by Nick Holland
Percy’s Catholicism should have made him ineligible for the Gentleman Pensioners as all members had to swear an oath of allegiance to the King, acknowledging that James had supremacy over religious leaders including the Pope. Knowing how strong Thomas Percy’s faith had become, Northumberland didn’t ask him to take the oath but made him a Gentleman Pensioner anyway. It was a gesture made in friendship, and it was one that would later come close to costing the Earl of Northumberland his life.2
As a Gentleman Pensioner, Thomas Percy would be expected to spend certain times of each year in proximity to Parliament, and this gave the conspirators the perfect cover to buy a property close to the House of Lords without arousing too much suspicion.
A suitable property was soon found in Westminster, owned by John Whynniard who was Yeoman of his Majesty’s Wardrobe of the Beds. Once again the rather archaic title belies the importance of this position, as it gave the holder privileged access to the King. Whynniard, however, was not living in the property himself but had sub-let it to a man named Henry Ferrers. For that reason Whynniard and Guy Fawkes were destined not to see each other until the fateful night of 4 November 1605.3
Percy opened negotiations with Ferrers, but found them more difficult than he might have expected. In his capacity as rent collector for the Earl of Northumberland he normally found it easy to make people comply with his wishes, not always by lawful means, but he was under strict orders not to use his normal negotiating style with Ferrers, as the last thing the conspirators wanted to do was to draw too much attention to themselves at these early stages of the plot.
In some ways it’s surprising that Ferrers was not more easily swayed, as he too was a Catholic recusant and the owner of Baddesley Clinton. Baddesley Clinton had been rented by Anne Vaux and her sister Eleanor between 1586 and 1591.4 The Vaux sisters dedicated their lives to helping and sheltering Catholic priests, and it was probably at their behest that the manor house had three hidden priest holes constructed within it by Nicholas Owen.
Owen was known as Little John because he was very small, and he walked with a limp as the result of a riding accident. Despite his physical frailties, he was a man of great courage and the undisputed master of the construction of complex priest holes. Owen’s hidden chambers were almost impossible to discover and they afforded their occupants vital shelter when searches were being made by the authorities. After a long career designing these holes he was captured in 1606, taken to the Tower of London and tortured to death, with his stomach bursting open and his intestines pouring out.5 He was canonised by the Catholic Church in 1970, and it is believed that many of his priest holes remain hidden and undiscovered in houses across England to this day.
The effectiveness of Owen’s priest holes at Baddesley Clinton were put to the test in 1591, when they successfully concealed nine Jesuits for four hours during a search, including Fathers Southwell and Gerard, who described the ordeal:
Outside the ruffians were bawling and yelling, but the servants held the door fast. They said the mistress of the house, a widow [Eleanor Brooksby née Vaux], was not yet up, but was coming down at once to answer them. This gave us enough time to stow ourselves and all our belongings into a very cleverly built sort of cave. At last these leopards [the searchers] were let in. They tore madly through the whole house, searched everywhere, pried with candles into the darkest corners. They took four hours over the work but fortunately they chanced on nothing. All they did was to show how dogged and spiteful they could be.6
With such excellent Catholic credentials, it seems surprising that Henry Ferrers was not more immediately compliant to Percy’s wishes, especially as Catesby, who he must have known, and Anne Vaux of White Webbs could also have pleaded their cause. Eventually negotiations for the house were finalised and Thomas Percy took possession of the property, and with it the neighbouring house belonging to a man named Gideon Gibbons. To sweeten the deal Percy gave Henry Ferrers, a man always short of money, the substantial sum of twenty pounds, or, as Ferrers says at the end of his document granting the lease to Thomas Percy, ‘And the said Thomas hath lent unto me the said Henry twenty pounds, to be allowed upon reckoning or to be re-paid again at the will of the said Thomas’.7
At last Guy Fawkes could begin the construction of the tunnel, but as soon as the ink on Percy’s lease had dried they found themselves frustrated again. King James, holding the throne of both England and Scotland, had decided to unify the two nations, and this resulted in official meetings between councillors from both sides of the border. To the dismay of the plotters, the government commandeered Whynniard’s house for this purpose. While the talks continued, plans for the tunnel would have to be put on hold indefinitely.
Guy Fawkes was a man of action, yet he now found himself facing a delay that might prove as frustrating and fruitless as that he had endured in Spain. His distress was heightened at the thought that the house they had planned to use as a base from which to destroy the persecutors of England’s Catholics was instead being used to negotiate a union with the Scottish, a people despised by Guy.
Anti-Scottish sentiment was widespread across England, but Guy’s hatred of Scotland and its inhabitants was extreme. This may have had its origins in Guy’s York roots, as the people of York still passed on tales of the city’s suffering during the Scottish siege of the city in 1297.8 Guy also saw Scotland as the seat of Puritanism, and the followers of the Scot John Calvin were among the most vigorous persecutors of Catholicism. The depth of Guy’s anti-Scottish feeling was shown in the letter he had carried to King Philip III of Spain, in which he wrote,
There is a natural hostility between the English and the Scots. There has always been one, and at present it keeps increasing. Even were there but one religion in England, nevertheless it will not be possible to reconcile these two nations, as they are, for very long.9
Even when presented before King James himself, after being arrested and with torture and death inevitably to follow, he looked the King in the eye and declared that his intention had been ‘to blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains’.10
With no likelihood of commencing work on the tunnel for some months, the conspirators dispersed to their homes around the country. It may be that Guy lodged with Thomas Percy at this time, for he had now adopted another guise – that of John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy.11
One of Guy’s great advantages compared to his fellow plotters was that he had been out of England for a decade. This meant he could go where he wanted, and do what he wanted to a certain degree, without arousing the suspicion of Robert Cecil’s spies who had a heavy, if shadowy, presence in London. People like Catesby and Jack Wright were well known for their Catholic sympathies, and for their part in the Essex rebellion, and so they remained constantly under suspicion, and were treated accordingly. It is possible that the name of Guido Fawkes was known to the London spymasters because of his career in the Spanish army and his mission to Spain, but even if his name was vaguely familiar there would be no way of linking it with his face. As John Johnson, Guy could become the unknown servant, free to bring about the destruction of those oblivious to his real background.
By October 1604 the plotters had returned to London, Catesby having discovered that the initial talks on union would soon be drawing to a close. It was now that they began to gather some of the materials they would need for their plot, primarily gunpowder and timber, which were at this point stored in the house that Catesby had rented on the south side of the Thames, across the river from the property Percy had rented.
By the time of the planned explosion, the plotters had gathered a huge amount of gunpowder – it is estimated that they had around two and a half tonnes, contained in 36 barrels, and that this was more than 25 times the amount needed to bring down the House of Lords.12 It would also have devastated the surrounding area to a radius of around 500 metres, taking in buildings as far away as Westminster Abbey. Guy Fawkes, in charge of the munitions and with a good knowledge of th
eir efficacy, could have ordered this extra gunpowder to make allowance for the effect that damp conditions could have on its effectiveness, but it could have been another sign of his contempt for those he was targeting. As he stared at the pile of barrels hidden by timber on that fateful night in November 1605 a faint smile may have crossed his lips: this indeed would blow them back to their Scottish mountains.
Some have questioned how the plotters could have obtained such large amounts of gunpowder, as it was only officially available in the south of England from George Evelyn and his family who since 1590 had held a government sanctioned monopoly.13 The increasingly peaceful situation in Europe, however, meant that the gunpowder suppliers may have been less stringent than usual about who they supplied it to, and in what quality. It is also possible that extra supplies were obtained by way of Guy Fawkes’ ongoing connection to William Stanley and Hugh Owen in Flanders.
Gathering in Lambeth, the plotters decided to take on another man whose job it would be to hold the keys to the Lambeth dwelling and look after its stock while the others were away on their preordained business. The man chosen to hold the keys was Robert Keyes, who perhaps in part due to his surname was made the sixth member of the gunpowder plot. Robert Keyes was not a wealthy man, his wife worked as governess to the children of the Catholic peer Lord Mordaunt, but he must have been known to Catesby, who assured all that Keyes was ‘a trusty honest man’.14
At last the news came that the men, and most of all Guy Fawkes, had been waiting for. On 6 December 1604 the Commission on Union between England and Scotland reached its initial agreement, freeing the house and returning it to its lawful inhabitant, the King’s Gentleman Pensioner Thomas Percy.15 Now Guy could put his expertise to good use. This was the moment he had been waiting for all his life; he would not fail now.
Less than a week after the building was vacated by the commissioners, the plotters had moved in, with Guy taking charge of the excavations. It was back-breaking work, particularly for the likes of Catesby who although strong had no experience of manual labour. The men worked long gruelling shifts, starting their work at night and subsisting on large supplies of dried and cured meats that they brought with them16 and drinking ale (a common practice when water was often unsafe to drink).
Guy was the most experienced at tunnelling, and the most suited to the work, but his supervisory role entailed directing the others rather than wielding a tool himself. His soldierly instincts also meant that he acted as a lookout, looking and listening for anything that might signify danger. With each blow from a pickaxe and each sweep of a spade, Guy could feel his dreams approaching reality.
Guy knew how to dig tunnels as quietly as possible, and may have used materials to baffle the noise of excavations; as they worked primarily at night the plotters were in constant dread of being discovered. Working after dusk was essential: if figures as notorious as Catesby and Jack Wright were seen entering the house every day and leaving it hours later dirty and fatigued, it wouldn’t take long for suspicions to grow.
The men made steady if unspectacular process, going through the laborious process of clearing space, propping it up with wood, and then passing the rubble and soil back down the tunnel to be disposed of into the Thames by moonlight. By Christmas Eve 1604 they had reached the outer wall of the Parliament House,17 but there was much more work to be done if they were to have their task completed by 7 February, the date that King James was due to open Parliament.
On the night before Christmas they received unwelcome news: in light of the threat of plague, the opening of Parliament had been prorogued, the official term for being moved back, from February to 3 October 1605. This gave them more time to finish their work, which was a relief, but it also created more months of uncertainty and time in which their plot could be discovered and foiled.
The plotters were all men of action. Once they had formulated an idea, they wanted to carry it through there and then, so the announcement of the prorogue represented a low point for them, especially as some were already suffering the physical effects of mining in a dark, dank, unhealthy environment. Oswald Tesimond commented,
It was remarkable that they should have been able to last out so long in work to which they were not accustomed and which involved such effort. So much so that in a short time they did considerably more than men would have done who were used to earning their bread by using their hands and muscles. It must be admitted that some of them became seriously unwell. These had to stop work. The rest, however, carried on.18
It was clear that the men were in need of a rest, physically and mentally, so Catesby took the decision to send them all back to their homes over the Christmas period, to reconvene at the Lambeth house in January.19
The conspirators, Catesby, Fawkes, Wintour, Percy, Wright and Keyes, were given strict instructions not to communicate with each other about the plot in any way during this time, and Father Tesimond describes how they gave themselves up to recreation: ‘some engaged in sports and pastimes, others to seasonal devotions’.20
Guy’s lodgings at this time are unknown, but as Catesby had ordered them to leave London and to keep away from each other he could have returned to York. Visiting the one place where his face could have been known, however, would bring unnecessary danger, so he may instead have stayed just outside London at the White Webbs home of Anne Vaux, a woman always ready to give refuge to Catholics and who, when interrogated after the gunpowder plot, admitted that Guy had spent time under her roof on occasion.21
Guy Fawkes was no longer a man for recreations, the boy who played Nine Men’s Morris was gone, and hunting and duelling had lost their appeal. It was a brooding Christmas for Guy, one spent largely on his knees praying for a speedy and successful resolution to the plot, and an end to the delays. There would be two more months in the mine, but at last in March 1605 it looked as if the unknown servant’s heartfelt prayers had been answered.
Chapter 16
An End to Tunnelling
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
At Candlemas in 1605,1 the six men who had sworn their oath of fidelity to the gunpowder plot gathered together once more.
In the meantime, the Christmas sojourn had given Guy Fawkes a perfect opportunity to achieve one of the aims of their plan – the death of King James.
On 28 December Guy was present at a wedding in Whitehall. This was no ordinary wedding, but that of Sir Philip Herbert to Susan de Vere. Herbert was a favourite of the King, who made him Earl of Montgomery a year after the wedding, and Susan was the daughter of Anne de Vere, the sister of the Earl of Salisbury, Sir Robert Cecil. Prince Henry, heir to the throne, led the bride to the church and King James gave her away.2
It was an occasion full of pomp, one with no expense spared. Somehow, whether by accident or design, during the gathering Guy found himself standing next to a very important guest, the King himself. Guy had his sword by his side, and in a second could have dispatched James without any difficulty, but when later questioned about his presence at the wedding, Guy stated that ‘he went with no evil intent’.3
It seems hard to believe that Guy had indeed gone with no ill intentions, and it is also surprising that he, a stranger to all present, had been allowed to gain such close access to the King while wearing a sword. It was reckless of Guy: he was sure to have been noticed by Cecil, even at the wedding of his niece. We must assume that Guy had gone there either to get a close look at the enemies he knew he was going to destroy, or that he had, on an impulse, decided to assassinate the King and then changed his mind at the last minute. Guy’s hand would have trembled upon the hilt of his blade, heart racing, before he turned round and left the wedding party. His soldierly discipline had won through at the last, there was a bigger target than merely the King alone.
Guy kept this meeting to himself when he arrived at Catesby’s Lambeth dwelling. Catesby looked into the eyes of the fi
ve men before him, assessing whether they were having doubts, whether they now regretted taking the oath that bound them in death and destruction, of themselves and others. His gaze was returned confidently by them; he had nothing to fear from his recruits.
One of the subjects discussed by the six was what to do after the explosion had taken place, and specifically how they would be able to get their hands on a member of the royal family that they could then use to further their means. At this point it was suggested that Percy, who as a Gentleman Pensioner had easy access to the palace, would enter it and snatch the 6-year-old Duke Charles (later to be King Charles I) under the guise of taking him into protective custody against any potential threat to his life.4 Others would be gathered in the Midlands near to Coombe Abbey under the pretext of a hunt, where they could take Lady Elizabeth from her protector Lord Harrington, by force if necessary.5
It was time to return to the mine, but after two weeks further digging it became clear that the stone wall they had reached was proving too difficult for them to penetrate. The solution was to move the gunpowder from the Lambeth house to the house that Percy had rented on the opposite side of the Thames.6 It was a mission fraught with danger and so was undertaken at night, using a boat to carry the barrels from one side of the river to the other. This made the logistics of the operation even harder, but it was an operation that would have to be undertaken at some point, and it meant that Robert Keyes could now be freed up to work on the mine with the others.
