I will never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion …
KING JAMES VI
to Robert Cecil
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, DID KING JAMES, while in Scotland, promise to the Catholics in England? The question is of crucial importance in understanding the Powder Treason. And there is a supplementary question: if such promises were made, were they verbal or written? Unfortunately, the various personalities involved complicate rather than simplify the issue: none of them is particularly satisfactory from the point of view of honest record.
There was King James’ own way with hints, protestations and the like – the superb diplomatic skill by which he raised but did not satisfy religious hopes. His dealings with the Papacy were certainly not sincere since, whatever his feelings about Rome as the historic Mother Church, King James never had any plans to become a Catholic. The granting of toleration for other Catholics was rather different, and makes estimating the King’s sincerity a much subtler problem.
In the course of his secret correspondence with Robert Cecil, which began in the spring of 1601, King James gave vent to a number of opinions on the subject, although we should bear in mind that these letters, written and received without the old Queen’s knowledge, were emphatically not destined for publication, and nor were they dated. For example, on one occasion he saw fit to warn ‘my dearest and trusty 10’ as Cecil was known in their private code, of ‘the daily increase that I hear of popery in England’. King James, who enjoyed giving a good lecture, ended his warning on a kindly if condescending note. He admitted that it might be argued that Cecil (actually in England) knew all this much better than James (in Scotland) did: ‘yet it is a true old saying, that another man will better see a man’s game than the player himself can do’.1
Cecil responded with an interesting account of his personal credo. Much as he loathed the Catholic priests and the peril they represented – ‘I condemn their doctrine, I detest their conversation’ – nevertheless he confessed that he shrank to see them ‘die by dozens’ when ‘at the last gasp’ they came ‘so near loyalty’. (Cecil’s compassion, however, specifically excluded the Jesuits, whom he designated ‘that generation of vipers’ trading in ‘the blood and crowns of Princes’.) On another occasion James similarly dissociated himself from the shedding of blood. And where the priests were concerned, he believed that exile was a better solution than execution: rather than have their heads separated from their bodies ‘I would be glad to have both their heads and their bodies separated from this whole island and transported beyond seas!’2
This letter from King James probably comes near to expressing what he actually felt on the subject: ‘I will never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion, but I should be sorry that Catholics should so multiply as they might be able to practise their old principles upon us.’ Although he would never agree that men should die for ‘errors in faith’, a pronounced rise in the numbers of Catholics was another matter. Such a Catholic increase would have serious consequences ‘as by continual multiplication they [the Catholics] might at last become master’.3
When King James wrote these words, he suggested at the least that English Catholics might one day enjoy the tolerated minority status of the Protestant Huguenots in France. Yet there was an obvious flaw in this argument, at least from the Catholic point of view. The King indicated that Catholics might be tolerated, just so long as their numbers did not increase. But Catholic toleration almost certainly would bring about an increase in numbers. The religious climate would be balmier and the Church Papists would venture forth again under their true colours.
These were ideas being floated rather than plans being made. But some time in 1602 Henry Percy 9th Earl of Northumberland initiated a more down-to-earth correspondence on the subject with the King. He came of a family (like the Howards) that had suffered much for the King’s unfortunate mother. Cecil’s father might have been responsible for Mary Queen of Scots’ head being cut off (as James was rumoured to believe) but Northumberland’s uncle had lost his head in 1572 for his part in the Northern Rising on behalf of Queen Mary. Born in 1564, the 9th Earl was two years older than James VI and a magnificent peer with massive estates in northern England, as well as in the south, where he had an establishment at Petworth in Sussex. Highly gifted, his scientific experiments and his remarkable scientific library would later earn him the sobriquet of the ‘Wizard Earl’. But Northumberland also had something remote about him (to which his deafness contributed) and his speech was inclined to be slow. At times shy – ‘a kind of inward, reserved man’ – and at other times a manic gambler with a temper that flared up, he constituted a puzzle to his contemporaries.4 His lofty position aroused in others not only respect but jealousy.
Northumberland’s status at the court of Elizabeth was further complicated by a troubled marriage. His wife Dorothy was the sister of the Queen’s favourite Essex, and for this, and her own sweetness of character, Elizabeth bore her great personal fondness. The Queen took Dorothy’s side when the couple separated. A brief reconciliation resulted in the birth of a longed-for heir in 1602, but then the marriage again broke up. In general Northumberland does not seem to have exercised good judgement in his various relationships. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his employment of a certain Thomas Percy as his go-between with King James.
Thomas Percy was a poor relation, one of those hangers-on that flocked around great men, petitioning for preferment. The connection was actually quite remote: Thomas Percy was a second cousin once removed, being the great-grandson of the 4th Earl (not an illegitimate half-brother of Northumberland as is sometimes suggested).5 But a kind of clan system existed by which a comparatively distant relation such as Percy would look to the proverbially generous Northumberland as his patron. In 1596 Percy was made Constable of Alnwick Castle, the great Percy fortress on the borders of Scotland, and thus the agent for the family’s northern estates. Northumberland declined a post as ambassador from Queen Elizabeth (his deafness made him draw back) but he did hold a command in the Low Countries from 1600 to 1601, where Thomas Percy joined him before the death of Queen Elizabeth. At some point Percy’s particular energies convinced Northumberland that he was the man to handle the somewhat delicate Scottish mission.
Presumably Percy’s religion was the clinching factor. Northumberland himself was summed up by a French ambassador as one who was ‘a Catholic in his soul’. Northumberland put it rather differently when he wrote to James to say that, although he was not a Catholic himself, there were sundry people in his entourage who had ‘oars in that boat’.6 He was referring by this to a few old recusant servants lingering in his house: the sort who would threaten no one. But Percy was different. He was a much more political animal, and his Catholicism more determinedly active.
Percy was a controversial figure in his own time – ‘a subtle, flattering, dangerous knave’ according to one verdict. He was in his forties at the death of Elizabeth (although his white hair made him look older) and a striking figure with his exceptional height and formidable build. He had a certain charm, despite the general seriousness of his manner, and a great deal of energy. This energy was physical as well as mental and as a result Percy had a tendency to sweat and used to change his shirt twice a day, giving ‘much labour to his laundresses’.7
The personality of Thomas Percy still exercises a baleful influence on the events surrounding the Gunpowder Plot in the minds of historians, as, it might be argued, it did over the unwisely generous Northumberland. According to a Catholic source, Percy had had a wild youth in which he ‘relied much on his sword and personal courage’ and relished being among ‘foul-mouthed, ribald people’. His conversion to Catholicism – or at any rate his moving from some form of Church Papistry to more ardent belief - was supposed to have calmed him down.8 Nevertheless, some wildness seems to have remained, since he left his wife for another woman. In an age before the official registration of marriage or for that matter any possibility of legal divorce, men dealt with the situation by simply marrying again in another part of the country, which is what Percy appears to have done. His first wife, born Martha Wright, whom he married in 1591, was abandoned in London, in Holborn, ‘mean and poor’, to support herself as best she could by teaching the daughters of recusants. The other wife was in Warwickshire.9
The first marriage, even if a failure in personal terms, had important consequences for Percy. Martha Wright came from one of those stubbornly recusant families in Yorkshire, whose womenfolk were celebrated for their constancy. Her mother Ursula Wright – ‘a great prayer’ – served many years in prison for refusing to attend Protestant services. Another of Ursula’s daughters, who married into the Yorkshire recusant family of Ward, became the mother of the remarkable proponent of female education and founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Ward, born in 1585. At Ploughland Hall in east Yorkshire, the young Mary Ward spent five years in grandmother Ursula’s care.10
Martha was, in the family tradition, ‘an honourable good lady’ and her teaching was still remembered with gratitude over forty years later by ‘those that were her scholars’. Apart from her work, Martha lived ‘very private’, due to the fact that she frequently harboured priests.11
Thomas Percy himself was clearly a clever man. If he were not, Northumberland’s continued reliance on his administrative abilities in the north would not make sense. At the same time, Percy was in some ways unscrupulous. He was not the only unjust steward to seek to benefit from the profits of a master immeasurably more wealthy than himself. Nevertheless, it was hardly to his credit that charges of dishonesty relating to the handling of the Percy estates were at one point brought against him, and proved. Yet Percy unquestionably had Northumberland’s trust. It was Percy who was sent on a confidential mission to Scotland, before the death of Queen Elizabeth, on behalf of the English Catholics. Northumberland intended to ‘deliver’ the English Catholics to King James, and the King seemed to be ready to ‘receive’ them – on his terms.
Northumberland’s plan was to build up a power base in the new reign and with the new sovereign, to make up for the Elizabethan family disgrace. There was also the need to counteract the rising influence of Cecil, in that perpetual dance to the music of jealousy which occupied sixteenth-century courtiers. As for the English Catholic faction, its floating quality, stressed in the previous chapter, made it easy for outsiders to overestimate its importance. Afterwards, when everyone was busy rewriting history to assert their own innocence (or the guilt of others) Northumberland would assert that the mission had been Percy’s idea.12 For all Percy’s power to manipulate his patron, this does not ring true. Northumberland had a clear agenda in which he intended to make use of the Catholics to his own advantage.
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 and 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 recusant 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.
Robert was known to be a devout Catholic. He had also made a grand marriage to Gertrude Talbot, kin to the Earl of Shrewsbury, which brought him yet deeper into the Catholic world. His wife’s family had suffered much for recusancy: her father, John Talbot of Grafton Manor near Bromsgrove, had spent nearly twenty years in prison, and her mother, a Petre, was the daughter of Queen Mary Tudor’s Secretary of State and sister to that hospitable Sir John Petre who was the patron of William Byrd.27 Maybe it was Gertrude Wintour’s influence which made Robert so strong for the Faith, or maybe he had deliberately sought out a devout Catholic bride. At all events, Huddington Court, under the sway of Robert Wintour, was a known refuge for priests, where secret Masses could and would be celebrated.†
Tom Wintour, intelligent, possessed of a strong personality, with neither the burden nor the advantage of an estate, grew up to be an operator rather than a benefactor. Here was a reverse of Jack Wright: not a strong silent man with a sword but an argumentative one, with the reputation of being skilful in debate, inclined to win the day over his opponents. He was a short, stocky man and like Robert was physically very fit. Lack of stature did not prevent Tom being considered good-looking, with his sparkling eyes and a face that was ‘round but handsome’. Having received an education as a lawyer – a natural profession perhaps for one of his disposition – he took to a life of ‘dissipation’, in Father Tesimond’s words, at least for a while.28
Tom, like so many others of his class and background, crossed the sea to Flanders in the Spanish Netherlands. At first, however, he enrolled in the English army fighting Spain in the Low Countries on behalf of the Protestant rebels: dissipation did not match with religious enthusiasm. Tom had always been interested in history and he now acquired a special interest in military history, as well as experience as a soldier. Naturally he became familiar with the Flanders scene: expatriates, intriguers as well as fighters, and many who were all these things. He also fought in France and maybe in Central Europe against the Turks. He certainly learnt Spanish – which would be important – as well as French and Latin.
Then something changed Tom Wintour. About 1600 he became as passionate a Catholic as his soberer brother, who went often to the Sacraments. Tom Wintour gave as his reason that he had come to see the injustice of the English war in Flanders, supporting the cause of the Protestant rebels against the imperium of Catholic Spain. But he must also have been convinced of the paramount truth of Catholicism. It therefore seems more likely that Tom, in his late twenties, first reverted to the traditions in which he had been raised, a spiritual journey which is not particularly unusual, and then threw in his lot with Spain.
One might add in parenthesis that a conversion of this sort, a rejection of youthful misdemeanours, a ricochet towards ardent piety, has been the sign of many fanatics in history, not all evil but some sanctified (such as St Augustine). It is another common factor among the so-called Plotters which is surely not altogether coincidental: at least four of them – as it happens, the leading figures – had undergone this very same process.
At all events, Tom Wintour changed sides. Late in 1601 he arrived in Spain, with the aim of contacting the Council on behalf of various Catholic dissidents left behind, rudderless, after the execution of their patron Essex. His primary aim seems to have been to secure Spanish money to provide modest English Catholic help as and when a Spanish invasion took place. Meanwhile not only would the Catholic faction in England be strengthened but the Spanish King would ‘have them at his devotion’. Wintour’s hope was for a faction vigorous enough to press for toleration.29
Nearly five years later, this mission, together with a second mission of 1603, was christened the ‘Spanish Treason’. It would be the subject of fearful denunciation on the part of the English government. Details were altered (including the personnel involved) to suit the government’s purpose. Sir Edward Coke, for the government, would furiously declare that Wintour had promised ‘two thousand horses’ from the English Catholics to help the Spanish on their arrival in England: horses, fit for military service, to be kept in permanent readiness for this happy event.30
If Wintour did make such promises, believing them himself, he was certainly living in the realm of fantasy since there was no question of these famous ‘Catholic’ horses existing. Furthermore, the point about horses suitable for military service is an important one: in an age dedicated to the horse as a means of transport, one horse was by no means like another. The English Catholics may well have possessed, among them, two thousand horses of different varieties all over the country. But the horses which the Spaniards had in mind were exceptionally strong, heavy animals with great powers of endurance – war-horses, in other words, which, if truly kept in readiness, would be obvious targets for government inspection. They would also be extremely expensive, both to buy and to maintain.
Wintour was not a fantasist. At the same time he was a natural advocate - and a trained one – who knew exactly the picture he wanted to paint to the Spanish court. He intended to portray the kind of English Catholic readiness which would duly inspire Spanish financial subsidy. So while Wintour certainly did not promise exactly what Coke said he had, he may well have touched up the picture in rather more vivid colours than the situation actually warranted. He would have seen it as being in the best interests of his co-religionists to exaggerate their numbers and strength in order to lure the Spanish forward.
Further red herrings arose in later accounts of the affair. The visit by Father Oswald Tesimond to Spain in the spring of 1602 on some kind of mission to do with the Appellant controversy was one of them. Wintour’s introduction from Father Henry Garnet to the English Jesuits in Spain, and their Superior Father Joseph Cresswell, was another. This introduction was by no means a unique event: Garnet often provided such links to Cresswell. In this case, it seems likely that he believed Wintour’s mission was to secure Spanish pension money for destitute Catholics (another objective which was comparatively common) rather than anything more militaristic.31 But these connections could, much later, all be drawn into a damaging web.
Wintour, with the probable aid of another Englishman in Spain called Thomas James, found himself grappling with the Spanish Council at an unpropitious moment. Invasions were no longer popular projects. The Spanish attack on Kinsale of 1601, when Spanish troops landed in the south of Ireland in support of native Irish rebels, had been a disastrous failure. It was however true that Wintour had an ally in Father Cresswell, whose position gave him access to the Spanish Council and Philip III. It was a connection which Father Cresswell had long utilised to lobby energetically for an armed assault on England.
Perhaps it was Cresswell’s assiduity, perhaps it was Wintour’s eloquence. For the evidence does point to some kind of promise of Spanish money being given in the summer of 1602, as a prelude to unspecified Spanish armed help. Certainly no practical details were included, the name of the commander, for example, or the number of troops involved.32
Such vague assurances on the part of Spain, which could if necessary be denied later, were the stuff of diplomacy (as King James was demonstrating about the same time in Scotland). By the autumn of 1602, in any case, Spanish attention was turning ponderously in the direction of peace with England. In the event, the money would never be paid. Yet Wintour and others in his circle were convinced still that Spain would provide them with a solution.
King James in Scotland had declared that he would not shed blood for the sake of ‘diversity of opinions’ in religion, so long as the Catholics remained quiet. Tom Wintour and his associates could hardly be said to fit into such a peaceful scenario. It was unfortunate that on the eve of the King’s arrival in England the Catholics themselves were exhibiting a diversity of opinions as to how they should proceed. At certain levels they suffered from unhappy internal divisions, and at other levels were ominously restless. And yet the mood was one of optimism on both sides.
Ten years earlier at a time of great persecution in the north of England, Father Henry Garnet had convinced himself that the Faith was still flourishing in spite of these privations: indeed it shone more brightly every day ‘like gold in the furnace’. Despite the testing of his confidence in some dark years, he felt that in time all would observe ‘the religious conduct of Catholics’. By the summer of 1603, Father William Wright, a priest recently returned from abroad, prophesied that: ‘It will come to pass that we in England shall have a toleration as the Huguenots have in France.’33
As for King James, a man in his mid-thirties, coming to the promised land, he was almost childish in his joy, and in his expectations of the English. He was quite confident that they would prove a great deal easier to manage than the Scots: ‘Alas, it is a far more barbarous and stiff-necked people that I rule over.’ Scotland was ‘a wild unruly colt’, wrote the King, with a passion for equestrian sports, whereas in England ‘St George surely rides upon a towardly [docile] riding horse.’34
It remained to be seen which of these contrasting expectations – if any – were well founded. For the Catholics at least there were some cheerful portents. An early recipient of the royal favour was the crypto-Catholic Henry Howard, whose much disgraced family the King now embraced: ‘I love the whole house of them.’ Howard was given the precedence due to a duke’s son and made a Privy Councillor by a King ‘not ignorant of how many crosses he has sustained’; the following March he was created Earl of Northampton.‡35 In early July the recusant Sir John Petre of Ingatestone Hall, uncle of Gertrude Wintour, was created Baron Petre of Writtle: William Byrd’s Mass for the Feast of St Peter and St Paul (29 June) may have been written as a play on his patron’s name, in tribute to the event.36
But the most significant royal appointment, at least from the Catholic point of view, was that of Northumberland. He had continued to play his unofficial role of Catholic emissary at his first meeting with King James in early May, before the King reached London. Northumberland presented a petition on the Catholic behalf, although he took care not to sign it himself (he was after all not actually a Papist, even if many of his best friends were). Now he was installed as Captain of the Gentleman Pensioners, the royal bodyguards. This was an important as well as a prestigious post. Not only did it keep Northumberland in close contact with the King, but it gave him opportunities for personal patronage in appointing further royal bodyguards such as the ambitious and unscrupulous Thomas Percy. It was an appointment which would, in the next few years, alter the whole direction of Northumberland’s life.
* Twigmoor Hall still bears traces of numerous subterranean passages; on one occasion in 1940 a tenant farmer Percy Chappel discovered a complete room with stabling for a horse underground when the leg of his wife’s grand piano went through the floor.
† Huddington Court, still privately owned and still in Catholic hands, is another house which remains as an eloquent memorial to the events of 1605; two hiding-places can still be seen, probably constructed by Nicholas Owen. One is off a top room which would have been used, for reasons of security, as a chapel; it also has an inner hole, barred by an extremely heavy door: this might remain undiscovered if the searchers were satisfied with their first find. There is another hiding-place in the attic room opposite.
‡ But for simplicity’s sake he will now be described as Northampton in the text, anticipating the creation.