by Nick Holland
To this end, at the same time that Guy and Kit were in Spain, Philip III had already sent Juan de Tassis, the man who had taken Deventer from the surrendering Stanley six years earlier, to England. His mission was to act as his ambassador and to ascertain the true state of Catholics there, while also encouraging King James to make peace with Spain.15 De Tassis’ view was that English Catholics would be reluctant to take up arms against the kings, further damaging any hopes that Guy Fawkes, Wright and others had of persuading Spain to launch another Armada.
Guy’s efforts at diplomacy had foundered before he even reached Spain. Once again King Philip III pledged that he would provide the funds he’d mentioned on the earlier visit by Thomas Wintour, but the talks between Guy and Kit Wright and the Spanish court went on, and on, almost interminably. They had reached the point that Stanley had in earlier years, becoming irritants, but at the same time they were deemed too dangerous to let go.
While Guy and Kit were ostensibly still guests of the Spanish court in Valladolid and were allowed to travel unhindered in their immediate surroundings, they were, in effect, prisoners. Father Creswell, now favouring the Pope’s plans for peace rather than war, was concerned that the two Yorkshire men would launch some kind of assault against King James if they were allowed to return to England, and that this would damage the overtures of peace being made by Juan de Tassis. For this reason he encouraged the Spanish court to keep the men safely in Spain for the time being.
Making unheeded pleas and yet regarded as a threat to plans for peace, and without a passport that would allow him to leave Spain, this must have been a most frustrating time for Guy Fawkes. He had become a man of action, but was now forced into inertia. The months passed by, the hot humid summer turned to a chill winter, and still there was no sign of any of his demands being met, nor of him being allowed to return to England or to the men in Flanders who had sent him on his mission.
At last, around March 1604, Guy Fawkes and Kit Wright were given passports and allowed to leave. Creswell and prominent members of the court had become tired of them, and with formal peace talks now opened between Spain and England, it was thought safe to allow their travel.
Guy Fawkes had been in Spain for eight months, and events in the outside world had moved on apace in that time. The peace talks between England and Spain had made rapid progress, and on 18 August 1604 the Treaty of London was signed at Somerset House.16 This brought to an end nineteen official years of the Anglo-Spanish war, a conflict that in reality had been raging since the death of Queen Mary decades earlier.
While Guy and Kit had been kept under virtual arrest for fear that they would launch a plot, two actual plots had already been attempted, and foiled, during their time in Spain. They were known as the Bye Plot and the Main Plot, as it was suspected that the same masterminds may have been behind both attempts on King James’s life.
The Bye Plot was a plan to kidnap King James and force him to repeal anti-Catholic legislation. The plotters also wanted some anti-Catholic courtiers to be removed, notably Sir Robert Cecil. Unfortunately for them, and predictably, Cecil already knew of the plot before it had a chance to be enacted. Catholic priests William Watson and William Clarke were executed,17 and Sir Walter Ralegh, thought to be involved with both the Bye and Main Plots, was imprisoned in the Tower of London.18
The Main Plot of July 1603 was thought to be the work of Ralegh and Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, and its aim was to assassinate King James and replace him with his Catholic cousin Lady Arbella Stuart.19 It was uncovered during investigations into the Bye Plot, and saw Cobham take his place alongside Ralegh in the Tower,20 although he was released shortly before his death in 1618.
Within months of King James coming to the English throne, two attempts had been made against him: one that would have seen him killed. The more peace-minded Catholics were appalled, correctly foreseeing that James would use this as an excuse to turn against England’s Catholic population. Initially however, James praised the Catholics who had helped to foil the plot, notably the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet who had informed the Privy Council of the Bye Plot when it came to his attention.21 This toleration was not to last. With memories of his father’s fate always in his mind, along with the numerous plots which had involved his Catholic mother Mary, King James desired to do just what Guy Fawkes had predicted – to ‘drive the Papist sect out of England’.
Catholic plots had already ruined any goodwill James had towards the faith, and the peace with Spain meant there was no longer any hope of foreign action against the English king. It was a perfect storm for those Catholics who were already burning with anger and frustration. Kit Wright returned to England, Guy Fawkes was once more in Flanders – but they would soon be reunited, and the storm would reach its violent climax under the thunderous direction of Robert Catesby.
Chapter 12
A Gentleman of Good Family
Ambition, like a torrent, ne’er looks back;
And is a swelling, and the last affection
A high mind can put off; being both a rebel
Unto the soul and reason, and enforceth
All laws, all conscience, treads upon religion,
and offereth violence to nature’s self.
Ben Jonson, Catiline His Conspiracy1
Guy Fawkes’ role in the gunpowder plot is frequently misunderstood in one of two ways: his role is often downplayed, so that he becomes little more than the muscles of the operation, at the periphery of its planning – he was more than this; alternatively, some people think of him as the leader of the plot, but while he is certainly the most famous, or infamous, plotter, that position was held by Robert Catesby. Catesby was a complicated man, and a charismatic leader who could make people bend to his will. It was Robert Catesby who would seal Guy’s fate, and who in 1605 came close to destroying the whole ruling class of England.
Catesby was known as Robin to his friends, of which he had many. He shared many traits in common with the other gunpowder conspirators of 1605, including friendly or familial bonds with the majority of them. He was of a similar age to most of the plotters, including Guy Fawkes, having been born in around 1572. Also, like many of the plotters including Guy Fawkes and Thomas Percy, his faith and Catholic militancy seems to have developed later in his life, as we can see by his marriage to a Protestant woman, Catherine Leigh, in 1593.
If the young Robert was a pragmatist when it came to religion, the same couldn’t be said of his parents who hailed from two of the most notable Catholic and recusant families in the north of England – the Catesbys and the Throckmortons.
Another trait that Robert Catesby shared with many of the plotters was that he was from a solidly upper middle class family, one which owned a number of properties and manor houses, and yet they were one step down from the nobility. This is one of the factors that fed their sense of injustice, as although they freely mixed with lords and ladies, and even royalty itself, they felt themselves cut off from the ruling classes, and unable to make a peaceful contribution to the governance of England.
The Catesby family had risen rapidly from relatively humble beginnings, and yet perhaps not so humble as the Tudor kings and queens who traced their lineage back to the chamber servant Owen Tudor.2 The family were of Norman descent and took their name from their dwelling in Catesby, Northamptonshire. It was in this area that they built their ancestral home of Ashby St. Ledgers. Their rapid ascent began in the reign of the controversial King Richard III, when William Catesby became one of his most trusted advisors, acquiring land, wealth and a knighthood as a result.3
Sir William Catesby was commonly believed to be one of the powers behind Richard’s throne, as shown when the Tudor supporter William Collingbourne nailed a poem to the walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral in July 1484, beginning, ‘The cat, the rat and Lovell our dog ruleth all England under a hog’.4
Sir William fought alongside Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the bloody climax of the Wars of the Roses. He was captu
red and executed in August 1485,5 and was later immortalised as a character in Shakespeare’s play about the last Yorkist King. Sir William had chosen the wrong side and paid with his life – a trait that seemed to pass through the male line of the Catesby family tree.
Despite the execution of Sir William, the Catesby family could have been expected to continue advancing were it not for the English reformation. Robert Catesby’s father, another Sir William Catesby, would not make the required transition to Protestantism, and would not even make an effort to hide his Catholicism. This was the start of the downfall of the Catesby family that his son Robert would take to its nadir.
Robert was the third and only surviving son of Sir William and Anne Catesby. It is likely that he was born at Lapworth Hall in Warwickshire, as this had been the main residence of the family for the previous two centuries. He also spent time at Ashby St. Ledgers during his childhood, and at the beautiful Chastleton House in Oxfordshire, owned by his maternal grandmother.
While the family’s Catholicism may have been disastrous to any hopes of courtly advancement, it did little to prevent their success in Midland society. Many of the landowners and gentry of the area were also Catholic,6 making it one of the leading centres of Catholic resistance in the country, along with Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the north east.
Robert Catesby’s childhood was presumably a happy one; he was brought up in a wealthy family and wanted for little. From what we know of him in later life, it is probable that he excelled at school, as he was certainly a fluent and persuasive speaker. In his recollections on the gunpowder plot, Father Oswald Tesimond gave a glowing account of him:
Mr Robert Catesby was a gentleman of good family, indeed, of a house ancient and illustrious, rich and influential. He was some thirty-four years old at the time of the plot,7 and was loved and esteemed not only by Catholics but by the very Protestants for his many unusual qualities both physical and mental. This gentleman it was who decided after much reflection to gather together all the enemies of the Catholic religion in England and get rid of them in one single blow.8
As would have been expected of him, Catesby made his way to university in his mid-teens, becoming a scholar at Gloucester Hall College, Oxford, in 1586. The influence of his parents was still strong upon him at this point, as he left before graduating to avoid swearing an oath of allegiance that gave precedence to Queen Elizabeth over the Pope. This would have pleased Sir William and Anne, and it was hardly an unusual action at Gloucester Hall which had gained a reputation as the Oxford College of choice for Catholics,9 and where many students chose not to graduate.
It is believed that Catesby then made a journey to the continent, and spent some time at the Catholic seminary at Douai,10 but his next move after returning to England appalled his parents, when in 1593 he married Catherine Leigh. Catherine was the daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh of nearby Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, and a child of a prominent Protestant family. Catherine’s grandfather, another Sir Thomas Leigh, had served as Lord Mayor of London and had led Queen Elizabeth’s coronation procession (incidentally, Sir Thomas had a more famous descendant five generations later, the writer Jane Austen, who was a visitor to Stoneleigh Abbey).
Robert and Catherine’s betrothal must have been a love marriage, as the two sets of parents were diametrically opposed on matters of religion, which was the burning issue of the day. Perhaps Robert Catesby persuaded his in-laws that he had seen the error of his ways, and that he had become a loyal Protestant. He may also have promised to bring up his children as Protestants; if so, he initially stuck to this vow, as we can see from the baptism record of Robert and Catherine’s son, also called Robert Catesby, at the Protestant church of Chastleton on 11 November 1595.11
Catesby had inherited Chastleton House upon the death of his grandmother in 1594, and he and his wife made their home there. His early days at Chastleton were spent as a church papist, hiding his real faith and thus avoiding recusancy fines. Despite his fidelity to Catholicism it was an easy decision to understand – after all, Robert had enough examples in his own family of what could happen if you stepped too visibly out of line.12
His father, Sir William, was a bold man who refused to be bowed, and he was also a man who became ever poorer thanks to the recusancy fines levied upon him. The low point for Sir William came when he was caught harbouring the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion, and this landed both he and his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham, alongside William Vaux of Harrowden, in the Star Chamber in 1581. The Star Chamber was the Westminster court of law used to try prominent members of the gentry and the nobility, and a terrifying place for Catesby to find himself. The three accused were lucky to escape with their lives, although they all spent extended periods in prison throughout the rest of their lives. A worse fate was to befall his mother’s relative Sir Francis Throckmorton: in 1584 he was convicted of being behind a plot (one of the many plots) to free Mary Queen of Scots and place her on the throne, and for this he was tortured on the rack and then hung, drawn and quartered.13
Catesby was, to all intents and purposes, a good and loyal English subject in his first years at Chastleton House – one who fitted in, and who didn’t cause trouble. He had seen how Catholicism could make its followers poor, or leave them languishing in prison or sent to a gruesome execution, and had taken a more conciliatory route by marrying into a Protestant family and baptising his son into England’s new faith. The marriage to Catherine also brought Robert an instant financial advantage, as he gained a substantial dowry of £2,000 from her parents.14 As a Protestant, or at least one who was hiding his Catholicism, he could have expected a promising future, so what went wrong?
In one of the many strange coincidences linking the gunpowder conspirators, it seems that the same events that led to Guy Fawkes’ adoption of a more militant Catholicism were also behind Robert Catesby’s radicalisation: namely the loss of the woman he loved, and at the same time the opportunity that was presented by coming into his father’s inheritance.
Sir William Catesby and his daughter-in-law Catherine Catesby, née Leigh, both died in 1598, sweeping away the two main influences in Robert’s life within the space of a few months. It was a time for reflection, as similar events had been for Guy Fawkes, and a time for renewal. Sir William had stood up for what he believed in, and had been unflinching in the face of punishment. Comparing himself to his deceased father, Robert saw himself as an embarrassment to the legacy he had inherited – he had become an appeaser rather than a man of action, self-serving rather than faithful to his own beliefs. Now, with his Protestant wife dead, he could put away his Protestant mask.
The change in Catesby was dramatic, as he not only embraced his Catholicism once more, but determined to become what his father had been – one of the leaders of England’s Catholic cause. There is evidence, however, that Robert had begun this journey back to his old faith even before the deaths of his father and wife. In 1597, the Jesuit priest Father John Gerard made an audacious escape from the Tower of London by inching along a rope that had been thrown from a boat in the River Thames.15
This made Gerard one of the most wanted men in England, and one of the homes that he found refuge in after his escape was Morecrofts in Uxbridge, one of the residences of Robert Catesby.16 The fugitive priest remained there until he regained his strength and resumed his ministry. Already hiding at Morecrofts in 1597 was Father Garnet who had made his way there after entering the country, although he would soon find a more permanent home in White Webbs near Enfield, the property of devout Catholic Anne Vaux.17
Catesby’s militant Catholicism grew stronger and stronger after the deaths of 1598, and he became well known among those of his faith for harbouring priests, among them Oswald Tesimond of York, who under the alias of Father Greenway became Catesby’s confessor. Catesby’s inheritance gave him an annual income of approximately £3,000,18 a vast fortune, and he used this to further the cause of Catholicism – as if in penance for his days as a church papist. Con
verting others to Catholicism became his only joy in life. Father Tesimond gives the following account of Catesby, and his activities, at this time:
Physically, Catesby was more than ordinarily well-proportioned, some six feet tall, of good carriage and handsome countenance. He was grave in manner, but attractively so. He was also considered one of the most dashing and courageous horsemen in the country. Generous and affable, he was for that reason much loved by everyone. Catesby was much devoted of his religion, as one would expect of a man who made his communion every Sunday. Indeed, his zeal was so great that in his own opinion he was wasting time when he was not doing something to bring about the conversion of the country... In fact it became almost a proverb that Robert Catesby could be seen nowhere without his priest. He seemed to have much more success in converting Protestants than many of the priests now to be found in England.19
A further example of Catesby’s new way of life came in 1601, and it almost cost him his life. Already with a reputation as a fearless man of action among the Catholic community, it was inevitable that he should become embroiled in the Essex rebellion of 1601 that led to the downfall of Queen Elizabeth’s former favourite. Catesby may not have been involved in the planning of the plot, on this occasion, but he did march fully armed into London and was wounded in the fighting. He was arrested and imprisoned, and among those arrested with him were Jack and Kit Wright, Thomas Percy, Francis Tresham, Thomas Wintour and John Grant.20 They all endured periods in prison, in the Fleet in Catesby’s case, and were only released when large fines were paid.
Robert Catesby had to sell Chastleton House to pay his fine of £3,000,21 after which he moved into his widowed mother’s home at Ashby St. Ledgers. The wounding and imprisonment did Catesby’s reputation no harm, and his charisma and piety soon earned him the love and respect of those who had been caught up in the Essex rebellion alongside him, and who would shortly join with him, Guy Fawkes and others in an even deadlier plot. With family ties already binding the men, Catesby created a further bond by betrothing his son to the daughter of Thomas Percy at the age of 8: an agreement that they would marry when they were legally able to. This also created a bond with the Wright brothers, as the mother of Percy’s daughter was their sister Martha.22
