The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (38 page)

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There is a lack of documentary evidence to show conclusively where Guy Fawkes was held and tortured; traditionally he was held in the Bloody Tower, but tortured in the White Tower, in rooms below the present wooden (ground) floor; he may also have been held in a room, now vanished, in what looks like the thickness of the wall. Prisoners, in general, were tortured in subterranean areas and often held near by in advance to maximise the terror (Geoffrey Parnell, Keeper of Tower History, to the author; Yeoman Warders to the author).

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Torture was a judicial procedure that had been known among the Romans, when slaves were frequently subjected to it.

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There are various traditions at Huddington associated with this dramatic arrival: Gertrude Wintour is supposed to have stationed herself at her window, waiting for the messenger from London: if he waved his hat when he came into view, all was well, but if he rode with his head covered, all was lost. An inscription on a windowpane in the main bedchamber, ‘past cark [hope], past care’, may refer to Gertrude’s despair. ‘Lady Wintour’s Walk’ in the woods is said to be haunted by her restless ghost. (Huddington owner to the author; Hamilton, I, pp. 182–3.)

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According to local tradition, Stephan Littleton’s young groom, Gideon Grove, managed to mount a horse and break out of the courtyard in the confusion of fire and smoke; he got as far as some fenland near Wombourne where the soldiers caught and killed him. His ghost, as commemorated in a ballad by the nineteenth-century Rhymer Greensill, is said to haunt the spot as a ‘Phantom Rider’.
(Black Country Bugle,
October–November 1972; local information to the author.)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Fire and Brimstone

It may well be called a roaring, nay a thundering sin of fire and brimstone, from the which God hath so miraculously delivered us all.

KING JAMES
to Parliament, 9 November 1605

K
ing James’ speech to Parliament on Saturday 9 November was a fine flowery piece of oratory. As the .discoverer of the Plot, he certainly blew his own trumpet royally.
¹
At the same time, he showed courage – he did after all believe that he had been the intended victim of an explosion only four days earlier. Even more admirably, James showed himself merciful towards the English Catholics who had not been involved in the Powder Treason as it did not follow ‘that all professing the Romish religion were guilty of the same’. The ‘seduced’ Papists could still be good subjects. He expressly mentioned the fact that the souls of some Catholics would be saved and criticised the harshness of the Puritans ‘that will admit no salvation to any Papist’.

Although this policy of mildness and conciliation faded, as the extent of the Jesuit priests’ involvement – their alleged involvement – was signalled by a vengeful government, it is as well to remember that the Powder Treason was in the early days seen by the King for exactly what it was: the work of a few Catholic fanatics.

Naturally King James recalled his own troubled history. Monarchs, ‘like the high Trees’, were subject to more tempests
than ordinary mortals, and the King himself had suffered from more tempests than most monarchs: he had been first threatened ‘while I was yet in my mother’s belly’. Now God had miraculously delivered them all from ‘a roaring, nay a thundering sin of fire and brimstone’.

Then the King outlined the various unique elements which went to make up this particular treason. First, there was the sheer cruelty of the Plot itself which had threatened to destroy so many innocent people with no distinction made ‘of young nor of old, of great nor of small, of man nor of woman’. Considering the various ways of putting mankind to death, he had no hesitation in picking on fire as the ‘most raging and merciless’, because there was no pity to be expected and no appeal against it. (A man might pity his fellow man at the last moment, and in any case a defence could be mounted; as to the ‘unreasonable’ wild animals, even the lions pitied Daniel…)*
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The second element was one on which some might have had other views. The King insisted that there were small grounds if any to justify the conspiracy – only religion, and that was scarcely enough. The third element was the truly miraculous one, and on this the King really let himself go. This was his own unequalled brilliance in discerning what was about to happen. Regardless of his own trusting nature – ‘I ever did hold Suspicion to be the sickness of a Tyrant’ – he had been inspired to interpret the Monteagle Letter as indicating ‘this horrible form of blowing us up all by Powder’.

The King solemnly told the assembled peers that he would have had one consolation if the Plot had succeeded. At least he would have died ‘in the most Honourable and best company’, rather than in ‘an ale-house or a stew’ (a brothel). Concerning the conspirators, he quoted another King, the Biblical David:
‘they had fallen into the trap which they themselves had made’. Moving on from the Bible to Ancient Rome he emphasised the need for thanksgiving. For if Scipio, ‘an Ethnic [that is, neither Jewish nor Christian] led only by the light of Nature’, had called on his people to give thanks for his victory over Hannibal, how much more necessary was it for Christians to express their gratitude! ‘The Mercy of God is above all his works,’ said the King.

In the House of Commons, the point was well taken. Sir Edward Hexter moved that the Speaker of the House ‘should make manifest the thankfulness of the House to God, for his [the King’s] safe Deliverance’. For the future, ‘they would all, and every one of them be ready with the uttermost Drop of their Blood’. Parliament was now once more prorogued – until 21 January 1606 – since, as the King pointed out, all their energies would be needed in the unravelling of the recent wicked conspiracy. The chosen day was, incidentally, a Tuesday, like 5 August 1600 and 5 November 1605. Since the King had twice been ‘delivered’ on this propitious day of the week, he thought it ‘not amiss’ that the experiment of meeting on a Tuesday should be repeated.
²

Salisbury was left to write to the English ambassadors abroad an elaborate letter of explanation of what had occurred. These included Edmondes in Brussels, Parry in Paris and Cornwallis in Spain. Fortunately King James had taken pains in his speech to establish that the Catholic foreign powers were not suspected of complicity – ‘no King or Prince of honour will ever abase himself so much’. The government proclamation against the conspirators had indeed ended with the most slavish defence of the Catholic powers’ integrity: ‘we cannot admit so inhumane a thought as their involvement’. The way was open for these rulers to send back to London formal expressions of sheer horror at what had been so grossly plotted.
³

Of course the powers and potentates revealed their own preoccupations. The Duke of Lerma, the Spanish King’s
privado
(favourite), while describing the conspirators as ‘atheists and
devils’, hoped to hear that there were also Puritans ‘in the mixture’. Zuñiga, the Spanish envoy in London (he who had prudently lit bonfires and thrown money to the crowd on 5 November), believed that Thomas Percy had been in charge of the operation and that he was ‘a heretic’, in other words a Protestant, who was known to favour France over Spain. With equal conviction and equal inaccuracy the French King was quite sure that the Spanish ministers must have had a hand ‘in so deep a practice’.
⁴

On Sunday 10 November, Salisbury, armed with Guido’s confession, was able at last to set in motion proceedings to extradite Hugh Owen from Flanders. Owen angrily rebutted the charge: ‘I would take my oath’, he wrote to Lerma in Spain, that he had known nothing about the conspiracy. The cautious Archdukes, worried by the lack of proof, contented themselves with putting Owen and his secretary under house arrest.
⁵

Much more gratifying for the government was the sermon of the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Barlow, at Paul’s Cross on this same Sunday. It was to be the first in a long line of such exhortatory sermons on the subject of the Powder Treason. Described as ‘one of the ripest in learning’, Barlow had been part of the team associated with producing the Authorised Version of the Bible after the Hampton Court conference. Since he, like the King, would have been present in the House of Lords at the moment of the explosion, his awareness of his own narrow escape must have lent him a particular fervour. In any case Barlow, a man who had already given two sermons at Paul’s Cross, one praising Essex on his return from Ireland in 1596, and another justifying his execution five years later (with detailed instructions from Salisbury), had surely been primed over what to say.
⁶

Yet again the party line was to vilify Guy Fawkes, and to see the Plot as the work of fanatics. In contrast to many, many subsequent sermons, the English Catholics were not attacked as such, just as King James had been careful to distinguish good Papists from bad. But the main thrust of Barlow’s sermon was an extraordinary panegyric of his sovereign in
terms which made even James’ own self-glorification seem rather flat. The King was not only a ‘universal scholar, acute in arguing, subtle in distinguishing, logical in discussing’, he was also ‘a faithful Christian’: and so forth and so on, in what has been described as an evocation of the King as ‘something of a Christ figure’.
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An awareness of having had a narrow escape was not of course confined to the King and Dr Barlow. Queen Anne, that famously fruitful vine, found herself being congratulated all over again on her fecundity in every loyal address. Yet, in her case, once sheer relief – for she would certainly have been present at the Opening – had given way to a more sober consideration of the future, she could appreciate the shadows falling over her Catholicism. As James’ Queen Consort, she had attended Protestant services (although without taking the Sacrament); she had agreed to the baptism of the Princess Mary in the Protestant rite in May, while she herself had similarly undergone the ceremony of ‘churching’ (the purification of a woman after childbirth) in the Protestant rite. At the same time, she maintained her position as a closet Catholic – literally so, since her Mass had to be heard extremely privately in her own apartments.

This graceful ambivalence might not survive in the post-Plot atmosphere of England, and in fact Queen Anne was careful to evade meeting the emissaries of the Catholic powers. She declined to meet Baron Hoboken, envoy of the Archdukes, for two years, thanks to their laggard response to the Hugh Owen business. A convenient fever also caused her to cancel an audience with Zuñiga immediately after the Plot’s discovery, lest the Queen’s patriotism be suspect. When she did meet the Spaniard, towards the end of November, she spoke at length about her grief at the unfortunate plight of Catholics, and her desire to help them.
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But in the future her active Catholic sympathies found their expression chiefly in trying to secure grand Catholic marriages for her children.

Another member of the Royal Family who became aware of her own escape as details of the Plot emerged was the nine-year
-old Princess Elizabeth. When the alarm came from Warwick, she had been bundled off to Coventry, which was thought to be safer than Coombe Abbey. In her case, she had escaped abduction rather than death, but she made it clear to her guardian Lord Harington that what had been proposed for her by the conspirators would have been a fate
worse
than death. Lord Harington reported: ‘Her Highness doth often say ‘‘What a Queen should I have been by this means? I had rather been with my Royal Father in the Parliament-house, than wear the Crown on such condition’’.’ Not surprisingly, the shock of it all left the little girl ‘very ill and troubled’.
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If Queen Anne was justified in bewailing, however ineffectively, the unfortunate plight of the English Catholics, that of the conspirators was infinitely worse. Those at Holbeach – Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood and John Grant, all in bad physical shape – were taken first to Worcester in the custody of the Sheriff and then to the Tower of London. Meanwhile the bodies of Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy were exhumed from their midland graves by orders of the government, and their heads cut off. The intention was to exhibit the decapitated heads at the corners of the Parliament House which they had planned to blow up. (The blacksmith who forged the ironwork to make this possible was paid 23 shillings and 9 pence.) Among those who inspected these grisly relics
en route
to London was Lord Harington himself, who thought that ‘more terrible countenances were never looked upon’. He discerned a special evil mark on their foreheads, a description one suspects that he passed on to his royal charge to fuel her understandable fears still further.
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