The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (26 page)

So Rookwood had a sword which in its decoration was laden with Catholic symbolism. It is doubtful if it or the others prepared were ever used, even in the final stand at Holbeach, since by then the plotters had a great stock of utilitarian weaponry to hand. When they were killed (like Thomas Percy and Christopher Wright) items of value about their bodies were apparently looted for private gain. When the plotters were injured and captured (like Rookwood and Winter) such things should have been seized and accounted for by their captors for presentation to the authorities in London. An item as rich as Rookwood’s sword was evidently too great a temptation to someone in the raiding party. Perhaps the sheriff of Worcestershire saw it as his reward for a dangerous mission accomplished. Indeed, given the notable quality of the weapons, it is not entirely surprising that they were filched, but it is curious (and unsatisfactory) that as time passed, and presumably the swords were handed down through families, that they did not eventually surface in known collections. Were they perhaps broken up during the Civil War?

Today the Swiss National Museum in Zurich has the only sword (LM3675) that uniquely conforms to the description given by Cradock of his work.
³
This fine weapon, however, has an Ottoman blade and so cannot be assigned to Rookwood. The source of the scenes on the plaques, all reflecting Christ’s suffering from the Betrayal to the Crucifixion, has not yet been identified, but perhaps the artist was Wierix who later engraved a portrait medallion of Fr. Henry Garnet. Since John Cradock, cutler, had not been paid in full for the sword set up for Thomas Percy, he was probably allowed to keep it. Cradock was himself a Catholic and it may be that he held on to the sword before later allowing it to pass by sale or gift into fraternal Catholic hands – like Sir Charles or Sir Allan Percy. How it came so much later into Swiss hands remains a mystery since the family anecdote is clearly wrong. Cradock himself remains, too, something of a mystery because the early records of the London Cutlers’ Company are incomplete. Given that the plotters were so often in the Strand, it is no surprise that they went to him since he was living, according to the poor-rate books of the parish of St Clement Dane, at Temple Bar in the Strand. He remained there, probably as a working cutler rather than simply a retailer, until 1610 when he seems to have retired to the nearby parish of St Giles in the Field. His will, undated but proved in 1623, shows him to have been a well-off property owner despite his recusant status.
⁴

C
HAPTER
O
NE

  1   A.J. Slavin, ‘The Precarious Balance’ (
Borzoi History of England
, 1973), p. 286.

  2   Ibid.

  3   C.P.H. Wilson, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Gunpowder Plot’,
TMBS,
1972, p. 268.

  4   L. Solt,
Church and State in Early Modern England
(1990), p. 99.

  5   Ibid., p. 101.

  6   A.L. Rowse,
Eminent Elizabethans
(1983), pp. 42–73.

  7   H. Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre),
Historical Essays
(1957), pp. 42–73.

  8   Solt, op. cit., p. 105.

  9   B.W. Beckingsale,
Burghley: Tudor Statesman
(1967), p. 154.

10  D. Cressy, ‘Binding the Nation: the Bonds of Association, 1584 and 1696’; in D.J. Gurth and J.W. McKenna (eds),
Tudor Rule and Revolution, Essays for G.R. Elton
(1982).

11  A. Haynes,
Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services
(1992), pp. 54–82.

12  D. Mathew,
The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe
(1933), p. 64.

13  Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. 109.

14  L. Guiney,
Recusant Poets
(1938), p. 305.

15  Ibid., p. 310.

16  M. Axton, ‘The Queen’s Two Bodies; Drama and the Elizabethan Succession’,
RHS,
1977, p. 92.

17  Guiney, op. cit., p. 310.

18  Ibid., p. 312.

19  Quoted M. Carrafiello, ‘Robert Persons’ Climate of Resistance and the Gunpowder Plot’,
TSC,
1988, p. 123.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

  1   C. McIlwain,
The Political Works of James I,
Introduction (1918), liii.

  2   G. Henry,
The Irish Military Community in Spanish Flanders
, 1586–1621 (1992), p. 93.

  3   E. St John Brooks,
Sir Christopher Hatton
(1946), p. 264.

  4   Ibid., p. 268.

  5   Henry, op. cit., p. 33.

  6   Quoted C. Nicholl,
The Reckoning; The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
(1992), p. 237.

  7   Ibid., p. 245.

  8   D. Mathew,
Catholicism in England
(1955), p. 65.

  9   M. Edmond,
Hilliard and Oliver, The Lives and Works of two great miniaturists
(1983), pp. 115–18.

10  L. Hotson,
I, William Shakespeare
(1937), pp. 146–7.

11  BL Harl. Mss 1974, f.21g.

12  A.H. Dodd, ‘The Spanish Treason, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Catholic Refugees’,
EHR,
LIII, 1938, p. 629.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

  1   R. Mathias,
Whitsun Riot
(1963), pp. 122–3.

  2   Ibid., p. 125.

  3   M. Richings,
Espionage
(1934), p. 160.

  4   R.W. Kenny,
Elizabeth’s Admiral, The Political Career of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham
1536–1624 (1970), p. 263.

  5   Mathias, op. cit., p. 126.

  6   T.W. Laquer, ‘Crowds, carnival and the state in English executions, 1604–1868’, in A.L. Beier, D. Cannadine and J.M. Rosenhelm (eds),
Essays in English History in honour of Lawrence Stone
(1989), p. 327.

  7   A.J. Loomie, ‘Toleration and Diplomacy’,
TAPS,
Vol, 53 pt 6, 1963, pp. 15–16.

  8   Ibid., p. 19.

  9   Carrafiello, op. cit., p. 127.

10  McIlwain, op. cit., xlviii.

11  S. Parnell Kerr, ‘The Constable kept an Account’,
N & Q
ns IV 1957, p. 168.

12  Dodd, op. cit., p. 639.

13  M. Nicholls,
Investigating Gunpowder Plot
(1991), p. 103.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

  1   H. Belloc, A
History of England,
Vol. IV (1931), pp. 440–1.

  2   F. Edwards, SJ, ‘Still Investigating Gunpowder Plot’,
RH,
21, 3, 1993, p. 312.

  3   J.W. Hales,
Notes and Essays on Shakespeare
(1884), p. 28.

  4   Dodd, op. cit., p. 633.

  5   J. Knipe, ‘Conspiracy and Conscience; a psychological study of the Gunpowder Plot’,
The Churchman,
January 1930, p. 38.

  6   Ibid., p. 39.

  7   J. Gerard, SJ,
What was the Gunpowder Plot?
(1897), p. 9.

  8   Nicholls, op. cit., p. 40.

  9   Knipe, op. cit., p. 41.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

  1    Hales, op. cit., p. 30.

  2   Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 40–1.

  3   O.F.G. Hogg, ‘Gunpowder and its associations with the Crown’,
JRA,
LXXI, 1944, p. 179.

  4   S. Middelboe, ‘Guy Certainly was Not Joking’,
NCE,
5 November 1987, p. 32.

  5   Knipe, op. cit., p. 41.

  6   Ibid., p. 43.

  7   Ibid., p. 127, April 1930.

  8   S.E. Sprott, ‘Sir Edmund Baynham’,
RH,
X, 1964, pp. 96–110.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

  1   Haynes, op. cit., pp. 156–7.

  2   Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 7–8; also G. Anstruther, ‘Powder Treason’,
Blackfriars,
xxxiii, 1952, p. 455.

  3   Hales, op. cit., p. 31.

  4   Knipe, op. cit., p. 130.

  5   Ibid., p. 131.

  6   Hales, op. cit., p. 42.

  7   Knipe, op. cit., p. 133.

  8   Ibid., p. 135.

  9   Hales, op. cit., p. 44.

10  J. Wake, ‘The Death of Francis Tresham’,
NPP,
II, 1954, p. 32.

11  Hotson, op. cit., p. 190.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

  1    A. Haynes,
Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, Servant of Two Sovereigns
(1989), p. 153.

  2   Edwards,
Investigating,
p. 323.

  3   L. Winstanley,
Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History
(1922), p. 55.

  4   Wake, op. cit., p. 33.