The men known to history as the Gunpowder Plotters were thirteen in
number.
They were at first Robert Catesby, already mentioned, Thomas Winter,
Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy (or Guido) Fawkes.
Subsequently, there were added to these five——Robert Keyes, Christopher
Wright (a younger brother of John Wright), and lastly Robert Winter (an
elder brother of Thomas Winter),[A] Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant, Sir
Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, and Thomas Bates.
[Footnote A: Lord Edmund Talbot, brother to the present Duke of Norfolk,
K.G., Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, is allied to Robert Winter,
through the latter’s marriage with Gertrude Talbot, the daughter of John
Talbot, Esquire, of Grafton in Worcestershire. The brother of Gertrude
Winter became Earl of Shrewsbury. John Talbot had married a daughter of
Sir William Petre. Lord Edmund Talbot, I believe, now owns Huddington.]
Of these thirteen conspirators, all, with the exception of Thomas Bates, a
serving-man of Robert Catesby, were, as Fawkes said, “gentlemen of name
and blood.”
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.
This heavy fine, together with the fact that in the year 1605 his mother,
the Dowager Lady Catesby, was living at Ashby St. Legers in
Northamptonshire, and owned for life all rents of the estates, except
Chastleton near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, seems to have been the
cause that, at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, Catesby had not any very
great amount of ready money in hand.
Besides this, until some four or five years prior to 1603, the year of the
death of Queen Elizabeth, when he began to practise the religion which in
1580 his father, Sir William Catesby, had embraced or re-embraced, and for
which the latter had suffered imprisonment and heavy fines, Robert Catesby
“was very wild; and as he kept company with the best noblemen of the land,
so he spent much above his rate, and so wasted also good part of his
living.”
“He was of person above two yards[18] high, and though slender, yet as
well proportioned to his height as any man one should see.” He was,
moreover, reputed to be “very wise and of great judgment, though his
utterance was not so good. Besides, he was so liberal, and apt to help all
sorts, as it got him much love.”
At the time of the Plot Catesby was about thirty-five years of age. He had
married Catherine Leigh, a daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh, of Stoneleigh, a
Protestant gentleman of wealth and influence in Warwickshire. The Parish
Register of Chastleton has the following entry:——“Robert Catesbie, son of
Robert Catesbie, was baptised the 11th day of November, 1595.”[19] He had
only this one surviving child, who is said to have married the only child
of Thomas Percy.
Catesby had the misfortune to lose his wife by death before the year 1602,
and at the time of the Plot his home seems to have been with his mother,
the Dowager Lady Catesby, at Ashby St. Legers in the County of
Northampton, the family ancestral seat. For in 1602 he had sold his
residence, Chastleton, in Oxfordshire.
Now, as Robert Catesby, it seems by many circumstances, was the first
inventor and chiefest furtherer of the Plot, it is worth while thus
lingering on a description of what manner of man he was.
It, however, may be asked how came it to pass that this one person gained
such prodigious ascendency over twelve other persons so as to make them,
in the event, as mischievously, nay fatally, deluded as himself?
The answer is manifold: for besides the wrongs which these ruthless
plotters sought to avenge, they evidently came under a potent
psychological spell when they came under the influence of this wayward,
yet fascinating, son of the brilliant age of Elizabeth——an age in which
men’s intellectual and physical powers too often attained a complete
mastery over their moral powers.[20]
For a proof of Catesby’s immense influence over others, it may be
mentioned that Ambrose Rookwood, one of those whose blood afterwards
stained the scaffold at the early age of twenty-seven for his share in the
wicked scheme, says of Catesby that “he (Rookwood) loved and respected him
as his own life.”[21]
Four things seem to have caused those who came in contact with Robert
Catesby to have been carried captive at his will, if from the first they
were at all well affected towards him——his personal appearance, his
generosity, his zeal, and his skill in the use of arms.
We are told that Tesimond (alias Greenway), another contemporary of
Catesby, says that “his countenance was exceedingly noble and expressive.
That his conversation and manners were peculiarly attractive and imposing,
and that by the dignity of his character he exercised an irresistible
influence over the minds of those who associated with him.”[22]
His zeal was of that kind which is contagious and kindles responsive fire.
As for his martial prowess, it was sufficiently attested by his behaviour
at the time of the Essex rising, when Father Gerard, his contemporary,
tells us that “Mr. Catesby did then show such valour and fought so long
and stoutly as divers afterwards of those swordsmen did exceedingly esteem
him and follow him in regard thereof.”[23]