Thomas Percy was the eldest of the conspirators and in 1605 was about forty-five years of age.
Sir Everard Digby was the youngest, being twenty-four years of age, whilst the ages of the others ranged betwixt and between.[15]
Thomas Percy, a native of Beverley, an ancient and historic town in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was therefore a Yorkshireman by birth. He was the son of Edward
Percy and Elizabeth his wife. Though not the ringleader of the band of conspirators, Thomas Percy must have cut the greatest figure in the eyes of the public at large. For he was a “kinsman” of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland, according to the testimony of the Earl himself,[16] and through this nobleman Thomas Percy had been made Captain of the Pensioners-in-Ordinary — Gentlemen of Honour — in attendance at Court. At the time of the Plot, too, Thomas Percy — the Constable of Alnwick and Warkworth Castles — acted as officer or agent for his noble kinsman’s large northern estates, at Alnwick, Warkworth, Topcliffe, Spofforth, and elsewhere.
Robert Catesby, the arch-conspirator, was — as we have seen already — the son and heir of Sir William Catesby, whose wife was a daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton in Warwickshire.
Sir William Catesby was a gentleman of ancient, historic and distinguished lineage, who had large possessions in Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire, yielding him about £3,000 a year, or probably from £24,000 to £30,000 a year in our money.
These large estates his ill-fated son Robert Catesby succeeded to in expectancy in 1598.[17]
Catesby, the younger, diminished his annual revenue very considerably by involving himself in the rising of the brilliant Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex (1601), who had given to Catesby a promise of toleration for Catholic recusants, who chafed greatly under a system of politico-theological persecution, at once galling, cruel and despicable.
But this promise of toleration was conditioned by the very vital condition precedent that the insurrectionary movement of the gallant but rash Essex against the Government of Elizabeth had a successful issue.
The movement, however, was emphatically not smiled on by Fortune, that fickle goddess, with the result that Catesby found himself locked up in prison, and was only ransomed by payment of a sum of £3,000.