The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  If the Catholic strain remained, the strain of dissidence and bravado appeared to vanish – with one exception. Ambrose Rookwood, great-grandson of the conspirator, was named for him – an ill-omened name, one might have thought, and so it proved. After the Restoration, Ambrose rose in the Stuart army to become a brigadier under James II. Unfortunately he preserved his Jacobite sympathies following the ejection of the Catholic James from the throne in favour of his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary.

  In 1696 Brigadier Rookwood was involved in a plot to assassinate King William. When one of his co-conspirators turned King’s evidence he was apprehended (in a well-known Jacobite ale-house) and taken to Newgate prison. After being tried for high treason, Ambrose Rookwood was put to death at Tyburn on 29 April 1696 – the second man of that name within the century to die for the ultimate offence. But Ambrose Rookwood the younger did not exhibit at the last quite the noble spirit of his ancestor; in a paper he delivered at the scaffold, he declared that he had only been obeying the orders of a superior officer.28

  The Catholic peers who had been arrested at the time of the discovery of the Plot were subjected, like the conspirators’ families, to a process of political forgiveness – provided they paid up. Lord Montague, who should somehow have known better than to employ a young Yorkshireman called Guy Fawkes as his footman fifteen years previously, was one who had always spoken up fearlessly for ‘the ancient Faith’. At the moment of the Plot’s discovery, he was questioned on the subject by his father-in-law, the powerful and venerable Lord High Treasurer, the Earl of Dorset. Montague expressed his absolute horror at such an undertaking and still further shock at the very idea that he, Montague, could be involved. ‘I never knew what grief was until now,’ he told Dorset. Montague also asked his father-in-law’s advice on how he could get back into the King’s good graces without violating the integrity of his religious principles. The short answer was, of course, money. Montague paid a fine and he also underwent a spell of imprisonment. Thanks to Dorset’s influence, however, he escaped trial.29

  His grandmother Magdalen Viscountess Montague, now in the evening of her life, certainly did not allow anything – including frequent searches of her establishments around the festivals of the Church such as Easter – to violate the integrity of her Faith: a Faith which she had held since her youth, when she had been Maid of Honour to Queen Mary Tudor. This representative of the grand old, unswervingly loyal Catholicism, whose prayers had been sought by Queen Elizabeth, died in 1608 at her house near Battle. There had been no less than five priests in the house to say Mass the day before, and William Byrd wrote an elegy to mark her death.30

  Lords Mordaunt and Stourton were not so fortunate as Montague. Both Catholic peers – one connected to Robert Keyes, the other Francis Tresham’s brother-in-law – faced trial in front of the Star Chamber, and were condemned to imprisonment in the Tower. In 1608 they were transferred to the Fleet prison. Lord Mordaunt was fined ten thousand pounds, although it is not clear whether the money was ever handed over, since his son was ‘forgiven’ the fine in 1620. Lord Stourton was fined six thousand pounds but was finally allowed to settle for paying a thousand.31

  Meanwhile Monteagle, the other Tresham brother-in-law, enjoyed the pension granted to him for his heroic role in discovering the conspiracy, and he otherwise occupied himself with his interest in colonial enterprises. He donated to the second Virginia Company and was elected a member of its council in 1609, and he had shares in the East India and North-West Passage companies. However, it has to be said that his executors complained that his pension was in arrears to the tune of nearly two thousand pounds at his death in 1622.32

  At least Monteagle used his influence to protect his brother-in-law Thomas Habington from the ultimate consequences of harbouring the forbidden priests at Hindlip, which could have been death. Although Habington was condemned, the pleas of his wife to her brother secured his reprieve. So he survived to pursue his antiquarian interests with vigour for the rest of his long life. Thomas Habington died in 1647 at the age of eighty-seven, his enthusiasm, as with Anne Vaux, leading to longevity. The baby William Habington, who had been born at Hindlip on the inauspicious day – from the Catholic point of view – of 5 November 1605, survived this traumatic birthdate to become a poet, author among other works of Castara. He estimated his own work as ‘not so high as to be wondered at, nor so low as to be condemned’. Many recusants of the previous generation would have been happy to have been so judged.33

  In political and personal terms, the clear loser from the affray of the Powder Treason was the Earl of Northumberland. Nothing was ever proved against him: none of the Plotters, tortured or self-preserving, confessed his name as the putative Protector; nor did the Jesuits incriminate him in the course of their overheard conversation. Salisbury was riding high at the time of Northumberland’s trial in front of the Star Chamber in June 1606, having been made a Knight of the Garter in April.* Even he admitted that Northumberland would never have let those he loved perish in the explosion: a man of ‘his birth, alliance and disposition’. It seems, therefore, to have been the personal distrust of the King which cast a fatal blight upon Northumberland.34

  What caused this distrust? The indictment charged Northumberland with ‘endeavouring to be the head of the English Papists, and to procure them Toleration’. The admission of Thomas Percy to the ranks of the King’s bodyguards without causing him to take the Oath of Supremacy, knowing him to be a recusant, was cited as proof. This was a charge with which Coke was able to make merry, in his usual style, when he described the promotion of Percy to such an intimate position as putting ‘an axe in his hand to carry it over the King’s head’. There was also Northumberland’s interest in the matter of the King’s horoscope, and how long he would reign.35 Northumberland’s patronage of Thomas Percy was an ineluctable fact, and he admitted to the treasonable affair of the horoscope (although since the chart had – quite correctly – predicted a long reign for James I, it is difficult to see that much damage had been done).

  But it was surely the question of toleration and, above all, those promises made (or not made) by the King while still in Scotland which were the key element in James’ distrust of Northumberland. Coke himself summed it up when he said that the King himself had given his royal word (in verbo regio) that ‘he never did promise or command’ toleration.36 Whatever the truth was of those distant dealings – whether Thomas Percy lied then or the King was lying now – it was wrapped in a convenient Scottish mist which obliterated all memories of such a very different era. It was Northumberland who in 1606 paid the penalty for being the front man of the Catholics, a position from which, in 1603, he had hoped to reap the reward.

  At his trial, Northumberland, who was hampered by his deafness (he had of course no counsel), was fined thirty thousand pounds, and sentenced to imprisonment at the King’s pleasure. He kept increasingly magnificent state during his incarceration. In the capacious Martin Tower he had a study, library, great chamber, withdrawing-room and two dining-rooms; while his personal cook (he was not reliant on Father Garnet’s ‘good friend Tom’) lived in a rented house on Tower Hill. His accounts show not only considerable expenditure on clothing, but also that he was in the habit of wearing the blue ribbon signifying his membership of the Order of the Garter, since it frequently had to be renewed.37 Nevertheless Northumberland remained in the Tower until 1621, when his son-in-law, the King’s favourite Lord Hay, successfully pleaded for his release. He retired to his estate at Petworth, where he died in 1632.

  The government had pinned down Northumberland for his part in the conspiracy, but those ‘Plotters’ abroad who were the bane of the English government’s existence remained happily outside the long arm of its law. The Archdukes did not keep Hugh Owen long under house arrest and no charges were brought against him. When Owen moved on to Spain, Salisbury tried in vain to get him kidnapped and brought to England. However, Hugh Owen retired to Rome with a pension and
lived to the age of eighty. That old soldier – and old intriguer – Sir William Stanley also lived on in freedom to the age of eighty. Only Father William Baldwin, the Cornish priest who had been named in the indictment of January 1606 as being part of the conspiracy, fell into the English net, although not for some years. The Archdukes had declined to extradite him then, but in the course of a journey to Rome in 1610 Baldwin was captured by the Protestant Elector Palatine, who despatched him to England. He remained in the Tower until 1618, even though no charge of treason was ever brought against him, presumably for lack of evidence. Father Baldwin’s final release was due to the intervention of the Spanish Ambassador. He was then banished, and thereafter he spent eleven years as Rector of the English seminary at St Omer.38

  Spared from destruction by gunpowder, the Royal Family, that domestic phenomenon still new to the English in 1603, was surely set to prosper. Where religion was concerned, Anne of Denmark maintained the discreet stance with which she had handled the difficult months following the discovery of the treason. The more or less public Catholicism on which the Pope and others had pinned so many hopes while she was still in Scotland (and which had deluded them about James’ own Catholic sympathies) gave way to something more elegantly lethargic. In 1612 Pope Paul V would even go so far as to refer woundingly to the Queen’s ‘inconstancy’. In view of the many changes she had made in religious matters, he wondered if it was even true that she was a Catholic. Anne of Denmark was certainly a Catholic – she fitted up a chapel at her palace at Oatlands, and enjoyed having Catholic priests come to minister to her at Hampton Court.39 But from 5 November 1605 onwards she lived her life as a royal version of a Church Papist. Like Church Papists in the reign of Elizabeth she wanted spiritual consolation in private, but no trouble in public.

  There was however a fleeting quality to this perceived prosperity of the Royal Family, and May 1606, when Father Garnet on the scaffold prayed for its welfare, turned out to be the high point of its expansion. There were then four living children, two Princes and two Princesses, and the Queen was on the verge of giving birth yet again. But the expected baby, who was born on 22 June and named Sophia, died the next day.40 Then Princess Mary, the special child because she had been born in England following her father’s accession, died in September 1607 at the age of two and a half*

  No treasonable horoscope would have dared to predict that the glorious Prince of Wales would be the next to die. Prince Henry had been the hope of the nation ever since he won all hearts at the first royal procession of the reign. Alas for such expectations: he died of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen in November 1612. That left his brother Prince Charles, that timid, undersized child known to the conspirators as the Duke of York. He succeeded James in 1625 as King Charles I.

  If the death of the healthy upstanding Prince Henry would have been an unlikely prediction for anyone in England in 1606, the execution of Charles I, by his own subjects in 1649, would have been an unthinkable one. The roundabout of history turned again. Nicholas Owen’s cunningly devised hiding-places, designed to protect Catholic priests from the government of James I, enabled James’ grandson Charles II to elude capture after his defeat by Cromwell at Worcester. Subsequently, the throne of England was lost to the male Stuarts. For all the seeming fecundity of the Stuart dynasty, the seventeenth century was destined to draw to a close exactly as the sixteenth century had done: with problems of succession and religion compounded by the reigns of two childless sisters – Mary II and Anne. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the Protestant succession passed as it had done in 1603 to a foreigner, the Elector George of Hanover.

  King George I was the great-grandson of James I. His right to the throne was derived from his maternal grandmother. There is a delicate irony in the fact that this grandmother was none other than the Princess Elizabeth, that little girl whom the Gunpowder Plotters had intended to place upon the throne as their puppet monarch, and marry off to some suitably Catholic prince. A staunch Protestant all her life, even at the early age of nine, the Princess had once regarded with horror the prospect of receiving the crown in this unnatural manner. With the ripeness of time, however, the crown did come the way of her posterity. Indeed, it is the direct descendant of this same Princess Elizabeth, mooted in 1605 as sovereign in her own right, who sits upon the throne of Great Britain today as Queen Elizabeth II.

  So the dramatis personae of the Powder Treason and of their descendants made their farewells, dead, fled or reintegrated in their different ways into English life. But the propaganda war was only just beginning.

  * The present (10th) Lord Vaux of Harrowden descends in the female line from Mary Vaux, Lady Symeon, the eldest sister of Edward, 4th Lord Vaux.

  * The Catesby family, kin to Robert but not descended from him, is however flourishing today. The famous eighteenth-century naturalist Mark Catesby, author of Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731), was part of it.

  * Vestments, embroidered by her, including a set of white High Mass vestments of which the chasuble bears the words ‘Ora pro me Helena Wintour’, are still to be seen at the Jesuit-run Stonyhurst College, Clitheroe, in Lancashire (see plate section).

  * Although there were rumours that the lofty Kings of France and Denmark had protested at this, considering a Cecil too common for such an honour, Salisbury was installed a fortnight after Garnet’s death.

  * She was buried, like the infant Princess Sophia, in Westminster Abbey. Poignant monuments to them both can be seen in the North Aisle of the Henry VII Chapel (see plate section).

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Satan’s Policy?

  The quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach and stain of human malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled… as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals.

  FRANCIS HERRING

  Popish Pietie, 1610

  Nearly four hundred years have passed since that dark night in November when searchers found a ‘desperate fellow’ with explosives in the vaulted room beneath the House of Lords. In the time that has elapsed, the Gunpowder Plot has meant many different things to many different people – including many different historians. The propaganda war has been long and vigorous and shows no signs of abating, given that the most recent scholarly works on the subject have taken diametrically opposite points of view.

  Father Francis Edwards, S.J., in Guy Fawkes: the real story of the Gunpowder Plot? (1969), maintains that the entire conspiracy was devised by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, hereditary foe to the moderate English Catholics, who used double-agents including Robert Catesby himself (deliberately killed at Holbeach to stop his mouth), Guy Fawkes and Thomas Percy. Mark Nicholls in Investigating Gunpowder Plot (1992) believes that ‘it is surely more realistic to see the treason as one of the greatest challenges that early modern state-security ever faced…’*1

  These two totally irreconcilable positions have in fact been present in the historiography of the Gunpowder Plot from the very beginning. Taking the government’s official stance first, its invective on the subject (including the vituperative language of Sir Edward Coke) was based on the premise of an appalling danger narrowly averted. Succeeding writers and pamphleteers built energetically upon these foundations in what came to be a prolific body of literature. An extract from a work of 1610 entitled Popish Pietie by a physician named Francis Herring is a characteristic reflection of it, rather than an exaggerated version of the genre. For Herring, the Powder Treason – ‘that monstrous birth of the Roman harlot’ – was ‘the quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach and stain of human malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled among the savage Turks, the barbarous Indians, nor, as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals’.2

  In such estimates, there was an additional frisson in the status of the proposed victim. A King – God’s chosen representative on earth – had been menaced. That meant that the conspiracy was not only wicked but actually sacrilegious. Macbeth, first performed in 1
606 (possibly at Hampton Court in August to mark the state visit of Queen Anne’s brother King Christian of Denmark),* is a work redolent with outrage at the monstrous upsetting of the natural order, which is brought about when subjects kill their lawful sovereign.

  O horror! horror! horror!

  Tongue nor heart cannot conceive, nor name thee!

  Macduff’s appalled cry when he discovered the bloodstained body of the murdered King Duncan would have certainly reminded his hearers in that summer of 1606 of the recent conspiracy against their own King. Macduffs words of shocked expostulation even echoed the government indictment against the conspirators, which found the Gunpowder Plot to be a treason such as ‘the tongue of man never delivered, the ear of man never heard, the heart of man never conceived…’.3

  Rumours concerning the King’s safety – a monarch who was once threatened in such an appalling manner could always be threatened again – continued to rustle in the nervy months following the discovery of the Plot. At the end of March a story spread that James had been stabbed by a poisoned knife at Okingham, twenty miles from London, ‘Which treason, some said, was performed by English Jesuits, some by Scots in women’s apparel, and others by Spaniards or Frenchmen’ (showing an even-handed list of contemporary prejudices).4 The story was a complete fantasy, but it demonstrated the continued perturbation on the subject of the King’s personal safety; he was ‘the life o’th’ building’, as Macbeth described Duncan, whose presence guaranteed order.