The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (37 page)

As Wintour and Stephen Littleton were on their way back to Holbeach, a man brought them a message, which suggested that these conspirators were dead, and the rest of the company ‘dispersed’. At this point Littleton’s determination gave out – he had after all been a latecomer to the enterprise. He encouraged Tom Wintour to fly ‘and so would he’. Wintour, however, showed his usual stubborn resolve. He refused to turn away. ‘I
told him I would first see the body of my friend [Catesby] and bury him, whatsoever befell me.’ Wintour went on alone.
²⁸

When he arrived at Holbeach, however, he found that the messenger had exaggerated the disaster. It was true that Digby had vanished – in fact he went with the intention of giving himself up – and so had Robert Wintour, who would eventually join up with Stephen Littleton. John Wintour, the stepbrother, who felt he had blundered into the conspiracy by mistake, slipped away during the night hours and gave himself up. The servant Thomas Bates had gone: no pressure was now being put on the Plotters to remain together. But Catesby at least was ‘reasonably well’ and so was Rookwood, although John Grant had been so badly disfigured by the fire – ‘his eyes burnt out’ – that he was blind. Morgan had also been burnt. The remainder of the company consisted of the two Wright brothers, Jack and Kit, stalwart to the last, as they had been among the first of the Plotters, and Thomas Percy. Wintour asked them what they intended to do.

‘We mean here to die,’ was the unyielding reply.

Wintour answered with equal firmness: ‘I will take such part as you do.’

It would not be long now. Sir Richard Walsh and his two hundred men were closing in on Holbeach. On the morning of Friday 8 November, as Guido in the Tower prepared painfully to make the first of his major confessions, his erstwhile comrades readied themselves for the end. The devastating chance of the explosion had convinced them that their deaths were fast approaching, and so they all started to pray: ‘the Litanies and such like’. Then Catesby, taking the gold crucifix which always hung round his neck, and kissing it, said that he had undertaken everything only for ‘the honour of the Cross’ and the True Faith which venerated that Cross. He now expected to give his life for that same cause, since he saw it was not God’s will that they should succeed as they had planned. Yet he would not be taken prisoner: ‘against that only he would defend himself with his sword’.
²⁹

The company under Walsh arrived in front of Holbeach
about eleven o’clock to besiege the house. Walsh was afterwards criticised for keeping himself ‘close under the wall’ for safety’s sake, although such a quantity of men, armed with muskets, could hardly be said to be in any great danger, nor could the issue of the siege be in much doubt. Almost immediately Tom Wintour, crossing the courtyard, was shot in the shoulder, which cost him the use of his arm. The second shot dropped Jack Wright; Kit Wright was hit next. Their famous swordsmanship had availed them little against the muskets’ fire. After that, Ambrose Rookwood, still suffering from the effects of the fire, was also hit.

There were now left, as possible defenders, Catesby and Percy, as well as the wounded Tom Wintour, the blinded John Grant and the burnt Henry Morgan.

‘Stand by me, Mr Tom,’ said Robin Catesby, ‘and we will die together.’

‘I have lost the use of my right arm,’ answered Wintour, ‘and I fear that will cause me to be taken.’ Even so, the two stood close together for their last stand, along with Percy, at the door of the house by which their assailants would enter. Robin Catesby and Thomas Percy were then brought down together by the same lucky shot. (John Streete of Worcester, who fired the shot, later petitioned for a thousand-pounds reward for this feat, although it was certainly by chance rather than design.)
³⁰
Then the besiegers rushed in. What happened next was a macabre kind of rout, in which common sense – these men were wanted criminals – and even humanity, took second place to brutish greed.
*

The Wright brothers and Percy were clearly
in extremis
but might just possibly have been kept alive, despite their ‘many and grievous wounds’, if there had been a surgeon available. Instead, their moribund bodies were crudely stripped: the Ensign of the posse himself pulled off Kit Wright’s boots and
fine silk stockings. It was a distasteful scene. Sir Thomas Lawley, who was assisting Walsh, commented on it afterwards to Salisbury, when he referred to the unpleasant lack of discipline of ‘the baser sort’. Percy died fairly quickly, thus fulfilling the explanation of Simon Foreman, the astrologer consulted after his flight: ‘Saturn, being Lord of the 8th house [of death] sheweth that the fugitive shall be taken by the commandment of the Prince, and in being taken, shall be slain.’
³¹
If the Wrights lingered longer, it was not to any purpose; lying there naked on their way to death, they had neither the voice nor the energy to explain why and what they had done.

Grant and Morgan, both damaged by the fire, were easily captured, as was Ambrose Rookwood, who was not only scorched but wounded by musket fire. Tom Wintour, the first to fall, seems to have been saved by the action of the Sheriff’s assistant, Lawley, and Lawley’s servant. Afterwards there was a squabble about Wintour’s horse, which the rival Sheriff of Staffordshire tried in vain to claim. But at the time Lawley at least had some practical sense of duty, realising that the conspirators, taken alive, would do ‘better service’ to the King than their speechless bodies.
³²
Wintour was at first manhandled and beaten and probably stabbed in his stomach by a pike. Then someone came from behind, caught his arms, including the wounded one, and made him prisoner.

Robin Catesby survived long enough to crawl painfully inside the house. There he managed to find a picture of the Virgin Mary, and it was clutching this in his arms that he finally died. Lawley, who had denigrated the plunderers, saw himself in a different light when he collected up Catesby’s gold crucifix and the picture of the Virgin, together with any other religious items he could find. Naturally, these were not despatched to the bereaved Lady Catesby at Ashby St Ledgers, the mother to whom Robin, on his fiery course, had not wished to say goodbye. To Lawley, these were not devotional emblems but valuable trophies. He sent them up to London to demonstrate just the kind of ‘superstitious and Popish idols’ which had inspired the rebels.
³³

So Tom Wintour’s worst fears had come about. He had not died with his beloved Robin Catesby and he had lived on, in whatever lacerated state, to tell the tale of the Powder Treason. But Catesby, whose gallantry and rashness had dazzled and seduced a generation of young Catholic men, had had his last wish fulfilled. He had died without being ‘taken’. Not for Catesby the Tower of London and its rigours, nor for him the pitiless indignities of a traitor’s death. Of the two of them, Robin and Tom, it was Catesby who was the lucky one.

In London, the confused frenzy which had gripped almost everyone from King to commoner in the first two days after the discovery of the Plot was beginning to subside. Even before the news of the Holbeach shoot-out reached the capital, the general feeling of actually being endangered – where would they strike next? – was fading. Yet the government made it clear that no chances were being taken. On 7 November, while Percy was still at liberty, his patron the Earl of Northumberland was placed under house arrest, in the care of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace.

On the same day, the gunpowder ‘from out the vault of the Parliament House’ was transported to the Tower of London. Here it was deposited in ‘His Majesty’s Store within the office of Ordnance’, not very far from where Guido was incarcerated in his subterranean chamber. The gunpowder was described in the official receipt in the Debenture Book of the Royal Ordnance as having been ‘laid and placed for the blowing up of the said house [Parliament] and the destruction of the King’s Majesty, the nobility, and commonality there assembled’. Together with a couple of iron crowbars, eighteen hundredweight of powder was received.
³⁴

Interestingly enough, the powder was described officially as ‘decayed’. A cynical clerk in the Royal Ordnance might have reflected that the danger to the King and all the rest of them had not really been so great after all. This powder (unlike the wretched stuff which had burnt up the conspirators at Holbeach) would not have exploded anyway. The straightforward
explanation for this failure in the Plotters’ arrangements is that the powder had once again separated in its elements – as had happened previously – and that Guido had simply not realised the fact (unless of course the ‘decay’ had taken place in the two days following 5 November). A rider to this, of a more Machiavellian nature, involves the Earl of Salisbury. One may question whether he really tolerated with equanimity the presence of a substance such as gunpowder in the vault at Westminster, in such large quantities and for so long. Perhaps a discreet search had established that the powder no longer constituted a real threat to anyone – except of course to Guy Fawkes himself by incriminating him.

Now that the government was so demonstrably on the winning side, an amazing quantity of people of all sorts, high and low, stepped forward to flag their loyalty by providing information. One of the first to do so was Lady Tasborough, mother-in-law to Agnes Lady Wenman, the bosom friend of Eliza Vaux. She thought it helpful to communicate the contents of that fatal letter of April which, it will be remembered, she had opened in her daughter-in-law’s absence. On 5 November itself Lord Chief Justice Popham was already able to communicate to Salisbury details of Eliza’s unfortunate prophecy – ‘we shall see Tottenham turn French’ – which proved that she ‘expected something was about to take place’. Popham’s comments on this were not encouraging for Eliza’s future. Since two Jesuits, Gerard and Whalley (an alias for Garnet), made Harrowden ‘the chiefest place of their access’, therefore ‘she may know somewhat’.
³⁵
All this was in advance of Henry Huddlestone’s capture and Eliza’s frantic efforts to free the priests, which scarcely improved her chances of eluding the attentions of the Privy Council.

Others rapidly discounted any connection to the traitors. There were, for example, those who stepped forward gratuitously to point out – in case there was any doubt – that they had not seen the conspirators for at least ten years. Where Catholicism was concerned, Ben Jonson reflected cynically that immediately after the Plot’s discovery there were ‘five hundred
gentlemen less’ professing that religion. On 7 November, Jonson himself, uneasily aware of his known connection to the Plotters, came before the Privy Council. He had tried to contact an undercover priest who wanted a safe conduct in exchange for information but had failed to find him, in spite of the help of the (Catholic) chaplain to the Venetian Ambassador.

Two days later Sir Walter Ralegh (whose wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton, was a first cousin of Lady Catesby) utterly denied any connection with the recent treason, which he said he would have given his life to uncover. He recalled to mind his many services to his country, and desperately tried to distance himself from a plot which he termed ‘this more than devilish invention’. On the same day, the Earl of Dorset, father-in-law of Viscount Montague, asked him anxiously whether he had known anything ‘either directly or indirectly’ which would have stopped him coming to Parliament.
³⁶

All the while Guy Fawkes sweated in the Tower, first to resist his torturers, then to give them in some measure what they wanted – or at any rate enough to relieve his torment. So far as the evidence can be pieced together, he revealed his true identity on 7 November and said that the Plot was confined to five (unnamed) people. His important confession was that on 8 November.
³⁷
This confession named at last names, although it did not identify any Catholic priests. Nor for that matter did Guido incriminate prominent English Catholics or reveal the identity of the Protector, although he did talk at length about the plans for the proclamation of the Princess Elizabeth.

The third confession of 9 November, attested in front of Commissioners on 10 November, must be assumed to be the product of prolonged bouts of torture, growing increasingly severe.
³⁸
Guido named Francis Tresham at this point, although he ascribed to him a comparatively minor role, and he named the priest who had administered the Sacrament following the oath as Father Gerard (but Guido stuck to his point that Gerard had not known what was going on). It is quite possible that Salisbury was present at this session since Waad wrote to
him, saying that Fawkes wanted to see him. At all events, one new revelation was exactly what Salisbury wanted to hear. Here at last as a result of torture was the name – or so Coke would pretend later – of the government’s
bête noire
, Hugh Owen of Flanders.

The signatures of Fawkes, declining in strength and coherence as the interrogation proceeded, provide, even today, their own mute testimonial to what he suffered (see plate section). The last ‘Guido’ – his chosen name, his name of exile – was scarcely more than a scrawl, and little helpless jabs of the pen beside it showed what it had cost Fawkes even to write as much as this.

*
In 1215 Magna Carta, that cornerstone of English liberties, had expressly forbidden torture (Jardine,
Torture,
p. 48).

*
It should be pointed out that England was not alone in the practice. The Spanish Inquisition – the ‘Holy Office’ – employed torture: this was one of the aspects of England’s hereditary Catholic enemy, Spain, which had aroused disgust and horror among the English, especially those merchants who might fall foul of the Inquisition, during the reign of Elizabeth I.