Martin Stephen: The Desperate remedy

Gresham had guessed at much of it, of course, but Cecil had not denied it. He had known Fawkes had to be a triple agent as soon as he had seen the completed mine. It was Fawkes who supervised the mine early on, Fawkes who put the powder in the cellar and kept watch on it. The activity needed to finish the mine would never have escaped him.

Mr Fawkes, thought Gresham, was about to have an interesting exchange with Cecil.

They had come upon him at midnight, dragged him out of his sleep and from his comfortable chamber and down into the bowels of the White Tower. What had gone wrong? His grim-faced gaolers would not speak in answer to his entreaties. He knew they showed prisoners the rack, the mere sight of the obscene contraption enough often to break men. His hope died as they strapped him to the machine, still without a word being spoken.

The pain was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to Guy Fawkes. There were no words for the appalling agony that drenched through every fibre of his being, the pain that defied all experience, the pain that made his scream simply a tiny little thing heard far away on the winds of his destruction. They did not take him from the rack when finally he lost consciousness. They threw filthy water over his tortured, strung-out frame, and waited for part of him to emerge from the dark. When he did so he could hardly think. In losing its absolute top, searing edge, the pain had almost worsened, spreading out in equal measure to every limb and every extremity of that limb. It had broken his body, that he knew. He would never walk properly again, stand up like a man. It had broken his spirit too, that he knew.

The face of Cecil loomed over him, devilish in the torchlight.

'You did not tell me about Lord Percy,' he said. 'That was a pity.'

He turned to the gaoler.

'Rack him. And then rack him again. Yet keep him alive. He must walk or be carried on to the scaffold.'

The screams followed Cecil as he swung out of the chamber.

Cecil and Guy Fawkes met only once thereafter, alone. Fawkes had been tossed like a rag doll on to the rough cot in his cell.

Courteously, Cecil had asked one of the gaolers to straighten out his limbs as they lay on the bed, contemplating his fingernails as Fawkes screamed and sobbed as each limb was gently rearranged. Cecil waited. Patience was something he had always had plenty of. When there was something resembling a light of intelligence in Fawkes's eyes, he spoke.

‘You are a dead man, of course. You must realise that?'

Something that might have been a nod came from Fawkes.

'So the issue is not whether you die, but how. We could arrange for you to be kissed by the rack again…' A shudder passed through Fawkes's frame. 'Or, of course, we could arrange for a clean break at your execution.'

Those sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered were first of all hung, and then had their entrails dug out before being chopped into pieces. If the prisoner made a suitable confession and prepared to die in a manner that pleased the crowd and the executioner, he was let to hang until he was either dead or wholly unconscious, and only then cut down and dismembered. Other prisoners would be cut down almost immediately the halter had tightened around their neck, and left to experience the full pleasure of the executioner's crude surgery.

'Now,' said Cecil, almost gently, 'let us consider. Is it the rack, or a slice through the tongue to render you speechless and a long death on the scaffold? Or no more meetings with the rack and a quick death? Well, it will mean a trial, of course. And we could always try to speak out there, couldn't we? And an execution, too, where we might wish to speak more than the people should hear. But it would be good, very good for Guy Fawkes to go to his death and say nothing. What talk can there be of conspiracy if the man who was set to blow the powder says nothing of it? Oh, they will talk and conjecture, for a thousand years for all I know. But with you silent, my friend, they can never know, can they? No, my friend, much as it grieves me, we are in a bargaining situation. You have something I need — your silence. I have the power to grant you an easy death, little though you deserve it.'

Fawkes stirred on his cot. A croak emerged from his mouth. Cecil gazed carefully at the prostrate figure, checking that no knife or weapon was lurking on his person, and bent down close to listen.

'Ah, my Lord of Northumberland? You are still loyal to him, are you? A very praiseworthy thing in a servant.' He bent down again, to listen to the muted whisperings. He stood up, a colder and darker tone in his voice. 'Agreed. I swear on my oath that Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, will not be brought to execution by any power or inaction on my part. Strangely enough, as another has recently pointed out, I have never broken my sworn oath.

'Yet I wonder if your concern for the ninth Earl might not be linked to his support of your wife and child? Yes, I know of it. And of them, though a devil of a time it has taken me to find them. So I will swear another oath, swear that they will both die, most horribly and at most great length, should you break your oath of silence.'

Why take the risk? thought Cecil, as he swept from the room, leaving the broken figure behind him.

Gresham would have told him. Gresham would have said that he was a man whose whole life had been based on control, on having the strings of the puppets in his hands. Then a figure, Henry Gresham, had come along and shown that those same strings, the strings Cecil thought he held, were in fact held by another man, a man who had taken control completely away from Cecil's hands. Could Robert Cecil, by force of will and by imposition of pain, bend this man Guy Fawkes to obey him, to take the secrets he held to his grave? Cecil needed to know he could do this thing. If he could then his power was undiminished. He was like the mighty Mark Antony, whose power failed him only in the face of the one man, Octavius Caesar. He would block Gresham from his mind. Yet hidden from Cecil's own sight, he and Gresham knew that the secret of Cecil's survival lay in one man alone, and that was not the man who would go to his death on the scaffold with the other plotters.

There had been a brief flurry when at the trial Fawkes had pleaded ‘Not Guilty'. Cecil's heart had started to beat louder, but he had kept his outward calm and merely looked at the broken man in the dock. Fawkes had mumbled — he could hardly speak — that he had not understood some of the charges, and the crisis had passed. In fact, Cecil mused, it had probably been not so much a potential rebellion against Cecil, but more an attempt to protect some of the Catholic priests implicated in the plot, and Father Henry Garnet in particular. It was to no avail. Garnet would die, in agony, as was right.

It had been a bitterly cold morning when the first four had been dragged through the streets. The sentence had been for the traitors to be hauled at the tail of a horse, heads dragging on the ground. Amusing though the humiliation was, interpreted in its simplest form it meant the prisoner was likely to drown in the filth of the streets, or have his head banged so much as to make the executioner redundant. The crowd must not be deprived of their sport, so the prisoners were placed on a wicker hurdle for the first part of their ordeal. Would Jane wait and watch for him in a nearby house as he was dragged through the streets? wondered Gresham. He hoped not. You were best seen as already dead at this stage in the proceedings, and no dignity was to be acquired from any part of what went on.

Everard Digby's wife and children had managed to find a spot on the roadside. One of their little boys had cried out. Tata! Tata!' as their father was dragged past, the baying crowds silent for a moment, the clods of earth ceasing their hurtling towards the traitor. Did the little boy notice the spit staining his father's shirt and body? wondered Gresham. Tom Bates's wife had dashed out to him on the street as well. He had apparently told her where some money was stashed, practical to the last.