Free The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) by Alan Haynes Page B

Catholic gentry’.
    Drunkenness was an accepted habit of the day; affrays in the street were common. On the night of 18 March 1600 the unenviably nicknamed ‘Pox’ Baynham (Sir Edmund Baynham), one of a number of young rips who swarmed around the Earl of Essex, led such an affray in the Mermaid. At midnight they ‘cast off their cloaks and upper garments’, drew rapiers and daggers and marched through the streets until they came upon the bemused watch. After a scuffle (and no recorded injuries, or injuries worth recording perhaps) they were overcome and locked in the Counter prison to sober up. Baynham was in a belligerent mood and when the story reached Elizabeth (who must have wearied of these performances) she set the case before the star chamber, ‘for the more and exemplar punishment of so great and outrageous disorder’. The rioters at first denied the charges, but when brought before the court on 6 July ‘confessed their faults and submitted themselves to the court and proved that all was done in the drink and heat’. Each man was fined £200 and imprisoned, but Baynham was evidently free to join the Essex revolt, an even more ‘outrageous disorder’. His plea this time was ignorance and the sentence death, but once again he was pardoned (in August 1601) after paying Ralegh a large sum. Yet as the leader of the so-called ‘damned crew’, Baynham had learned nothing about civic decorum, and when Elizabeth died he was briefly sent to the Marshalsea prison by the privy council for declaring that James VI was a schismatic ‘and that he would not acknowledge him as King’.
    After Essex had led his followers in the miserable skirmish that ended his career, some sixty-six gentlemen were imprisoned and fifteen of them were suspected Catholics. Sir Griffin Markham was among them and fetched up in the Fleet; Robert Catesby, who was wounded, was sent to the Tower and might have been executed then had not Elizabeth been moved to save a very personable young man from a premature death. Instead she substituted a heavy fine of 4,000 marks (getting on for £3,000), and Catesby had the mortification of seeing 1,200 marks of his bestowed on Francis Bacon who was always short of money. To raise such a very large sum Catesby was forced to sell Chastleton, his manor in Oxfordshire, and for this employed the good offices of his friend Thomas Percy, steward or agent to the Earl of Northumberland. When Catesby left the Tower he still had his head, but no inclination to use it for sober reflection, and his immoderate actions and vexatious losses caused no loss of esteem for him among certain of his contemporaries. It was noted by John Gerard that Catesby was ‘respected in all companies of such as are counted there swordsmen or men of action, that few were in the opinions of most men preferred before him and he increased much his acquaintance and friends.’ The gunpowder plot was Catesby’s conspiracy and this has led certain Catholic writers on the period to view him with morbid suspicion. Hilaire Belloc sternly called him ‘a doubtful character’ and wondered if he had betrayed his own cause to the government. 1 More recently Father Francis Edwards, SJ, has suggested something along the same lines, and colours it with the thought that having been obliged to sell Chastleton and live with his mother at Ashby St Legers, he would not have been inclined to embark on a new episode that, if it failed, threatened total ruin. 2 Edwards also cites a deathbed confession by one George Bartlet, apparently a servant of Catesby, that his master went to Salisbury House several nights before the discovery ‘and was always brought privately in at a back door’. This is thin stuff, too remote from many details available in other sources of a dynamic enthusiast.
    Robert Catesby was born in 1573; tradition has it at Bushwood Hall, near Lapworth, some eleven miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. 3 It was the favoured residence of his devout