Henry Spink

Shortly after Midsummer (i.e., July), 1605, Father Garnet was at the Jesuit house at Fremland, in Essex. Catesby came there with Lord Mounteagle and Tresham.

At this meeting, in answer to a question, “Were Catholics able to make their part good by arms against the King?”— Mounteagle replied, “If ever they were, they are able now;” and then that young nobleman added this reason for his opinion, “The King is so odious to all sorts.”

At this interview Tresham said, “We must expect [i.e., wait for] the end of Parliament, and see what laws are made against Catholics, and then seek for help of foreign princes.”

“No,” said Garnet, “assure yourself they will do nothing.”

“What!” said my Lord Mounteagle, “will not the Spaniard help us? It is a shame!”[A]

[A] If Mounteagle was in the company of Catesby at Fremland in the summer of 1605, these two may have been together at Bath between the 12th October and the 26th. Catesby probably would endeavour to induce Lord Mounteagle to join Sir Everard Digby’s rebellion, as he did induce Stephen Littleton and Humphrey Littleton.

Then said Father Garnet, “You see we must all have patience.”[100]

It is also to be remembered that when Sir Edmund Baynham, a Gloucestershire Catholic gentleman of good family— but of whom Winter said “he was not a man fit for the business at home,” i.e., the purposed Gunpowder massacre— went to Flanders and Rome in the first week of September, 1605, Mounteagle appears to have written certain letters of introduction or of general recommendation, in Baynham’s behalf, to English Catholics residing in Flanders or in Rome. Jardine says that “it is not quite certain that Baynham was himself entrusted with the great secret of the Plot.”[101]

I think that it is morally certain he was not.

Sir Edmund Baynham[A] was intended by the prime conspirators to be at Rome to justify (if he could) to the Pope any action that the conspirators might have perpetrated on or after November the Fifth in behalf of their religion. But the prime conspirators were far too astute “to open their mouth” to let a chattering, hare-brained swashbuckler like Baynham “fill other people’s” in every wine-shop en route for “the Eternal City.”

Guy Fawkes probably was authorised to impart and possibly actually did, under the oath, impart some knowledge of the Plot to Captain Hugh Owen, a Welsh Roman Catholic soldier of fortune serving in Flanders under the Archdukes.[102] Owen’s name figures in the Earl of Salisbury’s instructions to Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General who prosecuted the surviving Gunpowder conspirators in the historic Westminster Hall.

Moreover, I have thought that at least some of the powder must have been purchased in Flanders through the good offices of the said Captain Owen. The powder and the mining tools and implements appear to have been stored at first in the house at Lambeth and placed under the charge of Robert Keyes and, eventually, of Christopher Wright. The powder was, I take it, packed in bags, and the bags themselves packed in padlocked hampers. Afterwards, I conclude, the powder bags were deposited in the barrels, and the barrels themselves carried by two of the conspirators, with aid of brewers’ slings, and deposited in the cellar, which apparently had at least two doors.