and who promptly hired Guy again.

  After the arrest and interrogation of Guy Fawkes in 1605, any person known to have a connection to him soon found themselves arrested and questioned, and this is what happened to the second Viscount Montague. It was in anticipation of such questioning that the Viscount wrote to the Earl of Dorset,

  Yesternight, as I was going to bed, one of my folks told me, that he heard in the house that the miserable fellow, that should have been the bloody executioner of this woeful tragedy, was called Guy Faux; surely, if so were his name, he should seem to have been my servant once (though sorry I am to think it), for such a one I had for some four months, about the time of my marriage, but was dismissed from me by my lord upon some dislike he had of him; Some six months after my lord’s death, at what time he coming to one Spencer, that was, as it were, my steward and his kinsman, the same Spencer entreated me, that for that instant (being some few days) he might wait at my table, which he did, and departed, and from that time I never had to do with him, nor scarcely thought of him.21

  This testimony from the second Viscount is strange on many levels. He has obviously been warned that he is being linked with Fawkes, and it is this that has prompted his letter to the influential Earl of Dorset, his father-in-law. Given this, we must base our interpretation of the letter upon the assumption that its sole purpose was to distance the Viscount from Guy Fawkes. Even so, it seems strange that he would have agreed to take in Guy as a table waiter for a few days, especially after his grandfather had earlier dismissed him from service at Cowdray. The term ‘scarcely thought of him’ also seems odd, if he truly was talking about someone he had only employed for a few days twelve years earlier.

  We have some idea of what Guy’s duties would have been as a table waiter for the second Viscount Montague. Montague was a stickler for things being done in exactly the correct way, and he wrote a book on this subject entitled A Book of Orders and Rules. In it he gives detailed accounts of the duties of his huge number of staff, including ‘the yeoman of the cellar’, ‘the yeoman of the ewery’, ‘the yeoman of my buttery’, ‘the gentlemen of my horse’, ‘the brewer’ and ‘the granator’.

  Guy served as a ‘gentleman waiter’, and his job was described thus by the Viscount:

  I will that some of my Gentlemen Waiters harken when I or my wife at any time do walk abroad, that they may be ready to give their attendance upon us, some at one time, and some at another as they shall agree amongst themselves; But when strangers are in place then I will that in any sort they be ready to do such service for them as the Gentleman Usher shall direct. I will further that they be daily present in the great chamber or other place of my diet about ten of the clock in the forenoon and five in the afternoon without fail for performance of my service, unless they have licence from my Steward or Gentleman Usher to the contrary, which if they exceed, I will that they make known the cause thereof to my Steward, who shall acquaint me therewithal. I will that they dine and sup at a table appointed for them, and there take place next after the Gentlemen of my Horse and Chamber, according to their seniorities in my service.22

  Given the fastidiousness of the Viscount in household matters, the haphazard way in which he hired Guy for a few days, as detailed in his letter to Dorset, seems unlikely. Perhaps there was another reason for Guy’s service at Cowdray House, and for his dismissal? The house had a reputation for taking on Catholic staff, and this may have led to Guy being highly recommended to the first Viscount as a servant for his grandson. It could be however that Guy was already too militant, too rebellious a Catholic, for a man who was as careful in his dealings as the first Viscount Montague. Something in Guy’s words or actions scared the first Viscount enough to dismiss him from his service before he could become an unhealthy influence on his grandson, but after the Viscount’s death his grandson recalled Guy to Cowdray House as quickly as possible.

  Guy learned to be subservient in his time at Cowdray House, and he learnt the art of etiquette, but it could also be where his Catholic militancy began to find its voice. We have already heard from Smith’s report that many notable Catholics visited Cowdray House, not only priests but also a new angry generation of young Catholics. It is possible that it was in this East Sussex house that Guy Fawkes first met the charism
atic and dangerous Robert Catesby.23

  With Guy, once an idea found voice, it inevitably had to be put into practice. Guy had determined that action was needed, and he was now to sail away from England’s shores and enter a world of warfare and intrigue, of espionage and betrayal, on the continent of Europe.

  Chapter 8

  Spies, Secrets and Sundry other Places

  Every ministering spy,

  That will accuse, and swear, is lord of you,

  Of me, of all, our fortunes, and our lives.

  Our looks are called to question and our words,

  How innocent soever, are made crimes;

  We shall nor shortly dare to tell our dreams,

  Or think, but ’twill be treason.

  Ben Jonson, Sejanus His Fall

  There are moments in the life of Guy Fawkes that remain a mystery to us. What, for example, was he doing during the year that elapsed between him being dismissed by the first Viscount Montague and being rehired by his grandson the second Viscount? The sale of Guy’s property and his rental income would have given him some money to live on, but where did he stay? Presumably his whereabouts must have been known to the second Viscount, or to the mysterious steward Spencer who it was claimed obtained the job for Guy.

  One possible location for Guy during these months of 1592 and 1593 was Cambridge University. This is given some credence by an answer given by Guy when he was under interrogation following his arrest in 1605. In answer to a question prepared by King James (the question being ‘where hath he lived?’), Guy’s reply was, ‘He hath lived in Yorkshire, first at school there, and then to Cambridge, and after in sundry other places’.1

  This confession is difficult to verify. Guy had not yet been subject to torture, and while he undoubtedly knew there was now no hope of his escape, he was determined to protect those who had been involved in the conspiracy with him, perhaps giving them time to make their escape or to enact a second part of their plan. He was also careful not to implicate others innocent of the plot but whom the government would have loved to see attached to it. This is why Guy’s initial answers are comprised of truths, half-truths and untruths (for example he was at this time still successfully using his alias of John Johnson, as we shall later see, and he gave his father’s name as Thomas Johnson and his mother’s as Edith Johnson, née Jackson2). Questions that seemed to Guy relatively harmless, he did answer truthfully, as for example when he confessed that he had been to school in Yorkshire. But he didn’t mention his time at Cowdray House, as he knew it would have brought danger upon his erstwhile employer Viscount Montague. This could add credence to his subsequent statement that he spent time at Cambridge.