Nevertheless Francis Tresham’s new affluence – at least he had access to horses and could borrow money – meant that he could not be altogether ignored by the Plotters as a potential supporter. Besides, Robin Catesby had been accustomed to dominating his wayward cousin since their shared boyhood and he had a blithe confidence in the unchanging nature of their relationship.
Leaving Rushton in mourning Father Garnet and Anne Vaux went on to Gayhurst, the seat of their fellow pilgrim, the glamorous Sir Everard Digby. Here was a young man whom everyone adored and everyone trusted. He was only twenty-four, but had already been married to his heiress wife Mary Mulshaw (who brought with her Gayhurst) for nearly ten years. Theirs was an ideally happy match: she was ‘the best wife to me that ever man enjoyed’, he would say later, while he himself was by common repute ‘the goodliest man in the whole court’.30 His handsome face, athletic figure and height – he was over six foot tall – had indeed caught the eye of the King when he knighted Digby on 23 April 1603. Everard Digby was not politically ambitious – why should he be? He was wealthy, beloved by his wife and, being passionately interested in every kind of field sport, had quite enough to occupy his time. He had his horses (he was an expert horseman), his gun-dogs and his falcons. He was also a Catholic convert, whose life had come to be defined by his recusancy, but at this point it was the kind of religion of which Father Garnet would have approved: acquiescing in the status quo, trusting in God to bring about the conversion of England in His own good time.
Everard and Mary Digby had both been converted by Father John Gerard – but separately. It was a measure of the secrecy which obtained that for some time Mary Digby had absolutely no idea that the elegant gentleman hunting by day, playing card-games by night – who was introduced to her by a neighbour – was in fact a priest. ‘The man lives like a courtier,’ she exclaimed in astonishment when she learnt the truth, ‘he never trips in his terms.’ Then Everard Digby became seriously ill, which gave Father Gerard the opportunity to catch him too ‘in St Peter’s net’. Gerard and Digby became extremely close, ‘calling each other ‘‘brother’’ when we wrote and spoke’, and Father Gerard acted as godfather to Digby’s first son.31 Meanwhile the Digbys installed a secret chapel and sacristy at Gayhurst.
At hospitable and easy-going Gayhurst, Anne Vaux came to Father Garnet and expressed her extreme disquiet about what she had noted in the course of their recent journey. The suspicions of this shrewd and observant woman, whose life had been lived centrally in the recusant world for over twenty years, had been aroused by what she had seen. She was disturbed that there were so many fine horses being collected in the various stables of her cousins and relations. Anne Vaux, much perturbed, told Father Garnet that she ‘feared these wild heads had something in hand’. She begged him, for God’s sake, to talk to Robin Catesby.32
A little later Father Garnet felt able to reassure her. There was nothing to concern her unduly. Her cousin Robin was actually aiming to obtain a military commission under the Archduke Albert in Flanders, which in the wake of the Anglo-Spanish peace was no longer an illegal venture. Catesby even showed Anne Vaux a letter of recommendation for this enterprise written for him by Father Garnet – a document, we may believe, that Father Garnet must have penned with exquisite if unspoken relief, believing that this was the shape things were now taking. But of course this relief was quite unjustified. The risk of the destruction of the King and Royal Family, which on the other side encompassed not only the conspirators themselves, but their relatives, the Catholic community as a whole and above all their fugitive pastors, was as great as ever.
Although there is some conflict of evidence about when Guido Fawkes returned from the continent, slipping back into his personality of John Johnson, he was certainly in London again by late August, as the King went back to his hunting and the pilgrims set forth for St Winifred’s Well. At this point Fawkes and Wintour discovered that the gunpowder in the so-called cellar, which had been there for some time, had ‘decayed’ – that is, the elements had separated. So the conspirators transported more gunpowder and more firewood, as a cover and to conceal it. During the summer also John Grant seems to have installed a quantity of weaponry at Norbrook, including muskets and powder.
The rising tempo of the conspirators’ plans was further demonstrated at a secret meeting at Bath in August, at which Catesby, Percy, Tom Wintour and possibly some others were present. An important decision was taken that, ‘the company being yet but few’, Catesby should be given the authority ‘to call in whom he thought best’.33 It was a decision which was perhaps inevitable, given the wildly ambitious nature of their terrorist project, but it only increased the further risk of the plan – the risk of discovery.
* The consequences of the seal of the confessional, where a priest must not divulge what he has learnt even to save an innocent person/people, have always been seen as having great dramatic potential; of the various works in which it has been put to use, the most notable is the film I Confess (1953), with Montgomery Clift as a priest who hears the confession of a murderer and is subsequently himself accused of the crime; he cannot clear himself by breaking the seal of the confessional.
* They are literally innumerable; Owen was a genius at his work and it is likely that some of his hiding-places still remain uncharted today (discoveries were made both in the late nineteenth century and in the twentieth). It is remarkable that Father Richard Blount, who spent forty years in England (and for twenty-one years was Superior of the Jesuits) had some hiding-places whose whereabouts are still unknown (Morris, Troubles, ist, p. 192).
* These trademarks help to establish which of the surviving hiding-places in England are the work of Nicholas Owen. In addition to those named above, holes at Sawston Hall, near Cambridge (the home of the recusant Huddlestone family), Baddesley Clinton and Huddington Court are generally rated as his work; Owen was also most probably responsible for the surviving hiding-places at Coughton and Coldham Hall.
* In the late nineteenth century, the shrine and St Winifred herself inspired the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:
As sure as what is more sure, sure as that spring primroses Shall new-dapple next year, sure as tomorrow morning, Amongst come-back-again things, things with a revival, things with a recovery, Thy name…
It is pleasing to report that Hopkins’ prophecy has come true; St Winifred’s shrine, today owned by Cadw (Welsh Heritage), is still a centre of devotion and pilgrimage, maintaining its unbroken record. The shrine is open all the year round, but the ‘Well Season’ is less spartan than it was in Father Gerard’s day, lasting only from Whit Sunday, through the 22 June feast, till the end of September. There are grateful inscriptions in the chapel such as ‘TW’ for ‘Thanks Winifred’. A pilgrimage on the part of James II and his second (Catholic) wife Mary of Modena in August 1686 was believed – for better or for worse – to be responsible for the birth of their son James Edward, known to history as the ‘Old Pretender’, after fifteen childless years of marriage. (Hopkins, p. 165; Br Stephan de Kerdrel, O.P.M., Franciscan Friary, Pantasaph, and Fr D. B. Lordan, St Winefride’s, Holywell, to the author; David, passim.)
CHAPTER TEN
Dark and Doubtful Letter
The means was by a dark and doubtful letter…
SIR EDWARD COKE
1606
There was a double eclipse in the early autumn of 1605 – a lunar eclipse on 19 September followed by an eclipse of the sun in early October. Such celestial phenomena were traditionally held to ‘portend no good’. The sequence of these astronomical events with the political cataclysm of the Powder Treason was remarked on afterwards. Shakespeare probably commemorated the coincidence in King Lear* when he had Gloucester express a series of gloomy predictions as a result of the late eclipses of the sun and moon: ‘friendships fall off, brothers divide…in countries, discord; in palaces, treason…’ Second of October, the date of the solar eclipse, was just over a month before Parliament was to reassemb
le in the Palace of Westminster. But there would be not much more than three weeks before the first betrayal occurred, and friendship fell off, as brothers divided. The means by which this took place was described later – with perfect truth – as ‘a dark and doubtful letter’.1
In the early autumn, Robert Catesby recruited three more conspirators, as he had been deputed to do. At Michaelmas – 29 September – he let the young, wealthy and staunchly Catholic Ambrose Rookwood into the secret. It is sometimes suggested that Rookwood had been enlisted earlier, but this is improbable, given that Thomas Percy, as late as November, had no idea that Rookwood was part of the group.2 Rookwood had of course already supplied gunpowder the previous year, apparently for Flanders, and he may therefore have had his own suspicions about the ‘private endeavour’; similarly, his wife’s relationship to Keyes (and Keyes’ wife Christiana) left open the possibility of rumours having spread on the distaff side. This is unverifiable, but what is clear is that Rookwood immediately became an enthusiastic member of the conspiracy.
Ambrose Rookwood was in his mid-twenties, that is, considerably younger than the Plotters; already, however, he had the reputation of a brave man, one that would dare anything for ‘a cause that was good’. He was the child of staunchly Catholic parents, Robert Rookwood and his second wife Dorothea Drury (both were imprisoned as recusants). Robert Rookwood had considerable estates, including Coldham Hall, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, and Ambrose had been educated abroad, among the first of the pupils at the Jesuit school at St Omer, near Calais, which had been founded in 1593. Since it mainly attracted the children of the wealthy, St Omer was beginning to create a new kind of Catholic elite, consisting of well-educated and pious young men.
Even without this influence Ambrose Rookwood had many recusant connections. His cousin Edward was the kind of affluent Papist who was allowed to entertain Queen Elizabeth at his great house, Euston Hall, in Norfolk, but who also spent ten years in prison for his Faith. One half-sister Dorothea became a nun at St Ursula’s, Louvain – ‘the talk of the place for her holiness’ – and another, Susanna, also a nun, was one of the earliest and closest associates of Mary Ward.3
On his father’s death in 1600, Ambrose Rookwood inherited Coldham. With his wife Elizabeth, he proceeded to make the house ‘a common refuge of priests’ as it had been in his father’s day.* This devout young man had however his lighter side: his manner in public was ‘easy and cheerful’. Being handsome, but rather short, he found compensation in a taste for extravagant, showy clothes, and was generally rated a dandy – perhaps too much so for ‘his degree’, when clothes were supposed to denote rank rather than money. There was, for example, his ‘fair scarf with figures and ciphers upon it, his ‘Hungarian horseman’s coat’ entirely lined with velvet.4
But horses rather than clothes were Rookwood’s abiding passion, after his religion. And it was for his celebrated stable of horses at Coldham that Ambrose Rookwood – among the many who were under the charismatic spell of Catesby – was drawn into the net. It was necessary to have Rookwood and his horses close by the other midland conspirators. He was persuaded by Catesby to rent Clopton House, adjacent to Stratford. At Clopton, where Rookwood took up residence after Michaelmas, we know from government records later that he introduced at least two chalices, two or three crucifixes, vestments of different colours for the various feasts of the Church (including red for martyrdom and black for a Requiem Mass), Latin books and ‘praying beads’ made of bone. To conceal all this, Little John constructed a large cellar stretching under the garden, which could be reached by an underground passage.5 Ambrose Rookwood was the eleventh conspirator.
On 14 October, Catesby recruited a twelfth, Francis Tresham. The encounter took place at the home of Lord Stourton, Tresham’s brother-in-law, in Clerkenwell. Afterwards Tresham gave a highly partial account of the whole affair.6 By this time he had every reason to minimise his own participation (and guilt), not only for his own sake but for that of his wife and children.† Throughout this exculpatory confession Tresham emphasised his own belief that he had at the very least secured a ‘postponement’ of the Powder Treason until the end of the Parliamentary session when the full extent of the new anti-Papist laws would be known.
In conversation with Catesby, Tresham raised at once the moral issue of whether the conspiracy was ‘damnable’, that is, leading to their spiritual damnation. When Catesby said it was not, Tresham replied: ‘Why then, Robin… you must give me leave to censure it myself.’ With the perfect accuracy of hindsight, Tresham presented himself as having foreseen correctly the dreadful effects of the Powder Treason. If Parliament was blown up, what could the Catholics do afterwards? ‘What strength are they of, as of themselves?’ he asked, having no foreign power to back them. Even if the government were confused at first, they would quickly rally, in order to run down and kill all the Catholics in England. To this Catesby simply answered: ‘The necessity of the Catholics’ was such that ‘it must needs be done’. These last words, with their ring of authenticity, represent Catesby’s unswerving view on the subject since the spring of 1604, when he had despaired of securing that toleration, once promised by King James, by peaceful means and had called for ‘so sharp a remedy’.
Catesby pressed his cousin for two favours. First he wanted a large sum of money – two thousand pounds – and then he begged Francis to keep Rushton open. According to Francis, he carried out neither request. He was not in possession of the kind of money Catesby wanted, given the tangled state of his father’s affairs, although he did give a hundred pounds to Tom Wintour, on the understanding he was taking a ship for the Low Countries. Secondly, Francis did shut up Rushton, bringing his mother and unmarried sisters to London, which, he pointed out, he would hardly have done if he had believed he was carrying them into ‘the very mouth and fury’ of the coming action.
In short, Francis Tresham, while admitting that from the government’s point of view he was ‘guilty of concealment’, maintained that he had never in any sense been an active Plotter. Furthermore he believed he had brought Tom Wintour and even Thomas Percy to see the wisdom of postponement. Lastly, he had actually been planning to tip the wink to Sir Thomas Lake, the King’s Latin Secretary (but he planned to talk of a Puritan conspiracy in order to save his friends and relations), when events forestalled him.
It is questionable how much of all this should be believed, beyond the characteristic do-or-die attitude of Catesby, given the circumstances under which the story was told. It seems unlikely that Tresham, so clever and so close to Catesby, really thought he had secured this famous postponement, but the matter is finally unprovable. The most important point which emerges from Tresham’s narrative is his sheer unreliability. Whether he believed the Plot to be postponed or not, he was contemplating betraying his companions – among them his closest friends – to the authorities. For it was hardly likely that the assiduous Lake, who had the King’s ear for his championship of the Scots at court, would be long fooled by the prospect of a phantom Puritan rising, when emerging evidence of a real Catholic one was at hand. It was a man of this dangerous calibre that Catesby, with the reckless confidence of one who knows himself to be a natural leader, had introduced into the Powder Treason.
A week after Tresham’s meeting with Catesby – on Monday 21 October – the Feast of St Luke was celebrated at Harrowden. This was a day on which the Jesuits in England traditionally tried to gather together to renew their vows.* Everard and Mary Digby rode over from Gayhurst for the occasion, returning that night. Father Garnet went with them, and so did Anne Vaux. It was at Gayhurst on this visit, while out riding, that Robin Catesby took the opportunity to let Everard Digby in on the secret.7
Sir Everard Digby was the thirteenth and last conspirator. But, whoever was to be the Judas in their midst, it was not Digby. He was twenty-four and like the other junior member of the band, Ambrose Rookwood, was recruited for two practical reasons. Digby was wealthy, and he also had the essential horseman
ship, as well as the equally essential stable of horses.
Digby, unlike Rookwood, was never involved in the grim London end of the proceedings. On the contrary, he was asked to install himself at Coughton Court, near Alcester in Warwickshire, which he was to rent from the current head of the Throckmorton family, Thomas, who had gone abroad in 1604. This move was, in Catesby’s words, to make Digby ‘the better to be able to do good to the cause’. He was to take Coughton for a month, ‘purporting to take it longer… if his wife should like to live there’.8 Near by, Digby was to organise a meeting of gentlemen, ostensibly for a hunt, but actually armed and on horseback ready for some great deed.
What was that great deed to be? There are some grounds for thinking that Digby, unlike Francis Tresham, was for the time being left in ignorance about the heart of the treason, the plan to blow up Parliament. It makes sense that Digby should have been entrusted with the vital midlands operation to abduct the Princess Elizabeth. Not only his horsemanship but his famous chivalric presence made him an excellent and even, it could be argued, reassuring figure. It is also likely that Digby believed that this abduction was the English side of some Flanders-based project of the sort which had beguiled Catholic intriguers for so long. Furthermore, he was informed – quite wrongly – that the Jesuits had given the venture their blessing.9 So, far from being a Judas, the thirteenth conspirator may well have been at this stage an innocent, or comparatively innocent, figure in the whole affair.
The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 Page 21
