The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  What Father Garnet did next made perfect sense under the Catholic rules. Immediately he wrote to his own general, Aquaviva, in Rome. He said that he had prevented violence or ‘serious trouble’ breaking out on four separate occasions already, but that he remained perturbed on two counts. First, that those ‘in another country’ might ‘fly to arms’ which could cause others in England to join them in open rebellion. Secondly, and much more seriously, he wrote: ‘there is a risk that some private endeavour may commit treason or use force against the King’. In this way all the Catholics might be obliged to join them in the fighting, to the ruin of the community. Yet again Father Garnet urged that the new Pope, Paul V, elected on 29 May, himself might issue a public brief against the use of ‘armed force’. In order not to mention his own heavy burden of knowledge, Father Garnet carefully suggested that the pretext for the Pope’s action could be the recent troubles among the recusants in Wales who formed a notoriously turbulent community.8 But Garnet did not leave his ‘hindering’ of the treason at that. He also asked the English Catholic emissary to Rome, Sir Edmund Baynham, to emphasise the need for the papal declaration. The government later delivered a two-pronged attack on the Baynham mission.9 It was made out that Garnet had deliberately despatched Sir Edmund too late to produce any effective restraint. A picturesque sporting analogy was used: Garnet was like a thief going to steal partridges with the aid of a dog, who takes care that his animal (Baynham) does not go too near the birds too soon, before the net is fully over them, ‘for fear the game should be sprung and the purpose defeated’. By contrast, it was also suggested that Baynham had been sent in order to justify the plot in advance, an absolutely contradictory thesis.

  The real truth about Baynham seems to have been somewhat different. He was a wild young man, who had been imprisoned around the time of the Essex Rising for some outspoken speeches against the King of Scots. He had then had some peripheral involvement in the Bye Plot. But he was a master of languages, with the unusual accomplishment of being able to pass as a Frenchman or an Italian, and his mission across the whole of Europe – remembering the perils of travel at this period – would therefore attract less attention.10

  On 28 July Parliament was prorogued by proclamation yet again. It would not now meet on 3 October as had been intended for the last six months, because it had been decided that ‘some dregs of the late contagion’ (the plague) still lingered in the capital. Since people were accustomed to return to London around All Hallows – 1 November – the new date chosen, which was in fact the third projected date, was Tuesday 5 November.11

  In the course of the next fourteen weeks, Father Henry Garnet allowed himself to be lulled into a sense of false security. Everything was in abeyance until the results of the Baynham mission were known. The nightmare scenario was not going to take place. But in the popular imagination, forever after, Father Garnet’s activities at this point were as presented in a well-known rhyme, Mischeefes Mysterie… The Powder Plot:

  Yes, impious Garnet for the traitors prayed

  Pricked and pushed forward those he might have stayed

  Being accessory to this damned intent

  Which with one word this Jesuit might prevent.12

  There was a deceptive placidity about English life in the high summer of 1605. This outward normalcy existed at many different levels. The King busied himself with his hunting. He was quite convinced that the prolonged violent exercise (away from London) was essential to the royal health. Since this was in fact ‘the health and welfare of us all’, as he had pointed out to his Council in January, he asked his Councillors to take charge of ‘the burden of affairs’ and see that he was neither interrupted nor troubled with too much business.13 It was an insouciant request which meant, of course, that his Councillors, led by Salisbury, now had the freedom to decide what was or was not sufficiently important to trouble their master. And there was another kind of freedom. His absence from the centre of affairs gave them freedom to plot and plan without royal interference.

  The anniversary of the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600 against King James, so miraculously foiled, was once again celebrated with a solemn thanksgiving on Tuesday 5 August. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Bancroft (formerly Bishop of London), seized the opportunity to preach an extremely anti-Papist sermon at St Paul’s Cross in the course of which he quoted the King. So resolute, he said, was King James to sustain the Protestant religion that he was quite prepared to pour out the last drop of blood in his body.14 Obviously, there was no perceived contradiction between this kind of bold statement and the fact that King James, on his sporting tour, continued to stay with prominent Papists, as and when convenient. James even spent the night at Harrowden Hall, where he was entertained not only by Eliza Vaux, but also by that aspiring bridegroom, the young Lord Vaux, whose match to the lovely Elizabeth Howard was still hanging fire for religious reasons.

  On 27 August, King James, Queen Anne and Prince Henry arrived in Oxford for a three-day visit. King and Queen lodged together at Christ Church and the eleven-and-a-half-year-old Prince at Magdalen College. Elaborate preparations on behalf of the University had also included instructions to the undergraduates to behave themselves and dress decently. Streets were swept, much new paint was applied. Varying intellectual pleasures were on offer. As for Queen Anne, she was impressed when an official of the University made a speech in front of her at the city centre in ancient Greek, a language which, as the Queen said, ‘she had never before heard’.15

  The King for his part enjoyed a Latin entertainment by Matthew Gwinn, entitled Tres Sybillae. Two aspects of it gave him special pleasure. First, the sybils’ prophecies made flattering allusions to his Scottish ancestry: his royal descent in a line of kings from a certain Banquo was praised while a certain Macbeth was described in contrast as having no descendants. Secondly, the Gwinn play was short. William Shakespeare, in Oxford at this time, had the opportunity to take note of both things in the development of his own play on the historical theme of Macbeth. At the Bodleian Library, King James observed genially: ‘Were I not a King, I would be a University-man.’16 Immediately after this, however, despite the lure of academe, King James went back to his hunting again.

  At another, much less public level, Papist life also continued, revolving, so far as was possible, with the year’s religious cycle, just as it had done in happier times gone by. The Feast of St Bartholomew on 24 August found Father Garnet at White Webbs, near Enfield, with the Catholics to whom he was closest – Anne Vaux, her sister Eleanor Brooksby, her nephew William Brooksby and his wife Dorothy. The decision was reached to take a great pilgrimage through the midlands to the shrine of St Winifred, at Holywell on the north coast of Wales.

  Convinced that ‘as far as we can ascertain, the Catholics live quietly at peace’ – at least until the return of the Baynham mission – Father Garnet announced his intention to depart for the pilgrimage, accompanied by his loyal supporters, on 28 August.17 On 30 August, the day that King James left behind the cheers of Oxford, these pilgrims also set forth. It was a journey which took them across the whole recusant arc from Enfield in the east, just north of London, via John Grant’s house at Norbrook near Stratford, Huddington Court near Worcester, a tavern at Shrewsbury and finally into Wales itself.

  Afterwards Sir Edward Coke made great play with the fact that this pilgrimage was a cover-up for more serious matters. ‘By colour thereof’, Father Garnet intended to call a conference of the conspirators.18 In fact, if the pilgrimage had a specific individual purpose, it is more likely to have been the cure of Anne Vaux, who, now in her forties, was persistently troubled with some kind of female disorder. Apart from that, the recusants in England had plenty to pray for, given the deepening severity of their persecution. As for Father Garnet himself, he may have wished to keep an eye on his restive midland flock along the way, but he would scarcely have ventured as far as remote Holywell if he had had any idea that the dreaded ‘private endeavour’ continued to develop for all his
prohibitions. In retrospect, the pilgrimage to St Winifred’s shrine appears as an elegy for a certain kind of old Catholic England, where spiritual people, however sorely tried, really did live ‘quietly at peace’.

  Around thirty people made the pilgrimage, and then, as ever, there were the servants. Eliza Vaux joined her relations, bringing with her two priests, habitués at Harrowden, Father Gerard and Father John Percy. The latter, like Gerard, had been captured and tortured (in Bridewell prison), but like Gerard had also managed to escape. Father Tesimond came and the lay brother who attended him, Ralph Ashley. Then there was a young pair, Sir Everard Digby and his wife Mary, who came from Gayhurst in Buckinghamshire. They brought with them their secret chaplain, the Jesuit Father Edward Oldcorne.

  This son of a Yorkshire bricklayer (with a devout mother who had been imprisoned for her faith) had been educated at St Peter’s, York, like Guy Fawkes, the Wright brothers, and also Father Tesimond. In school terms, however, Father Oldcorne was more of an age with his fellow priest: Tesimond and Oldcorne were in their early forties, while the conspirators were on average five years younger. Father Oldcorne had studied medicine before he went abroad; but he had become so strict a punisher of his own health through penances such as scourging that he had, according to Father Gerard, developed cancer of the tongue. Since he was a talented preacher, this constituted a special penance in itself. But Father Oldcorne had been cured by a visit to the shrine of St Winifred four years earlier. His own participation in the pilgrimage was in the nature of a thanksgiving.

  One lowly figure in Father Garnet’s entourage, a little man with a limp, would not have attracted much attention. Nor for that matter would he have attracted much sympathy: this was a time when a ‘crooked’ body was often believed to denote a similarly twisted nature. Yet the great soul and measureless courage of Nicholas Owen would provide in themselves, if such a thing was needed, the strongest possible refutation of the contemporary prejudice. This inconspicuous lay brother, not much higher than a dwarf, actually held within his craftsman’s hands all the vital secrets of the Catholic hiding-places. Nicknamed Little John (Father Gerard in contrast was Long John of the Little Beard), Nicholas Owen was one of the four sons of an Oxford carpenter. Two of his brothers, Walter and John, were Jesuit priests. A third brother, Henry, ran a clandestine press for Catholic literature in Northamptonshire whose publications were falsely stamped ‘printed in Antwerp’. At one point, when he was convicted for recusancy, Henry even set up a secret press in prison.19

  Little John found his vocation in his work as combined architect, mason and carpenter of innumerable hiding-places.* His various constructions have been described by his biographer Margaret Waugh as ‘wordless prayers’.20 He probably worked for Father Edmund Campion in the 1580s, and was certainly imprisoned for championing him in 1585. In 1586, however, he joined Father Garnet and henceforth accorded him his complete devotion.

  In 1599 Little John suffered an accident which crippled him, giving him a further handicap beyond his small stature. A packhorse fell on top of him, severely damaging his leg: ‘ill-setting’ of the bone did the rest. But when it came to working in the cramped conditions needed to construct a hideaway – a chimney, a drain – Little John’s tiny size was a positive asset. He nearly always worked alone, praying silently as he toiled away, in the covering darkness of the night hours. This solitude was Little John’s deliberate choice. He wanted no one else to share the danger at the time – nor the threat of interrogation, including torture, afterwards. Since Little John was among those who had been tortured in a London prison in 1594 (hung up for three hours on end ‘with their arms pinioned in iron rings’ and their bodies distended), he knew exactly the risk that he was taking.21

  ‘How many priests, then, may we think this man did save?’ enquired Father Gerard rhetorically. Father Garnet for his part described how Little John travelled all over the country making hiding-places for priests and other Catholics so that they could conceal themselves from the ‘fury’ of the Protestant searchers.22 His clientele included Sir Everard Digby at Gayhurst, Eliza Vaux at Harrowden, and preeminently Thomas Habington at Hindlip in Worcestershire, where Little John constructed about a dozen hiding-places.

  Owen did his chosen work ‘free of charge’; if any money was forced upon him, he gave it to his brothers. It was essential that each hiding-place should be different, lest the uncovering of one should lead to the uncovering of many others. Working in the great thickness of Tudor masonry – a problem in itself – Little John had nevertheless to make a solid construction of his own, lest the tapping of the searchers be met with a hollow sound. (It was dangerous to use the space provided by chimneys because fires might be lit by the searchers.) Over the years Little John developed certain trademarks. He passed feeding or communicating tubes into the hiding-places for the longer sojourns of the priests, and he worked out a trick by which an outer hiding-place concealed an inner one in order to delude the searchers into going away when they found the outer hiding-place empty.* As the pilgrims wended their way across England to Holywell in North Wales, Owen took the opportunity of their various stopovers to render new hiding-places, and renovate the old ones yet more securely23

  The shrine of St Winifred with its well of healing waters was one of great antiquity. It took its inspiration from the legend of the seventh-century virgin Princess – Gwenfrewi in Welsh – described by Father Gerard as ‘a saintly and very beautiful girl’ whose faith and love of chastity made her more beautiful still. When Winifred’s head was struck from her body by a suitor, Caradoc, whose advances she resisted, a spring of water welled up where the head had hit the ground: that was the first miracle. The second occurred when Winifred’s uncle St Beuno managed to reunite the severed head and body, leaving only a white mark round her neck as a reminder of what had occurred. The murderous would-be ravisher Caradoc vanished into the ground, leaving the triumphant Winifred to become the patroness not only of virgins but also of problems of female infertility and allied illnesses. Her two special feast days were 22 June (her martyrdom – or rather her apparent martyrdom) and 3 November.24

  The cult of St Winifred grew during the middle ages, when pilgrimages to St Winifred’s Well became increasingly popular. In 1415 a statute ordered the feast-days of St Winifred to be officially celebrated throughout England along with those of St George and St David. Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, had an especial devotion to the saint, and to Holywell itself. She was responsible for the first printed life of St Winifred (by William Caxton) and was a substantial benefactress of the Holywell chapel and surroundings. Winifred was one of those saints, beloved by ordinary people, who was demoted in 1536 as a result of the Reformation; her feast-day was no longer to be regarded as a holiday. Nevertheless St Winifred’s Well and its pilgrimages – a very long way from Parliament – continued to flourish regardless of governmental prohibitions and inclement weather. Father Gerard described how the mass of the people crossing the stream on 3 November once had to break the ice on the water. He himself prayed, immersed in the waters, for fifteen minutes; yet he took no cold afterwards, in spite of leaving on his dripping shirt under his other clothes.25

  The ladies of this 1605 pilgrimage made the last part of the journey, as was customary, barefoot. The priest whom they found in charge was a remarkable man in his own right. John Bennett, who had trained at Douai, had arrived in Holywell nearly thirty years before. He had been imprisoned in 1582 for three years, and banished thereafter (the actual sentence was death but it was presumably commuted due to local feeling in his favour). In spite of his banishment, however, Father Bennett managed to get back to Holywell in 1587, operating there under a series of aliases for the rest of his life. In total, he served the chapel for nearly fifty years. Once again, the loyalty of the Welsh people to the pastor they loved must have protected him.*26

  *

  The way back from the pilgrimage turned out to be distressing and disquieting in equal parts. At Rushton Hal
l, Father Garnet and Anne Vaux found a house of mourning. Sir Thomas Tresham, the august, self-willed and devout patriarch, had died on 11 September, after a long sickness. His widow Muriel was still keeping to her chamber, according to custom. Francis Tresham reported that his father’s last hours had been spent in great suffering, ‘tossing and tumbling from one side and from one bed to another’, and said that he himself would rather choose a ‘death the pain whereof could not continue half an hour’ than to die in such an agonising manner as his father.27 Francis meant death by hanging. Before the year was out, Francis Tresham would discover that very few get to choose the manner of their own death, and he would not be among them.

  The death of Sir Thomas at this precise moment had a profound effect on the development of the Powder Treason as it introduced Francis Tresham into the equation in quite a different light. Theoretically, the thirty-seven-year-old Francis was now a man of substance, with properties (and responsibilities, including his widowed mother, unmarried sisters and financially reckless brother Lewis). Unfortunately, Sir Thomas, the Catholic Moses, once colossally rich, had left enormous debts. These debts – including those where Francis had been bound up with him in a bond – provided a further cause for bitterness for his son.28 Francis Tresham was now in the position of a man who has long awaited his inheritance, and at the last minute finds that the overflowing cup is poisoned. Furthermore, the Tresham family entail of 1584 meant that Francis was only a life tenant of a greater part of the estate, which at the time seemed yet another disaster.

  The best of Francis Tresham was in his steadfast relationship with his wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Tufton of Hothfield in Kent. This devoted and resourceful woman – as events would prove her to be – had borne two daughters in the previous five years, Lucy and Eliza; no doubt the male child necessary for the family entail would soon follow. In all other respects, Francis Tresham’s character was generally considered unsatisfactory in recusant circles. The priests did not rate his Catholicism very highly: he had none of the passionate – if fanatical – piety of a Catesby or a Guy Fawkes. He was clever enough, but ‘not much to be trusted’, in the words of Father Tesimond. At the same time Francis Tresham knew how to look after himself. An example of this was his reaction to the accession of King James. On a visit to his brother-in-law Lord Monteagle, he was frank with Tom Wintour (who was acting as Monteagle’s secretary): henceforth he was resolved ‘to stand wholly for the King’. All former plots were done with and he asked Wintour ‘to have no speech with him of Spain’.29