Gunpowder Plot Trials

The early 1950s were not the only McCarthy era. Other ages, when international threats produced internal intrigue and witch hunts, have had partisan trials to cinch the benefits of foiling and trying insidious conspirators.

A clear example is in the use made of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by the Stuart regime. There was a plot against the life of King James, and it nearly succeeded. But the trial of the plotters had a sequel which served the regime’s interests fully. England’s rivals were the other two superpowers of the time, Spain and France. To those running England, Catholicism was a subversive un-English ideology. Jesuits were the agents of a vast international conspiracy against England. The plots that William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Elizabeth’s close advisor, and his son Robert Cecil (the Earl of Salisbury), James’s advisor, each saw against the crown were real enough. The plots involving Ridolphi and Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, Babington and Mary, Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh, contained elements of genuine treason. They followed a pattern, as C. Northcote Parkinson demonstrates: a nucleus of conspirators with contacts in Spain or France, a public crisis putting the monarch in danger, a timely intervention, and a public trial and execution. “Each plot,” Parkinson concludes, “was put to good use by those in power.”⁸

The Gunpowder Plot, far more ominous than the others, followed the pattern exactly. Guy Fawkes was captured in the most dramatic fashion: outside the door leading to a cellar directly beneath the throne in the House of Lords near midnight on November 4, 1605, the eve of King James’s speech from the throne. In the cellar the guards found thirty-six barrels of gunpowder hidden under some coal and wood, enough gunpowder to destroy the entire House of Lords, killing everyone assembled, including James I.

Fawkes’s refusal to cooperate with his interrogators provided his accomplices two days’ time to make their escape from London. Gradually, after the use of torture, Fawkes confessed the details of the plot and the names of the others involved. The sheriff of Worcestershire caught them riding west toward Wales. Four leaders were killed in a fight, and the others were either arrested then or captured soon.

After the survivors were returned to London and the Tower, they confessed fully to the plot. They readily admitted their own guilt, as Fawkes had, and admitted that they were Catholics. Nevertheless, they were interrogated much longer than would seem necessary. Robert Cecil delayed their trial until he had obtained evidence which would incriminate a priest, or better yet, a Jesuit. After two months of questioning in the Tower, during which the plotters denied any such suggestion, the one servant among them, Thomas Bates, avowed something which proved to be the wedge Cecil needed. It was enough for Cecil to order the arrest of the superior of English Jesuits, Fr. Henry Garnet.⁹ It was the only wedge Cecil found, but it proved large enough. We will return to Fr. Garnet.

The Gunpowder Plot nearly succeeded. Had it done so, it would have killed James I, members of the royal family, noble lords, and members of the House of Commons. The plot failed because Cecil had been tipped off. He read a mysterious letter that Lord Monteagle, a Catholic, received.

A dozen days after Bates had implicated Fr. Garnet and the Jesuits— after, that is, Cecil got the anti-Catholic wedge he wanted—Fawkes, Bates, and the six other conspirators were put on trial in Westminster Hall. They were the survivors of thirteen who had earlier laid the plot. The original central figure was a major landholder from Warwickshire, Robert Catesby, who had been killed in the battle after the plot had been discovered. Killed with him was Thomas Percy, a friend of the royal family who, had the gunpowder exploded as planned, was to have kidnapped five-year-old Prince Charles. John and Christopher Wright, friends and former schoolmates of Fawkes, had been involved with Catesby in the 1601 Essex plot. They were also killed in the battle with the sheriff. Francis Tresham, a cousin of Catesby’s, died in the Tower a month before the trial. Since his sister was Lord Monteagle’s wife, he might have been the author of the tip-off letter.¹¹

A controversy in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, similar to ones that followed the Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenberg trials, is whether or not Guy Fawkes and the others were framed. Fr. John Gerard, S.J., wrote in 1897 What Was the Gunpowder Plot? He argued that the traditional story was false, that Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, invented the entire plot to pin it on the Jesuits and all Roman Catholics. The noted historian Samuel Gardiner, in the same year answered Gerard with What Gunpowder Plot Was, a point-for-point analysis of the accusation that Salisbury originated the plot for his own purposes.

The eight who were tried were Ambrose Rockwell, at twenty-seven the head of an ancient and wealthy Suffolk family that had never left the Catholic faith; Sir Everard Digby, also at twenty-seven one of the largest landholders in the Eastern Midlands; Robert and Thomas Winter, two brothers in their thirties, cousins of Catesby and Tresham; John Grant, a Warwickshire Catholic married to a sister of the Winter brothers; Robert Keyes, related by marriage to Rockwood; Thomas Bates, Catesby’s servant; and finally, Guy Fawkes, the technical expert, a former Protestant from York who had learned his skills with explosives during his years as a volunteer in the Spanish army.¹³

Together, the thirteen conspirators were young (only Percy was over forty), wealthy, and connected to each other by family or, in Bates’ case, employment. Only Fawkes and Digby were outsiders.

When the indictment was read at the opening of the trial, the first persons named as “false traitors” were Fr. Henry Garnet and two other Jesuits, who were not on trial. After the Jesuits the eight actually on trial were listed. Garnet and the other Jesuits were given top billing as the evil geniuses who “did maliciously, falsely, and traitorously move and persuade” Fawkes and the others that “the king, nobility, clergy, and whole community of the realm of England (papists excepted) were heretics…accursed and excommunicate…and that it was lawful and meritorious to kill our said sovereign lord the king, and all other heretics” to advance and enlarge the authority and jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome and restore the Romish religion to England. This was Cecil’s wedge. Fr. Garnet is mentioned in the indictment twelve times, nearly as often as those on trial.¹⁵

Attorney General Sir Edward Coke, in our day regarded as the preeminent jurist of English common law, was the prosecutor. The Gunpowder Trial was not the first time he had served as the royal hatchet man. In the cabals at court Coke lined up with Cecil and even married into his family. Coke had cooperated with the Earl of Essex in the 1594 prosecution of Dr. Roderigo Lopez, Queen Elizabeth’s physician, a foreigner and a Jew, one who appears to have been suitable for framing as part of a Spanish plot to poison the queen.

Coke’s experience in persuading judges and juries that treason can be a vague matter of intention and that evidence of treason could be equally insubstantial served him well in the Gunpowder trial. Undoubtedly, Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators could have been convicted on any definition of treason, narrow or wide. They had all worked diligently to position thirty-six kegs of gunpowder directly beneath the throne, and they were caught red-handed. But Coke, and behind him Cecil, reached for more than the conviction of the Gunpowder eight. He pushed the definition of treason far beyond what he needed, and he painted a picture of treason more vividly than necessary to convict the eight in the dock:

It is treason to imagine or intend the death of the king, queen, or prince. For treason is like a tree whose root is full of poison, and lieth secret and hid within the earth, resembling the imagination of the heart of man, which is so secret as God only knoweth it. Now the wisdom of the law provideth for the blasting and nipping, both of the leaves, blossoms, and buds which proceed from this root of Treason; either by words, which are like to leaves, or by some overt act, which may be resembled to buds or blossoms, before it cometh to such fruit and ripeness, as would bring utter destruction and desolation upon the whole state.

He probably surprised no one when he identified such roots as “all planted and watered by Jesuits and the English Romish Catholicks.”¹⁸

In Coke’s tale of the Gunpowder Plot the gunpowder activities were a subplot to a theme of Jesuit provocation. Some believe, he claimed, that the lay Catholics were “either desperate in estate or base…without religion, without habitation, without credit, without means, without hope.” On the contrary, they were “gentlemen of good homes, excellent part, howsoever most perniciously seduced, abused, corrupted, and jesuited.” Others have the opinion that the conspirators were men without religion, but, charged Coke, “I never yet knew a treason without a Romist priest.” In this plot, he asserted, “there are very many Jesuits… seducing Jesuits; men that use the reverence of religion, yea, even the most sacred and blessed name of Jesus, as a mantle to cover their impiety, blasphemy, treason and rebellion, and all manner of wickedness.… Concerning this sect, their studies and practices principally consist of two dd’s, to wit, in deposing of kings, and disposing of kingdoms.”¹⁹

Robert Catesby, the leader of the plot, had been instructed in the conspiracy, according to Coke’s version, by Jesuits who told him that it was “both lawful and meritorious.” With Thomas Bates’s statement given under interrogation in the Tower, Cecil and Coke had the link between Catesby and the Jesuits that they wanted. When, as Coke told the story, Catesby suspected his servant, Bates, knew about the plot against the king, Catesby took Bates in, swearing him to secrecy and requiring him to receive the sacrament and to go to confession with Fr. Tesmond, a Jesuit. The priest, according to Coke, told Bates to keep the plot a secret, that it was for a good cause, “and thereupon the Jesuit gave him absolution.”²⁰ The eight in the dock accused of the Gunpowder Plot offered no defense, were found guilty, and were hanged.

In the follow-up trial of March 1606, Cecil and Coke delivered their knockout punch. The trial of Fr. Henry Garnet allowed Coke to amplify the warning about the Catholic and Jesuit threat. It began with a reading of the overblown indictment from the Guy Fawkes trial. Coke reviewed the various plots against Queen Elizabeth, the invasion by the Spanish Armada, as well as the Gunpowder Plot, blaming them all on Catholics led by Jesuits. Apart from Coke’s diatribe, the trial reveals that Fr. Garnet knew about the plot against King James, but his defense was that he was bound to keep the secrets of confession. When asked “if someone confessed today that he meant to kill the king tomorrow, would he conceal it,” Fr. Garnet responded that he would. When accused of being in secret league with Catesby, Fr. Garnet replied that he did what he could to stop the plotters and “went into Warwickshire with a purpose to dissuade Mr. Catesby.” After further questioning Fr. Garnet said, “My lord, I would to God I had never known of the Pow-der-Treason.”²¹ Garnet’s equivocation and his defense of equivocation found reflection in Macbeth, which dates from the summer of 1606. The porter enters to answer the door:

Knock, knock! Who’s there, in the devil’s name? Faith here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in equivocator. (Act 11, scene 3)

Cecil’s agenda for the trial was clear. He could use the trial to pin all of England’s difficulties on Catholics led by Jesuits. He revealed his intentions in a letter:

Whether Garnet lives or dies is a small matter, the important thing is to demonstrate the iniquity of Catholics, and to prove to all the world that it is not for religion but for their treasonable teaching and practices that they should be exterminated. It is expedient to make manifest to the world how far these men’s doctrinal practice reacheth into the bowels of treason, and so, for ever after stop the mouths of their calumniation that preach and print our laws to be executed for difference in point of conscience.²²

Garnet was convicted and executed. One side saw him as a martyr who refused to reveal a secret confided to him in confession, but the other side held the levers of power and was able to use the trial as prime anti-Catholic propaganda, placing Fr. Garnet in a Mephistophelian role. The Lord Chief Justice spoke to Fr. Garnet toward the end of his trial, summing up more the expedient dictum than any conclusion derived from the evidence: “You are in every particular of this action, and directed and commanded the actors: nay, I think verily you were the chief that moved it.”²³

Coke’s extended metaphor that treason is a tree with poison roots that bears the fruit of destruction and desolation itself bore tyrannical fruit seventy-two years later. Among the consequences of claiming that the Gunpowder Plot was the work of Catholics led by Jesuits was the Popish Plot of 1678. Anti-Catholic sentiment in the 1670s was stirred by fears of a strong France and of a return to “Popery” when James, Duke of York, would take the throne. A reign of terror against Catholics was initiated by Titus Oates, who presented a pack of lies as the Popish Plot. As Oates told it, he had a scoop on a vast conspiracy to murder King Charles II, invite a French invasion, massacre Protestants, and establish the Roman Catholic Church in England. Parliament and most of the public believed Oates, many in Parliament because it conveniently served the Whig cause and many of the public because it looked like another Gunpowder Plot caught just in time. While Oates became a hero and was granted a lifetime pension, Catholics were persecuted. Fourteen went to their death on the perjured testimony of Titus Oates.²⁴