VII

So Sharp a Remedy

He [Catesby] told me the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy, and asked me if I would give my consent. I told him Yes, in this or what else soever, if he resolved upon it, I would venture my life …

Confession of Thomas Wintour, 1605

SUNDAY 20 MAY 1604 WAS THE FATEFUL date. On this day a meeting was held between Robin Catesby, Tom Wintour, Jack Wright, Thomas Percy and Guido Fawkes. Although the band of conspirators would eventually amount to an ill-omened thirteen, these five were regarded as the prime movers of the plot that followed, with Catesby as their inspirational leader and Wintour as adjutant. This meeting, which kick-started the Powder Treason into life, was held at an inn called the Duck and Drake, in the fashionable Strand district, where Tom Wintour stayed when he was in London.

The background to this meeting is as follows.^*1 Catesby first sent for Wintour, who was in Worcestershire with his brother Robert, in late February. Tom Wintour was however ill, and could not at first answer Catesby’s summons. When he did arrive at Catesby’s house in Lambeth he found his cousin together with the swordsman Jack Wright: he may have wished he had stayed at secluded tranquil Huddington instead of answering Catesby’s summons.

The proposition put by Catesby was simple and it was blood-curdling. A scheme would be devised to blow up ‘the Parliament House with gunpowder’ in order to destroy the King and his existing government. Catesby justified his choice of Parliament for this deliberate holocaust with equally shocking simplicity. ‘In that place’, he said, ‘have they done us all the mischief’; perhaps God had designed that place for their punishment.

When he first heard of Catesby’s deadly plan, which he called ‘a stroke at the root’, Wintour demurred. If the stroke succeeded it would certainly bring about ‘new alterations’ in religion, but, if it failed, the scandal surrounding Catholicism would be so great in England that not only their enemies but also their friends would with good reason condemn them. This was an eminently sensible judgement. Unfortunately Wintour did not hold to it. The Catesby spell continued to work on him. Wintour was won over.

When Catesby told his cousin that ‘the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy’ and asked Wintour if he would give his consent, Wintour agreed. ‘I told him Yes, in this or what else soever, if he resolved upon it, I would venture my life …’

Catesby still had not quite given up on the idea of foreign help, that pipedream which had obsessed the English Catholics for so long. In order to leave ‘no peaceable and quiet way untried’ Tom went back to the continent yet again, where the Constable of Castile was holding court before sailing for England. The Constable was, as it happened, a great deal more interested in the affairs of Flanders than in those of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty he was supposed to be concluding (he would not actually arrive in England until August). When the Constable did meet Wintour, he was friendly rather than forthcoming. As for Hugh Owen and Sir William Stanley, they poured cold water on the idea of Spain providing assistance, or for that matter the Archdukes ruling Flanders, Albert and Isabella: ‘all these parts were so desirous of peace with England’.²

But Owen did provide the necessary introduction to Guido Fawkes. Guido’s name had already been supplied by Catesby as ‘a confidant [discreet] gentleman’ suitable for their business, but Wintour had evidently not yet encountered him. Fawkes’ name could have been mentioned to Catesby by anyone in recusant circles, including his schoolfellow, Catesby’s friend and ally, Jack Wright; he would have been recommended as a staunch and courageous soldier. Although the English government, who feared and detested Hugh Owen, tried to pretend later that he had been directly involved in the Plot, there was at this point no plot. Owen, an expert on the Flanders scene after so many years, simply put Wintour in touch with Fawkes; Stanley (who had been Fawkes’ superior) also commended him. An advantage of introducing Guido into this secret plot was that, while his name was known, his face was not, as he had not been in England for many years.

Tom Wintour’s first encounter with Guido was the satisfactory part of his trip abroad. They were after all two people of a similar outlook, contemporaries, men of action, who had both experienced first hand the dilatoriness of the Spanish and the empty nature of their promises. Wintour told Guido that if the peace with Spain really gave no assistance to the beleaguered Catholics, ‘we were upon a resolution to do somewhat in England’, although as yet there were no firm plans. Finally the two men sailed back together, landing on or about 25 April.³ Together they went to find Catesby in his Lambeth lodging, on the south bank of the river. Wintour broke the news that, although the Constable had spoken ‘good words’, Wintour very much doubted whether his deeds would match them. In this way, Catesby could consider himself thrown back on his original, radically violent plan. Four conspirators were now in place.

The fifth member of the inner caucus, Thomas Percy, joined them a few weeks afterwards. Percy, like Guido, was immediately attracted by the idea of taking some action in England itself. Percy was a vigorous character and he had shown already in Scotland his wish to be part of the solution to his co-religionists’ woes. He was also working for Northumberland, ‘one of the great Peers of the kingdom’ as Tassis described him.⁴ Furthermore, there was a family connection to bind him to the conspirators: not only was Percy Jack Wright’s brother-in-law but it seems that his young daughter (by Martha Wright) had been betrothed to Robert Catesby’s eight-year-old son the previous year.

‘Shall we always, gentlemen, talk and never do anything?’ were Percy’s first words. Whatever his moral failings as an individual, he spoke for so many in that frustrated cry. It was in this way that the 20 May meeting at the Duck and Drake was convened. All the Plotters – Catesby, Wintour, Wright, Guido and Percy – swore an oath of secrecy upon a prayer book in a room ‘where no other body was’. Afterwards, since it was a Sunday, Father John Gerard celebrated Mass in another room, in ignorance of what had taken place. The five men all took the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

At the time this Mass merely seemed like a silent personal endorsement of what had been decided earlier. Guido, Catesby and Wintour were, of course, conspicuous by the frequency with which they went to the Sacraments, at a time when recourse to them was not necessarily made all that often. Father Gerard and Catesby were friends. One of their links was Eliza Vaux, the Dowager of Harrowden Hall, who was the priest’s chief protector in the country and an important part of Catesby’s family network, Catesby himself being a frequent visitor to Harrowden. The presence of Catesby and his companions at the Mass was not exceptional, nor, for that matter, was Father Gerard’s presence in London.

London, said to be the largest city in Europe, was at this date a vast sprawling conurbation of teeming tenements and slums, as well as palaces and mansions. The population had swollen so alarmingly in the course of the previous century that King James himself observed that ‘soon London will be all England’. Under the circumstances, recusants often stood a better chance of preserving their anonymity here among the ‘dark dens for every mischief worker’ (including priests) than in the isolated state of a country house, which gave servants the chance of prolonged inspection leading to betrayal.⁵ But there was no question of Father Gerard being let in to the secret of the oath which had just been sworn.

Much later the coincidence of the oath and the Mass, including the taking of the Sacrament, would become a big stick with which the government beat the hated English Jesuits. Lancelot Andrewes, in an official sermon on the subject, described how the plot was ‘undertaken with a holy Oath, bound with the holy Sacrament’. It was a favourite slur that Catholic confessors gave absolution for crimes in advance, thus using their sacramental authority to legitimise a crime. In the case of Father Gerard it was suggested that he had purposefully sanctified the enterprise of destruction which lay ahead. But Tom Wintour was quite clear in his confession that the priest knew nothing. Even Guido, while admitting to the oath and receiving the Sacrament upon it, ‘withal he added that the priest who gave him the sacrament knew nothing of it’. In a subsequent examination, Guido specifically exculpated Gerard.⁶ The only conspirator who implicated the Jesuits at his interrogation was Catesby’s wretched servant Thomas Bates, who, being small fry, had some expectation of saving himself if he gave the government what they wanted: ‘the considerable hope of life which they held before him’. Even Bates retracted his charge on the eve of his death, when he was conscious that he was about to appear before what Father Gerard called ‘that dreadful tribunal’ of God’s own judgement.⁷

Eliza Vaux declared eloquently that she would pawn her whole estate -‘yea, and her life also’ – in order to answer for Father Gerard’s innocence.⁸ She was of course quite as passionately partisan as the government. More cogent therefore is the surviving correspondence of the Jesuits with Rome in the summer of 1604. The Plotters had decided on ‘so sharp a remedy’, but the English Jesuits were in contrast manifestly holding on to their previous hopes of liberalisation in the wake of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty. As Father Garnet expressed it, in the high summer of 1604 ‘no one with any prudence or judgement’ found the idea of peace ‘displeasing’. But he added in cipher that, if the expected moves for toleration did not go well, it might be impossible to keep some of the Catholics quiet.⁹

Father Garnet spent a great deal of 1604 in travels throughout England which have been recorded (others of his peregrinations remain unknown to this day because of the constant need for secrecy). At Easter, for example, he was reported to have said Mass at Twigmoor, the house of Jack Wright in Lincolnshire, which was a notorious haunt of seminarians. In the following November, he was at White Webbs, with Anne Vaux as hostess, when the Jesuits made their annual renewal of their vows on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady. This may have been the musical occasion cited earlier, witnessed by a Frenchman, when Father Garnet, with his fine voice, sang and William Byrd played. The Jesuit Superior was therefore all too well qualified to make his anxious prediction about the instability of certain lay people. ‘The Pope must command all Catholics not to make a move,’ Father Garnet pleaded to his Superior in Rome.¹⁰ It was a point to which he would return with increasing desperation over the next twelve months.

Although still without a detailed plan, one of the Plotters now received a lucky promotion. On 9 June Thomas Percy was appointed a Gentleman Pensioner – one of fifty special bodyguards – by his kinsman and patron the Earl of Northumberland, who commanded them.¹¹ This meant that Percy had an unassailable reason to establish himself with a London base. The conspirators were moving closer to some kind of proper organisation. A small dwelling in the precincts of Westminster – more of an apartment than a house – was chosen.^† In May 1604 the house belonged to John Whynniard, by right of his office as Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe, but it was leased to a distinguished recusant, the antiquarian Henry Ferrers, who owned Baddesley Clinton, that house in Warwickshire where Anne Vaux had formerly entertained the Jesuits. Here Guido was installed as a kind of caretaker, passing himself off as one John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy.

Gentlemen Pensioners were supposed, as a matter of the law, to swear the Oath of Supremacy, which sincere Catholics found so uncomfortable to take because, by implication, it denied the spiritual authority of the Pope. But Lord Northumberland did not impose the oath upon his cousin Percy, whom he supposed to be a Catholic. It was a gesture, rather like Father Gerard’s coincidental celebration of Mass, which was to have most unfortunate consequences for Northumberland himself. In the hectic atmosphere of post-Plot accusations, the omission, as we shall see, was construed in a sinister light. But in the summer of 1604, when the Plot was in its very earliest stages, Northumberland was doing no more than behaving in his usual generous manner towards Percy.

As that summer wore on, events did nothing to persuade the conspirators to abandon their lethal project. Until Parliament was formally adjourned on 7 July, to meet again on 7 February 1605, anti-Catholic legislation continued to go through. Priests were put to death including Father John Sugar, who, with his servant Robert Grissold, was executed at Lancaster shortly after the adjournment of Parliament. The priest died heroically, confident of his soul’s salvation as his body was cut into pieces. Pointing to the sun he remarked, ‘I shall shortly be above you fellow,’ and later, ‘I shall have a sharp dinner, yet I trust in Jesus Christ I shall have a most sweet supper.’¹²

The persecution was not likely to abate, for in mid-September King James issued a commission to Lord Ellesmere to preside over a committee of Privy Councillors ‘to exterminate’ Jesuits, other priests and ‘divers other corrupt persons employed under the colour of religion’ to withdraw his subjects from their allegiance. As to the laymen, by the end of the year the recusant fines were back in full force, and would shortly net three thousand pounds. ‘Ancient’ recusants complained of the new severity, but without success. It may well be that arrears of the fines already remitted were also sought, bringing an additional hardship (and injustice). Although the point has been debated, at least one leading recusant, Sir Thomas Tresham, was charged with paying arrears. His accounts reveal that the charge was made, following a year of paying nothing, thanks to the ‘relief’ of 1603. In fact the so-called relief cost Sir Thomas nearly £200 in bribes; that was the amount which he had dispensed that summer as a sweetener, in order to secure ‘the pardon concerning recusancy money’ - of which £120 had gone to Sir Edward Coke.¹³

Even the long-awaited visit of the Constable of Castile in August was nothing more than a ceremonial interlude of banquets and processions which left behind an Anglo-Spanish Treaty – but absolutely no promise of toleration. Papists who listened to this magnificent peace being proclaimed at Cheapside by a herald on 19 August may have wondered at the secret agenda which lay behind it. But there was none. It was simply the conclusion of years of fighting between nations, a conclusion which suited the great men concerned. Owen and Stanley in Flanders had been right when they warned Tom Wintour that the peace was too precious to all parties to be disturbed by any other enterprise.

The conspirators (with the exception of Guido) left London some time after their initial pact. The adjournment of the government from the targeted ‘Parliament House’ gave them, as they thought, until early February to get their plans in place. They went to the country, to those various family houses which made up a stately map of recusancy. They left, having decided on a course of action which would cause them, in the late twentieth century, to be described as terrorists. The words terrorist and terrorism were not then in use. Nevertheless the Gunpowder Plot does satisfy a modern definition of terrorism: ‘the weapon of the weak, pretending to be strong’.¹⁴

Like the Irish men and women involved in the Dublin uprising of 1916, they saw themselves as a small band, whose actions would lead to great change.^‡ The Plotters also believed that they had left no peaceable and quiet way untried, as Catesby put it to Wintour. In face of continuous persecution, theirs was the violence of last resort. Furthermore, they took on board what Bakunin, the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, would call ‘the propaganda of the deed’.^§ That is to say, the blowing up of Parliament by gunpowder was to be a deliberately sensational and indeed outrageous action. In this way not only the government but the outside world would be alerted to sufferings which were in themselves outrageous.

Of course Elizabethan and Jacobean state justice itself was conducted along these same lines. When the public gazed with morbid fascination at the disembowelment of living Catholic priests, they were supposed to draw the conclusion that the victims must have deserved such cruel treatment. In other words, the crime which had taken place must have fitted the appalling punishment which was taking place. Catesby’s showman instinct to blow up the place where all the mischief had taken place had something of the same propagandist logic.

Violent opposition in the historical period under consideration was conducted not by terrorism but by tyrannicide, both methods being justified by their proponents by doctrines of the right to resistance. The demerits (or merits) of tyrannicide had been debated for centuries. It is important to realise that, in the course of the debate, tyrannicide – to bring about the overthrow of an existing government – had never been condemned outright by the Catholic Church. On the contrary, there was a long tradition of discussion about whether an evil ruler could be removed. (That begged the question, naturally, of exactly what constituted an evil ruler.) In the thirteenth century St Thomas Aquinas, the doctrinal Father of the Church, had held that the overthrow of a tyrannical government was not necessarily an act of sedition, unless the community concerned suffered more from the overthrow than from the previous tyranny. In the sixteenth century, not only Catholics but Protestant Huguenots discussed it in their polemical literature. The discussion spilled from theology into art, where the bloodthirsty description of (holy) Judith slaying (unholy and tyrannical) Holofernes was a significantly popular one.¹⁵

The furthest position on such an overthrow was that taken by the Spanish Jesuit Mariana in De Rege et Regis Institutione, published in 1599. Written in the form of a dialogue, Mariana answered the question ‘Whether it may be permissible to oppose a tyrant?’ in the affirmative. There could be ‘no doubt’ that the people were able to call a king to account, since there was a contractual element in their relationship. Ideally a public meeting should be held, but if that proved impossible a tyrant might be destroyed by ‘anyone who is inclined to heed the prayers of the people’, and the assassin ‘can hardly be said to have acted wrongly’ by serving as an instrument of justice.¹⁶

This notorious passage aroused the frenzy of Protestants, and was the basis of accusations about ‘Queen-killing’ and ‘King-killing’ Jesuit policy in the English state trials of 1606. All one can say with certainty is that on the edges of Catholic political thinking what one authority has called ‘an ultimate right of tyrannicide’ was reserved for the oppressed, based on an idea of a broken contract. (It is an ultimate right which has after all been reserved by many of those who see themselves as oppressed throughout history.) Against this ultimate theoretical right, at the turn of the sixteenth century lay the heavy weight of practice, under which lawful governments could in fact expect the obedience of their citizens, whatever their religious persuasion. This was a point of view expressed vividly by Erasmus in 1530 in a book designed for the instruction of the young. ‘Even if the Turk (heaven forbid!) should rule over us,’ he wrote, ‘we would be committing a sin if we were to deny him the respect due to Caesar.’¹⁷

The distinction between a lawful and an unlawful ruler was crucial. After that, debate could still rage over what constituted such a ruler (debates which may be compared to modern arguments about what constitutes a democratically elected government in considering the legality of the coup which overturns it). However, to many English Catholics, led by priests such as Father Garnet, there was a vital difference between Queen Elizabeth and King James. The former had been a bastard by Catholic rules, had usurped the throne rightly belonging to the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, and had been subject to a bull of excommunication by the Pope. None of these blemishes marred King James. He was legitimate and he was not a usurper, having inherited the throne as next in blood. Above all he had never been excommunicated – thanks to that cleverness with which he handled the Papacy while still in Scotland. What was more, since James had never been a Catholic, he could hardly be accused of apostasy. Father Garnet himself would make a careful distinction between King James and the Catholic backsliders, those who reneged on the religion into which they had been born.¹⁸

Thus the Plotters were going against the profoundly held loyalties of many of their co-religionists when they decided to remove ‘a king who had succeeded lawfully to his kingdom’. And yet there was enough in the contemporary Catholic political literature on the overthrowing of tyrants - which they had probably not read themselves, but had simply imbibed at second or third hand – to convince men of their particular temperament, frustrated men (‘Shall we always talk and do nothing?’ Percy had asked), that their course was virtuous.¹⁹

It was Father Tesimond who commented that such gentlemen as these would not have staked their whole future on a conspiracy ‘if they had not been convinced in their utmost consciences that they could do so without offence to God’. The conspirators ordered for their endeavour special swords of Spanish steel, their blades richly engraved with scenes from the life of Jesus Christ; these swords would bear the legend, ‘The Passion of Christ’.²⁰ In their own estimation, these men were not assassins; they were fighters in a holy cause (which they found to be an absolutely different concept).

For all the wild language of horror after the Plot’s discovery – one Biblical comparison was made to the ‘Passover’ massacre of the first-born of Egypt – both the killing of rulers and the killing of the innocent were endemic in the times in which Catesby and his companions lived.^‖21 But if the Plotters’ consciences were at ease with the killing of rulers, there is evidence that they were greatly anguished over the killing of the innocent. Blowing up the King was one thing, and the Royal Family – his wife and heirs – another. But the extinction of the Parliament house by gunpowder at the Opening would inevitably result in many more deaths than that.

It was the possible deaths of Catholic peers which aroused this fierce anxiety. These conspirators were terrorists, but it is too simple a view of human nature to suppose that they were immunised from all weakness or regret. Father Garnet later described Catesby’s split mind. On the one hand he planned to save ‘all the noble men whom he did respect’ and on the other he was determined not to spare his own son if he were there ‘rather than in any sort the secret should be discovered’. For these men to envisage the deaths of co-religionists who had borne the heat and burden of the day might prove to be ‘cruel necessity’. But it could never be a light decision.

In general, Parliament had been responsible for anti-Catholic legislation: hence the choice of the site for the explosion. The prospect of the death of Robert Cecil, a member of the House of Lords since the granting of his first peerage in May 1603, could no doubt be accepted with equanimity. But was the devout young Lord Montague to die? He had spoken up bravely on behalf of ‘the religion of our fathers’ in the House of Lords this very summer in a bitter attack on the Act against recusants, and as a result had spent four days in the Fleet prison.²² Was he to be sacrificed? Then there were the two prominent peers who were married to the daughters of Sir Thomas Tresham (Catesby’s first cousins). Lord Stourton, husband of Frances, was some twenty years older than Catesby, but the men were close friends. Lord Monteagle, husband of Elizabeth, belonged to the Catesby generation – he was born in 1575 – and he had been involved like Catesby, Jack Wright and Tom Wintour in the Essex Rising. Wintour now acted as his secretary.

In the light of what happened later, there is a question mark, to say the least of it, over Monteagle’s subsequent commitment to Catholicism. He had in fact privately made a grovelling submission to Cecil while in the Tower in April 1601. He had also described himself as a born-again Protestant in a letter to the King, in order to establish his right as Lord Monteagle (it was a title that came through his mother) so that he could sit in the House of Lords in the lifetime of his father, Lord Morley.²³ But these kinds of ambiguities and compromises were far from uncommon at the time, especially at court, where Monteagle had an appointment in the household of Queen Anne.

In the summer of 1604 Monteagle would have been seen as a member of the recusant family ring, not only through his Tresham marriage, but through his brother-in-law Thomas Habington (his sister Mary’s husband). Habington had been involved in one of the plots to free Mary Queen of Scots and had spent six years in the Tower as a result. In the recent Parliamentary election, Habington had been among the prominent Worcestershire recusants who supported a Catholic candidate, Sir Edward Harewell. Although it was not yet technically illegal for a Catholic to sit in Parliament if he swore the Oath of Supremacy, an armed guard on the gates of Worcester against Harewell’s supporters had proved an effective if brutal deterrent.²⁴ Habington’s house, Hindlip, like neighbouring Huddington, was another important recusant centre, a maze of hiding-places where priests could linger – it was hoped – for months with impunity.

Was Monteagle, was Stourton, to die? And finally, what of the great Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Percy’s patron?

On such an agonising question as the death of the innocent the doctrine of the Catholic Church was far more clearly established than over the murky question of tyrannicide. It was a matter of what was called ‘double-effect’. A single action might have two quite separate effects. There were, however, three conditions which had to be fulfilled for the double-effect principle to operate. First of all, the good effect had to be disproportionately important compared to the bad effect; secondly, the bad - harmful – effect had to be involuntary, rather than in any way desired; thirdly, both good and bad effects had to be so closely linked as to be brought about more or less simultaneously.^a25

The Powder Treason, as planned by Catesby, easily fulfilled the second and third conditions of the double-effect principle. No ‘innocent’ deaths were desired – absolutely to the contrary – and yet they would certainly be brought about simultaneously with those of the ‘guilty’ in the general combustion. The question of the fulfilment of the first condition – was the enterprise of sufficient worth to ‘countervail’ these innocent deaths? - entirely depended, as in all terrorist actions, on the standpoint of the individuals involved. Nevertheless, the theological clarity of the issue did not prevent each new conspirator, as he joined the band, from suffering the same doubts and anguish.

The Plotters returned to London in early October. Around this time, a sixth conspirator, Robert Keyes, was admitted to their ranks. They needed someone to take charge of Catesby’s house in Lambeth, where it was intended that the gunpowder and other necessary stores such as firewood should be kept for the time being. Keyes was nearly forty in 1604, a ‘trusty and honest man’, tall and red-bearded; he too, like Guy Fawkes, could be relied on to show courage in extremis. His father had been the Protestant Rector of Staveley in North Derbyshire, but Keyes had clearly always favoured the religion of his mother, who came from the well-known recusant family of Tyrrwhitt in Lincolnshire.²⁶

From the point of view of the Powder Treason, it was important that Keyes’ first cousin, the beautiful Elizabeth Tyrrwhitt, was married to a wealthy young Catholic with money and horses to spare, Ambrose Rookwood of Coldham Hall in Suffolk. This golden couple was thus brought within the general orbit of the conspirators. In the autumn of 1604 it was Ambrose Rookwood who was asked to acquire some gunpowder by Catesby and bring it to the Lambeth house. At this point, the acquisition of the gunpowder was presented as merely being for the use of the English regiment in Spanish service in Flanders, no longer of course an illegal operation, thanks to the Anglo-Spanish Treaty.²⁷

Keyes was not particularly well off. His wife Christiana, a widow when he married her, was a clever woman who acted as governess to the children of Lord Mordaunt at Drayton in Northamptonshire. Keyes received horses and other amenities in return for his wife’s teaching services. Mordaunt was another prominent Catholic peer and his safety in Parliament would obviously be a matter of much concern to Keyes. As for Drayton, Cecil described the great house as ‘a receptacle of most dangerous persons’, meaning ‘the foreign seminaries’ he believed to flock there. Nevertheless King James was happy to stay at Drayton for the hunting near by, good sport glossing over a multitude of Popish sins: an example of the doublethink which existed in court circles on the subject of grand Papists.²⁸

A few months later, a seventh conspirator was recruited. This was Catesby’s servant Thomas Bates, who according to his confession joined the Plotters in early December 1604. Bates must surely have had his suspicions about a Plot already. He was not a menial, since he was allowed his own armour and his own servant at Ashby St Ledgers. Bates, born at Lapworth, was more of a retainer, part of Catesby’s ‘family’ or intimate household; and he was known to be absolutely devoted to his master.²⁹ Bates’ own family consisted of an independent-minded wife called Martha. (The conspirators’ wives constituted a remarkable group: but then they were part of the larger, resolute and often intrepid body of Catholic women.)

However, Bates’ confession is one of the more unreliable pieces of evidence surrounding the events of the Plot. His lower social standing was relevant here for it meant that he could be subject to special pressures from the authorities. On the one hand he might – conceivably – hope to get off where the other more senior Plotters could not, or be induced to believe that such a chance existed. On the other, the ultimate threat of torture was routinely seen as a matter of social hierarchy: people without proper rank in the estimation of the governing class were much more likely to be subject to it than their superiors. Nor should too much attention be paid to Bates’ so-called revelations concerning the priests, including Father Tesimond.

In the context it is unsurprising to find Bates claiming to confess his sin in advance to Tesimond (that persistent Protestant smear on Catholics and the Sacrament of penance). In Bates’ official version he was not only absolved but encouraged by Tesimond with the words ‘that it was no offence at all, but justifiable and good’. What Bates probably did say under duress was much less incriminating: ‘he thought Father Tesimond knew something about this plot but he could not be certain’.³⁰ Bates of course recanted at the last and apologised to those he had traduced.

At the time, Bates’ recruitment made every sense in view of his close, dependent relationship to Catesby. He was a practical man, his loyalty could be taken for granted and so could his silence. The circumstances where this might no longer be true – twelve months ahead – were, perhaps fortunately, beyond the conspirators’ imagining. In any case, their plans were shortly to meet with a startling reversal, as it must have seemed at the time.

This reversal took the form of a postponement of Parliament, and in the event would be creatively used by the Plotters to elaborate and expand their plans. Nevertheless the announcement on Christmas Eve that Parliament would not after all sit again in early February, owing to renewed fears of the plague in London, must have come as a shock. The new date was 3 October 1605. That left many months of secrecy and planning ahead – months in which more help, either at home or abroad or both, might be recruited. Alternatively, of course, these were months in which news of the conspiracy might leak out, first in the secret recusant world, and then by degrees elsewhere through spies or covert governmental well-wishers high and low.

The prosecution in its account of the conspiracy had the Plotters involved in an amazing and daring venture at this period. This was the digging out of a mine beneath the Palace of Westminster, which was intended to convey the gunpowder from the cellar of the Whynniard house within Westminster to a cavity under the House of Lords. The digging was supposed to have been begun on 11 December and abandoned as impractical on 25 March, because the foundation walls were in places eleven feet thick.

This mine was most likely a mythical invention, used by the government to spice up the official account of the narrowly averted danger.^b For one thing, no traces of this famous mine were ever found – nor have any traces of it ever been found since. If dug, it was quite brilliantly shored up. The sheer logistics of digging out such a subterranean passage would have been horrendous – particularly since none of the conspirators had any mining experience or knowledge and no move was ever made to import an experienced tunneller from the mining communities that had existed in England since ancient times. Catesby and Percy were both exceptionally tall men: Tesimond in his Narrative was astonished that they had been able to, stoop to the work. Furthermore, the mind boggles at the problems of disposal within the busy Palace of Westminster. Some of the stones would have been enormous (far too big to lose in the little garden next door) and, if the Thames was used, it must be remembered that the river was at this date the main highway of a capital city.³¹

None of these obvious questions about the working of the mine was answered in any way by the prosecution. Nor was a real attempt made to do so. Sir Edward Coke, prosecuting, by admitting that the mine was ‘neither found nor suspected’ by the government until the danger was past, was able to tell a tall tale without risk of contradiction. It is notable that Guy Fawkes did not mention the subject at all until his fifth interrogation. By this time, he had been put to the torture and was in no position to quibble about such unimportant details as a mine which had played no part in the action and had subsequently vanished into the ground from whence it came. Even so, someone thought it necessary to add – in handwriting other than Fawkes’ own – a clarifying detail to his deposition. It was a mine leading ‘to the cellar under the Upper House of Parliament’.³² The wretched Guido obviously did not know the precise notional whereabouts of the phantom mine.

Why did the government bother? The answer must lie in the special sinister element which is introduced by the very idea of a subterranean tunnel occupied by wicked men, working away in the darkness like moles beneath the feet of the righteous. It is noticeable that in government propaganda the mine of itself made an excellent focus for shock, horror. ‘Lord, what a wind, what a fire, what a motion and commotion of earth and air would there have been!’ exclaimed Coke. The conspirators were regularly termed the ‘Miners’ in debate in Parliament. Its members had only to look down to be reminded of the great peril which had once threatened them all. One of their number, Sir Roger Wilbraharn, wrote in his diary of ‘hellish practices under the earth’, while the playwright Thomas Dekker would wax eloquent on the subject of Lucifer’s devilish assistant, the Mouldwarp: ‘Vaults are his delight.’³³

New Year 1605 was celebrated by the court with enthusiasm, all unknowing of the Plot which – mine or no mine – was being devised to blow so many of their number to smithereens. The proliferation of the Royal Family had been further emphasised by the arrival of Prince Charles from Scotland in October to join his brother and sister. The puny little boy was greeted glumly at first by the English courtiers, who hesitated to apply for his household in case he died and the household vanished.³⁴ But things looked up when he was created Duke of York at Twelfth Night. Besides, Queen Anne was visibly pregnant and would in fact bear her fourth (surviving) child in April.

The subject matter of the ‘entertainment’ which crowned the Twelfth Night revelries had an unconscious aptness. Written by Ben Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones, this was entitled The Masque of Blackness. Queen Anne and her ladies, representing ‘the daughters of Niger’, were conventionally swathed in azure and silver, decorated with pearls. But they blacked up their faces, and their arms up to the elbow, something which made the task of the French Ambassador in kissing the royal hand somewhat tricky.³⁵ A year which began with darkness as its official theme could not, perhaps, have been expected to pass without catastrophe threatening to engulf it.

^* This narrative is pieced together from the various contemporary accounts, although there is scarcely any piece of surviving evidence concerning the Gunpowder Plot which has not, by one authority or another, been considered dubious. This is hardly surprising in an episode which included interrogation after torture, as well as government revisionism after the event. As for the Plotters, obviously they did not always tell the truth, whether to protect themselves, their associates or their families.

^† The topography of this dwelling and that of ‘the Parliament House’ itself will be considered later.

^‡ Paul Wilkinson, in Terrorism and the Liberal State, points out that the Dublin Rising, by a ‘small band of dreamers’, although ostensibly a failure at the time, alerted the world to the cause of Irish national freedom and led to the foundation of the Irish Free State: ‘Violence can act as a dramatic revelation and catalyst not only for the destruction of the established regime, but also for the forging of a new political community’ (p. 86).

^§ The Oxford English Dictionary suggests a nineteenth-century origin for the word terrorist: ‘Anyone who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation; specially applied to members of the extreme revolutionary societies in Russia.’

^‖ There have been few periods of history when this has not been true. Leaders killed since the Second World War include President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Rabin of Israel. Attempts have been made on the lives of numerous leaders including Fidel Castro, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As to the killing of the innocent, since the Second World War (when the bombing of Dresden and its civilian population caused a controversy not yet extinguished) the bombing of Baghdad, with its civilians, in the Gulf War has aroused similar questions.

^a The principle of double-effect remains in place today in Catholic theology. The example of Dresden bombed in the Second World War was cited earlier. According to the double-effect principle, the bombing of a legitimate (industrial/military) target which incidentally causes unplanned civilian deaths would be in a different moral category from the deliberate bombing of the civilian population to strike terror and lower enemy morale.

^b Much ink was spilt in the late nineteenth century over the question of the mine, part of the ongoing controversy as to whether there really was a Gunpowder Plot, between the historians S. R. Gardiner and Father John Gerard (sic). Gardiner, who was a Pro-Plotter, defended its existence and Gerard, who was a No-Plotter, attacked it as part of the general picture of governmental fabrication; perhaps more ink was spilt than the subject deserved, since it is perfectly possible to have the Plot without the improbable mine. (Gardiner, Plot, pp. 34–5, 63–5, 41–2; Gerard, What Plot?, pp. 58ff.).