The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (44 page)

When Coke’s speech was concluded, the various ‘Examinations, Confessions and voluntary Declarations’ of the prisoners were read aloud.
²⁹
These began with the testimonies by Guy Fawkes and Francis Tresham about the Spanish Treason, Tresham including the names of Father Garnet and Father Tesimond as being ‘acquainted with Wintour’s employment in Spain’. After this followed the specific confessions to do with the Powder Treason. Guy Fawkes’ confession came first, followed by the confession of the recently captured Robert Wintour. This had been taken on 17 January in front of the Lords Commissioners, and was accompanied by a long statement signed by him four days later.

This statement had an important postscript: ‘I confess that on Thursday 7th of November, I did confess myself to Father Hammond the priest, as other gentlemen did, and was absolved, and received the Sacrament.’ Hammond was in fact the alias of the chaplain at Huddington, Father Hart. The general confession of the conspirators at Huddington in the small hours of the morning was probably more to do with
their expectation of death in the near future than with their guilt over the past. Nevertheless, the notion that the conspirators had been able to make a clean breast of their potential crimes and receive absolution from a priest – a Jesuit – two days after the discovery of the Plot was a damaging one.

More confessions were read, including that of Thomas Wintour as well as the examinations of Rookwood and Keyes. The last piece of evidence was not a confession, but it concerned a conversation which Robert Wintour was said to have had with Guido in the Tower after his capture. The two men found themselves in adjacent cells and took the opportunity to have what they believed to be an intimate conversation but was in fact overheard by a government spy. Wintour and Guido mentioned the taking of Nicholas Owen – ‘the little man’. Then Robert Wintour said something to Fawkes to the effect that ‘God will raise up seed to Abraham out of the very stones’, meaning that God in the future would raise up others for the good of the Church, ‘although they [the conspirators] were gone’.
³⁰
These confidences were less important than the revelation of the government’s methods of espionage among their prisoners. Sadly, Father Garnet never got to hear of this particular trick, otherwise his own conduct in the Tower might have been different.

After this evidence was heard, the seven were allowed at last to speak if they so wished, ‘wherefore judgement of death should not be pronounced against them’. Only Ambrose Rookwood elected to make any real use of this privilege.
³¹

Rookwood admitted that his offences were so dreadful that he could not expect mercy, and yet maybe there were some extenuating circumstances since he had been ‘neither author nor actor’, but had been drawn into the Plot by his feelings for Catesby, ‘whom he loved above any worldly man’. In the end Rookwood craved for mercy, so as not to leave ‘a blemish and blot unto all ages’ upon his name and blood. Kings, he hoped, might imitate God who sometimes administered bodily punishments to mortals, but did not actually kill them.

The rest of the conspirators spoke shortly. Tom Wintour,
clearly suffering from remorse at having brought Robert into the Plot, asked to be hanged on behalf of his brother as well as himself. Guy Fawkes gave an explanation for his plea of ‘Not Guilty’ which had earlier baffled the court. He had done so, he said, in respect of certain conferences mentioned in the indictment ‘which he knew not of. The reaction of Robert Keyes was terse and stoic: death was as good now as at any other time, he said, and for this cause rather than for another. Thomas Bates and Robert Wintour merely asked for mercy.

John Grant kept up his reputation for taciturnity by remaining completely silent for a while. He then said that he was guilty of ‘a conspiracy intended but never effected’. In a memorable phrase in the course of his speech, Coke had said that ‘Truth is the daughter of Time
[Veritas temporis filia];
especially in this case.’ But John Grant’s economical comment made before Time had had a chance to give birth to Truth was probably as just a verdict as any. It was indeed a conspiracy intended – but never carried out.

The trial of Sir Everard Digby followed. He pleaded ‘Guilty’ swiftly to the indictment, in order to have the privilege of making a speech. It was evidently not unmoving to some of those that heard it. Digby gave as his first motive his friendship and love for Catesby – how enduring was the influence and charisma of Robin! The cause of religion for which he had decided to neglect ‘his estate, his life, his name, his memory, his posterity, and worldly and earthly felicity’ took second place.
³²

He alluded to the broken promises of toleration – the King cannot have liked that – as well as mentioning the recusants’ fear of harsher laws in the coming Parliament. This referred specifically to the subject of recusant wives, the fear that women as well as men would be liable for fines. Digby then argued passionately that since his offence was ‘contained within himself the guilt of it should not be passed on to his family, least of all to his little sons. His wife – the unfortunate, destitute Mary – should have her jointure, his sisters their
marriage portions and his creditors their debts; his man of business should be admitted to him so that these arrangements could be made.

Coke, however, made short work of all this. The precious friendship with Catesby was ‘mere folly and wicked conspiracy’; Digby’s religion was ‘error and heresy’. Over the question of the wives, Coke laid all the blame for their recusancy squarely on their husbands’ shoulders in a fine seventeenth-century flourish. Either a man had married a woman knowing her to be a recusant, in which case he must expect to pay a fine, or she had become a recusant subsequent to her marriage, in which case the husband was equally at fault for not having kept her under better control. As for Digby’s children! Coke sneered at Digby’s pretended compassion for them when he had so easily accepted the prospect of the deaths of other people’s children, including the ‘tender princes’.
³³

Digby interrupted here – even now, he had enough spirit not to be cowed by Coke. He did not justify what he had done, Digby said, and he confessed that he deserved ‘the vilest death’; he was merely a humble petitioner for mercy and ‘some moderation of justice’ for his family. By way of answer, Coke quoted back to Digby a singularly relentless passage from the Psalms: ‘Let his wife be a widow, and his children vagabonds, let his posterity be destroyed, and in the next generation let his name be quite put out.’

Northampton was the next to make a speech, referring in elaborate terms to the favour which had been shown Digby by the late Queen Elizabeth and by King James. Northampton, too, was determined to put an end to the rumours that before he inherited the English crown King James had promised ‘some further hope and comfort’ for the Catholics. So he held forth on the subject of James’ lifelong Protestantism: that faith which James ‘had sucked from the breast of his nurse’ (but not of course from the breast of his Catholic mother – for once, the name of Mary Queen of Scots was not dragged in). Lastly Salisbury himself thought it necessary to return to the theme of the King’s alleged promises yet again. No promises had been
broken. There were no promises. Never at any time had King James given ‘the least hope, much less promise of toleration’.
³⁴

At the conclusion of Salisbury’s speech, Serjeant-at-Law Phillips asked for the judgement of the court on the seven conspirators found guilty, and upon Sir Everard Digby, guilty on his own confession. After a few remarks from the Lord Chief Justice, the jury was directed to consider its verdict. It can have surprised no one present in Westminster Hall on that icy late January day that the verdict was equally chilling: Guilty, all of them.

The Lord Chief Justice then pronounced judgement of high treason upon all the prisoners. Seven of them listened to him in silence. Once more the exception was Sir Everard Digby. As the court rose, Digby cried out impulsively: ‘If I may but hear any of your lordships say, you forgive me, I shall go more cheerfully to the gallows.’ His speech had aroused a feeling of compassion if not of mercy – or perhaps it was his youth, the nobility of his bearing, the sense of utter waste. For the lords told him: ‘God forgive you, and we do.’

*
The phrase ‘Devil of the Vault’, which took a hold on the popular imagination, was originally used by Bishop Barlow in his sermon of 10 November (Nowak, p.41).

*
Hindlip House burnt down shortly after this description was written and was totally rebuilt. No trace of its exotic unlawful past remains: its reincarnation has in fact brought it strictly within the law, for it is now the Headquarters of the West Mercia Police Authority. However, the Church of St James, close by, contains a fine and colourful memorial to the Habington family of Hindlip, including coats of arms.

*
There was no mention of the statute under which they were being tried but it was presumably that of 1352 (25 Edw. st. 5 Cap. 2), which made it treason ‘to compass or imagine the death of the king, his queen or the royal heir’ (Bellamy, p. 9).

PART FIVE

The Shadow of Death

He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death.

JOB
, 12:22
quoted in the Tower of London Memorial of the Powder Treason

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Heart of a Traitor

Behold the heart of a traitor!
Traditional cry of the executioner

T
he eight condemned men were put to death in two batches on consecutive days. On Thursday 30 January, Sir Everard Digby, Robert Wintour and John Grant were fetched from the Tower of London and Thomas Bates was brought from the Gatehouse. The time for executions was around eight o’clock in the morning, dark and bleak at this time of year. The site chosen on the first day was the western end of the churchyard of St Paul’s ‘over and against the Bishop of London’s house’. Not everyone, however, approved of the decision. Sir Arthur Gorges, a poet and a friend of Ralegh, who had sailed with him against the Spaniards, protested to Salisbury against the quartering of ‘these wicked and bloody conspirators’ being carried out in a place of such ‘happy memory’, for it was here that Queen Elizabeth herself had thanked God for her nation’s deliverance from the Armada.
¹

The custom of conveying certain miscreants to their place of death by dragging them at the horse’s tail, to which the Attorney-General had alluded at the trial, tended to rob the executioner of the material upon which to do his appointed work. The damaging ordeal also robbed the public of the full ceremony, which it much enjoyed. This included speeches
from the condemned men as well as those prolonged indignities to still-breathing bodies so graphically described by Sir Edward Coke. Therefore, in the case of important prisoners such as the Powder Plotters, it was government policy to convey them singly, each strapped to a wicker hurdle, used as a kind of sledge.
²

This open passage through the crowd had, however, its own dangers. First, there was the possibility – however remote – of rescue. Secondly, in the case of known Catholics, tiresome recusant devotions might interrupt the desired spiritual process of last-minute repentance. Thirdly, there was the question of the wretches’ wives and womenfolk, who had not seen their men for several months, since that dreadful day in early November when the reckless stand at Holbeach had been planned.
*
Recusants’ wives, or the friends of condemned priests, often tried to say a last goodbye in this manner. Thus armed men were stationed at doorways along the route from seven in the morning: ‘one able and sufficient person with a halberd in his hand’ for every dwelling house in the open street.
³