Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 15 September 2006

Doubts

After four centuries Guy Fawkes’s Day is still an English national festival, but the traditional story of the Gunpowder Plot is shot through with bizarre improbabilities. The idea of blowing up the entire British Royal Family, government and Parliament is so grotesque as to seem a joke—the whole establishment going up in one bang. A Jesuit historian, Father Francis Edwards, did not think the usual story of the plot held water, so he took a fresh look at the evidence. He found he was uncovering fascinating new clues about the shady people around the plot. Colin Cross wrote it up in an article in the Observer many years ago, and this is a lightly adapted version. So, what is obviously fishy about the traditional story?

Most actual or attempted assassinations in history have been the work of crazy fanatics, but Robert Catesby, the ringleader of this plot, and his colleagues were not fanatical men. They were, in fact, gentlemanly layabouts, short of money. They professed the Roman Catholic religion but were far from being devout. They were quite intelligent. Yet assuming for a moment that the Gunpowder Plot was a serious venture, they made no adequate preparation for taking over the government of the country.

Father Edwards

The mechanics of the plot are suspicious. It has been claimed that they placed 36 barrels of gunpowder, each containing 90 kg (200 lb) of powder in the basement of the House of Lords. It was supposed to have been left there for eight months. How could this be, especially at the time, 1605, when the area immediately around Parliament was busy and thickly populated. And where did they get such a vast quantity of gunpowder? The country under James was effectively a police state, with government spies everywhere, and the manufacture of gunpowder was under Crown control. After the alleged discovery of the plot, the cellar and the area around it were cordoned off. Nobody outside the government was allowed in. Historians agree the government was eager to use of the plot as propaganda against the Catholics, yet there were no conducted tours of the site.

Knyvett, keeper of the Palace of Vestminster, whose responsibility the security of the place was, was quickly honoured when disgrace and the sack would have been more appropriate.

The Roman Catholic peer Lord Monteagle was warned by letter not to attend Parliament. It arrived when he was giving a dinner party. Scarcely glancing at it first, he had it read straight out aloud. Who would make public a private letter in this way? It is peculiar behaviour, and looks more laike play-acting. Monteagle must have known what the letter would contain and wanted to make it known to his guests. The government gave him a pension of £700 a year. There is evidence that Monteagle was an Anglican before and after the period of the plot, and only pretended to be a Catholic convert during it.

To the government, the Gunpowder Plot was a blessing. It was like 9/11, a horror to capture the public imagination and turn popular feelings against the Roman Catholics, just as the government wanted. It worked and Roman Catholicism ceased to be a serious force in England.

Many agree that the government knew more about the plot than it claimed. The warning letter to Monteagle and the search of the cellars the night before Parliament met always sounded phony. The assumption has been that the government was content to allow the plot to go ahead so that it could be exposed at the most advantageous moment. More important is to ask whether there was a plot at all, other than by the government itself? Was it all instigated by the government? If it could be proved the government instigated the plot for its propaganda value, most of the discrepancies and improbabilities in the story would disappear. It cannot be proved precisely because the government has hidden the facts of the case, and now they will have gone for good. Even so, the circumstantial evidence for a conspiracy is as good as many of the conspiracy theories held today, and those who poor scorn on them, are too trusting of politicians and rulers to realize history is full of them.

Robert Cecil and Thomas Percy by Adrian George

The idea of the government inventing the plot might sound fantastic but it would have been a clever move, fitted exactly to its policy. And it matched the personality of the chief Minister, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who might have written the Monteagle letter himself. He was too clever by half. A limping hunchback, Cecil was ambitious, unscrupulous and bitterly anti-Catholic. His attitude to Catholicism was similar to that of the neocons to Islam. He was an expert manipulator who, while chief Minister of England, accepted annual bribes from the king of Spain. He knew how to play on men’s weaknesses. The Gunpowder Plot was of both personal and political benefit to him—it confirmed his standing with king James I, for he appeared as saver of the king’s life. It discredited the Roman Catholics at home. It checked foreign protests against persecution of Catholicism.

Evidence

Though there is little direct evidence, there is a lot of negative evidence—evidence that the present accounts are botched together and evidence suppressed. Why are the gunpowder records for 1605 conveniently missing from the Tower of London? There is an enormous volume of evidence of this nature. It would be tedious to catalogue it all. Most looks trivial, but together it produces a solid case for doubt about the orthodox view.

Suspicions regarding the gunpowder are as follows:

1. The quantity of 72 barrels, two consignments of 36 each is too much to be credibkle. It is one month;s worth of the whole English national supply at the time.
2. The cost was £500, a vast sum in those days yet the plotters were not rich men. The only possibility of them financing this is that Percy embezzled the money, as he was known to be an embezzler
3. Where could the conspirators have got such a vast amount of gunpowder, without anyone noticing? The traditional explanation is that it came from abroad, but that is just as unlikely since Cecil’s secret police could hardly have failed to notice.
4. Though lugging all these barrels into the cellar must have been fairly obvious, no one is reprted to have seen anything suspicious goping on. There was not a single eyewitness, even though this was a busy and even often crowded area, and the so-called cellar was actually a ground floor room which many people could access
5. Not only that, but there are also no witnesses that the powder was in the basement after the plot was exposed! The basement was actually cordoned off, so some who might have been witnesses were stopped from seeing the evidence. There is no direct evidence that there ever was any gunpowder at all, let alone the 72 barrels full. No indeopendent observers such as foreign ambassadors were shown the evidence, it seems.
6. Although the powder was presumably moved in in secret, it ought to have been seen being removed. No one did! Parliament met on schedule, on the day after the plot was allegedly dicovered. It seems unlikely that Cecil, having discovered the plot, would have risked the whole of the English establishment being blown to smithereens by accident. So, if they were not meeting with three tonnes of gunpowder in the room below them, the powder must have been removed immediately it was found, or it was never there anyway.
7. Where was all this gunpowder stored when it was moved out? No records exist of where the supposed giunpowder was taken, though the Tower of London is the obvious place. Strangely, the ordnance records for 1605 at the Tower are missing!
8. So, was there any powder? Orthodox history tells us there were the 72 barrels, but there probably were none at all.

The Conspiracy

Fr Francis Edwards, SJ, thought the Gunpowder Plot unfolded in the following way. Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, chief minister of king James I of England, sought to extirpate Roman Catholicism, which he hated, and to advance his own power. He planned the Gunpowder Plot with both these ends in view. It would discredit the Roman Catholics and he would get the glory for foiling it. Cecil enlisted Thomas Percy, an adventurer with wide contacts and willing to do anything for money. Percy gets Catesby, the nominal leader of the conspiracy, and five others to form a gang. He pays them and convinces them that when the plot is discovered they will be safe from execution, either by royal pardon or by being allowed to escape. Catesby and co bring in others without telling them that the affair is government inspired. They think these will be the scapegoats for execution.

For plausibility, these innocents are told that a coup d’etat will follow the explosion. The King’s nine-year-old daughter Princess Elizabeth will be seized from Combe Abbey, where she lives, and proclaimed Queen, with Catesby as Regent. It is unlikely there is any actual gunpowder in the plot. No record exists of its removal from the basement and it is unlikely that Parliament would have met on 5 November with a colossal stack of gunpowder underneath which could have gone off accidentally. Accidents with explosives were a common hazard of the period.

Cecil’s method of getting the plot going may not have been entirely by financial bribery. He may also have exploited divisions between the English Catholics. The mass of devotees of the old faith wanted no more than to live quietly with access to Catholic sacraments. They had no high ambition to reconvert the rest of the nation to Catholicism or to set up a Catholic government. While they were often willing to suffer and to pay enormous fines, they took no joy in martyrdom. There was a smaller, more enthusiastic group, products of the counter Reformation, who thought it the most important thing in the world to bring England back to the Church. With Jesuits in the van, they dedicated themselves to missionary work and consciously expected to end their lives on the quartering block, though the Jesuits were explicitly opposed to terrorist methods. Many of the moderates longed for a compromise with the government by which the Jesuits and other enthusiasts would cease operations. In return the government would tolerate quiet Catholics.

Cecil did not want to tolerate any Catholics at all. But, dissembling, he might have sold the idea of the Gunpowder Plot to moderates on the ground that it would discredit the enthusiasts and so strengthen the moderates—he was a good salesman. However it was, whether by money or subterfuge or both, Cecil would have been capable, morally and technically, of getting the plot going. Moreover the nature of the plot—to blow up the king in Parliament—indicates a propaganda genius. It was a far more stirring notion than just assassinating the shambling, homosexual king James I, and Cecil was a genius at propaganda.

On this supposition, Catesby and Percy assembled the band of eight conspirators of whom, apart from these two principals, Thomas Winter, Bates, the Wright brothers, Keyes and Grant almost certainly agreed to concoct a plot. The soldier, Guy Fawkes, also agreed to implicating the Catholics, if not the Jesuits, and with Winter drew up in the Tower the “confessions” which ended as the official tale of the plot as it passed into history. Others were brought in, mostly at the last moment, on the assumption that the conspiracy was genuine. They were to be the scapegoats for execution. During 1604 and 1605, there were an unusual number of summonings and proroguings of Parliament. On the supposition of Cecil being behind the plot, he was manoeuvring to get a State opening of Parliament to coincide with Catesby’s convenience.

The Gang 1

Those who know the plot is rigged and are promised safety and money:

The gang in the know! by Adrian George

1. Guy Fawkes, a soldier from Flanders wars—hired to implicate English Catholics fighting in Flanders
2. Christopher and John Wright, brothers, boyhood friends at York of Guy Fawkes—champion swordsmen
3. Robert Catesby, a charming rogue and ringleader, aged 35—rather older than the others
4. Bates, Catesby’s servant, and “yes man”
5. Thomas Winter who spoke several languages, was described as the intellectual of the conspiracy
6. Francis Tresham (or Tresam), related to Catesby and the Winters, brother-in-law of Lord Monteagle. Was he a double agent? He was in the innocents group but could have been a spy for Cecil. He had been in debt but inherited a fortune shortly before the discovery of the plot.

Would Catesby have played along with Cecil? The answer must be “yes”. He was a mature Elizabethan buck apparently with an eye for girls and certainly a swashbuckling taste for political adventure. Contemporaries, including at least one of his Gunpowder Plot associates, reckoned him to be untruthful and untrustworthy. He was often in hot water, lived above his income and was of loose religious affiliation. The link between Cecil and Catesby seems to be Thomas Percy, another loose man. According to one good authority, Percy kept one wife in the south of England and another in the north and enjoyed listening to lectures on atheism. Nominally Catholic, he was certainly in touch both with the government and the Catholics.

The Gang 2

The Dupes by Adrian George

Those not in the know—innocents to be sacrificed:

• Robert Winter, brother of Thomas Winter who had Jesuitical contacts and so brought in partly to implicate Jesuits.
• Rockwood, a very rich military man helping to organise English soldiers to fight on the Catholic side in the Flanders war.
• Robert Keyes, may have been innocent altogether and just framed.
• John Grant
• Everard Digby
• Francis Tresham is the possible double agent, a Cecil spy posing as an innocent.

Scene Of The Crime

The scene of the crime

The House. Next to the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster 1605. Contemporary evidence suggests it was let out when not needed for official purposes, for example Lord’s committees. It was often used as Peers’ robing rooms. Occupants were liable to be disturbed at any moment by official requisitioning. Owner was Whinnyeard, under Cecil’s authority, a court official, he ejected a sitting tenant called Ferrers to make way for the conspirators.

The Tunnel. According to the traditional story the conspirators begin by excavating a tunnel from the cellar of the house into the foundations of the House of Lords. This entails going through a wall between 9 and 1l feet thick. They dump the rubble in the garden (where it would have been visible to any passer by). Between 1800 and 1823 these buildings were demolished, but no evidence emerged of any traces of the Gunpowder Plot tunnel.

The Cellar. Then according to official accounts, the conspirators pay Mrs Bright, the caretaker (a mysterious figure), for access to a “celler actually under the Lords’ chamber”. Their gunpowder lies there from March to November. (Stock is renewed about September.) In fact this is not really a cellar but more of a basement, a commodious apartment on ground level, a place to which many could have access.

The Garden. Here the conspirators were supposed to have dumped the rubble from the excavations was in full public view!

The Alley to the River. This is the supposed route for bringing in the gunpowder.

The Supposed Rising

The route of the plotters riding north to raise a Catholic rebellion

After the “plot” had been discovered, Catesby galloped up to the Midlands and went from Catholic house to Catholic house announcing that the king and Cecil were dead and calling upon Catholics to rise in revolt. Few in fact agreed to do so, but why did Catesby tell such lies? His conduct is explicable only on the ground that he was acting as Cecil’s agent provocateur to get as many Catholics as possible implicated in the gunpowder drama.

Saturday 26 October—Betrayal

Lord Monteagle

Lord Monteagle, dubiously Roman Catholic and newly-created peer, about to take his seat in the House of Lords, well-known to the conspirators, arrived unexpectedly at his house in Hoxton, where he has not been for a year. While dining in company he received a letter—written by Robert Cecil? Hardly glancing at it, he commanded it to be read aloud. Did this mean he already knew what it contained? It warned him to stay away from the opening of Parliament on 5 November and hinted at a great “blowe”. He sent the letter to Cecil, who showed it to the king. King James I, son of Mary Queen of Scots, had lived from babyhood in an atmosphere of plots and intrigue, so the king concluded that a murderous conspiracy was afoot. But no immediate search of the Parliament buildings was ordered. Monteagle, according to Exchequer records, was later given a pension of £700 a year—worth around £200,000 in modern money—and for no apparent reason.

Monday 4 November—First Search

In the afternoon Monteagle and officials examined the House of Lords, including the basement. They found nothing—except Guy Fawkes hanging around looking unconcerned.

Monday 4 November—Friday 8 November

Flight To The Midlands. The conspirators, except Guy Fawkes, gallopped off from London ostensibly to whip up the country-house Roman Catholics of the Midlands into a revolutionary rising, telling them that king and Parliament had been blown up. The real motive was to implicate as many Catholics as possible in treason. Most Catholics refused to collaborate but a group of about 50 whipped up—mostly the conspirators and their servants. All outsiders left when they realised what is happening.

• Ashby St Ledgers. At 6pm 5 November, Catesby, Wright, brothers Rockwood and Thomas Percy meet after riding from London.
• Dunchurch. By 9pm 5 November, the main party, now 50 strong, had met with Robert Winter, Robert Digby and the Littletons, these latter two being influential Catholic gentry.
• Combe Abbey. Princess Elizabeth lives here in charge of Lord Harington.
• Warwick. On the night of 5-6 November the gang broke into a stable and stole nine cavalry horses.
• Norbrook. At 3am 6 November, Bates leaves for Coughton to implicate Jesuit chaplains there.
• Clopton. In September 1605, Ambrose Rockwood moved here. Not even plotters claimed he was involved before October. They got horses from him.
• Caughton. Lady Digby and Jesusits living here.
• Hewell Grange. Noon, 7 November. The party steals arms and armour.
• Huddington. At 2pm 6 November Thomas Winter joined the main party after a ride from London on his own.
• Hagley. Another Catholic house (Humphrey Littleton’s). This was on the conspirators’ route so they presumably called here.
• Holbeche. On the morning of 8 November, they were at Stephen Littleton’s house. The sheriff’s men surrounded it, the sheriff himself keeping in the background, then, ignoring what could have been the prearranged surrender sign, they shot Catesby and Percy, wounded Winter, and captured the others alive.

Ashby St Ledger where Catesby lived with his mother. He had sold his own house to pay political fines	Dunchurch, a market town with inns on the road from London to Birmingham, where the plotters were allegedly to assemble	Combe Abbey was the home of the 9 year old princess Elixabeth, supposed to have beenthe plotters' choice for the throne
Coughton was the home of an important Roman Catholic family, the Throckmortons, who were relatives of Catesby and Tresham	Huddington was the estate of Robert Winter which he held with an income of 1000 marks. He might have been set up	This was where the plotters allegedly resisted arrest, but Catesby and Percy were shot dead while surrendering Photographs by Bob Croxford

Monday 4 November—Second Search

Guy Fawkes' Lantern

At 11pm the plot was “discovered” and Guy Fawkes was arrested. Official accounts vary on whether the arrest is in the House of Lords basement, outside the basement or in his lodgings. He was holding a lantern at the moment of his arrest, now in tre Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Monday 27 January—Trial

In court the conspirators look nonchalant. They are living well in the Tower with food, drink and tobacco sent in. Normal Tower warders replaced by special men sent in by Ceci!. Believing they are safe, they make no attempt at the trial to justify or to defend themselves or to plead for mercy. Before each session they go to the Star Chamber where, possibly, they are privately “briefed”. They are found guilty of treason.

23 December—Double Agent Dies

The government announces that Francis Tresham—Cecil’s spy planted to keep an eye on the other conspirators—has died in the Tower. But later rumours suggest he has been seen in France. Was he secretly let out by Cecil?

An Objection

Against this theory stands one big objection. The penalty for high treason was to be hanged until half dead, then the victim was cut down, the executioner ripped open with a knife the victim’s stomach, pulled out heart and entrails and burnt them, the victim’s genitals got the same treatment, and, finally the victim was beheaded and his body cut into four quarters. Most of the conspirators who were not killed while being arrested suffered this hideous treatment.

What possible motive could there be for Catesby and his friends to embark on a plot which they knew would be discovered? The explanation, if it is true that Cecil instigated the plot, is a cynical doublecross. Cecil promised the conspirators they would be allowed to escape or pardoned and then broke his promise. How could he convince Catesby and co they would not be executed? There was the precedent of the “Main Plot” three years preyiously. The conspirators in that had reached the scaffold and were kneeling in the straw and about to put their heads on the block when a royal messenger with the king’s pardon dramatically revealed himself. Cecil could have assured the gunpowder conspirators that the same thing would happen to them.

Indirect support for the notion of Cecil double crossing the conspirators comes in the strange deaths of Catesby and Percy at Holbeche. The local sheriff arrived with a posse to arrest them. The two marched out of house back to back, Percy holding a crucifix. The sheriff’s men shot them dead. Now surely the aim of the sheriff should have been to capture them alive. That in the normal way would have won him most credit from London. Catesby and Percy could easily have been captured alive—the crucifix, presumably, being a form of white flag or else some prearranged sign. Shooting them down silenced them and also spared them the executioner’s knife.

The other conspirators were lodged in the Tower in exceptionally comfortable conditions, which was odd, because they were supposed to be murderers and traitors of the worst kind. They had plentiful food and drink and were allowed an unlimited supply of tobacco, which was then a luxury. At their trial in Westminster Hall they looked nonchalant and unconcerned. They attempted neither to justify their conspiracy nor to beg for mercy. Such conduct is compatible with the notion that they regarded the trial as just a formality and thought they were secure from execution. Their high living must have increased their sense of security. One can imagine them going to the scaffold with the same unconcern. Until almost the last, they would have assumed they were all right.

Sentence And Execution

A special committee, including Anglican bishops, was set up to try to devise an especially horrible and painful form of execution to fit the nature of the crime. But the members are unable to think up anything suitable and settle for the conventional hanging, drawing and quartering. While this was going on the conspirators could have been kept happy by their high living in the Tower and by assurances from the special warders that they were safe. But the executions were carried out, in two batches.

Not enough was recorded about the actual circumstances of the executions to determine whether they made any last-minute attempt to address the crowd and tell of Cecil’s perfidy. It would have been a normal procedure that the sheriffs prevented them from speaking, and on the pretext of avoiding disorder, the crowds were kept well back. Was it to prevent people hearing the plotters’ cries of angry disillusion? Any voices raised would have been drowned in a roll of drums. But

Graphology, the Final Nail?

Graphological evidence. Click to see on a larger scale

Did Robert Cecil, the ingenious chief Minister of England, slip up and reveal himself as the man behind the Gunpowder Plot? What could be his one careless act is the anonymous warning letter to Lord Monteagle, the mechanism through which the plot was officially exposed. Today it hangs framed in the museum of the Public Record Office, London. Was that letter written, in a disguised hand, by Cecil himself? Superficial examination showed obvious similarities between Cecil’s handwriting and that in the Monteagle letter. Further thought led to the possibility that if Cecil were behind the plot, he was probably the only person who knew all the convolutions. Accordingly, knowing nothing of twentieth century techniques of handwriting analysis, he could well have reserved for himself the delicate task of writing the letter.

Miss Joan Cambridge, a professional document examiner accustomed to giving expert evidence in courts of law, then chairman of Scientific Graphologists (England) and one of Britain’s leading authorities on handwriting, was asked to make a microscopic examination of original documents at the Public Record Office and to report, as if in a forgery case. Officials at the Public Record Office helped by removing the Monteagle letter from their museum for her to examine. Here are Miss Cambridge’s answers to a series of questions.

• Was the Monteagle letter written by somebody attempting to disguise his hand?—Yes, beyond doubt
• In traditional accounts Francis Tresham or the Jesuit Father Garnett have been suggested as possible authors. Could either have written it?—Extremely unlikely for Tresham to have written it and virtually impossible for Garnett to have done so
• Could Cecil have written it?—Yes, beyond doubt
• Did Cecil write it?—Probably he did. It is a 70 per cent probability. I can’t go further than that because there are special factors of the ink and paper having aged. But I’m reasonably satisfied in my own mind that he did.

The Graphology Technical Report

Before considering the possible authorship of tthe Monteagle letter, it is necessary to assess whether, and if so to what degree, the script is disguised from the writer’s normal graphic movement. Examination provides considerable evidence of deliberation and overcontrol, mainly in the form of abnormal increases in pressure, with marks where the pen momentarily rested. It is also apparent that contrary to his natural inclination the writer was doing his best to adhere to the contemporary formal script.

The most interesting feature in respect of deliberation is the stilted manner in which, with one significant exception, the letter “d” is formed throughout. The exception is the “d” in “friends” in the first line. Close examination shows that initially this consisted of a fluent, slightly leftward movement. Then, as if aware that this personal gesture might disclose his identity, the writer amended the stroke so that it appears stilted and arhythmic as do other “d”s in the document. Accepting the fact of disguise, an attempt must be made to break through the masked forms to obtain an indication of the writer’s normal style.

Apart from the stilted “d” forms, which indicate a naturally fluent movement in writing that specific, there is evidence of selfconscious control in the lower loop of the “g” form, suggesting an awareness of individuality in these extensions. Indeed in the sample of the last two lines of the Monteagle text, reproduced below, it can be seen that “god” was originally written as “yod” as, subconsciously, the writer sought to avoid the offending “g”.

Also spontaneous writing habits, of which the writer was unaware, occur throughout the text. Of these the serif-like stroke on the “e” form is the most significant, because it appears throughout, although the habit of amplifying the “t”-bar stroke and the fluent “h” and “s” forms must not be ignored.

Examination of original documents written and signed by Robert Cecil shows that his natural graphic movement, normal pressure pattern and character of stroke allow of the possibility that he wrote the Monteagle letter. Further to this, examination of his spontaneous letter-forms, particularly “h”, “s” and “e”, indicate definite similarities with those in the Monteagle letter. Then his naturally leftward flaring “d”, forms and highly individualistic “g” forms are compatible with the restrictions exercised on those forms in disguise, while his habit of adding a stroke to his “e”s has a definite parallel in the anonymous note.

So on aggregate there is sufficient evidence to support an opinion that in all probability Cecil himself wrote the Monteagle warning.

Results of the Plot

1. Roman Catholics, both enthusiasts and moderates, were discredited and ceased to be a political force
2. Roman Catholics became disunited
3. The English Catholic regiment fighting in the Flanders wars, which Fawkes and other plotters had close associations with, was discredited. Recruiting for it diminished drastically, reducing the danger of trained Catholic soldiers returning home posing a possible military challenge
4. Foreign Governments were less able to intercede on behalf of English Roman Catholics
5. The anti-Catholic legislation of 1606 passed mmore easily through Parliament than it would otherwise
6. Cecil obtaind the total confidence of James I

In 1606, an Act of Parliament established 5—November as an English national festival. It still continues long after the original propaganda purpose has been forgotten. Thereafter the Lords’ basement was always ceremonially searched for gunpowder before the State Opening of Parliament. But even now few people realize that bonfires, fireworks and ritual burning of a victim really are an ancient pagan British ritual to help to strengthen the waning sun, and ensure a new year. So the Catholic “plot” was also used to get rid of a lingering ancient pagan tradition, or rather hide it as an anti-Catholic ritual.

It is a tenuous theory. There are gaps. But it explains some otherwise incomprehensible aspects of the Gunpowder Plot. Just possibly, on bonfire night the English should burn not a Guy but a Robert?

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