The Cradle King by Alan Stewart

Author:Alan Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448104574
Publisher: Random House

A Terrible Blow

FIVE YEARS AFTER the Gowrie Plot, in 1605 James unearthed another conspiracy against his life, although this one was undoubtedly real.1 The Gunpowder Plot seems to have been the brainchild of an English Catholic gentleman named Robert Catesby who, as early as 1603, was discussing with his friend Thomas Percy the possibility of assassinating the new King. By the spring of 1604, the conspiracy had widened to include three other men: Catesby’s cousin Thomas Winter, a friend named John Wright, and a mercenary recently returned from the Low Countries wars named Guy Fawkes. The plot was startling in its audacity – and its simplicity. As James later put it, Catesby and his fellows intended ‘not only … the destruction of my person, nor of my wife and posterity only, but of the whole body of the State in general; wherein should neither have been spared, or distinction made to young nor of old, of great nor of small, of man nor of woman: the whole nobility, the whole reverend clergy, bishops, and most part of the good preachers, the most part of the knights and gentry; … the whole judges of the land, with the most of the lawyers, and the whole clerks’. This they would accomplish in a single blow by planting barrels of gunpowder under the Parliament House in Westminster – poetic justice since Parliament was where ‘the cruel laws (as they say) were made against their religion’, so ‘both place and person should all be destroyed and blown up at once’.2 Practical planning commenced in May of 1604 with the renting of a house that backed on to the Parliament building; from there the conspirators started to dig a tunnel, a difficult and back-breaking task that necessitated the recruitment of more men. It was only after ten months of toil that they discovered that the house next to their own had a cellar that ran directly under the Parliament building. Once they had rented that house, it was a simple matter to break down the wall between the two cellars, and to move twenty barrels of gunpowder under the relevant chamber. It was Fawkes who carried out this work, covering the barrels with iron bars and faggots.

But Catesby’s plans didn’t stop at the dynamiting of Westminster. An explosion at the opening ceremony might carry off James, Anna and Henry, but that still left two heirs to the throne still alive, Prince Charles and Princess Elizabeth. Elizabeth was being raised at the Haringtons’ estate at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, which happened to be only twenty miles from Catesby’s mother’s house at Ashby St Leger. The plotters resolved to snatch the princess ‘by drawing friends together at a hunting’ strategically located between the two houses at Sir Everard Digby’s at Dunchurch.3 Thomas Percy would use his position as a gentleman pensioner to abduct Prince Charles, under the pretence of taking him to a safe hiding place.4 In order to organise all this, more recruits were needed, and, by October 1605, some thirteen conspirators knew about the plot.

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