The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  King James of course expected the horse of St George to be infinitely more tractable than the wild unruly colt which was Scotland.* Yet these Scottish experiences had left an indelible impression upon him. The Spanish envoy took note that the King was a ‘timorous character’. Plague – ‘God’s devouring Angel’ as James termed it – was a further morbid fear: another silent assassin which might come at him out of a crowd.24 It was ironic that the King on the hunting field was fearless in pursuit, reckless of his own safety. His courtiers might have preferred him to lose himself less on the hunting field and cut more of a martial figure in public.

  One should not underestimate the depth of the trauma which the Bye conspiracy caused the King, for all the unrealistic nature of the plot itself. Despite the fair words King James spoke to the recusants led by Sir Thomas Tresham at Hampton Court, despite the efforts of the Jesuits and others to tamp down their explosive co-religionists, the fact remained that the first evil threats to the royal safety – and that of ‘the cubs’ – had come from the Catholics. It was an association of Catholicism with menace which a King haunted by fears for his own safety was not likely to forget.

  * Gibbon commented: ‘we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous… power of giving themselves a master.’

  † Princess Mary, born on 9 April 1605, was the first royal child actually born in England since the future Edward VI, child of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, in October 1537. Theoretically at least this English birth set her apart – favourably – from her siblings, born in Scotland.

  * Triangular Lodge is still standing, as is Lyveden ‘New Bield’ near Oundle, an unfinished shell begun in the 1590s, in the shape of a Greek cross. Rushton Hall (now an R.N.I.B. School for the Blind) preserves much of the stately atmosphere created by Sir Thomas. An aperture in the cellar leads to a hiding-place, using the drainage system of the house which lies in a direct line below what would have been the chapel on the top floor. It was discovered in 1979 by a local archaeologist: a small Sanctus bell dated 1580 and other objects consonant with recusant practice were found inside the hole.

  * One only has to remember that Essex committed a major crime in interrupting Queen Elizabeth at her toilette (on his unauthorised return from Ireland, before he rebelled) to understand the vast differences in attitude towards lèse-majesté between the two countries.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Spanish Charity

  The present case of the Catholics of England is one of charity and not of justice.

  CARDINAL DE ROJAS Y SANDOVAL

  Primate of Spain, 1603

  In mid-July 1603, Guy Fawkes set out from Flanders for Spain. It was around the time that Sir Thomas Tresham and other English Catholics presented their loyal petition to King James at Hampton Court. But Fawkes’ objective was neither loyal to King James nor was it peaceable. He intended to proceed further with the plan which had long obsessed certain Catholic activists, to prod Spain into a genuine commitment to the invasion of England. In spite of King James’ calm accession, Fawkes still managed to believe that the time was ripe.

  Guy Fawkes was now a man of thirty-three. His life is sometimes described as an enigma: but while certain details have been obscured by the thunderclouds of mythology surrounding his name, the essential facts are known. There may be ambiguous or at least puzzling characters in the large cast of the drama later called the Gunpowder Plot, for example Lord Monteagle. But Guy Fawkes is not one of them. Far from being enigmatic, he was a straightforward soldier – or you could say mercenary, since he had been enlisted in the Spanish army in the Low Countries rather than in the army of his native land.

  Fawkes’ appearance was impressive. He was a tall, powerfully built man, with thick reddish-brown hair, a flowing moustache in the tradition of the time, and a bushy reddish-brown beard. His physical courage was an important element in his make-up, and he was also steadfast. At the crisis of his life, he showed himself capable of extraordinary fortitude. He was neither weak, nor was he stupid. Although Fawkes was a man of action (hence Tesimond’s reference to his ‘considerable fame among soldiers’), he was capable of intelligent argument as well as physical endurance, somewhat to the surprise of his enemies.1

  Guy Fawkes was born in 1570, in York in a house in Stonegate which belonged to his parents, Edward Fawkes and the former Edith Jackson.2 Although the exact date of his birth is not known, it is likely to have been 13 April since he was unquestionably baptised in the nearby church of St Michael-le-Belfry three days later, and that was the customary gap.* Guy Fawkes’ family was not outwardly Catholic. Edward Fawkes was a conventional Protestant, having followed his own father’s profession of notary public, and succeeded him eventually as Registrar of the Exchequer Court. This of course meant that Edward Fawkes had sworn the Oath of Supremacy to hold office. Guy’s paternal grandmother, with whom he spent some time in early boyhood, born Ellen Harrington, came of a line of Protestant public servants: lord mayors and sheriffs. Guy Fawkes’ descent on his mother’s side was, however, different. The Jacksons were listed among the recusants of West Yorkshire, while Edith’s sister’s son (Guy’s first cousin), Richard Cowling, became a Jesuit priest.

  When Guy was eight, his father died. Two or three years later his mother remarried a recusant, Denis Bainbridge. Their life at Scotton near Knaresborough brought Guy formally into the Yorkshire Catholic orbit. Nevertheless Edith Jackson Fawkes’ second marriage suggests that she had never lost the recusant sympathies in which she had been brought up.

  The earliest strong Catholic influence upon Guy Fawkes was however exerted by St Peter’s School, York.* His schoolfellows included those taciturn swordsmen Jack and Kit Wright (the latter was Guy’s exact contemporary), as well as at least three men who became priests, Oswald Tesimond, Edward Oldcorne and Robert Middleton, put to death at Lancaster in 1601. It is evident that this outwardly conformist school was in fact something very different underneath. The previous headmaster had spent twenty years in prison for being a recusant. The current headmaster John Pulleine called himself a Protestant because otherwise he would have lost his job, but the Pulleines as a whole were notable Yorkshire recusants.

  Pulleine himself played along with the authorities, and on one occasion denounced a priest to them: further proof of his loyalty, necessary for one of recusant stock. But there were surely many other masters, less visible than the head, who contributed to the atmosphere of this ‘Little Rome’ (to adapt the term used of Magdalen Viscountess Montague’s Sussex home). At any rate, Guy Fawkes in the prime of life was known to be a devout Catholic, like Tom Wintour after his conversion, assiduous in attending the Sacraments and taking Communion. Father Tesimond made the further comment that Fawkes’ kind of ‘exemplary life’ was rare among soldiers.3

  Guy Fawkes took himself abroad in the early 1590s to serve in an army where he could exercise his talents and practise his Faith freely. Before that, he had acted for some months as a footman to the 1st Viscount Montague, Magdalen’s husband, at Cowdray in Sussex. (This was a good position for a young man in the household of a great lord, not a servile one.) Fawkes seems to have been dismissed by the venerable old peer ‘upon some dislike he had of him’. But he was subsequently reemployed by Montague’s grandson, Anthony, who succeeded as the 2nd Viscount Montague when he was eighteen. According to the young lord, this was at the suggestion of his steward, Spencer, who was kinsman to Fawkes. Spencer pleaded for Fawkes to be allowed to wait at table and Montague gave in, although by his own subsequent account he ‘scarcely thought’ about the matter.4 It may well be, however, that Montague, by inheritance one of the leaders of the Catholic community, went further. He may have actually helped Fawkes on in his army career by providing an introduction along the Catholic network, as would have been common practice. But Montague, who found his mere employment of Guy Fawkes embarrassing enough in 1605, was hardly likely to admit anything which was not already of record.

  There is anoth
er question mark over the early life of Guy Fawkes. According to one account, he married Maria Pulleine while he was still in Yorkshire and she bore him a son, Thomas Fawkes, in 1591.5 A Pulleine bride would have been plausible for Guy Fawkes, since he was already connected to the family because of his mother’s second marriage. However, not one contemporary account at the time of Guy Fawkes’ greatest fame – or infamy – refers to him as a married man, nor is there any reference to his wife or child either in England or in the Low Countries.* If the marriage did indeed take place, perhaps it was very brief, with both wife and son dying almost at once, while Guy was still in Yorkshire. Such tragedies were all too common and maybe the loss precipitated Guy’s journey, first south, then abroad. But this is to speculate. What is known is that Guy Fawkes, the successful and admired soldier, was also leading a clean life unusual for his profession. Whatever the background to his ‘exemplary’ conduct, the picture is created of a kind of soldier–monk, a man with a mission which did not include family and children.

  Guy Fawkes’ army career in the Spanish Netherlands prospered. Flanders was at that point ‘the mother of military invention’, as Tesimond described it. Fawkes was given a position and became an alferez or ensign and by the summer of 1603 was being recommended for a captaincy.6 His commander there in the service of Spain was Sir William Stanley, a veteran soldier in his mid-fifties.

  Stanley had probably always been a Catholic at heart, yet his interesting military career under Elizabeth illustrated just how difficult it was for the government to decide who was and who was not a Papist, providing the person concerned did not obtrude it. Stanley had been knighted for his services in the English cause in Ireland in 1569, and in the Low Countries served under Elizabeth’s favourite Leicester, who praised his courage at the siege of Zutphen in 1586, calling him ‘a rare captain’ and ‘worth his weight in pearl’.7 Unfortunately the very next year Leicester’s rare captain, now Governor of Deventer, surrendered his fortress to the Spanish and formally announced his change of sides (and religion). It was, in a sense, a good career move for one finding himself in the Netherlands, especially if Stanley had always held Catholic sympathies. But the English were understandably outraged. Stanley, the traitor, was high on the government’s hate list.

  Hugh Owen, another veteran, but a veteran spy rather than a soldier, also featured on this list. The ‘Welsh Intelligencer’ as he was sometimes known (he had been born in Caernarvonshire) was sixty-five at the death of Queen Elizabeth. For the last thirty years, since he fled from England, Owen had managed to have a finger in most of the conspiratorial pies in the Netherlands, his natural capacity for intrigue being greatly enhanced by his ability to communicate in Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, as well as English and, perhaps less usefully, Welsh. Owen, like Stanley, had supported the claims of the Archduchess Isabella. Whether it was Welsh antipathy or not, he had a passionate dislike of King James, whom he designated ‘this stinking King of ours’ and ‘a miserable Scot’.8 The two men, Owen and Stanley, had visited Spain together, and for a long time shared a belief in the future of Spanish military intervention as a means of solving the Catholic problem. Stanley himself had in the past been responsible for various forays against the English and Irish coasts.

  Yet vast tectonic plates were moving slowly beneath the surface of the diplomatic world. Sure enough, this invisible movement would one day produce its visible earthquake. The age-long hostilities between Protestant England and Catholic Spain would be brought to an end, and a treaty between the two countries negotiated. Already by the time of Guy Fawkes’ unofficial mission on behalf of English Catholics, sensible men, close to the councils of the great, were beginning to appreciate that the time for violent solution had passed.

  Guy Fawkes, a soldier rather than a diplomat, and certainly not close to the councils of the great, was not aware of this potential upheaval when he set out for Spain. The tectonic plates were moving, but the earthquake was still far off. It is only recent researches into the secret Spanish correspondence of the time which have revealed how doomed the Fawkes scheme was from the start. At the time the Spanish Council and Philip III continued to give amazingly friendly answers to Fawkes and his colleague Anthony Dutton, who had come from England and travelled to Spain via Flanders.9 They experienced much civility, just as Tom Wintour had a year earlier. It was not in the Spanish interest to give a yea or a nay, when elaborate courtesies would serve their purpose better and mask the changes which were occurring. However, a man in international politics who has not spotted a subtle change in direction tends to suffer an ignominious fate, or worse, as the story of Guy Fawkes shows.

  As for Dutton, from his arrival in Valladolid in May, he had already displayed himself as an incorrigible optimist (or another ardent advocate like Tom Wintour). Dutton asserted flatly that the English Catholics were ready and waiting to rebel, and that it would not even take very long to secure success. ‘With work, speed, secrecy and good weather,’ declared Dutton, ‘we will have the game in six days.’10 How far from reality all this was! This was the same period when the Catholic Moses, Sir Thomas Tresham, was in the throes of declaring his loyalty to the crown, Catholic priests were denouncing the fanatical Bye Plot and being rewarded for their loyalty, and Catholics in general were eagerly awaiting that toleration which they believed had been promised to them in Scotland by their new King.

  Fawkes’ memorandum (in his handwriting, preserved in the Spanish archives) has an even more bizarre flavour, given that in July 1603 King James had been over two months happily resident in England and had recently remitted recusant fines. Fawkes wrote that the King’s claims to inherit were scorned all over England as illegitimate. Then James was repeatedly described as ‘a heretic’, one who intended ‘in a short time to have all of the Papist sect driven out of England’. His table-talk was said to be equally crude: ‘Many have heard him say at table that the Pope is Anti-Christ which he wished to prove to anyone who believed the opposite.’ Any overtures to Spain for peace, Fawkes declared, were to be treated as royal subterfuges of the basest sort. The King’s true intention was to enrich himself with the property of Catholics and, once grown powerful as a result, join with other Protestants ‘to wage war on the rest of the Christian princes’ who were not heretics.11

  So far, so passionate and, given King James’ genuine desire for international peace, so wrong-headed. But there is another aspect to the memorandum and this is its fierce anti-Scottish bias. Fawkes concluded the memorandum with this prophecy: ‘There is a natural hostility between the English and the Scots. There has always been one, and at present it keeps increasing [due to grievances felt by the English against the King’s advancement of his Scottish favourites]. Even were there but one religion in England,’ went on Guy Fawkes, ‘nevertheless it will not be possible to reconcile these two nations, as they are, for very long.’

  It has to be said, however, that Guy Fawkes’ raging against the all-pervasive Scots was the one aspect of his memorandum which would have commended itself to the majority of his fellow Englishmen. It certainly gave notice of a new, potentially rebellious feeling among the English: deep resentment at being passed over in favour of the greedy new men from the north.

  Although the Spanish Council did solemnly debate the propositions of Dutton and Guy Fawkes, a percipient point was made in the course of the discussion by the Duke of Olivares, the King’s chief minister. ‘Any increase in men to a Catholic faction is composed of the malcontents,’ he remarked.12 And the debate was not ultimately favourable to the Englishmen’s cause.

  In the meantime Father Cresswell, Superior of the English College, who a year previously had been encouraging action, along with Tom Wintour, had now changed his tack. He begged the Council to send Dutton and Guy Fawkes away, on the ground that they were endangering the negotiation of a diplomatic peace. In Rome, the Pope was equally resolute in asserting that ‘the way of arms’, in the phrase of Philip III, would simply result in the destruction of those
English Catholics that remained.13

  The only real memento that Guy Fawkes took away from this unpromising mission was a change of name: henceforth he would be known universally as Guido, the name he also used for his official signature. It was a name which might be said by his enemies to make his foreign allegiances clear. But that was not how Guido Fawkes saw the matter. In his eyes, he was both a sincere Catholic and a patriotic Englishman, an Englishman abroad but with the true interests of his country at heart.

  From the point of view of English Catholic liberty of conscience, one crucial journey did take place in the summer of 1603: not the expedition of that amateur diplomat and adventurer Guy – now Guido – Fawkes, but the important mission of Don Juan de Tassis, from Spain to England. (The fact that Tassis could set out, travelling via Brussels, while the Spanish Council had still not officially ruled out providing armed support is characteristic of the ambiguity with which they operated.) Tassis’ brief was to pave the way for an Anglo-Spanish treaty and in so doing explore the whole matter of liberty of conscience for English Catholics.14

  For example, should toleration be a precondition of any treaty? Should the Spanish King hold out for it at all costs? In any case, what was the nature of the English Catholic community? Strong, armed, rebellious? Or crushed, weak and disorganised? There had been many wild reports recently from visitors, including Wintour and Fawkes, and Tassis was going to test the truth of these claims.

  A peaceful tide was flowing across Europe and King James was by temperament the right man to go with it. Guido’s denunciation of him as a militant was extremely wide of the mark. It was the personal motto in which King James would take pride, Beati Pacifici (Blessed are the Peacemakers), which expressed the truth. Although Spain and England were still technically at war, the immediate Anglo-Spanish ceasefire which James had ordered on his accession provided the diplomatic excuse for Tassis’ journey. It was now a matter of protocol that Spanish royal congratulations should be conveyed to James on his accession. Meanwhile the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella were so enamoured of the possibilities of the new reign that they despatched their own welcoming envoy without consulting Spain, the mother country. The new King’s friendship was precious, Isabella had written in April, ‘as a chance of peace’.15