The Real Guy Fawkes

by Nick Holland

  This was propaganda of the most preposterous kind, and Guy’s tortured signature is evidence that still screams out today. Hanging by the manacles was beyond the endurance of most, but Guy showed incredible fortitude. He resisted the rack too as far as he could, but it was an instrument that broke people mentally as well as physically. The prisoner’s hands were tied to one crank, and his feet to another, so that their turning stretched the body. It was not just the searing pain but the terrible snapping and popping noises that made it unbearable. It was an instrument that Waad revelled in.

  What really mattered to Waad and Cecil was that he was finally producing names, but just which names were they looking for? By the time that Cecil questioned Guy face to face, 9 November, the other conspirators were either dead or captured. Cecil, however, was looking to add other names to the list of transgressors and by doing so bring some of his most despised enemies to a kind of justice.

  On 10 November, Cecil wrote to Sir Thomas Edmondes, the ambassador in Brussels, again:

  For as much as by daily examinations [of Guy] it doth appear that there is great cause to suspect that [Hugh] Owen hath been made privy to this horrible conspiracy, I think it very expedient now for his Majesty’s service that you do inform the Archduke of it, and put him to the trial of the sincerity of his extraordinary professions towards his Majesty, by showing the horribleness of the fact and requiring at his hands whether he would not give order to make stay of the said Owen in some place of safety, until it may further appear what cause we shall have to charge him with in this action, and then to leave it to the Archduke’s own judgement upon the proofs thereof, what course he shall think fit to hold with him.6

  Cecil was being rather economical with the truth, for although Guy had admitted meeting Hugh Owen in the low countries he had not implicated him in the plot in any way. Cecil hoped by this lie to have Owen extradited to England, but he was unsuccessful.

  Guy’s deposition of 9 November is of interest for more than just its signature, as it reveals the name of another man that Cecil was hoping to implicate in the plot, one not often associated with it:

  He confesses also that there was speech amongst them to draw Sir Walter Ralegh to take part with them, being one that might stand them in good stead, as others in like sort were named.7

  Sir Walter Ralegh never shook off the suspicion of being involved in the treason and was asked about it at the 1618 trial that led to his execution.

  Guy faced many other interrogations throughout November, December and January, but his signature is surer and firmer in these other depositions, so the use of the rack must have been scaled back if not stopped altogether.

  By now the Tower of London was filling up with conspirators and those unlucky enough to have some kind of link to it. Thomas Wintour’s confession of 23 December is the most detailed account of the plot, but the signature on this document has also attracted great interest throughout the centuries. Its notoriety comes because Thomas signed it with the surname ‘Winter’ rather than ‘Wintour’,8 leading some to claim that it is a forgery, possibly created by Robert Cecil’s forger-in-chief Thomas Phelippes.9 It seems unlikely, some might say impossible, that a master forger with decades spent at his craft should make such a simple error as to copy the handwriting perfectly and yet spell the name wrong. The evidence within Wintour’s confession is also corroborated by other confessions and sources, so I have no doubt that it is genuine. The spelling of words and names was fluid in the Tudor and Stuart period, so Wintour may have used an alternate spelling on other documents unknown to us.

  Another notable confession was that given by Thomas Bates. Being of lowly birth, he hoped that he would be spared execution if he could show that his was a servile role. He may have been encouraged in this hope by Robert Cecil, as long as he was careful to provide the names that the Secretary of State wanted. In his confession of 4 December 1605, Bates implicates Father Greenway (alias Oswald Tesimond):

  He [Bates] thereupon went to confession to a priest named Greenway, and in confession told Greenway that he was to conceal a very dangerous project of work. That his master Catesby and Thomas Winter had imported unto him, and that he being fearful of it, asked the communal of Greenway, telling the said Greenway (which he was not desirous to hear) their particular intent and purpose of blowing up the Parliament house, and Greenway the priest thereto said, that he would take no notice thereof but that he the said examinate should be secret in that which his master had imported unto him, because it was for a good cause, and that he willed this examinate to tell no other priest of it. Saying moreover that it was not dangerous unto him, nor any offence to conceal it, and thereupon the said priest Greenway gave this examinate absolution. And he received the sacrament in the company of his master Robert Catesby and Thomas Winter.10

  When Bates later realised that he had been given false promises and his hopes were in vain, that he would in fact face the same fate as the others, he repented greatly of this statement, saying that his report of Greenway was false, and that he hoped the Lord would pardon him for the weakness he showed when his interrogators were offering him his life.11

  Another recantation came from Francis Tresham in a letter written just before his supposed death on 23 December 1605. It was given to his faithful servant William Vavasour, and then delivered to his wife Anne before reaching the hands of Robert Cecil in March.12 In his original deposition made the day after his arrest,13 Tresham implicated Father Henry Garnet, the head of England’s Jesuits, using the name of Walley which was one of the many aliases that he took. In the later letter however, Tresham writes,

  Now, my Lords, having bethought myself of this business (being too weak to use my own hand in writing this), which I do deliver here upon my salvation to be true as near as I can call to mind, desiring that my former confession may be called in, and that this may stand for truth. It was more than I knew that Master Walley was used herein. And to give your Lordships proof besides my oath, I had not seen him in sixteen years before, nor ever had message or letter from him, and to this purpose I desired Master Lieutenant to let me see my confession, who told me I should not unless I would enlarge it, which he did perceive I had no meaning to do.14

  This letter is problematic, as is Tresham’s arrest and death. It seems incredible that Tresham’s servant was allowed access to him in his cell, and we know that his wife Anne was allowed free access to him too, along with her maid Joan Sisor.15 It is also unique among the conspirators that Tresham’s land and property were not forfeit, in effect taken by the state, after his death, but instead passed onto his mother Muriel Tresham so that they could be later passed onto his son.16 Equally strange is that Tresham was allowed to roam free for three days after Guy had named him as a conspirator in his confession of 9 November.17 Perhaps oddest of all, however, is the manner of Tresham’s death, if indeed he did die at this time.

  Unlike the other conspirators, Tresham was not killed in action and nor was he executed, that much is for certain. The official account, given by Sir William Waad to Sir Robert Cecil, is that he died of a stranguary, a painful blockage of the bowels, in his Tower of London cell at two o’clock on the morning of 23 December.18 Some say that this death was the result of poisoning to stop him revealing too much, possibly about Cecil, but there is intriguing evidence that Tresham’s death may have been faked, and that he was allowed to leave the Tower and start a new life.

  Tresham was granted a passport by Robert Cecil on 2 November 1605,19 a time when Cecil had the Monteagle letter in his possession and would surely have suspected Tresham’s involvement in either the plot or the letter. From Tresham’s time in the Tower, we also have a strange letter from the Lieutenant, Waad, to Cecil on 15 December about Tresham’s health: ‘If he [Francis Tresham] escape it must be by great care and good providence that he may die of that kind of death he most deserveth’.20

  This could be Waad opining that if Tresham survived his illness then he deserved to be executed, but could the
re be another meaning sent from one man to another who were both well versed in the use of codes and cyphers? Was Waad actually saying that Tresham deserved to escape a traitor’s death, but they must take great care when arranging it?

  That same month Dudley Carleton wrote to Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels, saying he had seen two suspicious looking people in Calais. They were obviously English people who did not wish to be recognised and had stolen across the Channel, and, most tellingly, ‘one of them looked like Francis Tresham’.21

  If Tresham was allowed to escape, or assisted to escape, then it is surely a sign that he was an agent of Cecil’s, and that Cecil may have been rewarding Tresham for the letter he sent to Lord Monteagle in an attempt to prevent the plot from taking place. Father Francis Edwards, the gunpowder scholar, was of the belief that Tresham did escape from the Tower, and that he was then sheltered at the English embassy in Madrid, living under the assumed name of Matthew Bruninge in a seventeenth century version of a witness protection programme. There is certainly some similarity between Bruninge’s handwriting, as seen in letters to Thomas Wilson, Cecil’s secretary and veteran intelligencer, and the handwriting of Francis Tresham.22 Whether Tresham survived or not is a fascinating conundrum that may one day be solved, but what is undisputed is that he avoided the fate awaiting Guy Fawkes and others at the close of January 1606.

  The trial of Guy Fawkes took place at Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606. He was brought by boat from the Tower of London to Westminster alongside Thomas, Robert and John Wintour,23 Robert Keyes, John Grant and Sir Everard Digby. Thomas Bates was already waiting for them, his lower social position meaning that he’d been kept in the Westminster Gatehouse rather than in the Tower.24

  After waiting half an hour in the Star Chamber, Guy and his fellow accused were brought into the Hall and placed upon a raised platform so they could more easily be seen. Among those watching eagerly for a sight of the evil men that had been so talked about across London were Queen Anne and Prince Henry, who had been hours away from death two months earlier.

  This was to be a show trial, as everyone knew; there was no question of guilt or innocence. While waiting for the trial to begin, Guy and the conspirators showed incredible calm, muttering almost silently as they moved bead after bead on their rosaries. They had resigned themselves to death, they had no choice.

  Sir Edward Phelips, a lawyer and future Master of the Rolls, was the first to address the court, calling the plot, ‘Of such horror and monstrous nature, that before now, the tongue of man never delivered... nor the malice of hellish or earthly devil ever practised’.25

  As well as indicting the accused men, Phelips also stated that the Jesuit movement shared the guilt, and named Fathers Garnet, Gerard and Tesimond26 as prime movers in the plot. This was a theme continued by the next man to take the stand for the prosecution, the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke. Coke bemoaned the fact that the priests behind the plot were not yet on trial, angrily stating,

  I never yet knew a treason without a Romish priest; but in this there are many Jesuits, who are known to have dealt and passed through the whole action... So that the principal offenders are the seducing Jesuits; men that use the reverence of religion, yea, even the most sacred and blessed name of Jesus, as a mantle to cover their impiety, blasphemy, treason, and rebellion, and all manner of wickedness.27

  After the men’s confessions had been read in court the accused were asked if they accepted the charges against them. To the astonishment of the court officials, Guy, who was last to speak, denied the indictment, saying,

  We have never dealt with the Jesuits in this business. Nor did they ever persuade or urge us to undertake it. This is as false as it is true that we alone began and ended the business. So I say that all reference in the indictment to our meetings with them, and the advice and consent they gave us in this, is something entirely new. We never heard of it, and I deny it here and now as completely false. For this reason, I reject the indictment, and in no wise admit it is true!28

  Guy’s words were in vain, but he had said what he needed to say, and had remained defiant in front of those who held his life in his hands. All that remained now was for Coke to pronounce the sentence, in all its horror and inevitability:

  To be drawn to the place of execution from his prison as being not worthy any more to tread upon the face of the earth whereof he was made: also for that he hath been retrograde to nature, therefore is to be drawn backward at a horse-tail... He must be drawn with his head declining downward, and lying so near the ground as may be, being thought unfit to take the benefit of the common air. For which cause also shall he be strangled, being hanged up by the neck between Heaven and Earth, as deemed unworthy of both, or either; as likewise, that the eyes of men may behold, and their hearts condemn him. Then he is to be cut down alive, and to have his privy parts cut off and burnt before his face, as being unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any generation after him. His bowels and inlayed parts taken out and burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible treason. After, to have his head cut off, which had imagined the mischief. And lastly, his body to be quartered, and the quarters set up in some high and eminent place, to the view and detestation of men, and to become a prey for the fowls of the air.29

  Guy knew this sentence would be passed, yet terror still gripped him at the moment those dread words were said to his face. Sir Everard Digby, who was tried subsequently to the other seven accused on account of his rank, found the courage to say that he would go more cheerfully to the gallows if he heard any of the lords say they forgave him. They responded, ‘God forgive you, and we do’.30 It was a brief moment of compassion and humanity on a day of vindictive formality.

  Digby was the last to be tried and the first to be executed. He was dragged from the Tower to the courtyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral at first light on 30 January 1606. After making his final prayers, Digby was led to the scaffold. It was customary for the prisoner to be hung until half-unconscious and nearly dead before cutting them down, thus alleviating the suffering to come. Digby’s executioner however, whether acting on orders or through their own sadism, cut him down almost immediately so that he would suffer more when he came to be castrated and disembowelled. Digby banged his head when cut down, which may have stunned him a little, but it is said that when his heart was ripped out with the traditional cry of ‘behold the heart of a traitor’, he had enough life in him still to call back, ‘Thou liest!’31

  Also executed that day were Robert Wintour, John Grant, and Thomas Bates. Guy had one more sleepless night to endure, spending it in prayers for a quick and merciful end, and for the eventual success of the cause he so vehemently believed in. Guy had a much longer ride to endure on 31 January, as he was to be executed at Westminster Yard, in the shadow of the building he had hoped to destroy. A huge crowd had gathered throughout the day, a day that had already seen Thomas Wintour, Robert Keyes and Ambrose Rookwood hung, drawn and quartered to the cheers of most in the crowd (although there were also silent supporters of the Catholic cause, including priests saying prayers for the dying and dead).

  Being dragged on a wooden bracket behind a horse for two miles exacerbated the injuries Guy had received upon the rack, so that he was barely capable of standing by the time he reached the scaffold. This was the man the crowd had come to see, the devil himself, the gunpowder monster Guido Fawkes.

  It is fitting that the man who would have lit the fuse that would have changed history forever, the first of the conspirators to be arrested, was the last to be executed. His weakness was such that he had to be helped to climb the scaffold, and yet he insisted on climbing to the top rung. There he said one final prayer, and thought of his mother and father, of the sisters and others he had loved and would never see again.

  The supports were removed and within seconds there was a cracking noise. Guy’s body had been unable to support his own weight, his neck had broken and he died instantly. His last prayer had been answer
ed, Guy had escaped the torture and humiliation of being hung drawn and quartered. Nevertheless, his body was quartered after death and his head stuck on a spike on London Bridge32 so that all could see Guy Fawkes – the man who had tried to kill the King and all his government, now a feast for the crows and an object of scorn and hatred for evermore.

  Epilogue

  Guy Fawkes’ head was displayed to the elements and the public, and this fate befell others within the conspiracy too. Catesby’s death at Holbeche House did not spare him the wrath of the government: an order was sent by the Privy Council for his body to be exhumed from the grave, after which has corpse was hung, drawn and quartered. His head was placed on a pike, not on London Bridge, but atop the Parliament building itself, alongside the head of Thomas Percy.1

  Lord Harrington, the protector of the Lady Elizabeth at Coombe Abbey, would remark upon a similarity between the severed heads of Fawkes, Catesby and the other conspirators, saying they each had a mark of evil on their foreheads, and ‘more terrible countenances were never looked upon’.2 Of course there wasn’t an actual mark on their foreheads, but what Harrington referred to was the stain of Catholicism upon them.

  While much of the country celebrated the execution of Guy and his cohorts, for others it was the start of a period of terror. On 27 November, a wave of arrests saw the detention of Catholic Lords Montague, Mordaunt and Stourton, along with the arrest of the Earl of Northumberland, and his brothers Sir Allan and Sir Josceline Percy.3 Montague, Mordaunt and Stourton all fell under suspicion because they had stayed away from the opening of Parliament, and for that they were all convicted of treason, given fines ranging from £6,000 to £10,000, and imprisoned.4 Lord Montague was released quite quickly, despite his known meeting with Catesby, but Lord Stourton would not be freed until 1608, and Mordaunt died in the Fleet gaol in 1609.5