Francis Tresham – the forgotten plotter who betrayed Guy Fawkes

This edited article about the Gunpowder Plot originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 882  published on 9 December 1978.

The arrest of Guy Fawkes by Ron Embleton

The day Francis Tresham sat down and wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, he could hardly have guessed what a momentous impact his words would have on every schoolboy and girl in Britain for the next 300 years and more.

And who, you may ask, was Francis Tresham? He was the man who gave us our Guy Fawkes’ Day.

Tresham never very much liked the plot from the moment he was persuaded to join it. The more he thought of it, the less he liked it. A fortnight before the big bang that was planned to send King James I and his Parliament to oblivion, Tresham decided to betray the plot.

Why? Once, scholars thought that Tresham wrote his letter of betrayal to Lord Monteagle, his brother-in-law and a prominent Catholic, because he knew that Monteagle would be in the House at the opening of Parliament, and he was determined to save him.

Recently, however, it has been suggested that Tresham had already told Monteagle of the plot. They both agreed that Tresham should write the letter so that Monteagle could show it to his political friends and warn them, and also so that the plotters would have time to escape. That is possibly why Tresham did not sign his letter.

However that may be, in the afternoon of 26th October, 1605, there was a knock on the door of Monteagle’s house in Hoxton, a busy parish just outside the walls of London. Monteagle’s servant, a man named Ward, went to answer it. On the doorstep he saw a tall man wearing a cloak. Keeping his face covered all the time, the stranger handed over the letter that betrayed the Gunpowder Plot and then turned abruptly on his heels.

Ward took the letter to his master. This is what it said:

My lord,

Out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care for your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance of this Parliament, for God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. And think not slightly of this advertisement, but retire yourself into your country, where you may expect the event in safety, for though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them.

This counsel is not to be condemned, because it may do you good and can do you no harm, for the danger is past as soon as you have burned this letter: and I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it, to whose holy protection I commend you.

Monteagle reacted promptly. He took the letter to Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, the head of the Government. The mysterious words of the letter made the two men think that some mischief by means of gunpowder might be meant, and one of them remembered the existence of a cellar under the Parliament building. Other members of the Government were consulted but it was agreed that they should do nothing until just before the opening of Parliament, so as not to alarm the conspirators and give them an opportunity to escape.

The King, who had been in the country, returned to London on 3rd November and was shown the letter. It was agreed that the cellar should be searched next day.

That task fell to the Lord Chamberlain, who did not much believe in the plot, and was afraid of being laughed at for going to look for gunpowder and finding none. In fact, he found a pile of faggots and a stranger holding a lantern standing behind them. Under the faggots were the barrels of gunpowder.

The stranger, who was now identified as Guy Fawkes, was arrested, bound hand and foot and taken off to be tortured for the names of his fellow-conspirators before being hanged, drawn and quartered. The Gunpowder Plot was over and fireworks night was born.

To discover why it was so blatantly betrayed we need to go back to its beginnings. The conspirators had been assembled in the first place by a political activist named Robert Catesby, a Catholic who was enraged by King James’s new anti-Catholic laws.

In all, there were about 20 in the plot, hatched by Catesby at his home at Ashby St. Legers, near Coventry. Francis Tresham was one of the last conspirators to join. Another latecomer to the team was Guy Fawkes, an explosives expert who had gained his knowledge while serving as a soldier of fortune with the Spanish army in the Low Countries.

For nearly a whole year before the planned big bang on 5th November, the conspirators were hard at work piling up the gunpowder in the Parliament cellar. They laid down 36 barrels – one and a half tons of explosives. In all this time they were, of course, vulnerable to a betrayer – and it is strange that they never acted resolutely on their suspicion that they were about to be betrayed.

Catesby did not know much about Francis Tresham, but what he did know inclined him to trust the man; and since Catesby was leader of the plot, the others accepted his view. Indeed, Tresham seems to have earned that trust until about three weeks before 5th November.

Then, at Daventry on 14th October, some of the conspirators, including Tresham, had a secret meeting after which Tresham rode off to London with Guy Fawkes. Next day some of the conspirators met again in the capital. They included Tresham and Catesby and it was then suggested, not for the first time, that the conspirators should warn certain Catholic members of the House of Lords to absent themselves from the State Opening of Parliament on 5th November. Tresham was certainly in the forefront of this debate.

Later in October there was another meeting and again Tresham was noted to be a strong supporter of sending a warning. Some of the conspirators began to suspect him – would he, they wondered, blurt out the whole plot at the last moment just to save someone’s skin?

They sent a note to him to come and meet them again, intending to ask him some direct questions. In answer, Tresham sent back a note apologising for not being able to turn up. He went, instead, to another conspirators’ meeting on 1st November and made an announcement that shattered the other conspirators.

“Let’s call it all off,” he said. “It’s all too dangerous.”

Even as he spoke, Tresham knew that Monteagle had received his letter – that he had betrayed his friends.

Catesby called for order. “It’s too late,” he said. “We’ve all worked too hard and too long for this to fail now . . .”

Early in the morning of 5th November, a few hours after the arrest of Guy Fawkes, the conspirators heard of the ruin of their hopes and, taking to their horses, fled from London. Catesby and three others died in a shoot-out; the rest were all captured. Seven of them, as well as Fawkes, were hanged on January 31st, 1606.

Even for the great betrayer Francis Tresham, there was to be no mercy. He was sent to the Tower as a prisoner, and in the Tower he died.