WHEN a booted and spurred Guy Fawkes was found skulking near Parliament around midnight on November 4th, 1605, he unwittingly created a legend that has persisted to the present day.
On November 7th, having endured hideous tortures, Fawkes cracked and revealed a Catholic plot to blow up Parliament when it reconvened on November 5th. The idea was to effect a Catholic restoration in England the nine year old princess Elizabeth was to be married off to a Catholic prince while the Duke of Northumberland, a Catholic sympathiser not in the conspiracy, was to be induced to serve as Lord Protector.
Such, at any rate, was the official story used to legitimise the execution of Fawkes and those he named under torture. But the real centre of the conspiracy was Robert Catesby, sixth in descent from the William Catesby who perished with Richard Ill at Bosworth Field and who, together with the hunchback king's other favourites Ratcliffe and Lovell, inspired the well known contemporary couplet
The Cat, the Rat and Lovell our Dog
Rule all England under the Hog.
Catesbys it seemed, always picked the losing side. Or did they? The trouble about the Catesby of 1605 is that next to nothing is known of him, other than that he was killed in a shootout with a posse in Staffordshire after being named by Fawkes.
Catesby appeared to be a fanatical hothead, who confessed his own plot to a Father Tesimond under the seal of the confessional Tesimond confessed it to the Jesuit Father Garnet, who went to the execution block for putting the seal of the confessional ahead of his duty to James I.
There has long been a suspicion that Catesby was, in fact, a double agent employed by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, to bring English Catholicism into final ruin and discredit. The circumstantial evidence for this is competing Catesby insisted on carrying on with the plot even after it was blown on October 26th (one of the 12 conspirators was a Judas) the gunpowder stored near Parliament had decayed and would not have exploded he and three other conspirators were conveniently shot dead.
When the most wanted man is shot down for no good reason, we may always entertain legitimate suspicions. (Why, for example, did Edwin Stanton have a tamed John Wilkes Booth gunned down after the Lincoln assassination?)
The most likely scenario is that Catesby, acting under Cecil's direction, inveigled a number of gullible Catholic "blades" into a hare brained plot, which was later used as the pretext to suppress Catholicism in England Cecil then had Catesby, who alone knew the truth, "terminated". It is a scenario familiar from spy fiction, but it would be naive to think that the double cross originated in the 20th century.
Antonia Fraser, in an admirably balanced, nuanced and lucid piece of writing, is inclined to take the plot at face value but sometimes veers into scepticism. Her caution is warranted most of the evidence for a real plot was either hearsay or torture extracted confessions made by people who were prepared to tell their tormentors whatever they wanted to hear, simply to stop the pain.
The jury is not just still out on the reality of the Gunpowder Plot in the nature of things it is likely to be out for ever. Barring the discovery of some 1605 version of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the facts as Antonia Fraser sets them out in this judicious summary will always seem as ambiguous as Janus. {CORRECTION} 96100100168
