The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (9 page)

Reasonable incredulity at the fearsome nature of the proposal gradually subsided as they discussed the matter. Winter did not immediately withdraw by declaring it a monstrous absurdity. Having once been a soldier calculating risks, he fell back on his practical experience to see if he could begin to weigh up the chances of success or failure. The notion did strike at the root and would cause general confusion and changes; but if it failed, as did almost all similar schemes, then the scandal would be a great grief to their cause, ‘their religion would be injured, and not only enemies, but friends with good reason condemn them’. Catesby answered with that commonplace response of all who regard horror as a purification – only he gave it a medicinal slant. ‘The nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy.’
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He asked Winter if he would give his consent and despite the countervailing pressures he still felt his reply was ‘Yes, in this or what else soever, if he resolved upon it I would venture my life.’ So Thomas Winter, who was not a religious zealot, gave his initial consent (which proved to be binding), while still hoping that Catholics might yet benefit if relief could be procured by the peaceful intervention of Philip III. Catesby was no doubt a sceptic on this point, but wisely allowed that they would ‘leave no peaceable and quiet way untried . . . you shall go over and inform the Constable Don Juan de Velasco, of the state of Catholics in England, entreating him to solicit his Majesty, at his coming hither, that the Penal Laws may be recalled and we admitted into the rank of his other subjects.’ Winter who spoke Spanish well, readily agreed. Catesby then artfully nudged the matter in the direction of his own plan by requesting Winter to ‘bring over some confident (that is trustworthy) gentleman, such as you shall understand best for this business’ – by which he meant mining, and so named Guy Fawkes.

The meeting with the Constable, as we have seen, was a polite deadlock. Hugh Owen had warned that this would be the outcome, and in conversation with Winter touched on the second reason for his being in the Low Countries: the availability to any rising in England of Guy Fawkes whom he had met in Spain garlanded with ‘good commendations’. Owen did praise the skill of Fawkes as a siege master and promised that if Winter did not get to see him – Fawkes being then in Brussels – ‘he would send him shortly after to England’. Most of those considering the personnel of the gunpowder plot have assumed that the pull of his religion was enough for the professional soldier. This seems very unlikely since he had quit England in his twenty-first year, having sold his modest inheritance, to fight in Spanish service and would require something substantial to induce his return. Fawkes by this time had become by choice a rootless mercenary soldier, that would be reason enough. At the same time Winter wanted an informed opinion of another soldier on Fawkes’s merits and so he went to Ostend for the meeting with Sir William Stanley. Fawkes’s commander was asked about his ‘sufficiency in the wars’ and since the Spanish service gave a notable training in military engineering at that time, Stanley was able to give ‘very good commendations of him’. Winter was preparing to return to England when Fawkes arrived in the town and the two men talked there and further up the coast in Dunkirk. It seems likely that Fawkes was nudged towards acquiescence by Stanley, and two days later he did follow Winter down the coast and consented to return with him. Winter remained quite cautious in his briefing, saying no more than that there was ‘a resolution to do somewhat in England, if the peace with Spain helped us not, but as yet resolved upon nothing’. It would certainly be very surprising if Fawkes’s resolution was not assisted by a cash reward.

After sailing back to England, Winter and Fawkes took a two-pair of oars at Greenwich and rowed up to the Lambeth house where they were received by Catesby. Naturally his first question was ‘What news from the Constable?’ Winter’s reply was clipped and sardonic – ‘Good words.’ Not knowing Fawkes otherwise than by report Catesby held back somewhat in his company, but while waiting for the arrival of Thomas Percy in town he did engage Fawkes provisionally for service. Early in May Percy did arrive; he could handily claim business over the rents of his employer Northumberland to cover the conspiratorial aspect of his visit. He saluted the company – Catesby, Winter, John Wright and Fawkes – and asked vehemently: ‘Shall we always, gentlemen, talk and never do anything?’ The others looked at Catesby who then took Percy aside and explained that a scheme was being considered. They were set to meet within two or three days to bind themselves by an oath of secrecy, and this took place in a lodging belonging to a Mrs Herbert in Butcher’s Row behind St Clement’s Dane church. In an upper room, probably a garret reached by a trap-door ‘upon a Primer’ each swore the oath generally supposed to have been as follows: ‘Ye shall swear by the Blessed Trinity and by the Sacrament ye now prepare to receive never to disclose directly or indirectly by word or circumstances the matter that shall be proposed to you to keep secret nor desist from the execution thereof until the rest shall give you leave.’
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After this they went into an adjoining room where the Jesuit priest Father John Gerard, ignorant of their intentions, was vested and ready to say the mass and they made their communion. Retiring back to their empty room then, Catesby disclosed their purpose to Thomas Percy, while Winter and John Wright told Fawkes.

As a first step the conspirators needed to find a house to rent hard by the cluster of old buildings known collectively as the Houses of Parliament. Their choice came down to one (or rather part of one) standing near the Prince’s Chamber, and on the side towards the river. It was then in the possession of Henry Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton, the tenant of John Whynniard, yeoman of his Majesty’s Wardrobe of the Beds. In his first effort for the operation Thomas Percy was selected to take the house in his own name, using the simple pretence that his position in the King’s gentleman pensioners to which he was appointed on 9 June, required him to reside periodically in the ambit of the court. The bargaining for the house was eventually completed on 24 May 1604, St Robert’s Day, after a ‘long suit’ by Percy, and pressing requests by people connected to the Earl of Northumberland – Dudley Carleton and John Hippesley.
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But nothing yet could be done there because the premises were being used for important government business. The Scottish commissioners appointed by James to consider his great plan for the Union of Scotland and England were ensconced in it for several months. In the meantime, so that the flare of initial energy of the plot was not fruitlessly snuffed, the conspirators hired Catesby’s lodgings in Lambeth, conveniently opposite to Whynniard’s block, but on the south bank of the Thames. It was there that they laid up a store of gunpowder, wood and other combustibles. At an appropriate moment these could be moved at night by boat; and in the meantime a friend of Kit Wright – John’s brother – was taken on to watch the items as they lay in store. Robert Keyes was a Jesuit convert whose father had been a Protestant clergyman at Staveley, Derbyshire, while his mother was a Catholic relative of Lady Ursula Babthorpe. His wife was governess at Turvey (Bedfordshire) to the children of the Catholic Lord Mordaunt, and since the Keyes family was not well off it seems likely that Catesby paid him and then took him into the plot on the conviction that he was ‘a trusty honest man’.
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The commission on Union completed its work by 6 December 1604, and less than a week later the conspirators were back in possession of the house. By Christmas, these gentlemen, so unused to hard physical labour, but now galvanized by their mission, had tunnelled from their starting point to the wall they had to breach. They took a festive break then, no doubt glad to ease the blisters they had accumulated in a short time. When they set about the wall they were presented with a severe physical challenge, since it was stone and several feet thick. Eating from a store of eggs, dried meat and the like (where did they get their drinking water?), so as not to arouse suspicions in the crowded neighbourhood by frequent comings and goings of prepared food, they continued to work in very cramped conditions that took their toll. Up to this time it had been Catesby, Percy, Fawkes, Thomas Winter and John Wright who had done the labouring and maintained a watch. But not enough was being achieved and Keyes had to be brought in, which meant the gunpowder too. At this time they had about twenty barrels and this was now stored either in Percy’s lodgings or in an outhouse belonging to it. A fortnight after Candlemas, Christopher Wright was also brought in, but between January 1605 and the middle of March they had got perhaps halfway through. It was undoubtedly an effort that generated noise, and unless Fawkes had rigged sound baffles there must have been a real fear that some day a nosey neighbour would seek out the source.* After all, as it has been pointed out in previous studies of the plot, there were people living in the part of the property not let to the conspirators, and they were hemmed in by houses of the Keeper of the Wardrobe, auditors and tellers of the Exchequer and other such officials. There were also tradesmen and workmen constantly employed close to where the work went on, and yet no quizzical eye spotted evidence of soil or stone. A solution to this is suggested in later prints of the environs which always show clear evidence of demolition and rebuilding, with casual heaps of timber and stone. Given the age of many of these buildings such work cannot have been rare in the early seventeenth century. Indeed, the other Robert of the gunpowder plot – Robert Cecil, soon to be Earl of Salisbury – was a demolisher and rebuilder on a grand scale. And if anyone troubled to ask what was going on the plotters could simply say essential repairs caused by destabilized foundations – the result of seepages from the Thames.

* The ability to mine silently had been claimed many years before by Leonardo da Vinci in his famous letter to Lodovico Sforza.

T
he physical effort of mining in a confined space was overwhelming the small group. Empowered by the others to use their discretion in bringing in further hands to the plot, Catesby and Thomas Percy sent off letters to Robert Winter of Huddington, and to his brother-in-law, John Grant, a wealthy squire who lived at Norbrook, an old manor house some five miles from Stratford. They were requested to meet their brother Thomas Winter and their kinsman Catesby, a meeting that took place in January 1605 at the Catherine Wheel inn in Oxford. Robert Winter and John Grant took the oath binding them to secrecy before Catesby revealed the intention. According to his trial testimony Robert Winter, who was a more peaceable character than his brother, asked why such a dangerous project was envisaged when (as he thought), it was ‘impossible to take any effect without either foreign aid or some great men at home to join therein’. Catesby brushed these objections aside and said that ‘for great men he knew none he durst trust’. Winter also took the view that like most plots before, discovery was inevitable and unless James himself was extraordinarily charitable it would scandalize all other Catholics and ruin those involved – a fact of some importance to Robert Winter who was not only the owner of large estates in Worcestershire, but also the son-in-law of Sir John Talbot of Grafton, the largest landholder in the county. Despite the presence of his brother the scepticism of Robert Winter was undiminished and he held back from joining the plotters at this time.

Not so John Grant, who had previously been involved in the Essex revolt and was married to Dorothy, the sister of the Winters.
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A much more bellicose individual, Grant had a reputation for resisting government searchers when they descended on his strongly-walled property to pry for incriminating evidence. According to his contemporary, Father John Gerard, Grant gleefully heaped indignities on the pursuivants and they learned to stay away ‘unless they brought store of help with them’. Doubtless one or two fetched up in the moat. Catesby wanted more men on site to dig but neither Robert Winter nor Grant seem to have moved south, perhaps because the timing of Parliament’s sessions had been altered, prorogued from 7 February to 3 October (the day Thomas Winter was sent to watch the ceremony). Presumably the diggers had a day off on 7 February since the Lords met that day and aside from ceremonial matters they conducted, too, a little business, including the introduction of Lord Denny and the reading of his writ of summons. ‘The Moles that first underwent these underminings were all grounded Schollers of the Romish Schoole’, but they seem to have been surprisingly haphazard in their knowledge of the buildings about them and more specifically the object of their intentions – the House of Lords. In part this was probably due to a lack of plans for them to consult and the wilful ways of early builders when confronted with a problem of construction. The other factor, harder to calculate but impossible now to overlook, was that they were all gentlemen without any training in mining, demolition or understanding spatial relationships. Detailed planning applications to councils today often mystify the layman who has inadequate expertise in preparing a critique of such plans. The labourers then ‘in their Vault of Villainy’ operated more in hope than many writers have been willing to acknowledge, since whatever one’s sympathies, it suggests an amateurishness on their part that seems to detract in some way from the desperate seriousness of their operation. They fumbled in the dark, no doubt unwilling to acknowledge their blithe ignorance because that was too dispiriting, and it made all their efforts so far seem lame. Even the man credited with the most skills in the matter of mining – Guy Fawkes – did not realize that their exit would not be immediately beneath the chamber of the peers. Hence their agitation, verging on panic, when they heard a strange overhead rushing sound that none of them could with any confidence identify to the satisfaction of the group. Before they could risk proceeding someone had to be delegated to go above to find out the source. In the event it was Fawkes himself who went, probably because he was the least likely to be recognized, and his later testimony suggests that it was only then that the calculations of proximities were recognized as faulty. There was a large space above where they were labouring, a so-called ‘cellar’, although it comprised the ground floor of the building and was itself beneath the chamber of the House of Lords. According to a measurement given in a volume published some two hundred years after the events being described, the space was 77 feet long, 24 feet 4 inches wide and 10 feet high, having originally served as a kitchen for the palace, but by 1605 it did function in part as a cellar might, since some of the space was given over to coal storage – a privilege that was rented out to a London coal merchant. It was the noise of the stock being removed that caused the alarums below, until Fawkes returned (I suggest with a rare grin on his face) to report that the tenant’s widow, Ellen Bright, was selling off the stocks of coal, thus vacating the area at a crucial time. Curious when it was winter and there were working fire-places in the house. It cannot have taken the miners long to recognize that relief of their calloused hands and aching limbs was at hand. All they had to do was rent the space, to which no one paid any attention, and Thomas Percy set about obtaining the lease from Whynniard, but as ever the situation was a little more complicated than had first been thought. According to later testimony by Mrs Whynniard, Ellen Bright only had the lease indirectly through a man called Skinner, and while it is a fairly common name it would be interesting to know if he was in any way related to Anthony Skinner. Whatever the case the naturally voluble Percy was not deflected and the plotters had the space from 25 March 1605.
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