The Gunpowder Plot Read online

  Percy seems to have made three visits altogether to Scotland before 1603, carrying Northumberland’s secret correspondence. He was genially received by King James. Father Oswald Tesimond, often known under his alias of Greenway, wrote an account of it later in his Narrative, which is one of the important Catholic sources for the events surrounding the Powder Treason. Tesimond, a Jesuit priest from the north, knew many of the participants well and was a first-hand witness to a number of the happenings. Thus we have King James in Tesimond’s version making ‘very generous promises to favour Catholics actively and not merely to free them from the bondage and persecution in which they were then living’. It got better: ‘Indeed, he would admit them to every kind of honour and office in the state without making any difference between them and the Protestants.’ And even better: ‘At last he would take them under his complete protection.’ As the King pledged his word as a prince, he took Percy by the hand and ‘swore to carry out all that he had promised’. That was the thrilling story of his royal encounter which Thomas Percy now spread everywhere among the Catholics.13

  If all this was true, it is easy to imagine the elation with which Percy returned to England, hastening to pass the good news to his co-religionists. Similarly, one can understand only too easily their own rising excitement. As Father Tesimond explained, the report as it spread in secret did an enormous amount of good for the King, ‘winning over as it did the allegiance of the Catholics and filling them with the highest hopes’. But was it true?

  The consensus of opinions among historians is that King James did give certain assurances, but that they were verbal. In cultivating the Catholics his clear intention was to foster exactly those ‘highest hopes’ to which Tesimond alluded. This was how King James operated. (One should point out that he was making similarly encouraging noises, at precisely the same period, to the English Puritans, who would have been mortally offended at the merest hint of toleration for the Catholics.) The sort of thing he probably had in mind was to allow what Northumberland called ‘a Mass in a corner’ – that is, in a private house, giving no public offence. In his correspondence with Northumberland, King James continually stressed his unaggressive feelings towards those Catholics who were not ‘restive’.14

  But all this was a very long way from the wild message of future royal ‘protection’ spread by Percy. Also, Percy, eager to establish his own importance, had been given a perfect opportunity by these unwritten promises to impress his patron Northumberland, and his fellow Catholics. There is no question that the account of Tesimond shows a degree of exaggeration on Percy’s part. At the same time, equally fatally, the King promised much more than he would admit to later.

  King James’ surviving correspondence with Northumberland is of a very different tone. At the start Northumberland knew exactly the right note to strike: ‘My conscience told me of your succession right.’ This was Northumberland’s message: ‘It were a pity to lose so good a kingdom’ by not tolerating private Masses so long as the Catholics ‘shall not be too busy disturbers of the government of the state, nor seek to make us contributors to a Peter [i.e. Catholic] priest’. King James’ written reply to Northumberland was along the same lines. As for the Catholics, he would neither persecute ‘any that will be quiet’ and give outward obedience to the law, nor fail to advance any of them who genuinely deserved it through their ‘good service’.15

  Between this kind of sober, not unreasonable talk and Percy’s exaggerated account of a glorious future, there was an enormous, potentially lethal gap.

  Not all the English Catholics, however, were prepared to conduct themselves quite so quietly. The cause of the old religion in England had not been helped – how could it be? – by an angry split which developed in the late 1590s between the Jesuits and another group of priests, the so-called Appellants.16 The dispute emerged into the open in the prison of Wisbech Castle in Lincolnshire where a great many priests were held. It was immensely disruptive within the narrow confine of the prison, and outside in the wider world even more so. Most importantly, from the point of view of the future, the dispute encouraged the Appellants to paint the Jesuits to the government as treacherous emissaries of the Pope who owed to him their first loyalty. This of course was almost exactly the government’s own declared position on those ‘hellhounds’ the Jesuits.

  All the priests concerned were English-born, and most had had spells of education and training abroad since such training was of course impossible in England. But between the Jesuits and the Appellants there was a basic difference of approach over the restoration of Catholicism to their country. Was the right course to hold to the sacred tenets of Catholicism, spread them where possible, die in the attempt if not? This, simply put, was the Jesuit mission as they saw it. The Appellants for their part believed in establishing some kind of compromise with the state and in pledging their fervent loyalty to the government (even to the extent of denouncing the Jesuits as foreign-based trouble-makers). In this way they could set up a form of Catholicism as an unthreatening minority religion which would be officially tolerated. It is a dispute which has often been mirrored since, under totalitarian regimes where Christianity (and other doctrines) have been proscribed.

  It is possible to sympathise with both points of view; unfortunately, the situation was complicated by personalities and personal rivalries. The brilliant, intellectual Jesuits – Fathers Garnet and Gerard – were envied by the Appellants for the civilised lives they led in the great houses that nurtured them. This was petty and, given the disgusting deaths of the Jesuit priests when they were captured, it was also unfair. The Appellants had more of a case when they dwelt on the turmoil stirred up by the Jesuits. Their case – if one was necessary between co-religionists – was stronger still when they accused the Jesuits of supporting the power of the Pope to depose a given sovereign.

  This was the most damaging charge which could be made in the eyes of the English government and it had been given substance, as has been noted, by the disastrous Papal Bull of 1570 excommunicating Elizabeth. Jesuits like Father Garnet and Father Gerard, busy trying to stay alive and out of sight, busy trying to restore Catholics to their Faith equally out of sight, were not in business to depose any lawful sovereign. But some Jesuits of an older generation had taken a different view. Living in exile abroad, they had seen no reason not to support, from time to time, the invasion schemes of the Spanish King Philip II.

  Father Robert Persons was one of these. He had been born at Nether Stowey in Somerset, one of eleven children, in 1544, three years before the death of Henry VIII. (He was thus eleven years older than Father Garnet and twenty-two years older than Father Gerard.) He was outstandingly clever and supposedly had the best mind of all the English Catholics. He was also unswervingly loyal to the cause and on certain issues uncompromising to a degree that those who came after him were not. For example, Persons supported plainly the power of the Pope to depose sovereigns.17 Leaving England in the 1580s he had spent some time in Spain – hence his spirited advocacy of the Archduchess Isabella – before arriving in Rome in 1597.

  A notorious challenge was put to priests in England when they were captured by the authorities: the so-called ‘Bloody Question’. It ran as follows: ‘Whose side would you take if the Bishop of Rome [the Pope] or other prince by his authority should invade the realm with an army…?’ Most English priests, thus challenged, tried to evade the issue, taking refuge in silence or prevarication: the most sensible course.18 But Father Persons, had the Bloody Question been put to him, and had he answered truthfully, would have backed the ‘Bishop of Rome’.

  Apart from being a hate figure to the English government, Persons was a particular target of Appellant dislike. He was accused of trying to run the entire (subterranean) English Catholic organisation as a kind of Jesuit fiefdom. The very question of that organisation aroused Appellant indignation. The Appellants proposed a form of episcopacy where English Catholic bishops would have the traditional powers of consecration an
d confirmation. (This would of course have distanced them in practice from Roman control and helped forward their concept of a minority religion with tacit government approval.) Instead, in 1598, they got an overlord known as the Archpriest in the shape of Father George Blackwell. Father Blackwell, although a decent, likeable man, was not the vigorous character needed in these difficult circumstances to weld (or hammer) the English Catholics together. Although not a Jesuit, to the Appellants Blackwell gave the impression of being completely under the Jesuits’ thumb.

  Father William Watson was an Appellant with all their worst qualities of bitterness and self-pity, plus a few bad qualities of his own. He was coarse-mannered and very vain. (It is a sad truth that those who are able to compromise – or, as their enemies would put it, collaborate – are not always the most inspiring of characters personally.) The Jesuit Father Persons, alluding symbolically to Watson’s prominent squint, called him ‘so wrong shapen and of so bad and blinking aspect that he looketh nine ways at once’. The worst of Watson was his manic self-confidence on the subject of his own abilities which would lead him, as we shall see, into intrigues which were half crazy and wholly dangerous. Watson excoriated Jesuit control, wanting to make an addition to the Latin Litany which in English read: ‘From the machinations of Persons, free us, O Lord.’19

  Father John Mush was another Appellant who detested Persons with a vigour which would have made Robert Cecil proud of him. Mush, who hailed from Yorkshire, was a pious man (he had been the confessor of Margaret Clitheroe) but he was also notably irascible. He described Persons as ‘stationed at his ease’ in Rome, while the Appellants in England, ‘innocent of any crime and ignorant of his dangerous machinations’, underwent the punishment which his imprudence and audacity alone merited.20

  Ironically, the efforts of the Appellants to reach an official accommodation with the Elizabethan government were not successful, despite some heavy attempts to do so in the last months of the old Queen’s life. The French Ambassador tried to play a helpful role, given the kind of toleration which the Huguenots had in France, but was told that in England at least there was to be only one religion within one country.21

  A proclamation of November 1602 was more encouraging since a distinction was officially drawn between the ‘traitorous Jesuits’ and the Appellants. The latter were given three months to declare their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth and throw themselves on the government’s mercy. However, the Appellant position was not as secure as its priests hoped. An Appellant ‘Protestation’ of January 1603 went a long way towards shrugging off Papal temporal claims. Yet it was dismissed by the English Council because it did not go far enough. The Council took a hard line: priests would be safe only so long as they did not actually celebrate the Mass. To abandon the Mass was certainly not what the Appellants, dedicated priests like Father Mush, had in mind, for all their faults.

  The dispute between Jesuits and Appellants, between integrity and compromise, each policy with the aim of preserving English Catholicism, was like a canker eating away at the heart of the recusant world. However, if the new monarch did indeed tolerate ‘diversity of opinions’ in religion, it was possible that this painful dispute would begin to fade away.

  Not all unquiet Papists in England were priests. Thomas Percy had two brothers-in-law, John (always known as Jack) and Christopher (Kit) Wright, who, unlike their female relations, did not believe in heroic but passive resistance. They were an impressive couple physically, burly and well above average height. They would never be described as handsome but Jack had ‘pleasing features’ and Kit had a healthy, ruddy face. In general they conducted themselves as a couple of strong, silent Yorkshiremen. This natural taciturnity, coupled with a reputation for loyalty, made the brothers prized associates for any kind of venture needing action (with the sword) rather than argument. And they were both devout Catholics.22

  Jack Wright was one of the young men who, with his great friend Catesby, had formed part of the entourage of the Earl of Essex. He had been in the thick of the fierce if short-lived fighting of the Essex Rising in 1601; thereafter he did a spell in solitary confinement. Jack moved his family from Yorkshire into Twigmoor Hall in north Lincolnshire which, even before the Essex Rising, was noted as ‘resort of priests for his [Wright’s] spiritual and their corporal comfort’. A government report put it in less flattering terms: ‘This place is one of the worst in her Majesty’s dominions and is used like a Popish college for traitors’ in the northern parts.*23

  The Wrights were representative of what was, in effect, a younger generation of English Catholics. Jack and Kit Wright were born in 1568 and 1570 respectively. Guy Fawkes, whose name would eventually become synonymous with the Gunpowder Plot, was like the Wrights a pupil at St Peter’s, York; he was also born in 1570. Robert Catesby, born in 1573, was slightly younger: his first cousin Francis Tresham was born in 1568. Another pair of Catholic brothers to whom Catesby and Tresham were related were Robert and Thomas Wintour of Huddington Court, Worcestershire. The Wintours, who had both Throckmorton and Vaux blood, were born in 1568 and 1571 respectively. The Wintours’ sister Dorothy was married to a neighbouring recusant John Grant, who was roughly the same age.

  These scions of recusant families, or sympathisers, grew to manhood in the 1590s. A comparison might be made to the young people, born after the Second World War, who came to adulthood in the 1960s, with revolutionary results. In the 1960s, however, the young, standing on the shoulders of a previous generation wearied by war, were able to help themselves to a new kind of personal liberty. In the 1590s, the aims of the restless young men were on the surface much more idealistic: religious freedom. At the same time there was a special capacity for violence within them, due to the suppression in which they had been nurtured, which the children of the 1960s, busy making love not war, in general did not feel.

  It cannot be a complete coincidence that so many of the young males associated with the Gunpowder Plot were admired by their contemporaries for being expert fighters and in particular swordsmen – the gallant art that signified the gentleman. It was as though they were able to work out their disappointments in the manly sphere of combat: with the additional lurking possibility of one day wielding their swords in the cause of the Catholic Faith. Jack Wright for example was especially renowned for his valour, and was popularly considered to be the best swordsman of the day. His brother Kit was also admired for his skill. Robert Catesby was much respected ‘in all companies of such as are counted a man of action’ for his elegant way with both a horse and a sword. ‘Great courage’ and ‘intrepid courage’ were qualities associated with the Wintour brothers. Guy Fawkes the military man had ‘considerable fame and name among soldiers’.24

  There was no possibility of a university degree for such men in England unless by compromising their Faith and passing as Protestants, and no possibility of advancement in the endless purlieus of governmental service (both involved taking the Oath of Supremacy). Any kind of Catholic education or career had to be sought abroad, most conveniently in the Spanish Netherlands for geographical reasons, or in Spain itself. These young men suffered as a result frustrations unknown to the previous generation.

  It is true that in many cases their parents had been imprisoned and fined – Sir Thomas Tresham and Ursula Wright come to mind – but these same parents, having lived through the five Catholic years of Queen Mary Tudor’s reign, would have had different expectations. What had happened once – the restoration of Catholic England by a Catholic sovereign – might happen again. They practised endurance and submission to the will of God. The young men, resentful where their parents and their family finances had suffered, were much more disposed to seek remedy in positive action.

  The Essex Rebellion was a case in point. While the main thrust of the rebellion was to further the ambitions of Essex himself, young Catholics such as Catesby, Tresham and Jack Wright had a different agenda. Father Henry Garnet (who greatly disapproved of an involvement reflecting so badly on rec
usant loyalties) described these young men as having joined in the vain hope that, if Essex won the day, ‘there would be an end of the penal statutes against Catholics’. The abrupt failure of the rising meant that this avenue was blocked. However, it was possible that Spain might help to build up their faction again to a position of strength. With this in mind, Thomas (Tom) Wintour made an expedition to Spain from Flanders in 1601, travelling under the alias of Timothy Browne.25

  The Wintour name originally came from the Welsh Gwyn Tour, meaning White Tower – and was always spelt by the family with a ‘u’, thus commemorating its origins. ‘Wyntour’ was a variant in signatures but not ‘Winter’ (a fact which will turn out to be of some importance in this narrative). The Wintours’ mother was Jane Ingleby, daughter of Sir William Ingleby of Ripley Castle, near Knaresborough. Her brother Francis Ingleby was a priest: he had been hung, drawn and quartered in 1586. This tragedy, with its gruesome details, could hardly have failed to leave a stark impression upon the Wintour family.26

  Robert Wintour, as the elder of the two, inherited Huddington Court near Worcester and a considerable fortune. Huddington was one of those mellow, beautiful, moated Tudor houses which, like Baddesley Clinton, lay in an essentially private situation concealed by woods. Robert Wintour used his large fortune to good effect and had an attractive reputation for generosity. In general, he was held to be a reliable and decent fellow, if somewhat more low-key as a character than his lively brother Tom. As a result, it was commonly believed that the younger, cleverer brother influenced the tractable older one, rather than the other way round.