Gunpowder, treason and plot

Posted on November 5, 2015 by JuliaH

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

Actually there’s every reason why the plot might have been forgotten! There were at least four plots against James I during the early years of his reign. Yet it is Guy Fawkes, a York boy, who is remembered. This post is about two earlier plots and the wonderfully named Sir Griffin Markham.

Sir Griffin, the eldest son and heir of Thomas Markham, of Ollerton in Nottinghamshire, served as a soldier under the Earl of Essex in an expedition sent by Queen Elizabeth to the assistance of Henry IV of France. He was knighted during the siege of Rouen in 1591. He afterwards served in Ireland but there was a problem for this soldier that got worse with the passage of time. Sir Griffin was a Catholic at a time when being Catholic was a cause for suspicion and an impediment to power.

In the Parish Register of Mansfield it is stated that Griffin Markham was at the Market Cross in Mansfield and other gentlemen of the region for the proclamation of the accession of James I (pictured at the start of this post). Catholics had every reason to hope that persecution, which they faced during Elizabeth’s reign, might ease – after all, James’ mother and wife were Catholic. Yet, it appears that within a very short time of James’ accession Sir Griffin wasn’t a happy man. Four months later he was arrested on a treason charge – he’d become involved in a plot that history knows as the Bye Plot or the Treason of the Priests. (Ironically, Jesuits who were concerned that the Bye Plot was a harebrained scheme that would result in major difficulties for English Catholics revealed the conspiracy to Cecil.)

During the course of investigations into the Bye Plot a second plot, which became known as the Main Plot, was uncovered. The two were separate but involved many of the same people!

Sir Griffin Markham, Lord Grey (a radical puritan), Lord Cobham and George Brooke found themselves incarcerated in the Tower along with a couple of catholic priests- William Watson and William Clarke. They were charged with a plot to kidnap James and his Privy Council and then force them to make concessions to the Catholics including the repeal of anti-Catholic legeslation…like that was going to happen and with only three hundred men – not that there is any evidence of Sir Griffin being able to round up a posse that size. This was the Bye Plot.

At the same time Sir Walter Raleigh found himself under arrest on account of a slightly different plot called the ‘Main Plot’ to depose James (‘the kyngge and his cubbes’) and replace him with Arbella (Arabella) Stuart, the grand-daughter of Bess of Hardwick through her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish and Charles Stuart Earl of Lennox – who was the son of Margaret Douglas who in turn was the daughter of Margaret Tudor, eldest daughter of King Henry VII of England.

It is probable that Raleigh was caught in the net of the Main Plot because of his friendship with Lord Cobham who’d been travelling around Europe have shady chats with Spanish types looking at bankrolling the venture. The problem for Raleigh was that Cobham travelled home via Jersey where Raleigh was governor and clearly stopped off for a chat with his old friend. Cecil put two together, or so it would appear, and found an opportunity to rid himself of a political adversary. There’s another theory that says that Raleigh played his old friend along playing the role of agent provocateur and then managed to get caught in Cecil’s net – whichever way you look at the Main Plot it seems hard to believe that Raleigh would plot with the Spanish. There’s a third view that Raleigh himself spoke of at his trial which was that he thought that he was being offered a pension – not treasonable and something that Cecil was in receipt of himself!

The common denominators between the Main Plot and the Bye Plot were George Brooke and Lord Cobham who were, incidentally, brothers.

The Bye Plot conspirators including Lord Cobham were tried in Winchester and found guilty. A scaffold was built especially for the occasion in Winchester Castle. The warrant was signed on the 7^th December and Sir Griffin went to his fate on the 9^th complaining bitterly that his confession had been given on the promise of leniency. It was only as he was just about to lay his head on the block that a member of the King’s household arrived with another warrant from James I giving him an extra two hours of life. The same grisly process awaited Lord Grey who prayed for half an hour before the sheriff issued the stay of execution and then Lord Cobham. All three mounted the scaffold, thought their last moments had come only to be given a short reprieve at the last moment – sounding suspiciously like someone somewhere had a very nasty sense of humour or someone in authority wanted to entrap Raleigh through a pre-execution confession from his fellow conspirators.

Each of the three men also believed that the other two men had been executed until they were all bought back to the scaffold for a piece of Jacobean theatre contrived by the king for the news that they were to be spared death but banished from the kingdom. Brooke was the only one to be executed in Winchester, even though he might have reasonably expected leniency being married to Lord Cecil’s sister (talk about a family embarrassment).

Raleigh spent the next thirteen years in The Tower and Parliament passed an act called the ‘Statute Against Catholics’ banishing Catholic priests from England was passed into law as a result of the Bye Plot. Sir Griffin ended his life in continental poverty. According to some stories it is said that he often donned disguise and returned home, and that he assisted in the attempted escape of Arabella Stuart.

Fraser, Lady Antonia. (2003). The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. London: (Phoenix) Orion Books

Orange, James. (1840) History and Antiquities of Nottingham Vol II. London: Hamilton, Adams and Co. pp733-745

Nazareth Paget

Posted on March 1, 2014 by JuliaH

Nazareth Newton was the daughter of Sir John Newton and a cousin to Sir Robert Dudley. Her first marriage was to Sir Thomas Southwell of Woodrising in Norfolk. The family was noted for its catholicism but this didn’t prevent the widowed Nazareth from serving Elizabeth I.

The link to Robert Dudley is a reminder that much of the Tudor court were related to one another somewhere along the line. Nazareth’s web of unexpected connections extends to another generation. One of her daughters with Southwell was called Elizabeth. She became the mistress of the Earl of Essex and gave birth to his illegitimate son Walter Devereux.

In 1570 Nazareth married Sir Thomas Paget, the Third Baron Paget. His father was Sir William Paget – Henry VIII’s close adviser and it was perhaps because of the link with the Dudleys that Nazareth married Paget or perhaps they met at court. In any event Nazareth’s second marriage was a disaster. She was not permitted to keep any servants from her home in Woodrising and her new husband grew steadily more firm in his recusancy to the extent that he organised a sermon by the Jesuit Edmund Campion and was forced to take a course in the doctrine of the Church of England whilst under house arrest in Windsor. It did no good. Paget attempted to avoid Protestant Church services and his servants interrupted an easter service. His career was ruined. His home life was even worse. In the end he wrote to Cecil explaining that he and his wife were parting because, in his words, of the ‘continual jars.’

David McKeen is less sympathetic to Nazareth as this quote shows:

Thomas Paget, son of the protector of Cobham’s youth, a cultivated nobleman in whose house William Byrd found employment and whose loss to England and “theCommonwealth of Learning” even that notable defender of the Elizabethan settlement William Camden deeply deplored, was informed against by his strident wife Nazareth Newton, whose perpetual demands had driven them to separate despite Burghley’s efforts
to reconcile them and Paget’s reluctance to leave the woman he so self-destructively loved. Paget felt that he had a reason to remain in England so long as there was hope of regaining his wife, but when she died in 1583 he too fled abroad.

From McKeen, David, A Memory of Honour; The Life of William Brooke,
Lord Cobham (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1986), p. 380:

Thomas was stripped of his title and eventually gained a pension from Philip II of Spain. The Duke of Parma consulted with him about the proposed Armada invasion of 1588.

Nazareth’s brother-in-law Charles was also a Catholic but his involvement with European intrigues was rather more complicated.

Richard Topcliffe – torturer

Posted on February 28, 2014 by JuliaH

Richard Topcliffe, born in 1532, the eldest son of Robert Topcliffe of Somerby in Lincolnshire was orphaned early in his life and raised by an uncle. Perhaps he tore the legs off spiders but history has not recorded this information. He became a lawyer at Gray’s Inn and was an elected Member of Parliament for Beverley in Yorkshire. Again, perhaps he embodied all that was appalling about both professions – but that’s speculation.

What is fact is that Topcliffe was not a nice man. He is more ordinarily remembered as Elizabeth I’s interrogator – you would not have wished to have met this man down a dark alley and most especially not in the dungeons of the Tower of London nor in his own home where he’d improved on the official instruments of torture in his spare time.

Topcliffe had such a reputation for sadism and cruelty as well as enjoyment of his work (he took his work home at the weekend to his house in Westminster where he had a specially adapted cellar) that when he met Father Gerard for the first time he felt that his name was sufficiently terrifying on its own. Gerard was unimpressed.

He was responsible for the torture of Robert Southwell, Henry Garnet and John Gerard (who described him as a ’cruel creature’) as well as other Jesuit priests. He tortured ordinary citizens as well if it was believed that they could help track down priests and stamp out recusancy. Ben Johnson, the playwright, came to his attention and the unfortunate Father Gennings so outraged him that when Gennings was executed Topcliffe had the priest cut down far too soon so that the dying man was still alive when his heart was flung into the flames.

His most infamous act was the torture by racking and then the rape of Ann Bellamy in order to extract Robert Southwell’s location. Ann came from a notable Catholic family. One of her relations, Jerome Bellamy, was executed for his part in the Babbington Plot He covered this outrage up when she became pregnant by forcing her to marry his servant Nicholas Jones in July 1592. Ann’s mother was to die in prison and Southwell was captured and tortured most horribly with Mrs Nicholas Jones being forced to come to court to give evidence against him. Gerard was not far wrong when he described the interrogator as a ‘veteran in evil’.

Just for good measure Topcliffe also attempted to blackmail the Archbishop of Canterbury…

Cecil became alarmed about the appetites of the man who fantasied about having an intimate relationship with his queen and described his fantasies as he tortured his victims. He had Topcliffe removed from his post but not for long. The man was too creative in his use of rack and thumbscrews to ignore besides, Topcliffe regarded his authority as coming directly from the queen rather than Cecil or Walsingham.

He received rewards and wealth for his help in tracking down the threat of the Jesuit Counter-Reformation in England; after all Topcliffe had suffered as well. All that exposure in dank and damp dungeons had left him with rheumatism and a pronounced limp.

Topcliffe died in 1604 at home in his bed having retired to Yorkshire and also to his home at Badley Hall near Ashbourne in Derbyshire which he acquired in 1603. It had previously belonged to a catholic called Thomas Fitzherbert – Thankfully Fitzherbert hadn’t encountered Topcliffe in his place of work; he lived until 1640 as a Jesuit in Europe.