CHAPTER IX.
Towards the end of the last chapter, I showed that the conspirators were for the most part in fairly comfortable circumstances, and that some of them were rich. It was not necessary to my purpose to enter into details concerning Guy Fawkes, who was an adventurer and a mere tool, or concerning Thomas Bates, who was Catesby’s servant. Nor did I mention the Littletons—one a wealthy man, and the other a younger son, and a cousin of the former; for, although they joined in the rising after the discovery of the plot, and suffered death for it, they do not appear to have been among the sworn conspirators beforehand. But, before dismissing the subject of the riches or poverty of the plotters, I have something more to say.
Sir Everard Digby was chiefly enlisted by Catesby on account of his wealth. He promised to contribute £1500 towards the scheme, and to furnish, in addition, as much armour and as many arms, men, and horses as he might be able. Another large landowner was enlisted even later than Sir Everard, and for the same purpose. This was Catesby’s cousin, Francis Tresham, of Rushton, in Northamptonshire. He, like Catesby and Percy, had been implicated in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex, so a plot was no novelty to him, and he consented to help the new one with money to the extent of £2000. Funds, again, were to be found in another quarter.[200] “Mr Percy himself promised all he could get out of the Earl of Northumberland’s rents,”—in other language, he promised to embezzle, and apparently with the pious Catesby’s full consent, every penny he was able of his master’s money—“which was about £4000.” Here, therefore, we have a fund of £7500, to say nothing of what Catesby and the other conspirators may have spent in the early stages of the plot.
In the reign of James I., a sovereign sterling was worth very much more than it is at present; some people say ten times as much;[201] so if they are right, the Gunpowder Plot Fund amounted to £75,000 of our money.
What became of it? All the work done was voluntary and unpaid. The hiring of the cellar under the houses of Parliament could not have been a very heavy outlay; very many hundreds of pounds cannot have been spent in gunpowder; and if a good deal may have been invested in horses, that would only exhaust a comparatively small portion of so large a fund. Most likely the conspirators defrayed their own personal expenses while working for the plot, and even if they charged them to the fund, the men were so few in numbers that they cannot have amounted to much. Can it be that some immense bribe was given, or promised, to Guy Fawkes for the excessively dangerous part which he was to play in the drama? This is far from unlikely!
The fugitives, after the discovery of the plot, carried a good deal of cash with them as they rode about, trying to raise an insurrection. Sir Everard Digby alone took[202] “above £1000 in ready coin” with him. According to the authority quoted, this would be the equivalent of £10,000 nowadays, a large amount to carry about the country. Yet, as will be seen when the proper time comes, he apparently made no use of it. The financial aspects of the Gunpowder Plot are as curious as they are incomprehensible.
After giving his solemn promise not to divulge the conspiracy, Sir Everard evidently could say nothing about it to Lady Digby. It must have been a terrible trial to have the burden of that awful secret, with all its dangers to himself and those dear to him, on his mind when he looked upon his innocent, holy, and loving young wife, with her little boy, Kenelm, now two years old, toddling after her, and her baby, which had been born early in that year, in her arms, as she walked about the long, low rooms and corridors of Gothurst, or wandered about its sloping gardens and along the banks of the River Ouse. While the worst fear in her mind as she did so would be a visit from pursuivants, her husband knew of far more terrible dangers by which their hitherto happy home was threatened.
Already he was beginning to take precautions against possible failure and its fearful consequences. Of course, at Gothurst, as at every other house frequented by priests, there was a “priests’ hole”; but Sir Everard now ordered preparations for concealment to be made upon a much more elaborate scale. It is nearly certain that the most celebrated of all artificers in priests’ hiding-places was staying at Gothurst just at this very time. His real name was Nicholas Owen, but he usually went by the name of “Little John.” He was a Jesuit lay-brother, and he usually accompanied Father Garnet in his travels. It is recorded that he went to Gothurst with Father Garnet on his way to Holywell, and it may be assumed that he was with him when he returned. Nothing, therefore, would be simpler or easier for Sir Everard than, on the plea of a desire to increase his precautions for priests in case of a raid from pursuivants, to ask Little John to superintend the making of intricate places of concealment which should serve as refuges for himself and his fellow-conspirators in case of discovery, failure, or pursuit.
He could not have found a better workman for this purpose. Father Gerard writes of him:—[203] “He it was that made our hiding-places; in fact he made the one to which I owed my safety.”As he probably made the very curious hiding-places in Sir Everard Digby’s house, I may claim to say something about him. Brother Foley calls him[204] “that useful, cunning joiner of those times,”who “died a martyr for the faith, suspended from a Topcliff rack in the Tower of London, where he was divers times hung up for several hours together, to compel him to betray the hiding-places he had made, up and down the land; but not a word could they force from his sealed and faithful lips.” “The authorities, shocked at their own cruelty, gave out that he destroyed himself.”[205] A Protestant writer accordingly calls him[206] “that Owen who ript out his own bowells in the Tower.”Father Gerard denies this story at great length,[207] stating that the poor man suffered from hernia, and that although “the civil law doth forbid to torture any man that is broken,”the executioners “girded”the afflicted part “with a plate of iron to keep in”the portion which threatened to protrude, but that “the extremity of pain (which is most in that kind of torment), about the breast”and the seat of the hernia, “did force out”the interior, “and so the iron did serve but to cut and wound his body, which, perhaps, did afterwards put them in mind to give out that he had ripped his”part in question, “with a knife. Which, besides all the former reasons, is in itself improbable, if not impossible. For first, in that case, knives are not allowed but only in the time of meat, whilst one stands by, and those such as are broad at the point, and will only cut towards the midst.”
As to his skill in making hiding-places, a Jesuit, Father Tanner, wrote of him that[208] “With incomparable skill he knew how to conduct priests to a place of safety along subterranean passages, to hide them between walls, to bury them in impenetrable recesses, and to entangle them in labyrinths and a thousand windings. But what was much more difficult of accomplishment, he so disguised the entrances to these as to make them most unlike what they really were.”“When he was about to design”a hiding-place, he commenced the work by “receiving the Most Holy Eucharist, sought to aid its progress by continual prayer, and offered the completion of it to God alone, accepting of no other reward for his toil than the merit of charity and the consolation of labouring for the good of Catholics.”