Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (47 page)

On the afternoon of 4 November, the cellars were searched. Fawkes was found guarding the plotters’ chamber. He claimed to be ‘John Johnson’, the servant of plotter Thomas Percy. ‘Johnson’ calmly unlocked the cellar for the searchers’ inspection. They made a casual examination of the firewood without finding the lethal material beneath. A relieved Fawkes watched them troop away.

When the searchers reported to James that evening, however, they described ‘Johnson’ as ‘a very bad and desperate fellow … up to no good’. James’s ears pricked up. He ordered a second search that night, beefed up with soldiers. Just before midnight the searchers again found Fawkes/Johnson, still guarding the cellar door. They delved deeper into the piled firewood, and soon uncovered the thirty-five barrels of gunpowder with the lethal iron bars. The Gunpowder Plot had misfired.

A body search of ‘Johnson’ revealed several incriminating items, including a length of slow-burning match cord, a touchwood to light it, and a watch. Fawkes also carried a lantern, still to this day in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. He was marched off to Whitehall to be personally examined by the king. Questioned by James in the royal bedchamber, Fawkes readily admitted intending to blow up Parliament. His only regret, he said, was in not having blasted those he called, with no deference to his sovereign’s
nationality, ‘all the Scotch beggars back to their native mountains’. He stoutly refused, however, to name his co-conspirators.

Realising that they would get no more that night from the tough ex-soldier, the king ordered Fawkes to be taken straight to the Tower. James admitted finding Fawkes quite admirable. The miscreant had shown, he said, ‘a Roman resolution’ when under fierce cross questioning. Once at the Tower, Fawkes was thrust into the cramped niche cell Little Ease where his co-religionist Edmund Campion had suffered in the previous reign.

After an extremely uncomfortable night, the sleepless Fawkes was dragged to the Lieutenant’s Lodgings to be questioned anew. Three months before, Sir George Harvey, the second lieutenant whom Walter Ralegh had succeeded in charming, had been removed for his laxity, and replaced by a much tougher nut, Sir William Wade – or Waad. The son of another government servant Amigal Wade (who made an early voyage to America in 1536, and from whom the tennis player Virginia Wade’s family are descended), William Wade was employed by the Tudor and Jacobean state as a brutal fixer – a man to send for if a dirty job needed doing.

A former member of Walsingham’s intelligence service, and therefore a gnarled veteran of statecraft’s sharper end, sixty-year-old Wade had first crossed swords with Ralegh when he had acted as gaoler at Sir Walter’s treason trial in Winchester. He was the obvious choice when a hard man was needed to succeed the kindly Harvey. But Wade had only just started on the pleasurable job of making Ralegh’s life a misery by restricting his use of the garden laboratory and other petty cruelties (Ralegh referred to him simply as ‘that beast Wade!’) when his attention was diverted by the Gunpowder Plot. A skilled and ruthless interrogator who did not scruple to use torture, Wade confronted Fawkes in his own Tower apartment.

King James, whose personal interest in the plot must have been heightened by the knowledge that his own father, Lord Darnley, had been murdered in Edinburgh after his house had been ripped apart by a massive explosion, had appointed a high-powered commission of peers, headed by Robert Cecil, to investigate the conspiracy. The king had even drawn up a list of questions for Fawkes, aimed at linking him to the Papacy, the Jesuits, or a foreign power. But if Fawkes remained obstinately tight-lipped, James specifically authorised the use of ‘the gentler tortures’ at first, to be followed by harsher methods, a command that the learned king
disguised in Latin – ‘
et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur
’ (‘and so by degrees proceeding to the worst’) – before concluding, ‘And so God speed your good work.’

By the ‘gentler tortures’ the king meant the manacles, the breaks and the thumbscrew. And by ‘the worst’ he had the rack in mind. The Tower possessed the only working example of this fearsome bed of pain to be found in England. It is probable that Guy followed his co-religionist Edmund Campion’s path in being subjected to the manacles at first, but the strong and determined man – literally a tough Guy – held out against his tormentors. It was with mingled respect and pleasure then, that William Wade warned his prisoner to brace himself for the worst – and led him to the dark chamber beneath the White Tower where the rack was located.

Guy Fawkes had been arrested around midnight on 4/5 November. For two days and nights he held out against the escalating persuasions of his captors – blandishments, threats, ‘Little Ease’, the manacles – before he was broken by the rack and started to talk sometime on 7 November. Perhaps he judged that enough time had elapsed for his co-conspirators to make their escape. Or perhaps he simply, like other mortal men and women, cracked under the weight of the agonising pain that the rack delivered. Fawkes is thought to have withstood the rack for longer than anyone else on record. A total of two and a half hours is sometimes mentioned. By that time, the sinews and ligaments in his arms and legs would have been stretched and torn, and his wrists and ankles, chafed by ropes attaching them to the rack’s rollers, were blistered and bloody.

A mute but graphic testimony to Fawkes’s suffering is seen if the signatures he put to two confessions are compared. The name beneath the first statement, before his torture, is written as ‘Guido Fawkes’ in a script as bold as its owner’s character. But the faint scrawl under the transcript of the answers he gave to Wade on the rack is horribly changed. They must have put the pen between his numb fingers as all he could manage is a faint, weak and disjointed ‘Guido …’. That done, and the names of his fellow plotters secured, Fawkes was carried back to Little Ease, to subsist on a meagre diet of barley bread and stagnant water from the Tower’s rank moat.

Meanwhile, outside the Tower, the conspiracy was not unfolding according to Catesby’s plan. Catesby and his closest companions had travelled to Holbeche House, a stronghold of Midlands Catholicism in
Staffordshire. They had taken with them a cartload of extra gunpowder left over from their stock, as munitions for the planned Catholic rising. One plotter, Sir Everard Digby, told Catesby that he had around fifty men prepared to rise. Digby left to round up his little army while Catesby unwisely spread the gunpowder – soaked by the November rain – in front of a blazing fire to dry. A spark ignited the powder, and a sheet of flame badly burned some of the half-dozen plotters left with Catesby.

In despair, three plotters – Robert Wintour, Hugh Owen and Stephen Littleton – fled into the night, while Catesby, Tom Wintour, Thomas and Kit Wright, Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant and Thomas Percy grimly awaited their fate. The next morning, 8 November, the house was surrounded by a government posse led by the Sheriff of Worcester. Catesby and the others refused to surrender and were all shot dead, or were wounded and taken prisoner. These included John Grant who had been blinded in the gunpowder blast – hoist by his own petard. ‘Stand by me, Mr Tom,’ said Catesby to Wintour, ‘and we will die together.’ But it was another Tom, Percy, who died with his chief: they were killed by the same musket ball. The plot leader, in his dying moments, kissed an icon of the Virgin Mary – symbol of the faith for which he had sacrificed his own and many other lives.

Over the next days and weeks, the surviving plotters were rounded up. Only Hugh Owen managed to find his way abroad. The others were taken to the Tower along with two Jesuit priests – Fathers Garnet and Oldcorne – who had sustained them. As they were brought in, each conspirator was given the same treatment meted out to Fawkes: over three long weeks they were manacled and racked, and in between torture sessions supervised by Wade, were kept barely alive on a diet of stale bread and stinking water. Francis Tresham, suspected of betraying the plot to Lord Monteagle, died in the Tower – either from one of the diseases rampant in the fortress, or as the result of torture. Monteagle himself was awarded an annual pension of £700 for divulging his co-religionists’ plans to the authorities.

Apart from the crudity of the rack, Wade had subtler means of ferreting out the priests’ secrets. A veteran Papist hunter, Wade knew how well the Jesuits were trained in evasive answers – the technique known as ‘equivocation’ – and he adopted similar tricks. He treated the priests with relative kindness, visiting them in their cells and endeavouring to break down their defences with cosy chats. Wade confided that he was considering converting
to Catholicism himself, and moved Gerard and Oldcorne into comfortable adjoining cells in which they could communicate through a hatch. The cell was fitted with the seventeenth-century equivalent of an electronic listening bug: a hole drilled through the wall by which the crafty old lieutenant overheard the priests’ whispered conversations. Realising that Wade now knew all about his involvement, Garnet confessed to having foreknowledge of the plot – but hid behind the priestly vow of silence to explain why he had not seen fit to inform the authorities of the fiery end awaiting them.

The conspirators remained astonishingly defiant despite their desperate plight. Fired by their faith, none expressed regret for their actions. Even the kindly Everard Digby said that of the hundreds of Parliamentarians whose lives they had intended to terminate he did not think there were ‘three worth saving’. In January 1606 the eight surviving core plotters – Guy Fawkes, Thomas and Robert Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant, Sir Everard Digby, Robert Keyes and Thomas Bates – went on trial in Westminster Hall, herded together in a dock designed to resemble a scaffold. King James covertly watched proceedings from a hidden vantage point. The evidence was overwhelming, the prosecution by the bloodthirsty Attorney General Sir Edward Coke terrifying, and the jury of peers – containing two Catholic lords lest the government be accused of religious discrimination – took little time in convicting, and passing the prescribed savage sentence for treason of hanging, drawing and quartering.

The eight were executed in two batches of four on successive days. Digby, Robert Wintour, John Grant and Thomas Bates were the first to die, on Thursday 30 January. Three were dragged upside down on wicker hurdles from the Tower to St Paul’s Churchyard, while Bates, the common servant, who had not been held in the Tower, was brought from the Gatehouse prison. English class distinctions held firm even in this extremity. Digby had spent his last night at the Tower writing letters of love to his wife and sons. He had also composed a farewell poem in which his undimmed faith was expressed:

Who’s that which knocks? Oh stay, my Lord, I come
.

Digby was the first to mount the scaffold. Hanged and cut down alive, he was castrated and disembowelled. Then, according to Sir Francis Bacon, who witnessed the scene, as the doughty Digby’s still beating heart was plucked out of his chest, the executioner cried the traditional formula, ‘Behold the heart of a traitor!’ to which Digby, in his last moment of
consciousness, managed to mouth the magnificent response, ‘Thou liest!’ Robert Wintour next went quietly to his death, followed by John Grant who, blinded by the blazing gunpowder at Holbeche House, also remained defiant to the last, insisting that what he had done had been right in the sight of God. Thomas Bates was the only plotter to express penitence. He had acted, he said, out of love and duty for his master Catesby; but now he prayed for forgiveness and mercy.

The next day, it was the turn of Tom Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes and – last but not least – Guy Fawkes. Symbolically, their deaths would take place at the Old Palace Yard, outside the Palace of Westminster – the very building that, had their plot succeeded, would have been blown apart by their powder. Tom Wintour died hard, being cut down and messily eviscerated after hanging for only a ‘swing or two of the halter’. Ambrose Rookwood had his eyes closed in prayer as his hurdle was bumped along from the Tower. He opened them on arrival at Westminster to behold the face of his lovely young wife. ‘Pray for me!’ he cried, and when she promised to do so, urging him to be of good courage, he calmly submitted to the hangman, and appeared unconscious when he was cut down and chopped up.

Robert Keyes, the third man to die, went ‘stoutly’ up the ladder, and then, once the noose was around his neck leapt into space, hoping that he would thus break his neck and be spared further torment. Sadly, the rope broke and, still alive, he was picked up and carried to the chopping block. Finally, it was Fawkes’s turn. By now, the scaffold was swimming in blood, but Guido appeared undismayed. His powerful frame broken by the rack, his arms and legs almost useless, he had to be helped up the ladder by the hangman. He cheated his tormentors by jumping off the gallows and succeeded in breaking his neck. Mercifully, the ritual disembowelling was performed on his lifeless corpse.

Father Henry Garnet, the plotters’ chief spirtual confessor, despite slippery equivocations finally went to his death in St Paul’s Churchyard too. As he left the Tower he told the man who cooked his meals there, ‘Farewell, good friend Tom: this day I will save thee a labour to provide my dinner.’ William Wade was so proud of his work in searching out the plot’s secrets that he had a plaque put up in the room in his lodgings where he had interrogated Fawkes and where it can still be seen:

To Almighty God, guardian arrester and avenger, who has punished this
great and incredible conspiracy against our most merciful lord the King … [which was] moved by the treasonable hope of overthrowing the Kingdom … [by] the Jesuits of perfidious and serpent like ungodliness, with others equally insane, were suddenly, wonderfully and divinely detected, at the very moment when ruin was impending, on the fifth day of November in the year of grace 1605.

The Gunpowder Plot set back Catholicism in England for more than two centuries. It terrified loyal Protestants, convincing them that if they relaxed anti-Papist laws they would all be murdered in their beds by scheming Jesuits. Following ‘Bloody’ Mary’s burnings and the Spanish Armada, the plot entrenched a vision of Catholicism as an essentially alien intrusion in the body politic. Unfairly, it made criminals out of loyal Catholics whose only crime was their faith. They would suffer because of what Wade correctly called their co-religionists’ ‘insanity’.