The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (11 page)

Although Garnet’s account shimmers with a deliberate vagueness, it is possible even so to form an outline of the conference between the two Jesuits and Robert Catesby. It was the latter’s habit to stop at White Webbs whenever he passed through Barnet, and he was seldom long away because he had a great affection for Anne. On this occasion, to his great relief, Garnet had just received a letter from Father Robert Persons and this was presented to Catesby with a simultaneous admonition on papal policy. Garnet claimed that whatever device Catesby had in his head it would not prosper if it defied the will of the Pope. Catesby said that if the Pope knew what was intended he would not hinder it since it was for the general good of the country, and the more he was pressed by Garnet the more stubbornly he resisted, declaring that he would not listen to the Pope’s will through a third party. Garnet then acknowledged the limits of his own credit with Catesby and read to him from the Persons’ letter – ‘a man everywhere respected for his wisdom and virtue’ – pressing Catesby to acquaint the Pope with any scheme before attempting it. Catesby firmly declined to do so for fear of discovery. This duel of will and wits between allies eventually ended – the stalemate observed by the silent and deeply concerned Greenway.

What can be teased out of these reported exchanges nearly four hundred years later? Firstly, that Catesby’s replies were careful and somewhat studied. Secondly, that Garnet’s urgency, together with his warnings to Greenway and his messages by him to Catesby, meant that the Jesuit Provincial knew the secret heart of the matter. The seal of confession forbade him to communicate this otherwise than to Greenway himself. So in reply to Persons, Father General in Rome, Garnet fudged by referring in very general terms to the danger of private treason or violence against the king, and he asked for papal directives as to what was to be done in that case. ‘I remained in the greatest perplexity that ever I was in my life, and could not sleep at nights . . . I prayed that God would dispose of all for the best and find the best means that were pleasing to Him to prevent so great a mischief.’ Words that are poignant and ironic when we consider the fate of the plotters and Garnet himself. He had slid into a terrible predicament and no doubt he was sincere in his acute distress. But years of clandestine ministry against a background of persecution had led him to countenance treasons and plots against his country and his conscience was no longer as focused and active as it might have been. Indeed, it seems his sympathy was now more stirred by the recusancy fines and more minor hardships borne by Catesby and his cluster, than by the shocking fact that they were set to murder possibly hundreds of their contemporaries, including those who happened to live in the various buildings adjacent to the House of Lords. Garnet knew all this. If he had been a man of stronger character he must have been able to frustrate Catesby’s plans for mayhem, and that without breaking his word as a priest. Garnet never identified such opportunities as arose because he lacked some of the finest moral constituents of courage. As he admitted: ‘Partly upon hope of prevention, partly that I would not betray my friend, I did not reveal the general knowledge of Mr Catesby’s intention which I had by him . . .’

The Jesuit came to rest his ‘hope of prevention’ on Catesby’s reluctant consent to send an emissary to Rome to enquire further of the Pope’s will. But Catesby made the requirement that the envoy chosen should also carry letters from Garnet, whose fear of consequences he had spotted. Under pressure Garnet weakly refused to do more than write to the papal nuncio in Brussels. Fear of the Pope made him try to shift responsibility. The lay envoy chosen by Catesby was his friend Sir Edmund Baynham, who readily consented, and may have had his own reasons for undertaking such a jaunt. As we have seen, he had achieved a certain notoriety that led to the courts and gaol.
⁸
So a somewhat curious choice, but Catesby evidently judged Baynham to be unscrupulous which suited his own plans. Catesby emphatically hinted that there would be something of a seditious sort attempted for Catholics when Parliament met, and he secretly instructed Baynham to delay his journey after he reached Brussels. He should wait for whatever might happen, then gallop to Rome to inform the new pontiff, Paul V. All this ran counter to what Garnet had wanted, and Baynham tarried in England until early September before departing with introductions from Monteagle to Catholics in the Spanish Netherlands and Rome.

F
rom about 1570 onwards the great men of the Elizabethan privy council were prepared to use spies to assist the making of policy. As a junior administrator in the 1580s and early 1590s Robert Cecil was able to give close scrutiny to the successes in this labyrinthine area, and during the late 1590s as he took on more responsibilities for implementing policy, observation became practice. Cecil showed an increasingly favourable attitude to the business of espionage and received many reports – some lame, some acute. All he lacked at this time to become a spy master to equal Sir Francis Walsingham (
d
. 1590) was a dark, even paranoid imagination.
¹
Great vigilance was still required of the Secretary of State after the accession of James because enemies within and without did not generously melt away; the Bye plot and Main plot seemed to confirm this. But given the peace made with Spain (1604), much of the treaty being to England’s advantage, Cecil might have been tempted to trim severely the intelligence cluster he had inherited from Burghley (
d
. 1598). Certainly a greater weight was now placed on career diplomats like Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels, Sir Thomas Parry in Paris and Ralph Winwood in the Hague, who conducted diplomatic business and supervised necessary intelligence gathering. But Cecil still used spies, and it has been averred that the government might have been more secure and knowledgeable early about the gunpowder plot if the Secretary had been willing to continue the previous employment of the ageing Thomas Phelippes.

Once chief of operations to Walsingham, he had evidently revelled in the arcana of espionage. Phelippes was a good linguist, with a particular gift for penetrating ciphers, and he had played an important part in the wrecking of the Babington plot, for which he received a royal pension of 100 marks a year.* When Walsingham died Phelippes allowed his skills and reservoir of knowledge to be bought by Essex, because the earl’s political rival, Robert Cecil, did not like Phelippes, and he did not like Cecil. The reasons for this are now unfathomable, but perhaps there was an element of edgy competition between the two very short and physically unprepossessing men, with the hefty advantage of birth going to the hunchback Cecil rather than the pock-marked Phelippes. The latter evidently enjoyed money and eventually became Collector of Subsidy (Customs) for the Port of London. This provided him with an agreeable house and a servant shared with his colleague Arthur Gregory, a Dorset man whose peculiar accomplishment (also valued) was to open sealed letters without hinting that a violation had taken place. The
menage à trois
was completed by Thomas Barnes, a spy employed by Cecil. Phelippes’s port employment not only kept him comfortable, but also offered him the opportunity to follow ship movements along the estuary of the Thames, and to keep watch on any individuals who travelled abroad a little too often. One man with whom Phelippes had some contacts early in the seventeenth century was Henry Spiller (later knighted), an official of the Court of Exchequer in charge of recusancy fines, whose son was a suspect. Robert Spiller had been secretly denounced to Cecil, and it was noted that some of the family were known to be assisting Garnet and other priests in London; the young Spiller may have been a courier for Garnet.

In the spring of 1605 a spy claimed to have seen Robert Spiller in the company of Guy Fawkes, an event later reported by Edmondes. But simultaneously Spiller was somehow in London making friends with the household of the French ambassador, Comte de Beaumont, Christophe Harlay, himself an intimate of the Earl of Northumberland. Writing from Paris in March 1605 to Beaumont, Spiller said he had been ill and was going to convalesce in the country for two months. If the search for Catholic recusants in England abated he said he intended to visit London for a short time after Easter. Spiller was well regarded at the court of the archdukes and meeting with de Tassis before the Spanish ambassador crossed to England, he was accompanied by Stanley, Hugh Owen and Father Baldwin. Such a huddle was suggestive to Phelippes who took it that some treasonable act was being worked up between London and Brussels. It was enough to set him off, warming to his favourite task of concocting a correspondence. So he began writing to Owen using the pseudonym ‘Vincent’, but Owen did not respond at all (which was also unusual) so in a flush of invention Phelippes amused himself by self-penning replies in cipher under the name ‘Benson’. These he made pretence of deciphering as discoveries and he sent copies to Cecil. Unfortunately for him, Thomas Barnes had spotted the correspondence and snatched a letter from ‘Vincent’ to ‘Benson’. The handwriting had such similarities with what Phelippes had sent that Cecil noted the fraud. Cecil had Sir Thomas Windebank arrest Phelippes, and he was required to deliver him to Cecil House without any exchanges with anyone on the way. One of the letters purloined by Barnes contained an innocent piece of gossip regarding Sir Thomas Parry intercepting a letter from Persons to Sir Anthony Standen (now imprisoned too). This made it appear that the luckless envoy was in league with Phelippes, and when interviewed by Cecil about what he was up to, all the cryptanalyst and forger could do was admit what he had done and excuse himself for an effort intended to make some money. Probably he would have been satisfied with a cut from the huge Spanish bribes that were then sloshing around the English court. Thoroughly peeved Cecil had him sent to the Gatehouse for meddling in state business, and later to the Tower where his visitors included Salisbury’s own secretary, Levinus Munck and Sir William Waad. Had Phelippes been left to develop connections and then inform Salisbury, he might have traced back the connection between Thomas Winter’s mission to the Spanish Netherlands in March 1604, the meeting with Guy Fawkes, and the arrival of the two men in England to meet Catesby at Lambeth in May. Phelippes probably knew more about the exiles and their business in the Spanish Netherlands than any secret agent then in the employ of Cecil. Periodically the Secretary could be too unyieldingly suspicious and Phelippes paid the price – in his case, despite the best efforts of friends like Waad, a lengthy period in the Tower.

But then neither side in the extended duel of spies could afford to be very trusting. There were double agents galore, including the Brussels-based Captain William Turner, a professional soldier with past service in Ireland, France and the Low Counties. Owen fell into the trap of employing Turner, who was already one of Cecil’s spies, quite reliable over a number of years. Turner met Catholic exiles who told him to get in touch with Father Baldwin and Owen, and the agent first met the renegade Welshman when he was out walking with Charles Bailly. Owen’s reception of the unknown soldier was not cordial, and several days later when they met again at the court of the archdukes it became evident that Owen had been doing some background research on Turner for he referred to his brother who was serving in the forces of Count Maurice of Nassau, asking if this brother could be won over to the archdukes ‘and withal to render some town of importance’. Turner must certainly have been impressive under scrutiny because Owen gave him £100 and required him to go to Holland. Turner complied and when he got to meet Maurice told him of the offer concerning his own brother. Returning to Brussels with Dutch thanks and a reward in his pocket, Turner gave the exiles ‘such things as I thought could best please their humours’.

In May 1605 Turner got to meet Guy Fawkes, out of England to avoid any government sweep. The two then went together to report to Marquis Ambrogio Spinola, the Spanish commander, on what Turner had done in Holland. Some weeks later Owen sent for Turner and they had a long conversation about advancing arrangements for an invasion of England, after Turner had been received into the Catholic Church by Baldwin. Since England and Spain had ceased hostilities following the treaty signed in London in 1604, and there was no exclusion zone around the English coast, a company of 1,500 Spanish troops were then in Dover awaiting passage to the Spanish Netherlands. The intention was to use them as a vanguard, reinforced by the volunteer regiment of exiles, as well as some three hundred English cavalry ‘which he was assured would be ready to join them’. This must refer, even if the figure is optimistic, to the projected cavalry from the Midlands. From Dover it was envisaged the Spanish would move to Rochester where they would seize the strategic bridge over the Medway and immobilize the English fleet at anchor. Turner was himself told to wait in Dover for Father Greenway (Tesimond), who, returning with books and packets of letters, would then escort him to meet Catesby. According to Owen the plotters expected to use Turner in a freelance capacity, as the agent told Sir Thomas Edmondes. The ambassador was not impressed and for reasons of his own based on unknown evidence or maybe just intuition, decided that his informant was a feckless individual meriting little attention.
²
In a letter to Salisbury in late September 1605 Edmondes was most uncomplimentary, remarking on Turner’s ‘light and dissolute life’ – an authentically stuffy English diplomat’s cautious response. With Phelippes still in prison this attitude meant in effect that two vital conduits of information to Salisbury were blocked. Nor as yet did he receive anywhere near enough detailed material from diplomats like Parry who employed his own intelligencers. The lack of specificity extended for months and brought the government very close to having to dismantle the plot virtually as it happened. Their claim that it was the cryptic Monteagle letter which alerted them to the headlong progress of a projected calamity begins to look less unlikely, although candour was not a function of government, and Catholic historians have derided the notion.