The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (40 page)

Was torture used once more? There was no further official sanction for torture given this year, other than the King’s letter of authorisation concerning Guido and ‘the gentler tortures’ already quoted. The eager recommendation to Salisbury by Lord Dunfermline, the Lord Chancellor of Scotland, that ‘the prisoners should be confined apart, in darkness, and examined by torchlight, and that the tortures be slow and at intervals, as being most effectual’, is no proof that Salisbury actually followed his suggestion, although it does indicate the kind of atmosphere then prevailing.
*
More concrete evidence of the use of torture is provided by a letter from Salisbury himself, dated 4 December. In a document which is difficult to interpret in any other sense, he complained of the conspirators’ obstinate refusal to incriminate the priests, ‘yea, what torture soever they be put to’.
²⁴

It suggests that some at least of the Plotters had been subject to the manacles, or perhaps they had simply been shown the rack to terrify them: a method of interrogation which could be construed as needing no authorisation. The same technique may have been used over the trial of Ralegh. Coke denied that a certain witness had been threatened with the rack, answering smoothly: ‘we told him he deserved the Rack, but did not threaten him with it’.
²⁵
Since Salisbury and the government were now trying to entrap men who were innocent – the priests – in the same net as the guilty – the conspirators – they were no longer engaged in simply laying bare the truth. In order to achieve false or partially false confessions, torture and its threat might indeed be necessary.

A candidate for torture may have been the young recusant Henry Huddlestone, who made a series of confessions about that fatal meeting on the road with Catesby, and his expedition thereafter with the priests. Father Strange, captured with him, was certainly tortured at some point (‘grievously racked’), although probably not until the next wave of interrogations in 1606.
²⁶

Yet the first confessions, those of November, did not provide that precise, strong link between the priests and the Plot which would have been convenient for the government. In his declaration of 13 November (the day after his arrest) Francis Tresham, while generally exculpating himself, did implicate Father Garnet in the abortive negotiations with Spain of 1602 – the so-called Spanish Treason.
²⁷
This was helpful so far as it went, because the Spanish Treason was otherwise a somewhat tricky subject for the government to handle. It was undoubtedly a treasonable venture, whether described by Wintour or Guy Fawkes, for it was certainly treason to seek the armed assistance of a foreign power in order to overthrow the existing government of England. However, times had changed and there was absolutely no advantage, and a great deal of possible disadvantage, in berating the Spanish King in the new warm climate following the Anglo-Spanish Treaty. To make the Spanish Treason a Jesuit-inspired enterprise was the tactful solution.

In exactly the same way, the government were concerned to impose the names of their enemies Hugh Owen, Sir William Stanley and Father William Baldwin upon the conspiracy. Since the Plot already contained quite enough genuinely treasonable material, this imposition was for their own wider purposes. It has been noted that Salisbury had been quick off the mark in demanding the extradition of the detested Owen from the Spanish Netherlands. In the two published confessions of Guido and Tom Wintour, if collated with the various drafts and versions still in existence, there is evidence that these names were deliberately introduced. Salisbury let himself go about ‘that creature Owen’ in a letter to Sir Thomas Edmondes of 2 December. He instructed the Ambassador in Brussels carefully on the version of the Plot which must be spread among Owen’s friends. It should be ‘as evident as the sun in the clearest day’ that Stanley, Father Baldwin and Owen were all involved ‘in this matter of the gunpowder’. Furthermore, Baldwin, via Owen, and ‘Owen directly of himself’ had been ‘particular conspirators’.
²⁸

In short, a Cold War was being conducted (and had long been conducted) with the Catholic intriguers across the water. This meant that matters of veracity were less important than the wider issue of ensuring Protestant success.

Tom Wintour’s confession was supposedly signed by him on 23 November. He added to it further details of the so-called Spanish Treason on 26 November.
²⁹
Wintour’s account became the basis for most other subsequent narratives, including that of Father Tesimond himself. This was not only because the confession was published at length, but also because Wintour, uniquely among the survivors, had been in on the Powder Treason since the beginning. Guido, battered and tortured as he might be, could still not provide the full details of those early days with Catesby, the season before he himself was recruited.

It is, however, a document which cannot be taken purely at its face value. This is because Wintour’s signature at the bottom – ‘Thomas Winter’ (sic) – is quite impossible to reconcile with any signature that had been made by him in the past. The version ‘Wintour’ was the one invariably used by him – whereas the version ‘Winter’ (or ‘Wynter’) was generally used by the government.
³⁰
There is a further difficulty posed by the signature, which, whatever its spelling, is not noticeably shaky. Yet this was the alleged signature of a man who had been seriously wounded in the shoulder, losing the use of his right arm, less than a fortnight previously. Nor does Waad’s report to Salisbury on 21 November inspire confidence: ‘Winter’ (sic) now found his hand so strong that he would write down after dinner what he had already declared to Salisbury verbally; the prisoner would then add ‘what he shall further remember’. The implication is that Tom Wintour by now was remembering what he was told to remember.
³¹

Wintour, since his confession was so vital, may well have been exposed to the awesome sight of the rack. But perhaps, wounded and helpless as he was, it was not necessary. The implicit threat of his situation – the despair of the prisoner cut off in the darkness described by Lord Dunfermline – may have
been enough for the government to produce from him the confession they wanted. At all events, a surviving draft marked in Coke’s handwriting shows how carefully the text was monitored: wording has been altered in places, and underlined in others. The main drift of these markings is to hammer home the involvement of the Jesuits, especially Gerard, and of course the guilt of Owen.
³²

Then there was the question of the famous mine under the House of Lords, which had not been mentioned in Guido’s first confession, but featured, by a strange coincidence, in both the confessions which were published. It was suggested earlier that this mine – for which no independent corroboration exists and of which no trace remains – was a myth promulgated by the government. Its importance in the
King’s Book
was as an artistic effect intended to emphasise the sheer horror of what had happened – or rather, what had nearly happened. Having elaborated the kind of confession they wanted from Wintour – both for evidence and for publication purposes – it is scarcely surprising that the government then went further and appended his signature to it. Wintour was completely in their power: the forged signature – by ‘that villain Waad’ yet again? – was only the culmination of the process.

If the Council had not got all the information it wanted about the priests, it had also not succeeded in probing that worrying matter of the future Protector’s identity. The Earl of Northumberland was not, of course, tortured or even threatened with torture. He was a great man, not an obscure recusant. He was, however, subjected to intensive questioning by the King among others. James was preoccupied with the idea that Northumberland had had his horoscope – and that of the royal children – drawn up: casting the horoscope of a reigning monarch was always seen as a threatening and thus treasonable activity. Northumberland’s problem, as he himself would point out to the King a few years later, was that he could not prove a negative. On 15 November, in front of the Council, he had argued that he should be presumed innocent on the grounds of
his lifestyle, which was ‘unambitious and given to private pleasures, such as gardening and building’.
³³
Unfortunately this touching picture was not the whole image of the man.

It was Northumberland who had acted as the Catholics’ advocate in the previous reign, something the Earl might loftily dismiss as ‘an old Scotch story’, but others did not forget so easily. It was Northumberland who had employed Thomas Percy (a dead man who could tell no tales, even to exonerate his patron) and it was Northumberland who had been visited by Percy at Syon on 4 November, before the latter went back to Essex House, Northumberland’s London home. Against this, Northumberland, denying over and over again any complicity in the Plot, could only point to the practical arrangements he had made to attend Parliament on 5 November. Even Salisbury admitted to Edmondes: ‘it cannot be cast [charged] that he was absent’.
³⁴

It was not enough. Northumberland remained in the Tower, although he lived in comfort compared to the prisoners in their dungeons below.
³⁵
Nevertheless he was not a free man. Assuming that he was innocent, Northumberland, like the Plotters’ wives, was among the numerous tangential victims of the Powder Treason.

The rest of the prisoners held in connection with the Plot – with one key exception – did not provide the government with anything very much in the way of fresh information. Men like Ambrose Rookwood and Sir Everard Digby had been brought into the conspiracy too late to have much detailed knowledge.
*
Rookwood’s main contribution beyond attesting to his enduring feelings for Catesby, whom he ‘loved more than his own soul’, was to state that he had been promised that the Catholic lords would be spared.
†
36

As for Digby, he suffered from the delusion, pathetic under the circumstances, that he could explain everything to King James if only he could meet him face to face, and put the Catholic case.
³⁷
Of course the once petted darling of the court was not allowed this luxury. One can hardly blame King James for not wishing to entertain further a young man who had recently planned to murder him and his family in such a ruthless fashion. Nevertheless Digby’s conduct either raises a doubt about the full extent of his implication, or suggests that Digby was astonishingly naive and trusting of his sovereign’s forgiveness.

Digby had been involved in the conspiracy a mere fortnight before its discovery. It is possible that he learnt the full dreadful nature of what had been planned for the Parliament House only at Dunchurch when the London conspirators arrived to disband the meeting, by which time the Plot had already failed. Digby was not the kind of man to desert his friends at this juncture, and so he pressed on with them (although his reaction to the servant at the inn – ‘there is no remedy’ – suggests he did so with a heavy heart). But he did of course leave Holbeach, when the cause was evidently lost, to surrender himself to the authorities, and he was the only major conspirator to do so.

Denied an interview with the King, Digby took refuge in a kind of Christian defiance, as family papers discovered after his son’s death revealed. ‘If I had thought there had been the least sin in the Plot,’ he wrote, ‘I would not have been of it for all the world, and no other cause drew me to hazard my life but zeal to God’s religion.’ As for the reaction of the Pope and the English priesthood, he had been assured that they would not hinder any ‘stirs’ (risings) that should be undertaken ‘for the Catholic good’.
³⁸
Apart from writing, he occupied himself, like Rookwood, with carving an inscription in his cell at the Broad Arrow Tower.
*

The key confession which forged the link between priests and Plot so much desired by Salisbury was that of Thomas Bates on 4 December.
³⁹
This confession constituted something of a breakthrough, because Bates directly implicated Father Tesimond (something he would apologise for at the last). This false witness was born almost certainly as a result of his being threatened with torture on the one hand and promised a pardon on the other: that is certainly what Father Tesimond himself believed, accepting in effect Bates’ ultimate apology. But by then it was of course too late to save the Powder Treason from its transformation into the Case of the Conspiring Jesuits.

Bates, unfortunately, was in all too good a position to give the kind of testimony which would be lethal in the hands of an agile prosecutor. In his capacity as Catesby’s servant, he had been present at so many of the crucial scenes of the conspiracy. His great loyalty had been to his master, but now Catesby was dead, and he at least was beyond the government’s vengeance. Thus, in a subsequent examination of 13 January 1606, Bates was able to describe the mission he had made to Father Garnet at Coughton on 7 November, on Catesby’s instructions, to break the devastating news of the Plotters’ flight. He could report the fatal exchange between the two priests, Father Garnet and Father Tesimond, and that exclamation – all too accurate, as it turned out – ‘we are all undone!’ It was Bates who had ridden with Father Tesimond to Huddington, before Tesimond went to the Habingtons at Hindlip. Bates also spoke of a meeting between three priests, Garnet, Gerard and Tesimond, at Harrowden, some time in mid-October.
⁴⁰