Guy Fawkes took the rap, but he was only a bit player. David Phillips tells the true story of 1605’s Mr Big
IT is said — not always with tongue fully in cheek — that Guy Fawkes was the last man to enter the Houses of Parliament with honourable intentions. He certainly took the rap — and it’s his effigy that is burned with glee every Bonfire Night when Britain marks the momentous events of November 5, 1605.
But the truth is that Fawkes was only a bit-part player in the intricate plot that was woven in rural Northamptonshire by local Catholics who had endured religious persecution at the hands of the Protestant ruling classes. It was here in the English Midlands lived the men who almost pulled off the most audacious terrorist act to take place on British soil.
If their plot had succeeded, the Protestant King James I and his Parliament would have been blown to smithereens by 36 barrels of gunpowder secreted in the cellars beneath Westminster. And the reason it didn’t succeed was because one of the plotters let the cat out of the bag.
Enter Mr Big . . .
That man was Francis Tresham, a member of a family who loved the countryside, gardening and the Catholic church in equal measure. He was the son of Sir Thomas Tresham – one of the wealthiest landowners in Northamptonshire, but who was persecuted by the fiercely Protestant ruling elite.
Sir Thomas had spent 15 years in prison the late 16th century for refusing to become a Protestant. On his release in 1593, he designed Rushton Lodge near Kettering as a protestation of his faith. His belief in the Holy Trinity was represented everywhere in the lodge by the number three: it had three walls, each 33 feet long, and each with three triangular windows and surmounted by three gargoyles. The building had three floors and a triangular chimney. The building was crowned by three steep gables, with three-sided obelisks at the apex. It was a highly-provocative act at a time.
In 1540, the Tresham family had also inherited the Lyveden estate, a few miles away near Oundle. Here, in 1595, Sir Thomas decided to create an elaborate pleasure garden in which to entertain his friends. It included a deer park, complete with tall mounds from which lady guests could watch the menfolk hunting on horseback, as well as ornamental moats, a labyrinth and orchards.
The centrepiece was to be a lavish, stone-built garden lodge. Just like Tresham’s smaller folly at Rushton, the design was full of religious symbolism. Inspired by St Peter’s in Rome, it was designed on a plan like a Greek cross. The building had three floors, each with three rooms. The exterior of the building was decorated with friezes of a religious nature. Tresham’s passionate Catholic beliefs were highlighted throughout by religious friezes and various inscriptions on the walls. Most inspirationally, it was designed so that when the sun shone through the parlour window in the morning, it cast the shadow of a crucifix against the wall behind.
The lodge boasted a great hall, parlour, bedroom, buttery and a servants’ kitchen, in which the bread ovens and fireplace can still be seen. But Sir Thomas died on September 11, 1605, before his masterpiece was complete. The unfinished lodge – known as Lyveden New Bield – was left without a roof.
The man expected to finish the project was Francis Tresham, born in 1567, and the eldest of Sir Thomas’s 11 children. He was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, but was not allowed to graduate because of his Catholic faith. Embittered, he soon got involved in radical politics and in 1601 was arrested for his part in a foiled rebellion to remove the previous monarch, Elizabeth I, from the throne. He was fined £2000 – an enormous sum in those days – which was paid by his father.
On October 14 1605, just a month after his father’s death, Francis Tresham was invited to take part in the Gunpowder Plot by his cousin, Robert Catesby, the ringleader of the conspirators, who owned the manor house at Ashby St Ledgers, in the west of the county. In the room above the gatehouse, the 13 plotters planned their audacious strike. They were angry that the new king had failed to deliver his promises to be more lenient to Catholics and were determined to blow up both the monarch and his Government.
They rented a house in Westminster, where Guy Fawkes lived as he assembled the huge arsenal of explosives that was due to be lit on November 5th when the king opened Parliament. And there’s little doubt that it would have happened but for Francis Tresham’s uneasy conscience.
Among the Members of Parliament who would have died in the blast were two of Tresham’s close relatives. One of them was his brother-in-law, the 4th Baron Monteagle, who received an “anonymous” letter on the evening of November 4, warning him of the plot. He handed it over to the authorities, who mounted a full-scale search of the Houses of Parliament. When the search reached the cellar, Guy Fawkes was caught, red-handed. Tresham, of course, had been the author of that fateful letter to Monteagle.
Unaware of developments in London, the rest of the plotters were waiting in the Old Lion Inn at Dunchurch, just over the county border in Warwickshire. Once they’d received news of the plot’s success, they had planned to ride to nearby Coombe Abbey, capture the King’s daughter, Elizabeth, and place her on the throne. Instead, they were themselves captured and taken to the Tower of London, where they were tortured, executed and their heads stuck on pikes for all to see.
Tresham was also arrested, on November 12, and taken to the Tower. He died there on December 22nd. It is thought he was poisoned, perhaps by well-wishers who didn’t want to see him butchered – hung, drawn and quartered – like his fellow plotters. But he was still treated like a traitor: his head was hacked off and displayed alongside those of his co-conspirators, while the rest of his body was tossed into a pit.
Most of his property was forfeited, and his younger brother, Lewis, inherited what little remained of the family estates. The Tresham fortune was gone – replaced in the main by huge debts. There was certainly not enough cash remaining to complete Sir Thomas Tresham’s beloved pleasure garden at Lyveden. The estate was eventually sold in 1643.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Remarkably, Lyveden New Bield somehow remained virtually untouched over the centuries. None of the estate’s subsequent owners attempted to complete the unfinished garden lodge, nor did they demolish the building for its fine, dressed limestone. Perhaps its remote location, miles from anywhere and deep within Rockingham Forest, was sufficient deterrent.
Lyveden was acquired by the National Trust in 1922. Although the stone-built garden lodge was left in its unfinished state, the overgrown gardens have been gradually restored, including the moats and the medieval orchard, which has been recreated over the last 15 years with 306 historically-accurate fruit trees, acquired from Brogdale Farm in Kent, home of the National Fruit Collection. The meadows around the lodge have been seeded with wild flowers and are a haven for butterflies and insects in the summer months.
Help in restoring the gardens came from an unexpected quarter – Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe. Aerial photographs taken by Hitler’s aircraft on a bombing reconnaissance mission during the Second World War revealed remarkable evidence of how the garden had looked 350 years earlier.
The images clearly showed a series of strange concentric circles, 400 feet across, that looked like a labyrinth or turf maze – a popular garden feature in Elizabethan times. The 1944 photograph also confirmed the whereabouts of one of Tresham’s orchards, with a series of regular planting holes visible. The discovery led to the garden being upgraded by English Heritage to Grade I listing, putting it on a par with great historic gardens such as Stourhead and Studley Royal.
The restoration of Lyveden New Bield’s gardens to their Tudor splendour is an ongoing project, but the garden lodge is of course being left in its unfinished state, just as it was in 1605 when its owner screwed up the Gunpowder Plot.
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