The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (16 page)

They now took off with their plunder, going through Burcot, Lickey End, Catshill, Clent and Hagley to Stourbridge. Autumn rains had made the road exceedingly difficult, and the fording of the Stour, at a seasonal high, led to the unfortunate wetting of the gunpowder. Such conditions also provided opportunities for servants to desert and despite the efforts of the gentlemen the party was further diminished by the time it had reached Holbeach House, near Kingswinford the home of Stephen Littleton, at about ten o’clock. It had taken them some sixteen hours to travel twenty-five miles, and they needed rest and food, as well as an opportunity to disuss their dismal situation. Not one Catholic had thought to join them and news arrived shortly that they were being trailed by Sir Richard Walsh, sheriff of Worcestershire. A general understanding seems to have been reached at this point that they needed to make preparations to resist an assault on the house. They were extravagantly well provided with weapons and armour but sorely lacking in numbers, so their thoughts turned to John Talbot, who as we know, was on his way to his Shropshire estate at Pepperhill which was ten miles from Holbeach. The obvious delegate to go to Pepperhill was Robert Winter, Talbot’s son-in-law, but he refused saying that Talbot was certain to look after his daughter when she became a single parent. So it was Thomas Winter who volunteered to go, in company with Stephen Littleton, and long before dawn they were in the saddle again bound for Pepperhill. The house was situated on a high promontory of land with extensive views over the country, and Talbot had too a bowling green close to his door.
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At about eight o’clock on Friday morning, Talbot was out of the house going to the green when he spotted Winter approaching on foot. From his later testimony Talbot did not greet him at all warmly but baldly asked him what he was doing there. Winter replied: ‘Why should I not come hither?’ The next exchanges revealed why – Talbot wanted him off his property – ‘I pray you get hence’, to which Winter replied: ‘If you like my company no better, God be with you.’ Rebuffed, Winter and Littleton disconsolately retraced their journey back to Holbeach where news of a further calamity awaited them. Not only had Digby found an opportunity to flee, but the rest were in some disarray because having set some wet gunpowder on platters to dry before a fire, an ember had fallen onto one and caused an explosion. It was a pitiful replica on a small scale of what they had intended in London; Catesby and Rookwood were both badly burned, and it settled for Robert Winter and Stephen Littleton what they had to do in these dire circumstances. Both quit the house singly before subsequently meeting in an adjoining wood. A more purposeful Thomas Winter remained and he dressed the wounds of his friends as best he could before defining measures for the defence of the house. There was little to do and the sheriff’s force surrounded the house around eleven, started a fire and stormed the building. In the mêlée Thomas Winter was shot in the shoulder; the Wright brothers were killed and Rookwood further wounded. Catesby, Thomas Percy and Thomas Winter stood close together in a defensive knot before the former two died (as it seemed to Winter, himself piked in the stomach) shot with one bullet. In a more lurid version of this climax to the plot, Catesby was shot outside but dragged himself inside to kiss a picture of the Virgin Mary, before dying with it in his arms. Purists will doubtless prefer the more austere first version, but most will flinch at the immediate plundering of the corpses. Kit Wright’s boots were heaved off in order to secure his silk stockings, and someone certainly spotted the special swords of some of the gentlemen.* (See Appendix II.)

Of those who had just quit the house before the final assault, Digby was soon recaptured with two servants – possibly Thomas Bates and his son. The trio had taken horses and headed for the woods nearby where a dry declivity that they came across might have afforded them a temporary hiding place if their tracks had not been visible in the mud and leaf-mould. The cry went up that Digby had been found and he confirmed it with an abrupt ‘Here he is indeed’, edging his mount out and up trying to pass through the advance horsemen. Then he was confronted by a much larger cluster behind and he gave himself up. Those captured at Holbeach were then conveyed to London to the Tower, while John Winter, who seems to have escaped from Holbeach in the middle of the night, determined to throw himself upon the king’s mercy. His brother Robert and Stephen Littleton, however, remained at large, and the government later in the month put out a description of the two fugitives.

‘Robert Wynter [
sic
] is a man of meane stature rather low, than otherwise, square made, somewhat stooping, near forty years of age, his hair and beard browne, his beard not much, and his hair short.’

‘Stephen Littleton is a very tall man, swarthy of complexion, of browne coloured haire, no beard, or little, about 30 years of age.’

Humphrey Littleton, who had returned home directly from the gathering at Dunchurch, bribed one of his tenant farmers near Rowley Regis to hide his cousin and Robert Winter for a time, and subsequently they moved from one farmhouse to another during the coldest time of the year, eking out the modest fare offered them. Early on New Year’s Day (by our reckoning) they fetched up at Hagley, at the house of a family tenant – one Perkes. They gave him £30; his man £20 and his maid £17 as an earnest of their gratitude. Perkes put them in a barley-mow in his barn and they were given food and drink for the next nine days, concealed by winter straw piles. In the middle of the tenth night while they slept, a drunken poacher named Poynter took shelter in the barn and climbed onto the straw before lurching unexpectedly into their hollowed-out space. The two men seized him and with the aid of Perkes (to whom he was well known), the poacher was forcibly detained by them until the fifth day when he outwitted them and escaped. The news of this misfortune was taken to Humphrey Littleton at Hagley House and it was there that Perkes escorted the fugitives that night for the joy of food, drink, clean clothes and a bed. Such an effort in the house required compliant servants if it was to succeed for any time, and Littleton’s cook was the one who promptly betrayed his employer and unhappy wanderers. Soon they were resting uncomfortably in the Tower.

The town and country sweep by the government’s officials naturally extended to Francis Tresham’s county of Northamptonshire, where the sheriff was Sir Arthur Throckmorton. He was in London when the high drama broke on 5 November and he went quickly off to his territory for a muster of loyalists. He summoned his fellow justices of the peace, Sir Richard Chetwode and Sir William Samwell to meet him at Rushton, and the Tresham mansion was searched under their supervision. Then the party moved on to Mordaunt’s property at Drayton, and afterwards Throckmorton caught up with one of the unfortunate mothers, Lady Tresham, who had left London for Liveden. Throckmorton’s penultimate stop was Ashby St Legers to seize Catesby’s goods, and then came the rumpus at Harrowden, the home of Lord Vaux. Great hopes were entertained of finding Father John Gerard there and the house was investigated by at least three hundred men who pried and probed for two or three days while Anne Vaux and her young nephew vigorously denied all knowledge of the plot. As it happened, Gerard escaped and eventually crossed to Europe, while the pious lady of the house was taken to London for examination, as were many wives of conspirators.

The Tower of London became the hub of the investigation, but some preliminary work was done in the provinces with captives. On 8 November, still smarting from his wounds and burns, Ambrose Rookwood was taken before Sir Fulke Greville (snr), one of the great men of Warwickshire – Alcester became a family property. As Deputy Lieutenant of the county he had been alarmed by the raid on the stables in Warwick and he had roused the locality that something more than a robbery was afoot. Asked why he was abroad in the county Rookwood said he was going to Worcester to meet a man (one Ingram) who had sold him a hawk. When his servant William Johnson was asked the same question he recalled the hawk but got into a muddle about the town and said Hereford. Afterwards Greville wrote breezily to Salisbury that he hoped to be able to send him one of the horses left behind in the raid.
⁷
Rookwood was interrogated in the Tower but it soon became evident that this hapless young man had little significant knowledge of the inner workings of the plot. Digby, less naive, probably struck the interrogators as a more likely source of real details and he was examined on two successive days, 19 and 20 November, at some length before the lords commissioners. Their problem for now was that so many violent, abrupt deaths had already happened their lines of enquiry about ‘the most cruel and detestable practice . . . that ever was conceived by the heart of man’ were severely reduced. Still, writing to the English ambassador to Spain, Sir Charles Cornwallis, Salisbury was both realistic and optimistic: ‘It is also thought fit that some martial man should presently repair down to those countries where those Robin Hoods are assembled, to encourage the good and to terrify the bad . . . although I am easily persuaded that this faggot will be burnt to ashes before he shall be twenty miles on his way.’ It was Cornwallis in high spirits who planned the first ever fireworks party to celebrate the failure but he called it off despite his initial impression that the Spanish king and court were shocked.

After 12 November (the day Tresham was arrested), the government’s officials were preparing for the arrival of more prisoners and prisoners’ wives. They were also making other arrests, such as those on 15 November of Lords Montagu and Mordaunt – neither of whom had intended to be in Parliament on the day. Northumberland was now quarantined in Lambeth Palace with Archbishop Bancroft, whose initial response to the discovery of the plot had been to panic, rushing to the safety of his residence to pen a hasty letter to Salisbury about a possible sighting of one of the conspirators. Evidence that unlike the Bye plot it was an exclusively Catholic effort, may have caused the archbishop a twinge of regret that no puritans had meddled. Even the dead were not overlooked, for a privy council order was sent to Staffordshire for the slain of Holbeach to be exhumed and quartered. By the time of the trials the heads of Catesby and Percy were ‘upon the side of the Parliament House’, and what was said to be Tresham’s (dead of a strangury – a dysfunction of the urinary system leading to acute retention – while in the Tower) was fixed to London Bridge. Thus the hated and condemned became sightless spectators of their own failure. Such a macabre proceeding as quartering of bodies had a particular purpose identified approvingly by an anonymous pamphleteer in the Low Countries some years before this: ‘The standing quarters in England show God’s blessing upon that nation, who dothe reveal them, and the justice of the country that doth punish them.’
⁸
Deliverance from the plot in the view of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes was due to God alone and the English must recognize the intervention of their Saviour. In his first plot sermon the following year he did not hesitate to compare the deliverances of Britain within recent memory with the Passover of the Hebrews. Stern triumphalism was often the tone after the plot.
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One of the New Testament group at Westminster chosen to translate the Epistles for the so-called King James version of the Bible was Dr William Barlow. Dean of Chester and then Bishop of Rochester, with his mastery of language and rhetorical devices, he was a natural choice for the delivery of a Paul’s Cross sermon. It was calculated to be a chilling effort, and while references to Fawkes as more evil than Caligula, as ‘the devil of the vault’ and ‘Blood-sucker’, suggest the bishop was over-excited, no doubt it had an effect on his listeners. Indeed, in
Macbeth
there is the same sulphurous tone with the appearance too of demonic forces. Fawkes at this time was still alive, albeit faltering as he was subjected to torture. The notion that this item in the government’s armoury was dealt out indiscriminately is quite wrong, and they obtained a useful amount of (so to speak) leverage by using it with care. Salisbury was well aware that torture can induce a man to say anything and that was not what was wanted. So many of the conspirators were now known by the others to be in the Tower, and each was so much afraid of what the others might have confessed, that they spoke freely when examined. Each feared that at any moment the rack might be employed on him. The government meanwhile decided to use Fawkes for a propaganda programme by working up his confessions for publication. It gave them an opportunity to sneak in a reference to contacts between Fawkes and Owen in the hope and intention of ruining an enemy exile of many years. Salisbury wrote to Sir Thomas Edmondes on 14 November to declare that Owen had been definitely incriminated by Fawkes. Edmondes might have put this about with confidence in Brussels since the news came from his superior, but it was actually untrue, because according to the surviving evidence Fawkes did not mention Owen until 20 January 1606.

The assertion did, however, get some much needed backing by the confession on 23 November of Thomas Winter, who had like Rookwood survived his injuries. Catholic historians and apologists have constantly denied the authenticity of this confession because the manuscript version at Hatfield, an autograph example, has a variant signature substituting the unique spelling Winter for the usual form of Wintour which he used. No one has ever made a solid and sensible suggestion about why a government-employed forger (say Thomas Phelippes) would deliberately make such an error in a crucial state document, and why Salisbury would let it pass. Winter had an injured shoulder and penning his name in a simpler form may have been easier. Whatever the reason for this tiny (albeit eye-catching) blemish, it was written without immediate duress and the text was incorporated into the portmanteau publication known as the
King’s Book.
This was a highly coloured official account of the treason, printed at the end of November, and ready for circulation early in December.
¹⁰
For those outside the privileged cluster of councillors and courtiers it was powerful and essential reading just as the Secretary intended. It told enough about the plot to convince Londoners and direct their thinking on the matter. One reader hot to take it up seems to have been William Shakespeare and the little quarto set him to thinking about a Scottish play and the death of kings. When the conspirators were hauled to London the
King’s Book
noted how the people wished to see them ‘as the rarest sort of monsters; fools to laugh at them; women and children to wonder; all the common people to gaze –’. In
Macbeth
when Macduff has cornered the usurping king, he uses the same language as he taunts him: