by Jones, Nigel
Meanwhile, outside the Tower, the conspiracy was not unfolding according to Catesby’s plan. Catesby and his closest companions had travelled to Holbeche House, a stronghold of Midlands Catholicism in Staffordshire. They had taken with them a cartload of extra gunpowder left over from their stock, as munitions for the planned Catholic rising. One plotter, Sir Everard Digby, told Catesby that he had around fifty men prepared to rise. Digby left to round up his little army while Catesby unwisely spread the gunpowder – soaked by the November rain – in front of a blazing fire to dry. A spark ignited the powder, and a sheet of flame badly burned some of the half-dozen plotters left with Catesby.
In despair, three plotters – Robert Wintour, Hugh Owen and Stephen Littleton – fled into the night, while Catesby, Tom Wintour, Thomas and Kit Wright, Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant and Thomas Percy grimly awaited their fate. The next morning, 8 November, the house was surrounded by a government posse led by the Sheriff of Worcester. Catesby and the others refused to surrender and were all shot dead, or were wounded and taken prisoner. These included John Grant who had been blinded in the gunpowder blast – hoist by his own petard. ‘Stand by me, Mr Tom,’ said Catesby to Wintour, ‘and we will die together.’ But it was another Tom, Percy, who died with his chief: they were killed by the same musket ball. The plot leader, in his dying moments, kissed an icon of the Virgin Mary – symbol of the faith for which he had sacrificed his own and many other lives.
Over the next days and weeks, the surviving plotters were rounded up. Only Hugh Owen managed to find his way abroad. The others were taken to the Tower along with two Jesuit priests – Fathers Garnet and Oldcorne – who had sustained them. As they were brought in, each conspirator was given the same treatment meted out to Fawkes: over three long weeks they were manacled and racked, and in between torture sessions supervised by Wade, were kept barely alive on a diet of stale bread and stinking water. Francis Tresham, suspected of betraying the plot to Lord Monteagle, died in the Tower – either from one of the diseases rampant in the fortress, or as the result of torture. Monteagle himself was awarded an annual pension of £700 for divulging his co-religionists’ plans to the authorities.
Apart from the crudity of the rack, Wade had subtler means of ferreting out the priests’ secrets. A veteran Papist hunter, Wade knew how well the Jesuits were trained in evasive answers – the technique known as ‘equivocation’ – and he adopted similar tricks. He treated the priests with relative kindness, visiting them in their cells and endeavouring to break down their defences with cosy chats. Wade confided that he was considering converting to Catholicism himself, and moved Gerard and Oldcorne into comfortable adjoining cells in which they could communicate through a hatch. The cell was fitted with the seventeenth-century equivalent of an electronic listening bug: a hole drilled through the wall by which the crafty old lieutenant overheard the priests’ whispered conversations. Realising that Wade now knew all about his involvement, Garnet confessed to having foreknowledge of the plot – but hid behind the priestly vow of silence to explain why he had not seen fit to inform the authorities of the fiery end awaiting them.
The conspirators remained astonishingly defiant despite their desperate plight. Fired by their faith, none expressed regret for their actions. Even the kindly Everard Digby said that of the hundreds of Parliamentarians whose lives they had intended to terminate he did not think there were ‘three worth saving’. In January 1606 the eight surviving core plotters – Guy Fawkes, Thomas and Robert Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant, Sir Everard Digby, Robert Keyes and Thomas Bates – went on trial in Westminster Hall, herded together in a dock designed to resemble a scaffold. King James covertly watched proceedings from a hidden vantage point. The evidence was overwhelming, the prosecution by the bloodthirsty Attorney General Sir Edward Coke terrifying, and the jury of peers – containing two Catholic lords lest the government be accused of religious discrimination – took little time in convicting, and passing the prescribed savage sentence for treason of hanging, drawing and quartering.
The eight were executed in two batches of four on successive days. Digby, Robert Wintour, John Grant and Thomas Bates were the first to die, on Thursday 30 January. Three were dragged upside down on wicker hurdles from the Tower to St Paul’s Churchyard, while Bates, the common servant, who had not been held in the Tower, was brought from the Gatehouse prison. English class distinctions held firm even in this extremity. Digby had spent his last night at the Tower writing letters of love to his wife and sons. He had also composed a farewell poem in which his undimmed faith was expressed:
Who’s that which knocks? Oh stay, my Lord, I come.
Digby was the first to mount the scaffold. Hanged and cut down alive, he was castrated and disembowelled. Then, according to Sir Francis Bacon, who witnessed the scene, as the doughty Digby’s still beating heart was plucked out of his chest, the executioner cried the traditional formula, ‘Behold the heart of a traitor!’ to which Digby, in his last moment of consciousness, managed to mouth the magnificent response, ‘Thou liest!’ Robert Wintour next went quietly to his death, followed by John Grant who, blinded by the blazing gunpowder at Holbeche House, also remained defiant to the last, insisting that what he had done had been right in the sight of God. Thomas Bates was the only plotter to express penitence. He had acted, he said, out of love and duty for his master Catesby; but now he prayed for forgiveness and mercy.
The next day, it was the turn of Tom Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes and – last but not least – Guy Fawkes. Symbolically, their deaths would take place at the Old Palace Yard, outside the Palace of Westminster – the very building that, had their plot succeeded, would have been blown apart by their powder. Tom Wintour died hard, being cut down and messily eviscerated after hanging for only a ‘swing or two of the halter’. Ambrose Rookwood had his eyes closed in prayer as his hurdle was bumped along from the Tower. He opened them on arrival at Westminster to behold the face of his lovely young wife. ‘Pray for me!’ he cried, and when she promised to do so, urging him to be of good courage, he calmly submitted to the hangman, and appeared unconscious when he was cut down and chopped up.
Robert Keyes, the third man to die, went ‘stoutly’ up the ladder, and then, once the noose was around his neck leapt into space, hoping that he would thus break his neck and be spared further torment. Sadly, the rope broke and, still alive, he was picked up and carried to the chopping block. Finally, it was Fawkes’s turn. By now, the scaffold was swimming in blood, but Guido appeared undismayed. His powerful frame broken by the rack, his arms and legs almost useless, he had to be helped up the ladder by the hangman. He cheated his tormentors by jumping off the gallows and succeeded in breaking his neck. Mercifully, the ritual disembowelling was performed on his lifeless corpse.
Father Henry Garnet, the plotters’ chief spirtual confessor, despite slippery equivocations finally went to his death in St Paul’s Churchyard too. As he left the Tower he told the man who cooked his meals there, ‘Farewell, good friend Tom: this day I will save thee a labour to provide my dinner.’ William Wade was so proud of his work in searching out the plot’s secrets that he had a plaque put up in the room in his lodgings where he had interrogated Fawkes and where it can still be seen:
To Almighty God, guardian arrester and avenger, who has punished this great and incredible conspiracy against our most merciful lord the King … [which was] moved by the treasonable hope of overthrowing the Kingdom … [by] the Jesuits of perfidious and serpent like ungodliness, with others equally insane, were suddenly, wonderfully and divinely detected, at the very moment when ruin was impending, on the fifth day of November in the year of grace 1605.
The Gunpowder Plot set back Catholicism in England for more than two centuries. It terrified loyal Protestants, convincing them that if they relaxed anti-Papist laws they would all be murdered in their beds by scheming Jesuits. Following ‘Bloody’ Mary’s burnings and the Spanish Armada, the plot entrenched a vision of Catholicism as an esse
ntially alien intrusion in the body politic. Unfairly, it made criminals out of loyal Catholics whose only crime was their faith. They would suffer because of what Wade correctly called their co-religionists’ ‘insanity’.
One such man was Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, whose father, the 8th Earl, had died so mysteriously in the Tower – by either murder or suicide – during his third bout of imprisonment as a suspected Catholic conspirator. The 9th Earl was also strongly suspected of being a crypto-Catholic, as were most members of his ancient family. Percy’s chief interest, however, lay in science and the occult – dangerously heterodox pursuits which won him the nickname ‘the Wizard Earl’. The dividing line between alchemy and chemistry, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, was still a blurred one. His great wealth allowed Percy to fund his scientific experiments, and his circle included such free spirits in the arts and sciences as the magus John Dee, playwright Christopher Marlowe, astronomer Thomas Harriot, and – of course – Walter Ralegh. Meetings of the discussion circle known as ‘the School of Night’ were reputed to have taken place at the Wizard Earl’s London home, Syon Park.
Neither Percy’s wealth and social position nor his non-dogmatic nature saved him from persection after the Gunpowder Plot. He was first cousin to Tom Percy who had died with Catesby at Holbeche House, and the earl had employed his cousin as a steward to collect rents from his estates. It was suspected that some of this cash had funded the plot, as Percy had rented the cellar where the powder had been stored. The cousins had even dined together at Syon Park on the eve of the plot’s discovery. This was more than enough to indict the earl, who was convicted in the Star Chamber court of ‘misprision’ – i.e. foreknowledge – of treason.
Though he escaped the supreme penalty, the earl’s punishment was severe enough. He was condemned to perpetual imprisonment and fined a massive £30,000 (perhaps £4 million in today’s values). He was destined to remain in the Tower for even longer than his friend Ralegh – languishing there for sixteen years. Life in the fortress, though, was not entirely uncongenial for the Wizard Earl who, mildly deaf, was of a reclusive disposition anyway.
A highly privileged prisoner, the earl took over the Martin Tower – the future home of the Crown jewels – as his private apartments-cum-library and laboratory, where he experimented, among other things, on turning stale alcohol into drinkable whisky. For relaxation he built a bowling alley. He had his own cook, and paid Wade £100 annually to keep him in the comfort to which he was accustomed. The gruff old lieutenant was further softened by presents of rubies for his daughter, given by the Wizard Earl’s wife, who, like Bess Ralegh, rented a nearby house on Tower Hill. Like his friend Ralegh, the earl turned his time in the Tower to good literary account, writing a volume in 1609 of wise advice to his son and heir, Lord Percy, who sometimes stayed with him in the Tower.
The earl and Ralegh swapped books on Machiavelli and Tasso; on warfare, astronomy, astrology and the exploration of the Americas; and held court to a stream of distinguished scholarly visitors. The arrival in the Tower of this congenial fellow spirit was welcome news for Ralegh. The two captives’ shared interest in such subjects as maths, navigation, astronomy and chemistry must have eased the passing of many weary Tower nights. Despite his huge fine, Northumberland was still rich enough to pay pensions to a trio of mathematicians – Thomas Hariot, Thomas Hughes and Walter Warner – whom he called his ‘Three Magi’; and the presence of such powerful minds made the Tower’s atmosphere at the time akin to a university college. Hariot even voluntarily took up residence in the Tower so that he could be close to his two detained patrons. From the Tower he corresponded with the great German astronomer Johannes Kepler on the properties of rainbows.
In May 1612, the death of Robert Cecil, ennobled by James as Lord Salisbury, was welcomed by Ralegh with a bitter epitaph, as he regarded the clever little crook-backed minister as a former friend who had betrayed him. But with Cecil’s death the Jacobean court plunged towards corrupt decadence; and the kingdom, without his guiding hand on the tiller, sailed ever closer to Ralegh’s old enemy Spain. Far more important than Cecil’s passing, however, was the sudden demise that autumn of Ralegh’s patron and pupil, Prince Henry.
The prince, a keen swimmer, unwisely took a dip in the Thames one hot day. The seventeenth-century river was more or less an open sewer, and Henry contracted typhoid fever from the toxic water. In the last extremity of his illness, his mother insisted – against her husband’s wishes – that a phial of Ralegh’s ‘Great Cordial’ should be brought from the Tower and administered to the prince, who was already in a coma. Ralegh’s elixir was poured between the prince’s lips and for a minute a miracle seemed to happen. The unconscious boy opened his eyes, sat up and spoke. But it was a false rally. Henry lapsed back into his coma and died on 6 November. With him perished Ralegh’s last hope of early release – and much of the spirit seemed to flicker out of the old warrior.
The deaths of Cecil and Henry left a gaping vacuum at the heart of James’s kingdom. The space was inadequately filled by the gay king’s favourite, Robert Carr. A handsome fellow Scot, whom the besotted king created Viscount Rochester, Carr was little more than a pretty face. He was a political nincompoop, utterly unable to perfom the various jobs the king bestowed on him. He depended almost entirely on his closest friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, an ambitious and intelligent young courtier who had steered Carr’s career since the young Scot had first attracted James’s attention by dramatically breaking a leg at a tournament in front of the royal box.
His curiosity aroused, James visited Carr as he recovered, and interest soon turned into besotted lust. Carr was entrusted with the sort of state business that Cecil had once handled, but, too incompetent to master it, he thrust the paperwork in Overbury’s direction. Overbury thus became, by default, the king’s chief minister at one remove, and Queen Anne summed up the situation admirably if cattily when she observed that ‘Carr ruled her husband and Overbury ruled Carr’. Such influence made the proud and arrogant Overbury many enemies.
Carr soon became the lust object of another important player. This time his admirer was not an ugly, middle-aged male, but a young, beautiful and utterly ruthless woman. Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, was yet another sprig of the infamous Howard dynasty. As a fourteen-year-old, she had been married to the thirteen-year-old son of the executed Earl of Essex, but the couple had been separated after the ceremony and young Essex had been sent on a prolonged European tour. On his return, he failed to consummate his marriage. It is unclear whose fault this was. Essex’s second wife also complained of his impotence, but he protested that he was capable of sex with other women, and even demonstrated his prowess to doubting friends by lifting his nightshirt to exhibit a powerful erection.
There is no doubt, however, about Frances’s reluctance to grant her husband his conjugal rights. She used every excuse, from illness to absence, to keep him from her bed, and when they were alone, he complained, she dampened his ardour with a stream of abuse. To extinguish any remaining desire, it was said, she employed necromancers to make waxen images of the unfortunate Essex. These effigies’ outsize genitalia would be melted, or transfixed with pins. Frances’s reluctance to copulate with her husband became desperate when, around 1610, she fell violently in lust, if not love, with the king’s catamite, Robert Carr.
At first, wishing to keep his friend happy, Thomas Overbury encouraged the dalliance. A gifted writer, among his other talents, Overbury even penned the love letters that Carr sent to Frances. When it dawned on him that the couple wanted to marry, however, Overbury reverted to violent opposition, as he could see himself losing his hold over his feeble friend, who would become a creature of the Howard clan.
The head of the Howard family at this time was Frances’s great-uncle, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. Younger brother of the 4th Duke of Norfolk executed by Elizabeth, and second son of the Earl of Surrey whose execution had been ordered on his deathbed by Henry VIII, Nort
hampton had all his life been a closet Catholic. His family’s record of treason and suspicion of his secret faith had kept him away from the power he craved throughout Elizabeth’s reign, but he had carefully cultivated contacts with James, and with the king’s accession, at last came into his own. Northampton became the kingdom’s second minister after Cecil. He was a schemer and deceiver without rival. His long years in the cold had embittered him, and he was determined to rule James via his great-niece and her empty-headed husband-to-be Carr. As Overbury stood in his way, Overbury had to go.
Overbury’s opposition to the match had hit frantic heights. He wrote a best-selling tract, The Wife, proving why Frances would be an unsuitable spouse to his friend. The former friends had a furious public row when Overbury called Frances a ‘whore’. On hearing of this, the ruthless young woman and her evil old great-uncle concocted a scheme to dispose of Overbury – permanently. It is uncertain whether the dim-witted Carr was yet privy to their murderous plans, but he was certainly ready for his friend to be consigned to the Tower for a while. The plotters needed to have Overbury off the scene when Frances applied for an annulment of her marriage to Essex on grounds of his impotency.
In April 1513, the king offered Overbury – who had been a diplomat – two foreign ambassadorships, one to distant Moscow. Overbury indignantly refused both. He was instantly, and much to his amazement, rowed off to the Tower on charges of ‘disobedience’ and lodged in the ground floor of the Bloody Tower, becoming Sir Walter Ralegh’s neighbour. Meanwhile the conspiracy to destroy him got into gear. The Howards’ first step was to procure an annulment of Frances’s marriage to Essex. Despite the doubts of the bishops who sat on a special commission to decide the issue, Frances swore blind that she was still virgo intacta. Midwives who examined the heavily veiled woman claiming to be Frances agreed – though there were strong rumours that a virginal stand-in had been substituted. While the commission deliberated, at the Tower, the second stage of the plot was initiated.
