The year of lear, p.13
The Year of Lear, page 13
7
REMEMBER, REMEMBER
By the time that the inquisition of the “massing relics” took place in Stratford-upon-Avon in late February, Ambrose Rookwood was dead. So too were his friends John Grant and Robert Winter, as well as many others who had plotted with them at Clopton House.
After several rounds of interrogation and debilitating torture, the defiant John Johnson was finally broken. When he supplied the authorities with a full confession on November 9, he was so weak he could barely sign it. But he did so with his real name, Guido Fawkes. Guy Fawkes—as he was universally called—and his fellow conspirators had plotted “to blow up the king with all the nobility about him in Parliament,” then “resolved to surprise the Princess Elizabeth” and “make her queen,” and had “prepared, in her name, a proclamation against the Union of the kingdoms.” The plan, according to another conspirator, Sir Everard Digby, was for Catesby to proclaim her heir apparent at Charing Cross before riding north to abduct the princess. As idealistic as they were, the plotters were pragmatic enough to reach out to non-Catholics. Fawkes confessed that they had intended to make “use of all the discontented people in England”; the appeal, Digby writes, would have been broad, including a call for abolishing “wardships and monopolies.”
The originators of the conspiracy had been Robert Catesby, his cousin Thomas Wright, and Thomas Winter. The charismatic Catesby, who came up with the plan to blow up James and Parliament, had approached the other two in early 1604. They then recruited Thomas Percy and Fawkes (whose military experience in the Low Countries and training as a mining engineer were major assets). The five soon realized that more manpower and money were needed and over the course of the next year or so handpicked eight others to join them. Percy rented a building next to the old palace of Westminster, and they planned to tunnel from there to a spot under the House of Lords where they could set off the explosion. Three new recruits, John Grant, Christopher Wright, and Catesby’s trusted retainer Thomas Bates, helped with the digging. It was grueling manual labor for gentlemen unused to it, and noisy enough to attract attention, so there was considerable relief when a lease for a spacious ground-floor storeroom directly beneath the first floor of the House of Lords became available in March 1605. Percy secured the lease, enabling the plotters to hide nearly a ton of gunpowder, then cover it with stones, wood, and iron bars, to disguise the explosives and increase their destructive force.
Because the plot had grown more expensive, two others, Digby and Ambrose Rookwood, were invited to join and provide much-needed funds. Expanding the group one final time was its undoing; the well-to-do Francis Tresham, recruited just three weeks before the plot was discovered, was probably the author of the letter delivered to his brother-in-law Monteagle. When first told the details of the plot, Tresham was so horrified that he offered to pay the others to flee to the Continent rather than go through with it, fearing that if it failed “the whole kingdom” would turn its “fury upon such as were taken for Catholics.” Quite a few others—besides their Jesuit confessors and English Catholic contacts on the Continent, who were in on the secret—must have suspected or known that a plot was in the works, though their identities are now lost to us. The conspirators had much in common. Many were bound by ties of blood or marriage and had roots in the Midlands. Most of them were gentlemen in their thirties, young enough to be daring, but old enough to have had some experience of failure. All were recusants who chafed at the mistreatment of Catholics in England and, almost three years into the new reign, held out little hope that things would change.
Word of Fawkes’s arrest reached them in the early hours of November 5. With fresh horses waiting, they raced north on an eighty-mile dash to Warwickshire to their appointed rendezvous that evening with Digby’s hunting party at an inn at Dunchurch—a cover for the planned abduction of Princess Elizabeth—stopping only to arm themselves at Percy’s home at Ashby St. Ledgers. When they met up with Digby’s party, Catesby flat-out lied about what had happened in London, still hoping to keep the floundering rebellion alive, telling Digby that “there was such a pudder bred in the state by the death of the king and the Earl of Salisbury as the Catholics would now stir.” There was talk as well of joining forces with an army of a thousand supporters at Stephen Littleton’s estate at Holbeach, in Staffordshire. But it was impossible to conceal the truth for very long and most of Digby’s friends, rather than join them, quietly slipped away into the night. The conspirators were left at this point with “not above fifty horse,” but they remained hopeful that they could attract followers and that their uprising would succeed. They failed to see that while England’s Catholics were suffering under punitive recusancy laws and might grumble about their limited toleration, they weren’t about to commit treason and risk all to right those wrongs. Yet in truth, nobody at this moment had sounded the depth of Catholic resentment. The government certainly took the possibility of a Catholic uprising seriously. The attempted rebellion would put the loyalties of English Catholics to the test. Digby was especially crushed by their failure to find popular support: “Not one man came to take our part,” he lamented, “though we expected so many.” Their own servants abandoned them and guards soon had to be stationed to prevent further desertions.
The next forty-eight hours passed in a nightmarish haze. The rebels covered fifteen miles to Warwick to steal Benock’s horses, then another twenty-six or so after their brief stop at Norbrook on their way toward Huddington (by which point, whatever rumors local officials had heard, their numbers continued to dwindle). Thomas Bates peeled off from the group as they passed Alcester, riding a few miles north to Coughton Court, an estate that had been rented by Digby. His mission was to deliver a letter to Henry Garnet, England’s senior Jesuit, who was hiding there and knew of their plans, urging him to join them. Garnet refused, but another Jesuit, Oswald Tesimond, rode back with Bates, and the two caught up with the conspirators still riding hard to Huddington, where they slept on the night of the sixth. Early the next morning the troop, now shadowed by a local posse, made a short detour to find more arms (but once again disappointingly few recruits), raiding Lord Windsor’s home at Hewell Grange. If any doubts remained about the reluctance of the people to join them, they were put to rest here. When Catesby cried out to the villagers there, “Will you come with us?” one of them said in response, “It may be, if we know what you mean to do.” Catesby’s reply—“We are for God and the country”—failed to win any of them over. One of the villagers coolly answered, “We are for King James as well as for God and the country, and we will not go against his will.”
The tired troop, their numbers still shrinking, and traveling more slowly now through muddy roads while towing a cart full of weapons, veered north rather than heading westward toward the imagined safety of Wales, perhaps having heard that roads and bridges ahead were manned. They arrived at Holbeach House, Stephen Littleton’s home, on the evening of November 7. They would ride no further. They had left London less than three days earlier and had covered more than 150 miles. That evening, while they were drying out gunpowder dampened by the rain, disaster struck. The gunpowder accidently exploded, badly wounding some of the core group, including Rookwood, Catesby, and Grant, whose “face was much disfigured and his eyes almost burnt out.” The irony was not lost on any of them. A shaken John Wright grabbed hold of the injured Catesby and said, “Woe worth the time that we have seen this day,” before calling for the rest of the gunpowder so that “they might all together be blown up.” A despondent Catesby “began to think he had offended God in this action, seeing so bad effects follow from the same.”
The conspirators and their handful of supporters determined to make their final stand there and die fighting. By morning, Holbeach was surrounded. When some of the leading rebels charged out, local forces fired on them, hitting both Percy and Catesby. Other plotters were soon shot or fatally stabbed. Several were captured, including those too badly injured to fight on. A few managed to flee in the confusion but didn’t get far. Robert Keyes was caught the next day. Robert Winter and Stephen Littleton evaded the authorities for two months before they were betrayed and arrested. Winter later told Fawkes (their conversation overheard by a spy in the Tower of London) that while on the run he was haunted by nightmares in which he saw “steeples stand awry and within those churches strange and unknown faces,” before realizing to his horror that “the faces of his associates so scorched resembled those which he had seen in his dream.” Only Tesimond, a long-hunted Jesuit experienced at making his way unnoticed through England, eluded his pursuers and found safety on the Continent.
The Midlands uprising was over, though not even members of the posse at Holbeach, now fighting over spurs, stockings, and all the other booty they could lay their hands on, knew it. Local forces throughout the Midlands remained on alert and England’s ports remained closed. Devonshire’s army was still attracting volunteers—including, brazenly, Francis Tresham, the sole conspirator remaining free in London. When King James addressed Parliament the following day, November 9, he focused on what had happened in London. News of the shootout at Holbeach reached the court that same day, and the bedraggled remnants of the conspiracy arrived in London three days later, exactly a week after they had left, knowing full well the punishment that awaited them. James’s “King’s Book” would describe their entry into the city itself. The passage, attributed to the king and deemed significant enough to be reprinted in his collected works in 1616, recalls how they were “met with a huge confluence of people of all sorts, desirous 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, the wiser sort to satisfy their curiosity, in seeing the outward cases of so unheard of a villainy.” It must have been an extraordinary scene, regardless of whether onlookers felt fury, pity, or a mixture of both. The phrasing of the official and royal account of crowds gazing on these “rarest sort of monsters” stuck with Shakespeare, for the words are closely echoed in his next play in Macduff’s challenge to that archfiend Macbeth:
yield thee coward,
And live to be a show and gaze o’th’ time!
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole.
(5.8.23–26)
Hearing James’s description of those “rarest sort of monsters” who tried to kill him repeated in this way (in words spoken to a man who had in fact killed a Scottish king) must have come as a jolt to crowds at the Globe in 1606, one of those rare moments in Shakespeare’s work—akin to the Chorus’s words in Henry the Fifth about Londoners welcoming home the Earl of Essex—that neatly elides past and present and sharpens the topicality of the play.
The government might easily have held their trial that week or the next, while outrage was still fresh. Their treason, after all, was manifest. But their trial and execution were put off until late January. One reason for the delay was that nobody in authority really believed that a group of gentry could have done this without the assistance of a foreign enemy or an as-yet-unidentified English nobleman. The king shared this view: Molino writes that James “was amazed that so vast and so audacious a scheme should have been hatched in the mind of a man of such low and abject estate.” So the surviving conspirators—along with anyone with knowledge of the plot—were repeatedly interrogated and their stories checked against each other in the hope of discovering who was really behind it.
Sir Thomas Edmondes, the English ambassador in Brussels, reported in mid-November how hard he was finding it to convince others of “the truth of the said conspiracy.” Those he spoke with on the Continent were convinced that if not a devious Puritan plot, or a Dutch-inspired antimonarchical one, it could only have been the work of a Protestant-leaning devil, eager to rid England of her Catholic subjects. No friend to the Catholics himself, Edmondes added that he hoped that his government “may make that use of it, as we have just cause to do.” His words point to the two great challenges facing the authorities. The first was to craft a version of the story that would displace competing ones already circulating. The official report, first published as A True and Perfect Relation of the Proceedings at the Several Arraignments of the Late Most Barbarous Traitors published in the winter of 1606, was written in part to combat the “diverse uncertain, untrue, and incoherent reports” that “do pass from hand to hand.” The second challenge was to discover what political advantages could be gained, an early modern version of the political adage “No crisis should go to waste.” But King James was only interested in punishing extremists. At a time when his primary political goal was Union and he felt as threatened by radical Puritans as he did by seditious Catholics, it wouldn’t help to create fresh divisions within his kingdoms.
Still, the story had to be told, whatever the uses to which it might be put. And that task fell to Salisbury, whose hand is visible behind both James’s speech to Parliament and Barlow’s sermon at Paul’s Cross. Over the course of the next two months Salisbury played a role familiar to London’s playwrights, as he pored over his sources and chose key plot lines and characters. Survivors of the skirmish at Holbeach, along with plotters seized in London, were forced to provide long and detailed accounts of their involvement. Salisbury then took their various confessions and wove them into a narrative that suited the government’s interests. He knew that he had to strike the right balance between a main plot (in London) and the subplot (those “Robin Hoods” in Warwickshire), as well as between heroes and villains. King James, in uncovering the conspiracy, had to play a starring role, and Monteagle cast as best supporting actor. There were several candidates for the leading villain. Should this be, as initially scripted, Percy’s plot? Or should Catesby, whose plan it was, be cast as the archtraitor? Though not fully satisfied with the choice, Salisbury decided to cast one of the lesser players, the one who most captured the popular imagination and acted as a lightning rod for their feelings: that mysterious and foreign-sounding “Guido” Fawkes, the “villain in a vault,” the “Machiavellian with a match.”
Though only the plotters themselves would be destroyed in this high drama, emphasis had to be placed on the king and kingdom as the tragic victims. Barlow was correct, then, to draw attention in his early sermon at Paul’s Cross to the plot as “a devilish brutishness, and an hyperbolical, yea an hyperdiabolical devilishness.” But he overreached in then speaking of it as “this late tragic-comical treason”; “comical” would have to be suppressed. So too would the plotters’ accusatory words that cast the king and his plans for Union in an unfavorable light. The plotters’ hit list, mentioned by Molino, of “all the houses inhabited by Scots, so that after the explosion they could be massacred,” was also quietly omitted from all governmental accounts of the plot.
Visuals too were needed. The Privy Council was disappointed to learn that the authorities in Staffordshire had thoughtlessly buried the bodies of the conspirators they had killed and stripped at Holbeach. So they ordered that their corpses “be taken out of their graves and bowelled and their quarters to be set up in some principal towns where they most led their lives, and the heads of Percy and Catesby to be sent up hither purposely.” Their heads, soon displayed on iron poles at Parliament, had the intended effect on onlookers. One of them was a sixteen-year-old student at Westminster who was so struck by the frightening sight that he wrote a poem, “Trayterous Percyes & Catesbyes Prosopopeia,” in which he imagines seeing, as if in a dream, the pair of severed heads conversing. It’s a terrifying vision: “Two monsters’ skulls, which never plotted good, / Grim, ghastly, pale, shagged-hair, sulphurous eyes, / Piercing the air with howlings, yells, and cries.” On both sides, then, if we consider Robert Winter’s dream of his friends’ scorched faces and this teenager’s dream of talking heads, the Gunpowder Plot was producing nightmares, tapping deep into Jacobean political and religious anxieties.
On January 27 the eight surviving plotters—Guy Fawkes, Thomas Winter, Robert Winter, Robert Keyes, John Grant, Thomas Bates, Ambrose Rookwood, and Sir Everard Digby—were brought from the Tower to stand trial at Westminster Hall. King James was present, though hidden, as were Queen Anne, three months pregnant, and Prince Henry. As in the public theaters, you had to pay more for a decent view. One member of Parliament felt cheated when he and “diverse others” paid ten shillings for standing room in a space reserved for members, only to discover that many of the “baser sort” were squeezed into their crammed section for as little as three or four pence each. The crush for this once-in-a-lifetime event, and the price too, was far greater than at any sold-out performance at the public playhouses.
The judges, a special commission made up of the leading officials in the kingdom, were also part of the show. It wasn’t a trial in the modern sense: the accused weren’t permitted to defend themselves and had no counsel. From the perspective of the state, there was no need. It must have caused a stir when, “contrary to the general expectation,” with the exception of Digby they all pleaded not guilty. Digby chose to plead guilty with an explanation: he had acted because the government’s “promises were broken with the Catholics.” The punctilious attorney general, Sir Edward Coke, got in the last word before the verdict was read. He reminded those present how lucky these traitors were that the king hadn’t devised any “new torment or torture” for them. He then provided a plot summary of the spectacle that would soon follow. Everyone already knew what was coming, but Coke understood that they needed to hear once more the horrific punishment facing the conspirators. After being “drawn to the place of execution,” each traitor was to be hanged, then cut down before strangling to death. While still alive, he was then “to have his privy parts cut off and burned before his face” and his bowels “taken out and burned,” before his head would be “cut off.” Lastly, his body was to “be quartered, and the quarters set up in some high and eminent place, to the view and detestation of men and to become a prey for the fowls of the air.”
