The ceremonial role which the Powder Treason Plotters had in mind was that of titular Queen.7 The location of the King’s nubile daughter was a critical element in their plans, for her betrothal was an immediate practical possibility and her marriage could be visualised within years. The Princess was currently third in succession to the throne, following her two brothers. But from the start it seems to have been envisaged that Prince Henry would die alongside his father (he had after all been markedly in attendance at all the state ceremonies of the two-year-old reign). On the subject of the four-year-old Prince Charles, the thinking was rather more confused. This was probably due to the fact that he was a latecomer to the royal scene. This, with his notorious feebleness (he had only just learnt to walk) made it difficult to read the part he would play at the Opening of Parliament. In the end the Plotters appear to have settled for improvisation in this, as in many other details.
If the little Prince Charles went to Parliament, then he would perish there with the others. If he did not, then it was Thomas Percy who was deputed to grab him from his own separate household in London. The birth of Princess Mary on 9 April 1605 introduced another potential complication. Although fourth in the succession to the throne, following her elder sister, the new baby had in theory the great advantage of being born in England. Remembering the xenophobia of Henry VIII’s will – foreign birth had been supposed to be a bar to the succession – there seems to have been some speculation about whether the ‘English’ Princess Mary was not a preferable candidate.8
The baby was given a sumptuous public christening at Greenwich on 5 May. Her tiny form was borne aloft under a canopy carried by eight barons. Her two godmothers were Lady Arbella Stuart and Dorothy Countess of Northumberland.*9 But the talk about the baby, even the plans for the little Duke, do not seem to have had much reality, compared to the practical planning concerning the Princess Elizabeth.
In the total chaos which the ‘stroke at the root’ would inevitably bring about, the conspirators would need a viable figurehead and need him – or her – fast. No mere baby or small child would suffice. Princess Elizabeth, keeping her state in the midlands, was ideally placed for their purposes. As Catesby said, they intended to ‘proclaim her Queen’. Although a female ruler was never an especially desirable option, the memory of Queen Elizabeth, dead for a mere two years, sovereign for over forty, meant that it could scarcely be described as an unthinkable one. There was also the question of a consort, who might prove eventually to be the effective ruler: the Princess could be brought up as a Catholic in the future and married off to a Catholic bridegroom.10 (They were unaware – perhaps fortunately – that the Princess was completely unaffected by her mother’s romantic Catholicism and was already, at her young age, developing that keen Protestant piety which would mark her whole career.)
Such plans for a young girl did, however, pose the problem of an immediate overseer or governor. Once chaos had been brought about, a Protector would be needed urgently to restore order – and bring about those ‘alterations’ in religion which were the whole purpose of the violent enterprise.*11 Who was this Protector to be? The obvious answer was the Earl of Northumberland. At forty-one, he was a substantial and respected figure: the sort of man ‘who aspired, if not to reign, at least to govern’, in the words of the Venetian Ambassador.12 Northumberland was a Catholic sympathiser, and Thomas Percy, one of the chief conspirators, was both his kinsman and his employee. Compared to Northumberland, none of the overtly Catholic peers – not the outspoken Montague, not Stourton, not Mordaunt – because of their long-term depressed position as recusants, had the necessary stature. As for that untrustworthy Church Papist from the past, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, age was creeping up on him – he was sixty-five. His main Catholic activity these days was trying to persuade the King to have a splendid monument made to Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey (she was currently buried in Peterborough Cathedral in modest conditions which dissatisfied the aesthetic Earl).
It would certainly have made sense for the conspirators to reach a decision in Northumberland’s favour and, having made it, to alert him via Percy in some discreet fashion, if only to prevent his attendance at the fatal meeting of Parliament. Yet, curiously enough, the conspirators do not seem to have made any final decision on the subject. Once again there was an area of improvisation in their plans. Certainly, Northumberland’s behaviour around the crucial date in early November, which will be examined in detail in its proper place, gives no hint that he had been alerted to his glorious – or inglorious – destiny. Guy Fawkes never gave any information on the subject, presumably because he had none to give. Tom Wintour denied any knowledge of ‘a general head’.13
Father Tesimond’s explanation to Father Garnet, that the choice of the Protector was to be ‘resolved by the Lords that should be saved’, is probably the true one. And who these would be no one of course knew for certain in advance. As Father Tesimond added: ‘They left all at random.’ This was indeed the line taken by Coke at the trial: the Protector was to be chosen after the ‘blow’ had taken place from among those nobles who had been ‘reserved’ by being warned not to attend Parliament – a clever line to take, since it left open the important question of who had been warned and who had not.14 In short, the same policy was pursued as with the members of the Royal Family: they would wait and see who survived, with Northumberland as the front-runner.
Under the circumstances, there was a certain unconscious irony in an allusion to Princess Elizabeth made by King James in the spring of 1605. Increasingly he was venting his spleen on the subject of the Papists, who had been ‘on probation’ since his accession. Now he was irritated by their refusal to recognise how truly well off they were under his rule. Why could they not show their gratitude by remaining a static, passive community? John Chamberlain heard that King James had ranted away along the lines that, if his sons ever became Catholics, he would prefer the crown to pass to his daughter. In the meantime the recusancy figures were rising. As the Venetian Ambassador reported in April, the government was now beginning to use ‘vigour and severity’ against the Catholics.15
Some English Catholics were still exploring the option of ‘buying’ toleration with hefty amounts of cash, possibly obtained from Spain, and came to talk to the envoy Tassis about it. Meanwhile Pope Clement VIII, who died in the spring after a seventeen-year Papacy, went to his grave still believing in the imminent conversion of King James to Catholicism. In part this was due to the diplomatic manoeuvres of a Scottish emissary in Rome, Sir James Lindsay, whether sincere or otherwise; in part it sprang from the soulful communications of Queen Anne, which were certainly sincere but not necessarily accurate.16 From the point of view of the conspirators, however, both hopes were equally unrealistic. ‘The nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy,’ Catesby had told Tom Wintour, pointing to the need for terrorism. A year further on, plans to ‘do somewhat in England’ were at last taking practical shape.
Twenty-fifth of March, the date on which the new Plotters were admitted, was also the date on which a lease was secured on a so-called cellar, close by the house belonging to John Whynniard. This house itself, it must be emphasised, was right in the heart of the precinct of Westminster: and yet there was nothing particularly exceptional about that. The Palace of Westminster, at this date and for many years to come, was a warren of meeting-rooms, semi-private chambers, apartments – and commercial enterprises of all sorts.* The antiquity of much of the structure helped to explain its ramshackle nature. There were taverns, wine-merchants, a baker’s shop in the same block as the Whynniard lodging, booths and shops everywhere. In short, modern notions of the security due to a seat of government should not be applied to the arrangements at Westminster then.
The Whynniard house in 1605 lay at right angles to the House of Lords, parallel to a short passageway known as Parliament Place. This led on to Parliament Stairs, which gave access to the river some forty yards away. There was also a large ope
n space bordering on the Thames known as the Cotton Garden. One authority has compared the plan of the relevant buildings ‘for practical purposes’ to the letter H.17 If an H is envisaged, the House of Lords occupied the cross-bar on the upper floor, with a cellar beneath. The left-hand block consisted of the Prince’s Chamber, used as a robing-room for peers, on the same level as the House of Lords; Whynniard’s house, and the lodging of a porter, Gideon Gibbon, and his wife, lay below it. The right-hand block housed the Painted Chamber, used as a committee room, on the upper floor.
Most houses of the time had their own cellar for storing the endless amount of firewood and coals required for even the most elementary heating and cooking. The cellar belonging to Whynniard’s house was directly below the House of Lords and it seems to have been part of the great mediaeval kitchen of the ancient palace. However, this area, which was to become ‘Guy Fawkes’ cellar’, where in the popular imagination he worked like a mole in the darkness, was actually on ground level. It might, therefore, be better described as a storehouse than a cellar. Over the years it had, not surprisingly, accumulated a great deal of detritus, masonry, bits of wood and so forth, which quite apart from its location made the ‘cellar’ an ideal repository for what the conspirators had in mind. It had the air of being dirty and untidy, and therefore uninteresting and innocuous.18
Just as the cellar was really more of a storehouse, the house, on the first floor, was so small that it was really more of an apartment. Certainly two men could not sleep there at the same time. Thus while Guy Fawkes, alias John Johnson, was ensconced there, Thomas Percy used his own accommodation in the Gray’s Inn Road. A convenient door from the lodging – which, it will be remembered, was leased in the first instance to Whynniard as Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe – led directly into the House of Lords at first-floor level. This meant that it could be used on occasion as a kind of robing-room, and even for committee meetings (the shifting employment of the rooms around the Palace of Westminster for various purposes demonstrates the casual nature of the way it was run).*
Thomas Percy’s excuse for needing this ‘cellar’ – so crucially positioned – was that his wife was coming up to London to join him. Mrs Susan Whynniard appears to have put up some resistance on behalf of a previous tenant, a certain Skinner, but in the end money talked: Percy got the lease for £4, with an extra payment to Susan Whynniard. A Mrs Bright who had coals stored there was probably paid off too.19 Using the customary access from the river (with its easy crossing to Lambeth – and Catesby’s lodgings – on the opposite bank) a considerable quantity of gunpowder was now transported to the cellar over the next few months.
Guy Fawkes revealed that twenty barrels were brought in at first, and more added on 20 July to make a total of thirty-six. According to Fawkes, two other types of cask, hogsheads and firkins, were also used, with the firkins, the smallest containers, generally employed for transport. While there would be some divergence in the various other accounts of exactly how much gunpowder was transported and when – between two and ten thousand pounds has been estimated – the amount was generally agreed to be sufficient to blow up the House of Lords above the cellar sky high.*20
The gunpowder was of course vital to the whole enterprise. As Catesby and his companions lived in an age when the deaths of tyrants (and of the innocent) were observable phenomena, they were also familiar with the subject of gunpowder, and explosions caused by gunpowder. Although the government had a theoretical monopoly, it meant very little in practical terms. Gunpowder was part of the equipment of every soldier: his pay was docked to pay for it, which encouraged him to try and make the money back by selling some under cover. The same was true of the home forces – the militia and trained bands. Similarly every merchant vessel had a substantial stock. Proclamations on the part of the government forbidding the selling-off of ordnance and munitions, including gunpowder, show how common the practice was.
In any case, the Council encouraged the home production of gunpowder in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. There were now powdermills at various sites, many of which were around London, including Rotherhithe, Long Ditton in Essex, Leigh Place near Godstone, and Faversham. In 1599 powdermakers were ordered to sell to the government at a certain price, while any surplus could go to merchants elsewhere at threepence more in the pound. The diminution of warfare and the disbandment of troops in the context of the Anglo-Spanish peace meant that there was something like a glut. Access was all too easy, so that anyone with a knowledge of the system and money to spend could hope to acquire supplies. Furthermore, conditions of storage were alarmingly lax. Although powder was supposed to be kept in locked vaults, it was often to be found lying about, as official complaints to that effect also demonstrate.21
When two Justices of the Peace for Southwark had gone to search the London house of Magdalen Viscountess Montague in 1599, it was significant that they had been looking for gunpowder. They reported that it was supposed ‘to have been lately brought hither’, but although they searched ‘chamber, cellar, vaults’ diligently their efforts met with no success. (Either the gunpowder was well hidden – like the many priests this distinguished recusant habitually concealed – or the Justices were acting on false information.)22 The formula for gunpowder mixed together sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre, which by the end of the fifteenth century were, with added alcohol and water, being oven-dried and broken into small crumbs known as ‘corned-powder’. In this form gunpowder was used for the next four centuries. In many ways it was the ideal substance for explosive purposes. It was insensitive to shock, which meant that transport did not constitute a problem, but was extremely sensitive to flame.*23
The Plotters might have been original in the daring and scope of their concept, but they were certainly not original in choosing gunpowder to carry out the ‘blow’. In 1585 five hundred of the besiegers of Antwerp had been killed by the use of an explosive-packed machine, invented by one Giambelli. Then there were accelerated explosions, comparatively frequent, testifying to the lethal combustion which the material could cause. To give only one example, there was an enormous explosion on 27 April 1603 while the King was at Burghley. This took place at a powdermill at Radcliffe, near Nottingham, not many miles away. Thirteen people were slain, ‘blown in pieces’ by the gunpowder, which ‘did much hurt in divers places’.24
There was only one problem: gunpowder did, after a period of time, ‘decay’ – the word used. That is to say, its various substances separated and had to be mixed all over again. ‘Decayed’ gunpowder was useless. Or to put it another way, decayed gunpowder was quite harmless, and could be safely left in a situation where it might otherwise constitute an extraordinary threat to security.
While the logistics of the ‘blow’ were being worked out, foreign aid in the form of majestic Spanish coursers and well-trained foreign troops to supplement the slightly desperate cavalry which would be constituted by the English recusants was still the desired aim. Guy Fawkes went back to Flanders to swap being John Johnson for Guido again, where he tried to activate some kind of support in that familiar hotbed of Catholic intrigue and English espionage. About the same time, the grand old Earl of Nottingham set off for Spain to ratify the treaty. Approaching seventy, Nottingham (yet another Howard) had been married to Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin and close friend whose death had set off her own decline. However, age had not withered Nottingham, since he had quickly remarried into the new dynasty: a girl called Margaret Stewart, kinswoman of the new King. Unfortunately Guido and his colleagues did not share the same appreciation of diplomatic and dynastic realities as this great survivor.
At some point in this trip, Fawkes’ name was entered into the intelligence files of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. The King’s chief minister had of course an energetic network of spies everywhere, not only in Flanders but in Spain, Italy, Denmark and Ireland. Furthermore, Salisbury was able to build on the famous Elizabethan network of Sir Francis Walsingham. The number of ‘false’ priests
abroad – treacherous intriguers who either were or pretended to be priests – constituted a specially rich source of information, as Salisbury admitted to Sir Thomas Parry, the Ambassador in Paris. They were all too eager to ingratiate themselves with such a powerful patron. The rewards could include permission to return to England for one who actually was a priest or straightforward advancement for one who was not. In the autumn of 1605 George Southwick (described as ‘very honest’ – which perhaps from Salisbury’s point of view he was) returned to England in the company of some priests he had secretly denounced. The plan was that he should be captured with them, so as to avoid suspicion.25
After the official – and dramatic – discovery of the Plot, there would be no lack of informants to put themselves forward and claim, as did one Thomas Coe, that he had provided Salisbury with ‘the primary intelligence of these late dangerous treasons’. Not all these claims hold water: Southwick for example was still busy filing his reports about recusant misdeeds on the morning of 5 November, with a manifest ignorance of what was to come.26 The person who seems to have pointed the finger of suspicion at Guido Fawkes – and even he did not guess at the precise truth – was a spy called Captain William Turner.
Turner was not a particularly beguiling character. He was heartily disliked by the man on the spot, Sir Thomas Edmondes, Ambassador to Brussels, who considered him to be a ‘light and dissolute’ rascal, someone who would say anything to get into Salisbury’s good books. Rascal or not, Turner certainly had a wide experience of the world, having been a soldier for fourteen years, in Ireland and France as well as the Low Countries. His earliest reports on the Jesuits had been in 1598. Now he filed a report, implicating Hugh Owen (always a good name to conjure with where the English government was concerned) in a planned invasion by émigrés and Spanish, to take place in July 1605.27
The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 Page 18
