Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount

Author:Ferdinand Mount
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399409735
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that Salisbury had got wind of the plot and wanted to warn the plotters off by concocting the letter to Monteagle. In the letter he drafted to English ambassadors abroad, he remarks that the Monteagle letter had been ‘in a hand disguised’. The Jesuit historian Francis Edwards, who spent half a lifetime trying to prove that there never was a plot (in his spare time he devoted himself to proving that the Earl of Oxford wrote the works of William Shakespeare), argues that Salisbury could know this for sure, only if he had himself written the letter or got the code master Thomas Phelippes to write it for him. Phelippes had been chief of ops to Salisbury’s father’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, and had helped to wreck the Babington Plot against Queen Elizabeth, but had fallen out with the new regime. Might he not, as Haynes speculates in his life of Salisbury, have been eager to worm his way back into favour, first by sharing the information he had gathered about the movements of various Catholic dissidents on the Continent, including Guy Fawkes, and then offering to do the writing of the Monteagle letter to smoke out or disarm the conspirators?11

That’s quite possible, although a stratagem which alerted the conspirators and allowed them to slink off with impunity sounds to me altogether too generous for Salisbury, and in any case would leave them free to devise fresh plots. Far better to catch them red-handed.

A stronger possibility is that Monteagle himself had the letter written to be delivered back to him – which would explain why the tall stranger knew how to get the letter brought in via Thomas Ward loitering outside the Hoxton house, perhaps enjoying a pipe of the tobacco which King James so detested as a health hazard. (The plotters were keen smokers, like many young bloods of the day, and I like to think of the King’s fury as he watched them from his spyhole puffing away during their interrogations.) Monteagle’s motive would be plain: to win huge credit with the King and entrench his shaky credentials as a loyal subject. It is noteworthy that he did not stop at delivering the letter. He managed to get himself invited by Suffolk to join the first search of Parliament ‘both above and below’ on 4 November, together with other members of the Privy Council. In the words of the King, Suffolk merely ‘cast his careless and reckless eye’ over the various lodgings that surrounded the Parliament Chamber. But he did at least spot the enormous pile of firewood heaped up in the cellar, far too much for such a modest lodging. What this first search party also discovered was that the lodging was now let to Thomas Percy, an unreliable Catholic, kinsman and agent to the Earl of Northumberland. Quick as a flash, Monteagle told Suffolk that Percy must be the one who had sent the letter, not only

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