Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot

KING JAMES’ SPEECH TO PARLIAMENT on Saturday 9 November was a fine flowery piece of oratory. As the discoverer of the Plot, he certainly blew his own trumpet royally.¹ At the same time, he showed courage – he did after all believe that he had been the intended victim of an explosion only four days earlier. Even more admirably, James showed himself merciful towards the English Catholics who had not been involved in the Powder Treason as it did not follow ‘that all professing the Romish religion were guilty of the same’. The ‘seduced’ Papists could still be good subjects. He expressly mentioned the fact that the souls of some Catholics would be saved and criticised the harshness of the Puritans ‘that will admit no salvation to any Papist’.

Although this policy of mildness and conciliation faded, as the extent of the Jesuit priests’ involvement – their alleged involvement – was signalled by a vengeful government, it is as well to remember that the Powder Treason was in the early days seen by the King for exactly what it was: the work of a few Catholic fanatics.

Naturally King James recalled his own troubled history. Monarchs, ‘like the high Trees’, were subject to more tempests than ordinary mortals, and the King himself had suffered from more tempests than most monarchs: he had been first threatened ‘while I was yet in my mother’s belly’. Now God had miraculously delivered them all from ‘a roaring, nay a thundering sin of fire and brimstone’.

The second element was one on which some might have had other views. The King insisted that there were small grounds if any to justify the conspiracy – only religion, and that was scarcely enough. The third element was the truly miraculous one, and on this the King really let himself go. This was his own unequalled brilliance in discerning what was about to happen. Regardless of his own trusting nature – ‘I ever did hold Suspicion to be the sickness of a Tyrant’ – he had been inspired to interpret the Monteagle Letter as indicating ‘this horrible form of blowing us up all by Powder’.

The King solemnly told the assembled peers that he would have had one consolation if the Plot had succeeded. At least he would have died ‘in the most Honourable and best company’, rather than in ‘an ale-house or a stew’ (a brothel). Concerning the conspirators, he quoted another King, the Biblical David: ‘they had fallen into the trap which they themselves had made’. Moving on from the Bible to Ancient Rome he emphasised the need for thanksgiving. For if Scipio, ‘an Ethnic [that is, neither Jewish nor Christian] led only by the light of Nature’, had called on his people to give thanks for his victory over Hannibal, how much more necessary was it for Christians to express their gratitude! ‘The Mercy of God is above all his works,’ said the King.

Salisbury was left to write to the English ambassadors abroad an elaborate letter of explanation of what had occurred. These included Edmondes in Brussels, Parry in Paris and Cornwallis in Spain. Fortunately King James had taken pains in his speech to establish that the Catholic foreign powers were not suspected of complicity – ‘no King or Prince of honour will ever abase himself so much’. The government proclamation against the conspirators had indeed ended with the most slavish defence of the Catholic powers’ integrity: ‘we cannot admit so inhumane a thought as their involvement’. The way was open for these rulers to send back to London formal expressions of sheer horror at what had been so grossly plotted.³

Of course the powers and potentates revealed their own preoccupations. The Duke of Lerma, the Spanish King’s privado (favourite), while describing the conspirators as ‘atheists and devils’, hoped to hear that there were also Puritans ‘in the mixture’. Zuñiga, the Spanish envoy in London (he who had prudently lit bonfires and thrown money to the crowd on 5 November), believed that Thomas Percy had been in charge of the operation and that he was ‘a heretic’, in other words a Protestant, who was known to favour France over Spain. With equal conviction and equal inaccuracy the French King was quite sure that the Spanish ministers must have had a hand ‘in so deep a practice’.⁴

On Sunday 10 November, Salisbury, armed with Guido’s confession, was able at last to set in motion proceedings to extradite Hugh Owen from Flanders. Owen angrily rebutted the charge: ‘I would take my oath’, he wrote to Lerma in Spain, that he had known nothing about the conspiracy. The cautious Archdukes, worried by the lack of proof, contented themselves with putting Owen and his secretary under house arrest.⁵

Yet again the party line was to vilify Guy Fawkes, and to see the Plot as the work of fanatics. In contrast to many, many subsequent sermons, the English Catholics were not attacked as such, just as King James had been careful to distinguish good Papists from bad. But the main thrust of Barlow’s sermon was an extraordinary panegyric of his sovereign in terms which made even James’ own self-glorification seem rather flat. The King was not only a ‘universal scholar, acute in arguing, subtle in distinguishing, logical in discussing’, he was also ‘a faithful Christian’: and so forth and so on, in what has been described as an evocation of the King as ‘something of a Christ figure’.⁷

An awareness of having had a narrow escape was not of course confined to the King and Dr Barlow. Queen Anne, that famously fruitful vine, found herself being congratulated all over again on her fecundity in every loyal address. Yet, in her case, once sheer relief – for she would certainly have been present at the Opening – had given way to a more sober consideration of the future, she could appreciate the shadows falling over her Catholicism. As James’ Queen Consort, she had attended Protestant services (although without taking the Sacrament); she had agreed to the baptism of the Princess Mary in the Protestant rite in May, while she herself had similarly undergone the ceremony of ‘churching’ (the purification of a woman after childbirth) in the Protestant rite. At the same time, she maintained her position as a closet Catholic – literally so, since her Mass had to be heard extremely privately in her own apartments.

This graceful ambivalence might not survive in the post-Plot atmosphere of England, and in fact Queen Anne was careful to evade meeting the emissaries of the Catholic powers. She declined to meet Baron Hoboken, envoy of the Archdukes, for two years, thanks to their laggard response to the Hugh Owen business. A convenient fever also caused her to cancel an audience with Zuñiga immediately after the Plot’s discovery, lest the Queen’s patriotism be suspect. When she did meet the Spaniard, towards the end of November, she spoke at length about her grief at the unfortunate plight of Catholics, and her desire to help them.⁸ But in the future her active Catholic sympathies found their expression chiefly in trying to secure grand Catholic marriages for her children.

If Queen Anne was justified in bewailing, however ineffectively, the unfortunate plight of the English Catholics, that of the conspirators was infinitely worse. Those at Holbeach – Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood and John Grant, all in bad physical shape – were taken first to Worcester in the custody of the Sheriff and then to the Tower of London. Meanwhile the bodies of Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy were exhumed from their midland graves by orders of the government, and their heads cut off. The intention was to exhibit the decapitated heads at the corners of the Parliament House which they had planned to blow up. (The blacksmith who forged the ironwork to make this possible was paid 23 shillings and 9 pence.) Among those who inspected these grisly relics en route to London was Lord Harington himself, who thought that ‘more terrible countenances were never looked upon’. He discerned a special evil mark on their foreheads, a description one suspects that he passed on to his royal charge to fuel her understandable fears still further.^†¹⁰

Thomas Bates, Catesby’s servant, was taken prisoner in Staffordshire, and Robert Keyes, who had broken away from the Dunchurch meeting, was also caught. Sir Everard Digby, who had intended to turn himself in to Sir Fulke Greville at Warwick, was discovered by a small posse of pursuers with two servants concealed in ‘a dry pit’. Excited cries of ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ were met by the, imperturbable reply of the gallant horseman: ‘Here he is indeed! What then?’ Since Digby did not intend to surrender to such small fry, he advanced his horse ‘in the manner of curvetting’ – that is, in an expert equestrian leap.¹¹ He would have broken out of the encirclement had he not spied reinforcements of several hundred men coming up behind the posse. He then gave himself up to the most senior-looking man among them. These conspirators, also, were eventually taken to London.

By December, only Robert Wintour, of the surviving comrades, was still at liberty. In London, Francis Tresham was arrested, following Guido’s denunciation on 12 November, and taken to the Tower three days later. Three leading Catholic peers, Lord Montague, Lord Mordaunt and Lord Stourton, who all had embarrassing connections to the abortive Plot, were also taken to the Tower. Lord Montague had not only briefly employed Guy Fawkes, but had probably been tipped off by Catesby not to attend Parliament; Lord Mordaunt was Keyes’ patron as well as being connected to him by marriage and had planned to be absent because he disliked the coming legislation; Lord Stourton was Tresham’s brother-in-law, and Guido had said he would have been detained from the Opening by some kind of accident. The prisoners in the Tower were joined on 27 November by the Earl of Northumberland, transferred from Lambeth.

While plans for the intensive interrogation of the Plotters and their presumed allies were being worked out by the government in London, the English recusant community was suffering exactly that kind of relentless investigation which it had feared for so long. There was now no reason for the authorities to let sleeping recusants – and their priests – lie. On the one hand, further information about the recent wicked conspiracy must be sought, and on the other hand old scores might be paid off (there was always a degree of vindictiveness about the poursuivants’ action, nor were they above making a financial profit from it). The desire to make a good thing out of the Powder Treason was not however confined to one rank in society. One of the communications on this subject to Salisbury was that of Susan Countess of Kent who was quite sure – on no particular grounds – that a certain Mr William Willoughby must have been mixed up in the conspiracy. As a result of his presumed villainy, she suggested that she might have his £200 living in Suffolk.¹²

Then the terrified Jane Robinson gave the game away. She said that there had been a Mass said within the last month but she could remember nothing about the priest except he was ‘apparelled like a gentleman’. Father Garnet, the alleged brother of Mrs Perkins, had been known as Mr Meaze there; and yes, in answer to questioning, he had had quite separate apartments from Mrs Perkins. This was probably intended to establish that Mr Meaze was in fact a priest, not a bona-fide brother of Mrs Perkins, whose true identity was not at this point known. But the question marked the beginning of officialdom’s prurient interest in the relationship of ‘Mr Meaze’ and ‘Mrs Perkins’, which would continue till the day of the former’s death, and cause him great pain. James Johnson was now taken up to London and held in the Gatehouse prison.

The long-anticipated search of Harrowden took place over nine days beginning on 12 November. Father Gerard, an unseen, well-hidden presence throughout, was a veteran of such searches, and knew, like all the recusants, the importance of absolute attention to detail. Candles could not even be lit in the kind of dark hole where a priest was concealed, lest the characteristic smell of snuffed-out wax gave the game away. During one search, at Braddocks near Saffron Walden in the 1590s, Gerard had had to exist for four days on two biscuits and a pot of quince jelly which his hostess, Mrs Wiseman, happened to have in her hand as the poursuivants burst in and he was bundled away.

At Harrowden, Gerard was able to sit down but not to stand up in his refuge. But on this occasion he did not starve, since this hiding-place contained one of Little John’s characteristic devices, a tube through which he could receive food. After about four days, Eliza Vaux distracted the attention of the authorities by prudently revealing a hiding-place which contained ‘many Popish books’ and other objects of devotion, ‘but no man in it’, said the disgruntled government report. The search let up a little after this. Thus Gerard could be brought out at night and warmed by the fire. On 21 November, the searchers finally departed, quite convinced that no one could have survived their inspection.¹⁴ Father Gerard was safe.

In front of the Council, Eliza Vaux was equally spirited.¹⁶ She refused to admit a number of things. Most importantly, she absolutely refused to give way on the subject of Father Gerard’s priesthood. She swore she had not known that Gerard and the others were priests, since they looked ‘nothing like priests’; she had taken them for Catholic gentlemen. (This was a vital denial since the penalties for harbouring priests could include death.) She also absolutely refused to admit that Father Gerard had been or was now at Harrowden. She said she had no idea of his whereabouts, but, if she had, she would not give them away to save her own life or anyone else’s.

One of the Councillors who had always been friendly to her – probably Northampton – now escorted her courteously to the door. ‘Have a little pity on yourself and your children,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And tell them what they wish to know. If you don’t you will have to die.’

Eliza Vaux had handled herself and her secrets well. The wives of the actual conspirators were in far more parlous situation, from which bravery and bluff could not rescue them. Six wives, among other women connected to minor figures in the Plot, were brought up to London, and housed, like Eliza Vaux, by the City aldermen. Martha Wright Percy and Dorothy Wintour Grant, sisters as well as wives of Plotters, were in a specially fraught situation. Then there were Dorothy and Margaret Wright, wives of Jack and Kit, Christiana Keyes, the governess wife of Robert, and Elizabeth Rookwood (Martha Bates does not seem to have been rated worthy of arrest). Notification from the Sheriff to the government following these arrests drew attention to one poignant aspect of the wives’ removal to London. He had, he said, ‘taken care and charge of these women’s children until your honours’ pleasures be further known’.¹⁸

The conspirators’ homes were searched and in many cases looted. Goods sought were seized at Ashby St Ledgers, although this was the property of Lady Catesby rather than of her son. Huddington Court was similarly treated. By 17 November, nothing of any real value was said to be left there, since so much had been taken away every day; although some devotional objects and books to do with the Mass were discovered in a hollow in the wall a few weeks later.¹⁹ Even John Talbot, Robert Wintour’s staunchly patriotic father-in-law, had his house searched and arms and papers removed. (These papers, not surprisingly, revealed nothing to do with the treason.)

In the Tower of London, that fire and brimstone which had been so miraculously averted from Parliament was being brought down upon the heads of the erstwhile conspirators. Coke afterwards said that the interrogations had taken ‘twenty and three several days’ altogether (in a ten-week period), with a separate commission set up to examine the lesser folk – not only minor people who had become involved at Dunchurch but serving people and bystanders who could act as witnesses.²¹

The Lieutenant’s Lodgings, under the control of Sir William Waad, were used for the important interrogations. Waad, now in his sixties, had been made Lieutenant of the Tower in August. The appointment marked a long career of diplomacy and intrigue in the service of Salisbury’s father Burghley, and it was Waad who had first ransacked, then skilfully rearranged the papers of Mary Queen of Scots in 1586. It was also Waad, involved in the discovery of all the major conspiracies of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times, who was responsible for the interrogations centring on the Main and Bye Plots of 1603. Significantly ‘that villain Waad’ was later accused by Lord Cobham of tricking him into signing a piece of blank white paper so that Waad could forge his confession. Like Sir Edward Popham, Waad had a vindictive dislike of Catholics beyond the call of duty, and as Clerk of the Privy Council had been ardent in the pursuit of priests and recusants.²²

Only two of the ‘confessions’ which resulted from these numerous interrogations were ever made officially public. These appeared in the so-called King’s Book, printed for the general edification about the end of November.²³ The King’s Book had a wide circulation, stimulating popular interest in the recent dramatic – and potentially horrifying – events still further. (Among those stimulated by it may well have been Shakespeare as he worked on his new play, Macbeth.) The two statements printed in the King’s Book were a version of Guy Fawkes’ original full confession of 8 November, revised on 17 November, and the confession of Thomas Wintour signed on 23 November. Otherwise, the state papers provide various versions of the numerous interviews, while Coke quoted from them, freely adapted according to the needs of his prosecution, at the coming trials.

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

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

A candidate for torture may have been the young recusant Henry Huddlestone, who made a series of confessions about that fatal meeting on the road with Catesby, and his expedition thereafter with the priests. Father Strange, captured with him, was certainly tortured at some point (‘grievously racked’), although probably not until the next wave of interrogations in 1606.²⁶

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Bates’ testimony with that of Francis Tresham on 29 November which linked Father Garnet with the earlier Spanish Treason of 1602, Salisbury was rapidly developing the case he wanted against the Jesuits, one which specifically connected them to the recent treason. (As Catholic priests, their presence in England was of course already contrary to the law.)

Then in December there was an unexpected complication. Francis Tresham, held in the Tower of London, went into a rapid physical decline. The condition he was suffering from, known as strangury, was caused by an acute and painful inflammation of the urinary tract. This was no sudden out-of-the-blue attack. The condition had evidently been with Tresham some time before the current crisis, since he already had a doctor in charge of him. This was a distinguished man, Dr Richard Foster, who had recently been President of the College of Physicians. Tresham preferred him to the regular Tower doctor, Dr Matthew Gwinne, because Foster knew all about his case.⁴¹

By mid-December Tresham was being described by Sir William Waad as ‘worse and worse’. Indeed, Waad wondered gloomily whether Tresham would survive long enough to meet the death he deserved. In addition to Foster, three more doctors were being called, and a woman – a nurse – was also admitted to attend him. Tresham already had his own man in attendance, one William Vavasour, who acted more as a confidential assistant than as a servant, as was Thomas Bates to Robert Catesby. Vavasour was supposed to be an illegitimate son of the late philoprogenitive Sir Thomas, and thus Francis Tresham’s half-brother.⁴² This would have made sense of their intimacy by the standards of the time, when the ‘base born’ were often provided with just this kind of family employment. (Rumours that Thomas Percy was an illegitimate half-brother of Northumberland were in fact untrue, but demonstrate how frequently contemporary patronage had its roots in this kind of relationship.)

Tresham died slowly, agonisingly and inexorably. This wayward, treacherous and perhaps ultimately self-hating character was however, like many such, intending to do better in the next world than in the one he would shortly leave. Above all, he wanted to make restitution to Father Garnet for implicating him in the Spanish Treason of 1602. In the statement he dictated to Vavasour – ‘because he could not write himself, being so weak’ – Tresham referred to Garnet (under the name of Mr Whalley) as someone whose safety he respected and tendered as much as his own, adding ‘many words’ on ‘the virtues and worthiness of the man’. Tresham desired that his former confession might be called in and that ‘this [new one] may stand for truth’. He then pledged ‘his Salvation’ that he had in fact no idea whether Tom Wintour had had any letter of recommendation from Garnet for his visit to Spain ‘about the latter end of the Queen’s days … for he did not see Mr Whalley [Garnet] at that time, nor had seen him in fifteen or sixteen year before …’.⁴⁴

The rest of Tresham’s deathbed confession repeated the protestations of virtual ignorance and thus practical innocence which had occupied him on 13 November. He had, after all, his two little daughters’ future to protect. He commended Lucy and Eliza to his brother Lewis as Christ had commended his mother to St John. He never, however, referred to the Monteagle Letter at any point, which makes it virtually certain that Tresham did not write it. He would hardly have failed to claim the credit for it at a time when Monteagle, for his contribution, was being hailed as the saviour of his country.

When Tresham refused to add to his statement, in answer to the questions of the hovering Waad, saying that he had nothing heavy on his conscience, the Lieutenant of the Tower went away angry. Significantly, the son’s obsession with the father continued to the last. Francis observed, as he read De Imitatione Christi, that he hoped to make a better death than old Sir Thomas, who had died tossing and turning only three months before.

Francis Tresham did make a holy death: if not the short half-hour of agony which he had wished for himself.⁴⁶ The Litany and Prayer of the Virgin Mary and St John were said around his bedside by Anne Tresham and William Vavasour as Francis gradually became too weak to join in. Vavasour was asked to remind him to call upon the Name of Jesus (a Catholic devotion) at ten o’clock, but when Vavasour went to wake him Tresham looked ‘ghastly’, did not recognise Vavasour and tried to shake him off. About midnight, more Litanies, the Confiteor and the Mea Culpa were recited; at two o’clock in the morning on 23 December, Francis Tresham died.

Unfortunately, Francis Tresham left a further legacy, one which would justify the words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, a play first performed about five years earlier:

^* This, the King’s preeminent point, makes it clear that it was the fact of the terrorist plan being both random in its effect and inexorable in its execution which was found specially shocking, in exactly the same way as it is found shocking today about terrorist activities, which are usually pointed out to be cowardly as well as wicked.

^† This ghoulish practice was not special to the dead Gunpowder Plotters; the heads and limbs of traitors were commonly so displayed; these relics might survive in situ for a considerable time as an awful warning of the perils of betraying the state.

^‡ The monument – still extant today – begins with a tribute to King James (‘most renowned for piety, justice, prudence, learning, courage, clemency and the other Royal virtues …’), then names the Councillors who helped uncover the Plot, before listing the Plotters themselves, including Sir William Stanley, Hugh Owen and Father William Baldwin (see this page). But the Council Chamber where it lies cannot literally have been the site of the interrogations, since it was carved out of the Great Hall only in 1607. (Parnell, Tower, p. 61.)

^§ As for King James’ personal attitude to torture, it should be borne in mind, given his Scottish Lord Chancellor’s words, that the practice certainly did not come to him as an English novelty; he had grown up with its use.

^‖ The fact that the majority of the principal Plotters – Catesby, Percy and the Wright brothers – died at Holbeach House on 8 November meant that their version of the conspiracy would never be known; this complicated its unravelling for the government in 1605, and has continued to complicate it for historians ever since.

^a There is the etched name ‘Ambrose Rookwoode’ still to be seen in the upper Martin Tower (R.C.H., p. 83b (no. 12)).

^b This inscription is still extant, although it is currently (1996) covered by a panel to allow for an exhibition connected to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (R.C.H., p. 82b (no. 15); information to the author from Yeoman Warder B. Harrison.).

^c This account by Vavasour is of special importance since it lay for three hundred years unknown to, and thus untouched by, the government – among the muniments at Deene Park, the home of Thomas Brudenell; he had married one of Francis’ numerous sisters, Mary, in the summer of 1605 and would assist his mother-in-law Muriel Lady Tresham in her administrative duties after Francis’ death, so the document’s presence at Deene makes sense (Wake, p. 31).

XIII

Fire and Brimstone