On Monday, the 27th of January 1606, Sir Everard Digby, Robert and Thomas Winter, Guy Fawkes, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, and Thomas Bates, were taken from their cells in the Tower, led to a barge, and conveyed up the river to Westminster to be put on their trial in the celebrated hall, which stands on the site of the banquetting room of William Rufus. They were to stand before their accusers on soil already famous, and destined to become yet more famous for important trials. Here, three hundred years earlier, Sir William Wallace had been condemned to death. Here, only about eighty years before their own time came, both Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More had been tried and sentenced. In this splendid building, Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, and King Charles the First were destined to be condemned to the block. In the following century, sentence of death was here to be passed upon the rebel lords of 1745; here too, still later, Warren Hastings and Lord Melville were to be impeached.

Sir Everard Digby and his fellow-prisoners reached Westminster about half-an-hour before the time fixed for the trial, and they were taken to the Star Chamber to await the arrival of their judges. The following is a contemporary account of their appearance and behaviour while there.[380]“It was strange to note their carriage, even in their very countenances: some hanging down the head, as if their hearts were full of doggedness, and others forcing a stern look, as if they would fear” [“that is frighten. Footnote.”] “death with a frown, never seeming to pray, except it were by the dozen upon their beads, and taking tobacco, as if hanging were no trouble to them; saying nothing but in commendation of their conceited religion, craving mercy of neither God nor the king for their offences, and making their consciences, as it were, as wide as the world; and to the very gates of hell, to be the cause of their hellish courses, to make a work meritorious.”

This writer clearly did not go to the trial prepared to be pleased with the prisoners. If they looked down, they were “dogged”and ought to have been looking up; if they looked up, they were “forcing a stern look,”and ought to have been looking down: if they were not praying, they should have been praying, and if they were praying, yea, even praying “by the dozen,”they should have not have been praying; if they smoked, it was because they did not mind being hanged; if they talked of nothing but religion, it was because they did not desire God’s mercy, and one thing was certain—that their prayers and their religion and all things about them, to their very consciences, were “hellish.”

Sir John Harrington was another unadmiring spectator.[381]“I have seen some of the chief”[conspirators], he says, “and think they bear an evil mark in their foreheads, for more terrible countenances never were looked upon.”

Another writer takes a different view, at any rate in the case of Sir Everard Digby. As that prisoner was being brought up for trial, says Father Gerard,[382] “(not in the best case to make show of himself as you may imagine), yet some of the chiefest in the Court seeing him out of a window brought in that manner, lamented him much, and said he was the goodliest man in the whole Court.”

On entering Westminster Hall, the prisoners were made to ascend a scaffold placed in front of the judges. The Queen and the Prince were seated in a concealed chamber from which they could see, but could not be seen; and it was reported that the King also was somewhere present.[383] The crowd was enormous. Although a special part of the hall had been assigned to members of parliament who might wish to attend the trial, they were so[384] “pestered with others not of the House,”that one member complained, and a committee was afterwards appointed to enquire into the matter.

Sir Everard Digby was arraigned under a separate indictment from that of the other prisoners, and he was tried by himself after them; but he stood by them throughout the trial. The first indictment was very long. After a much spun-out preamble, it stated that the prisoners “traiterously[385] among themselves did conclude and agree, with Gunpowder, as it were with one blast, suddenly, traiterously, and barbarously to blow up and tear in pieces our said Sovereign Lord the King, the Excellent, Virtuous, and gracious Queen Anne his dearest Wife, the most Noble Prince Henry their Eldest Son, the future Hope and Joy of England, and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal; the Reverend Judges of the Realm, the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses of Parliament, and divers other faithful Subjects and Servants of the King in the said Parliament,”&c., “and all of them, without any respect of Majesty, Dignity, Degree, Sex, Age, or Place, most barbarously, and more than beastly, traiterously and suddenly, to destroy and swallow up.”

The prisoners under this indictment pleaded “Not Guilty; and put themselves upon God and the Country.”

Sir Edward Philips, Sergeant at Law, then got upon his legs. The matter before the Court, he said, was one of Treason;[386] “but of such horrour, and monstrous nature, that before now,

And, if it were “abominable to murder the least,” and if “to touch God’s annointed,” were to oppose God himself, “Then how much more than too monstrous” was it “to murder and subvert

The Sergeant, after dwelling briefly on the chief points of the indictment, and describing the objects of the conspiracy and the plan of the conspirators, sat down to make way for the principal counsel for the prosecution, His Majesty’s Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke.

Coke, the enemy of Bacon, was now about fifty-five, and he had filled the post of Attorney-General for nine years. Sir Everard Digby and his fellow-prisoners knew that they had little mercy to expect at his hands. The asperity which he had shown in prosecuting Essex, five years earlier, and the personal animosity which he had exhibited, still later, in his sarcastic speech at the trial of Raleigh, when he had wound up with the phrase, “Thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart,” were notorious, and he was certain to make such a trial as that of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot the occasion of a great forensic display. It so happened that his speeches at this trial and that of Father Garnet, which presently followed it, brought his career as an advocate to a close; for within a year he was appointed Chief-Justice of Common Pleas.

Undoubtedly, his speeches at the trial of Sir Everard Digby and his accomplices added to his fame; but Jardine[387] called one of them “a long and laboured harangue,” and other historians thought him guilty of[388] “unnecessary cruelty in the torture and gratuitous” insolence which he exhibited towards the accused. The glaring eyes, which we see represented in his portrait, would be an unpleasant prospect for Sir Everard as he listened to his cruel words; but whatever tenderness a biographer may feel for his subject, and whatever dislike a Catholic may entertain to the Protestant bigotry of Sir Edward Coke, it ought not to be forgotten that, according to his lights, he was an honest, if a hard and an unmerciful man, that some ten years later he himself fell into disgrace and suffered imprisonment in the Tower, rather than yield on a point of principle, and that, vindictive as he could be in prosecuting a prisoner, one of his enemies—Lord Chancellor Egerton—said that his greatest fault was his “excessive popularity.”

Although he began his speech by saying that the Gunpowder Plot had been the greatest treason ever conceived against the greatest king that ever lived, he had presently a complimentary word or two to say as to the origins and previous lives of some of the conspirators. With an air of great truthfulness and fairness he said:—[389] “It is by some given out that they are such men as admit just exception, either desperate in estate, or base, or not settled in their wits; such as are sine religione, sine sede, sine fide, sine re, et sine spe—without religion, without habitation, without credit, without means, without hope. But (that no man, though never so wicked, may be wronged) true it is, they were gentlemen of good houses, of excellent parts, howsoever most perniciously seduced, abused, corrupted, and jesuited, of very competent fortunes and estates.”

After having said these comparatively gentle words concerning the laity, he launched forth in declamation against “those of the spirituality,” not one of whom was actually on his trial. “It is falsely said,” he cried, “that there is never a religious man in this action; for I never yet knew a treason without a Romish priest; but in this there are very many Jesuits, who are known to have dealt and passed through the whole action.” He then named four of these, beginning with Father Garnet, “besides their cursory men,” the first of which was Father Gerard. “The studies and practises of this sect principally consisted in two D’s, to wit, in deposing of kings and disposing of kingdoms.” Having thundered away at Jesuits and priests to his heart’s content, he exclaimed that “the Romish Catholicks” had put themselves under “Gunpowder Law, fit for Justices of Hell.”

“Note,” said he, with great vehemence, “that gunpowder was the invention of a Friar, one of that Romish Rabble.”[390] “All friars, religions, and priests were bad”; but “the principal offenders are the seducing Jesuits, men that use the reverence of Religion, yea, even the most Sacred and Blessed name of Jesus as a mantle to cover their impiety, blasphemy, treason, and rebellion, and all manner of wickedness.”

No speech in those days was considered perfect without a few words of astrology, so he called the attention of the Court to the remarkable fact “that it was in the entering of the Sun into the Tropick of Capricorn, when they” [the conspirators] “began their mine; noting that by mineing they should descend, and by hanging ascend.”

In the latter part of his pompous harangue, there was a passage which must have been very unpleasant hearing to the prisoners, however interesting to the rest of the audience.[391]

“The conclusion shall be from the admirable clemency and moderation of the King, in that howsoever these traitors have exceeded all others their predecessors in mischief, and Crescente, malitia crescere debuit, etc., Poena; yet neither will the King exceed the usual punishment of Law, nor invent any new torture or torment for them, but is graciously pleased to afford them an ordinary course of trial, as an ordinary punishment, much inferior to their offence.” Nor was this reference to a “new torture” a mere figure of rhetoric on the part of the Attorney-General; for a few days earlier,[392] in both houses of Parliament, a proposal had been made to petition the King “to stay judgment until Parliament should have time to consider some extraordinary mode of punishment, which might surpass in horror even the scenes which usually occurred at the execution of traitors.” To their credit be it spoken, this suggestion was negatived by both Lords and Commons.

“And surely,” continued Coke, “worthy of observation is the punishment by law provided for High Treason, which we call Crimen lÆsÆ Majestatis. For first after a traitor hath had his fair trial, and is convicted and attainted, he shall have his judgment to be drawn to the place of execution from his prison, as being not worthy any more to tread upon the face of the earth, whereof he was made. Also for that he hath been retrograde to Nature, therefore is he drawn backwards at a horse-tail. And whereas God hath made the head of man the highest and most supreme part, as being his chief grace and ornament: PronÁque cum spectent Animalia cÆtera terram, Os homini sublime dedit; he must be drawn with his head declining downward, and lying so near the ground as may be, being thought unfit to take benefit of the common air. For which cause also he shall be strangled, being hanged up by the neck between heaven and earth, as deemed unworthy of both, or either; as likewise, that the eyes of men may behold, and their hearts contemn him. Then is he to be cut down alive, and to have —— cut off, and burnt before his face, as being unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any generation after him; his bowels and inlayed parts taken out and burnt, who inwardly conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible Treason. After, to have his head cut off, which had imagined the mischief. And lastly, his body to be quartered, and the quarters set up in some high and eminent place, to the view and detestation of men, and to become a prey for the Fouls of the Air.”

Considering that the prisoners had not yet been found guilty, and that even had they been, it was no business of his to pass sentence on them, this pointless and objectless description of their probable fate was as gratuitous as it was cruel on the part of the Attorney-General.

With the prisoners, other than Sir Everard Digby, I have nothing to do, and it will suffice to say, that, at the conclusion of the Attorney-General’s speech, the depositions of their examinations in the Tower—“the voluntary confessions of all the said several traitors in writings subscribed with their own proper hands”—were then read aloud. These are very interesting, and have already been partially used in framing the story in the preceding pages. They are humble and penitent in tone, and as a specimen of this apparent penitence I will quote the opening of one of the longest, namely that by Thomas Winter.[393]

“My most honorable Lordes.—Not out of hope to obtayne pardon, for speakinge of my temporall past, I may say the fault is greater than can be forgiven, nor affectinge hereby the title of a good subject, for I must redeeme my countrey from as great a danger as I have hazarded the bringinge her into, before I can purchase any such opinion; only at your Ho. Commans I will breifely sett downe my owne accusation, and how farr I have proceeded in this busyness w^ch I shall the faythfuller doe since I see such courses are not pleasinge to Allmighty God, and that all or the most material parts have been allready confessed.”

At the conclusion of the public reading of these confessions, the Lord Chief Justice made some remarks to the jury, and then directed them to consider of their verdict; upon “which they retired into a separate place.”[394]

Sir Everard Digby was then arraigned by himself upon a separate indictment issued by Sir Christopher Yelverton and other special commissioners of Oyer & Terminer, on the 16th of January, at Wellingborough, in Northamptonshire, and delivered to the same commission in Middlesex that had tried the other prisoners. It charged him with High Treason in conspiring the death of the king, with conferring with Catesby in Northamptonshire concerning the Gunpowder Plot, assenting to the design, and taking the oath of secrecy.

As soon as the indictment was read, Sir Everard began to make a speech; but was interrupted by being told that he must first plead, either guilty or not guilty, and that then he would be allowed to say what he liked.

He at once confessed that he was guilty of the treason; and then he spoke of the motives which had led him to it.[395] The first of these was neither ambition, nor discontent, nor ill-will towards any member of Parliament, but his intense friendship and affection for Robert Catesby, whose influence over him was so great that he could not help risking his own property and his life at his bidding. The second motive was the cause of religion, on behalf of which he was glad to endanger “his estate, his life, his name, his memory, his posterity, and all worldly and earthly felicity whatsoever.” His third motive was prompted by the broken promises to Catholics, and had as its object the prevention of the harder laws which they feared and professed to have solid reasons for fearing, from the new Parliament; as “that Recusant’s Wives, and women, should be liable to the Mulct as well as their husbands and men.” And further, that “it was supposed, that it should be made a PrÆmunire onely to be a Catholick.”

Having stated the motives of his crime, he proceeded to make his petitions—[396] “That sithens his offence was confined and contained within himself, that the punishment also of the same might extend only to himself, and not be transferred either to his Wife, Children, Sisters, or others: and therefore for his Wife he humbly craved, that she might enjoy her Joynture, his Son the benefit of an Entail made long before any thought of this action; his Sisters, their just and due portions which were in his hands; his Creditors, their rightful Debts; which that he might more justly set down under his hand, he requested, that before his death, his Man (who was better acquainted both with the men and the particulars than himself) might be licensed to come unto him. Then prayed he pardon of the King and Ll. for his guilt, and lastly, he entreated to be beheaded, desiring all men to forgive him, and that his death might satisfie them for his trespass.”

The daylight was waning quickly in the great hall of Westminster, on that short January day, when Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General, rose from his seat, at the conclusion of Sir Everard Digby’s dignified but distressed speech. He had already shown refinement of cruelty in treating the prisoners to a detailed description of the horrors of the death that was awaiting them, and he was now again ready to inflict as much pain as possible.

As to Sir Everard’s friendship with Catesby, he said, it was “mere folly, and wicked Conspiracy”; his religion was “Error and Heresie”; his promises—it does not appear that he had made any—were “idle and vain presumptions”; “as also his fears, false alarms, Concerning Wives that were Recusants.” “If a man married one,” great reason there is, “that he or they should pay for it”; but if a wife “were no Recusant at the time of Marriage”—as had been the case with Lady Digby, although he did not mention her by name—“and yet afterwards he suffer her to be corrupted and seduced, by admitting Priests and Romanists into his house”—Roger Lee and Father Gerard, for instance, Sir Everard might understand him to imply—“good reason that he, be he Papist or Protestant, should pay for his negligence and misgovernment.”

Next he dealt with Sir Everard’s petitions on behalf of his wife, children, sisters, &c., and on this point he became eloquent.[397] “Oh how he doth now put on the bowels of Nature and Compassion in the perils of his private and domesticated estate! But before, when the publick state of his Countrey, when the King, the Queen, the tender Princes, the Nobles, the whole Kingdom, were designed to a perpetual destruction, Where was then this piety, this Religious affection?” “All Nature, all Humanity, all respect of Laws both Divine and Humane, were quite abandoned; then there was no conscience made to extirpate the whole Nation, and all for a pretended zeal to the Catholick Religion, and the justification of so detestable and damnable a Fact.”

Here Sir Everard Digby interrupted the great lawyer with the remark that he had not justified the fact, but had confessed that he deserved the vilest death; and that all he had done was to seek mercy, “and some moderation of justice.”

As to moderation of justice, replied the Attorney-General, how could a man expect or ask for it who had acted in direct opposition to all mercy and all justice? And had he not already had most ample and most undeserved moderation shown to him? Verily he ought “to admire the great moderation and mercy of the King, in that, for so exorbitant a crime, no new torture answerable thereunto was devised to be inflicted upon him.” Was it not sufficient consolation to him to reflect upon his good fortune in this respect? Sir Everard had talked about his wife and children. Well! did he forget how he had said “that for the Catholick Cause he was content to neglect the ruine of himself, his Wife, his Estate, and all”? Oh! he should be made content enough on this point. Here was an appropriate text for him:—“Let his Wife be a widow, and his Children vagabonds, let his posterity be destroyed, and in the next generation let his name be quite put out.” Then Sir Edward Coke spoke directly to Sir Everard, and said:—“For the paying of your Creditors, it is equal and just, but yet fit the King be first satisfied and paid, to whom you owe so much, as that all you have is too little: yet these things must be left to the pleasure of his Majesty, and the course of Justice and Law.” Fortunately for Sir Everard, “in respect for the time (for it grew now dark)” the Attorney General spoke “very briefly.”

One of the nine Commissioners, appointed to try the prisoners, now addressed Sir Everard. His words came with more force, perhaps it might be said with more cruel force, because he was himself a Catholic. This was Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, and second son of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had been beheaded on Tower Hill, nearly sixty years earlier, in the reign of Henry VIII. This Commissioner had espoused the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots,[398] and he was rather ostentatiously put forward at this trial, and afterwards at that of Father Garnet, to prove his loyalty and to counteract the jealousy and suspicion which had been caused by the appointment of a man of his religion[399] to the Wardenship of the Cinque Ports. Banks wrote of him,[400] “other authors represent him as the most contemptible and despicable of man-kind; a wretch, that it causes astonishment to reflect, that he was the son of the generous, the noble, and accomplished Earl of Surrey.[401] He was a learned man, but a pedant, dark and mysterious, and consequently far from possessing masterly abilities. He was the grossest of flatterers, &c.”

Northampton began his speech as follows:—

[402]“You must not hold it strange, Sir Everard Digby, though at this time being pressed in duty, Conscience and Truth, I do not suffer you to wander in the Laberinth of your own idle conceits without opposition, to seduce others, as your self have been seduced, by false Principles; or to convey your self by charms of imputation, by clouds of errour, and by shifts of lately devised ‘Equivocation’; out of that streight wherein your late secure and happy fortune hath been unluckily entangled; but yet justly surprised, by the rage and revenge of your own rash humors. If in this crime (more horrible than any man is able to express) I could lament the estate of any person upon earth, I could pity you, but thank your self and your bad counsellours, for leading you into a Crime of such a kind; as no less benummeth in all faithfull, true and honest men, the tenderness of affection, than it did in you, the sense of all humanity. That you were once well thought of, and esteemed by the late Queen, I can witness, having heard her speak of you with that grace which might have encouraged a true gentleman to have run a better course: Nay, I will add further, that there was a time, wherein you were as well affected to the king our master’s expectation, though perhaps upon false rumours and reports, that he would have yielded satisfaction to your unprobable and vast desires: but the seed that wanted moisture (as our Saviour Himself reporteth) took no deep root: that zeal which hath no other end or object than the pleasing of it self, is quickly spent: and Trajan, that worthy and wise Emperour, had reason to hold himself discharged of all debts to those, that had offended more by prevarication, than they could deserve by industry.”

The main contention of his long and wordy speech was to refute the charge of broken promises to his co-religionists brought by Sir Everard Digby in his description of his motives. It was well-known that the Catholics considered the king guilty of perfidy on this point, and that they based their accusation chiefly upon the reports of Father Watson’s celebrated interview with James in Scotland, a matter with which I dealt in an early chapter. Northampton denied that James had ever encouraged the Catholics to expect any favour.

He made a strong point of Percy’s having asserted that the king had promised toleration to the Catholics; asking why, if this were really the case, Percy, at the beginning of the king’s reign, thought it worth while to employ Guy Fawkes and others to plot against the king in Spain? He wound up by praying for Sir Everard’s repentance in this world and his forgiveness in the next.

Then Lord Salisbury spoke. He began by acknowledging his own connection, by marriage, with Sir Everard, and then he proceeded, with even greater zeal than Northampton, to imply that the prisoner’s plea of broken promises to Catholics would be understood to mean bad faith on the part of the king; and it was thought by some that Sir Everard would have had his sentence commuted for beheading, had it not been for what Salisbury now said.[403] After defending the king from all imputation of faithlessness towards his Catholic subjects, Salisbury referred to Sir Everard’s personal guilt, and dwelt upon Guy Fawkes’s evidence that, at Gothurst, he had expressed a fear lest the gunpowder stored beneath the houses of Parliament, might, during the wet weather in October, have “grown dank.”

When Salisbury had finished, Sergeant Philips got up and “prayed the judgment of the court upon the verdict of the Jury against the seven first prisoners, and against Sir Everard Digby upon his own confession.” Each prisoner was then formally asked what he had to say why judgment of death should not be pronounced against him. Finally Lord Chief Justice Popham described and defended the laws made by Queen Elizabeth against priests, recusants, and receivers and harbourers of priests,[404] which seems to have been a little wide of the subject of the crime of the prisoners, and then he solemnly pronounced the usual sentence for high treason upon all the eight men who stood convicted before him.

Then Sir Everard bowed towards the commissioners who had tried him and said:—“If I may but hear any of your Lordships say you forgive me, I shall go more cheerfully to the gallows.”

They all immediately replied:—“God forgive you, and we do.”

And thus, late in the evening, this memorable trial ended, and the prisoners were conveyed by torches to their barge; then they were rowed down the river to the Tower, and led through the dark “Traitor’s Gate” to their cells.

FOOTNOTES: