In March 1604, only weeks after the Hampton Court Conference got under way, three English gentlemen met at the home of John Wright in the London suburb of Lambeth. The three were Wright himself, Robert Catesby and Thomas Wintour. The only things they had in common were high social position, the fact that they were all in their early thirties, and the firm belief that they were being persecuted because of their devotion to and practice of Catholicism.
Catesby was Wintour’s cousin and a close friend of Wright; he was also an inveterate plotter who had been involved in the Duke of Essex’s abortive rebellion against Queen Elizabeth some years earlier. Now he had come to the conclusion that despite King James’s assurances that honest Catholics were in no danger, the situation was sure to get worse unless devoted Catholics took matters into their own hands. Later, one of the group recalled that Catesby ‘bethought him of a way at one instant to deliver us from all our bonds and without any foreign help to replant the Catholic religion [in England]’. As the three men talked on into the night, Catesby insisted that the only solution to the spiralling crisis was to eliminate the royal family, all the ministers of state and the entire parliament – and do it all at a single blow. With the government dead, they could seize the king’s young daughter, Princess Elizabeth, declare her queen and raise a general revolt against all the Protestant sects.
Obviously, such an audacious, brutal and seemingly impractical plot did not sit well with Wintour and Wright. But Catesby convinced them that their cause would be justified in the eyes of God and therefore worth any risk and any cost. The others were finally persuaded to agree. But three men could not possibly carry out such a plan alone. They would need help and the assistance of people with the right technical expertise. Catesby had a friend named Thomas Percy, who was both brave and a good Catholic and would make a fine addition to the group, but he did not have the specific skills they would need. After much thought, Thom Wintour said he might know just the man they needed, but he was on the continent. First they would have to locate him and then persuade him to join them. His name was Guy Fawkes.
Fawkes had been born near York into a Protestant family in April 1570. His father was a notary to the York ecclesiastical court and the consistory court of the local archbishop. It was a respectable, conservative background. So too, apparently, was the rest of Fawkes’ early life. At the age of twenty he married Maria Pulleyn and a year later she gave them a son. Fawkes’ inheritance of 4 acres of farmland and a barn was respectable, though modest. But somewhere along the line something had changed. Shortly after the birth of his son, Guy Fawkes sold his land, left his wife and infant son and went to the Low Countries to join a group of exiled English Catholic mercenaries fighting there in the pay of the Spanish king.
At twenty-two Fawkes was already a tall, powerfully built man with thick reddish-brown hair and beard. By all accounts, he was also a natural soldier, being described as a man ‘of excellent good natural parts, very resolute and universally learned’. Apparently well liked both personally and for his fighting abilities, Guy Fawkes – who now called himself Guido – was ‘thought by all the most distinguished in the Archduke’s camp for nobility and exemplary temperance, of mild cheerful demeanour, an enemy of broils and disputes, a faithful friend, and remarkable for his punctual attendance upon religious observance’. As a result, he gained ‘considerable fame among soldiers’; he also gained advancement from common foot soldier to a ‘miner’, where he received extensive training in tunnelling, munitions and explosives.
After serving in the Low Countries for a decade, Fawkes resigned his commission to go to Spain with the intention of ‘enlighten[ing] King Philip II concerning the true position of the Romanists in England’. What he actually wanted was to persuade King Philip to finance a Catholic uprising to depose King James. Philip may or may not have met Fawkes personally, but after more than a year in Spain, Fawkes realised his mission was going nowhere. He had, however, run into an old school friend from York, Christopher Wright, who happened to be the brother of another boyhood friend (and Catesby’s co-conspirator) John Wright. Together they discussed politics and religion, the sad state of affairs in England and what could be done about it. Undoubtedly, Fawkes told Wright about his abortive plan to get the Spanish to back a Catholic uprising in England, but whether or not Wright divulged any of his brother’s plans is unclear. What is certain is that soon after Fawkes returned to England he received word – probably through one of the Wright brothers – that a man named Thomas Wintour wanted to see him.
In May 1604, roughly two months after Catesby, Wintour and Wright had first met, they met again in a private room at the Duck and Drake Inn in the fashionable Strand district of London. Catesby had brought along Thomas Percy and Wintour had brought Fawkes. Before divulging the exact nature of the plot to overthrow the government, Catesby swore the men to secrecy. To solemnise their vow of silence, they heard mass and were given communion by a Jesuit priest named Father John Gerard. This done, Catesby began laying out the details of one of the most bizarre and improbable plots in English history.
There was only one day in the year when the royal family, the chief government ministers and both houses of parliament were assembled in the same place at the same time – the State Opening of Parliament, traditionally held on 5 November. But King James was still putting together his government and would not convene his first parliament until November 1605; still more than twenty months away. Because this would be the king’s first official public speech, the House of Lords would be packed with government officials of every rank. The only people not in attendance would be the king’s two youngest children, Duke Charles and Princess Elizabeth.
According to Catesby’s plan, if enough barrels of gunpowder could be stashed in the cellars directly below the House of Lords, they could blow the entire government sky-high at a single sweep. Before anyone knew what had happened, the plotters would be well on their way to kidnapping Duke Charles and Princess Elizabeth. Charles would probably be killed and Elizabeth placed on the throne by Catesby and his men. Obviously, there would be no mention that the princess’s rescuers had been responsible for murdering the entire government. It was the perfect coup d’état.
As the men listened, open-mouthed, to the audacious plan, Catesby explained that he knew there was a nearly unused cellar directly beneath the House of Lords. All the men had to do was rent a house in the neighbourhood and dig a tunnel beneath the houses separating their location from the room beneath parliament. Fawkes’ experience as a miner and explosives expert would ensure that the tunnel was dug properly and the gunpowder placed so as to do as much damage as possible.
Since the area around parliament was a warren of twisting alleyways and narrow streets filled with churches, public meeting rooms, taverns, wine merchants and brothels, their movements should go completely unnoticed.
Amazingly, no one backed out of the conspiracy and the group proceeded to the next step; renting a house near the parliament building in the name of Thomas Percy. Under the fictitious name of John Johnson, Fawkes pretended to be Percy’s servant and assumed the responsibility of watching the premises, guarding it against unwanted visitors. According to Fawkes’ later confession, ‘we lay in the house and had shot and powder, being resolved to die in that place before we should yield or be taken’.
Around the end of September, Fawkes was told to begin preparations for work on the mine, but their activity was delayed for more than two months because the Commissioners for the Union between England and Scotland were meeting next door and any strange noises might alert the authorities. Finally, in early December, the men began tunnelling. But even at the best of times it was slow going, particularly for those in the group who were not used to hard physical labour. Things only got worse at the end of the second week when, according to Fawkes, ‘we came to the very foundation of the Wall of the House, which was about three yards thick and [we] found it a matter of great difficulty’. Obviously more hands were needed if the work was going to be completed in less than a year.
Into the plot were brought Catesby’s servant, Thomas Bates, John Wright’s brother Christopher (who had initially contacted Fawkes in Spain) and Thom Wintour’s brother Robert. Catesby also brought in his cousin Francis Tresham, and the Wintour brothers conscripted their brother-in-law John Grant. To their number they also added Sir Everard Digby, Robert Keys, Hugh Owen and Ambrose Rookwood. With the exception of Fawkes and Bates, all the new members were related to the original five either by blood or marriage.
With more hands, the work moved apace, but it was a long way from the rented house to the cellars of parliament. In March 1605, work came to a screeching halt when, according to Fawkes, ‘As they were working on the wall, they heard a rushing in the cellar as of the removing of coals, where upon we feared we had been discovered: and they sent me off to the [nearby] cellar, [where I found] the coal [was] selling and that the cellar was to be let.’ Amazingly, the cellar now up for rent had been their target all along.
Thomas Percy was immediately sent to take a one-year lease on the storeroom and the men began shuttling in barrels of gunpowder from their warehouse across the Thames. At this point, they had already acquired twenty barrels and were in the process of buying more. To hide this growing mountain of explosives, they brought in cartloads of firewood, which were piled on top of the barrels. Mixed in with the wood and gunpowder were hundreds of iron bars, which would act like shrapnel when the gunpowder was eventually detonated.
The hard work being almost over, the men could only wait till the opening of parliament in November. According to Fawkes, ‘About Easter, the Parliament being [in recess] till October next, we dispersed ourselves and I retired to the Low Countries by advice and direction of the rest . . . lest . . . by my longer stay I might have [aroused] suspicions . . .’. Presumably, one of Fawkes’ duties on the continent would be to alert English Catholics in exile to the coming unexpected change of government back home.
In Fawkes’ absence, Percy and the others continued to ferry more powder, iron bars and wood from across the river and haul them into the cellar. Again, according to Fawkes’ account, ‘I returned about the beginning of September . . . and then receiving the keys again [from] Percy, we brought in more powder and billets to cover the same again, and so I went for a time into the country till the 30 of October’. As Fawkes nervously waited to be called back to London only days before the final, awful move some of the others began to have moral misgivings about what they planned to do.
To cleanse their guilty consciences, Robert Catesby and Thomas Wintour confessed the entire affair to their priest, the Jesuit Father Greenway, and at least Catesby discussed it further with Father John Gerard who had given communion to the five original members of the plot more than a year earlier. At the same time as Catesby and Wintour were seeking absolution, Sir Everard Digby was unburdening his soul to Jesuit Superior Father Garnet. He needed to know if the Pope would approve of the death of so many innocent people in the name of the church; particularly considering that there were Catholics among the king’s ministers and in both houses of parliament. Francis Tresham went to his own priest with the same concerns, but in his case they were even more personal; William Parker who held the title of Lord Monteagle was a member of the House of Lords, a Catholic and Tresham’s cousin by marriage.
On 18 October, Catesby, Wintour and Tresham met to discuss the possibility of warning a few, key Catholic members of the government not to attend the opening of parliament. The specific results of their meeting are not known, but they probably decided it would be too dangerous even to hint that something was amiss. Everyone agreed they would keep their peace and live with the consequences, but one of them was growing increasingly uncomfortable.
Almost two weeks later, and only ten days before King James was scheduled to open parliament, Lord Monteagle had just sat down to dinner at his home in Hoxton when a letter arrived by special messenger. It read as follows: ‘My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care for your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance of this Parliament, for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time . . . and I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it, to whose protection I commend you.’ Not surprisingly the letter was unsigned.
Monteagle was certainly no friend of the new king. He believed, and had said, that ‘the King is odious to all sorts’, but whatever the letter hinted at, it was obviously a lot bigger than political loyalties. Leaving his supper to go cold, Monteagle hurried to find Secretary of State Robert Cecil.
Somehow, it only took hours for news of the letter to find its way to the ears of Catesby and Wintour. Immediately they accused Tresham of trying to warn his cousin, but he vehemently denied it. A week later the five leading conspirators agreed that since nothing seemed to have been done to heighten security around the houses of parliament, the whole thing must have been laughed off as a bad joke or had been lost in the government bureaucracy. But just to be on the safe side, all of them except Fawkes made plans to get out of London immediately, though Francis Tresham decided to remain in London at the last minute. Guy Fawkes had no choice but to stay behind and light the fuse at the appointed time. Once the government was dead, he was to make a break for the Low Countries and spread the word that Catholicism was about to be restored in England.
Whether it actually took nine days for Robert Cecil to act, or whether he was simply biding his time to avoid scaring off the plotters remains uncertain, but on Monday afternoon, 4 November, his men went into action. Accompanied by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Monteagle and John Whyniard, Thomas Howard the Earl of Suffolk led a thorough search of the parliament buildings. When they reached an exterior door leading to a rented-out cellar, they encountered a tall, powerfully built man with bristling beard and hair who identified himself as John Johnson, a porter in the employ of a Mr Thomas Percy. Dutifully and calmly he unlocked the cellar door while the ministers carried out a perfunctory search of the cellars. Their search uncovered no more than a pile of timbers and brushwood. Later that afternoon the delegation met with Cecil and the king, describing their search and admitting they had found nothing. They did, however, say that the man Johnson had appeared to be ‘a very bad and desperate fellow’ who ‘seemed to be a man shrewd enough, but up to no good’. Everyone decided the cellar would have to be searched again and this time they should take a magistrate and soldiers with them.