(1604 - 1606)

'Now we have a king who is of our religion and will restore us to our rights.' So said an Oxfordshire Catholic lady on the accession of the son of Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne. She was wrong on both counts.

It is true that James Stuart had been baptised a Catholic. He had, however, been raised a Protestant. And although he had given the impression that he would relax anti-Catholic legislation, his performance was a grave disappointment to most Catholics.

The first signs were promising. On his accession in March 1603 he knighted Henry Stonor, eldest son of Sir Francis. But two months later he instructed that the recusancy fines be collected.

Among those fined as a result was Lady Margaret Clarke, daughter of Mary Tudor's Secretary of State, Sir John Bourne. She and her husband, Sir William Clarke, lived at North Weston, a mile and a half west of Thame.

The following year she was reported to be sheltering a priest. It is said that, for the last twenty years of her life, Mass was regularly celebrated at her home, North Weston Manor Farm, or in a 15th century chapel which stood just to the west of it. A small portion of the east wing of Lady Clarke's house survives as part of the present farmhouse. The chapel was demolished in the last century but a few moulded stones from it remain.

Early in 1604, following the Bye Plot, the King commanded all Catholic clergy to leave England and never return. About this time Francis Plowden, son of the famous lawyer went into exile for six years. He left his son Francis and the rest of his family in the care of Andrew Blunden at Shiplake Court.

The disappointment at the King's treatment of Catholics led a small group of them to organise the Gunpowder Plot. None of the principal plotters came from Berkshire or southern Oxfordshire, but there is evidence that there may have been some knowledge of the plot among Catholics in the area.

The Earl of Salisbury, Robert Cecil, was head of the secret service at this time. He seems to have infiltrated the plot at an early stage and to have manipulated it for propaganda purposes.

One of his informants was a mysterious Davies. Could this have been Sir John Davis who later bought Bere Court? His name is sometimes spelt with an 'e'. Until recently he had been a Catholic and perhaps some Catholics believed him still to be one at heart. He and the Gunpowder plotter Robert Catesby had been co-conspirators with the Earl of Essex. Did Catesby mistakenly confide in him? Davis had already shown his preparedness to inform on his colleagues.

In January 1605 a number of the Gunpowder plotters, including Catesby, met at the Catherine Wheel Inn, Oxford. An ominous location perhaps, as this was the same tavern in which Thomas Belson and his companions had been arrested sixteen years earlier.

At the time of the Gunpowder Plot the Member of Parliament for Reading was Francis Moore. He was forty-seven years old, a barrister of the Middle Temple and one of the ablest lawyers of his day. He was also one of the lawyers to whom the younger Francis Englefield had been bound when Edmund Plowden had him admitted to the Middle Temple.

The Moores came from East Ilsley and had built Ilsley Hall. (The present building is later, at least externally.) The Catholic Englefields, Hildesleys and Perkins all held land in the village. Francis Moore had formerly acted as a lawyer for the Catholic Earl of Northumberland and Moore's daughter Elizabeth later became the second wife of Sir Richard Blount of Mapledurham. Moore therefore had plenty of Catholic connections and his family seems to have been Catholic.

Nine years after the Gunpowder Plot he built the remotely sited South Fawley manor, on the Berkshire Downs between Hungerford and Wantage. It had a Catholic chapel at the top of the tower. The manor formed an outpost of discreet Catholicism which was to endure into the following century. A number of Francis Moore's descendants became monks or nuns.

Fawley Manor
As it is today

Francis Moore left intriguing evidence of the government's infiltration of the Gunpowder Plot. At the time of the conspiracy he often had to work into the small hours with a client in London. Several times during 1605, on his way home at about two o'clock in the morning, he saw Thomas Percy leaving the home of the Earl of Salisbury, the head of the secret service. Francis Moore knew Percy, who was the Earl of Northumberland's steward. It later transpired that Percy was one of the Gunpowder plotters.

Francis Moore told all this to Dr Godfrey Goodman who moved to West Ilsley fifteen years after the Gunpowder Plot. Goodman later became Bishop of Gloucester and is said to have become a secret Catholic. His travelling chalice is owned by a Berkshire Goodman and is on permanent loan to Gloucester Cathedral.

Francis Moore was knighted in 1616. He was a Member of Parliament five times and a steward of Oxford University. He amassed considerable property in Berkshire. Among his many acquisitions were the rectory of the vanished medieval village of Whatcombe (1 mile S. of South Fawley) and Maidencourt Farm on the River Lambourn (1½ miles SSW of Whatcombe). Both of these were sold to him by the Catholic Sir George Browne of Great Shefford.

In the summer before the Gunpowder Plot a Thomas Hildesley became a Jesuit on his deathbed in Rome. The following winter the head of the East Ilsley line, Walter Hildesley, and his wife were to find themselves dangerously close to the Privy Council's investigations.

Walter and his wife Honour were staying with her father, Henry Carey, at Hamworthy near Poole in Dorset. (Carey and Carew are forms of the same surname. The family also intermarried with the Hydes of Purley and there is a road there named after the Carews.) On 2 January 1606, eight weeks after Guy Fawkes was arrested, the house was visited by two servants of Lord Howard of Bindon, a member of the Privy Council. They had come to arrest Honour's brother Henry.

At first she refused to open the door, answering the men from an upstairs window. But eventually, having been joined by her husband Walter, she let them in. It seems that at the time she was wearing a jewelled crucifix given to her by the Spanish ambassador who had visited the Hildesleys at East Ilsley.

The reason for the Privy Council's suspicion was that the younger Henry Carey knew Thomas Percy and Robert Catesby, and had been in London with his armour the day after the King and Parliament were to have been blown up.

Henry Carey's apparently successful defence was that, while in London, he had offered to join Sir Christopher Blount, the Earl of Devonshire, who was heading for Warwickshire, heartland of the plotters. Although a Catholic and former co-conspirator of the executed Earl of Essex, Blount was now Master of the Ordnance and a member of the Special Commission for High Treason that investigated and condemned the Gunpowder Plotters.

Walter Hildesley himself had also been in contact with a plotter. Five weeks before the planned explosion he had sold a horse to Ambrose Rookwood. It must have been a good one because £30 changed hands (= £2,000 today). However, as Rookwood's main interest in life was horse breeding, this was hardly evidence of conspiracy.

When the Gunpowder plotter Robert Winter was convicted, the Crown seized the main manor of Didcot, which a group of people including Winter held from the Stonors. But Winter may never have actually been there and the property was recovered by the Stonors in 1616.

The Catholic Alexander family of Caversham Rectory (later Caversham Court) were also drawn into the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Robert Newport, a Catholic servant of the Earl of Northumberland, had been living with them for two years. He was alleged to know much about the conspiracy and would certainly have known Thomas Percy, Northumberland's steward.

During his stay with the Alexanders (who were also known as the Milwards), Newport had never attended an Anglican service at the adjoining parish church. But the rector had been afraid to report him because William Alexander controlled the tenancy of the parsonage. Situations like this led shortly afterwards to legislation preventing Catholics controlling the patronage of Anglican benefices.

The family that were to succeed the Alexanders at Caversham Rectory, the Brownes, were also implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. The plotter Robert Catesby's sister Anne was the sister-in-law of Sir George Browne of Shefford. But it was Sir George's nephew, the second Lord Montague, who was arrested and put in the tower. It transpired that, thirteen years earlier, Guy Fawkes had been one of his servants. And apparently, a few weeks before the planned explosion, Robert Catesby had advised Lord Montague to avoid visiting Parliament for the time being.

Lady Agnes Wenman of Thame Park, site of the former Cistercian abbey, was also in trouble as a result of the Gunpowder Plot. Her husband Sir Richard Wenman was a Protestant, but she was a member of the Catholic Fermor family and related to Elizabeth Vaux, a great supporter of the Jesuit superior, Fr Henry Garnet. (Interestingly, Fawkes is a variant of the name Vaux.)

A letter Elizabeth Vaux had written to Agnes Wenman implied inside knowledge of Jesuit operations. Unfortunately it was found by her mother-in-law, who passed it to the authorities.

Subsequently Elizabeth Vaux and Agnes Wenman met to discuss their position. The venue was the home of Elizabeth Vaux's son-in-law, Sir George Simeon, at Brightwell Baldwin (3 miles W. of Watlington). This was presumably the former residence of Sir Adrian Fortescue.

John Fortescue, a grandson of Sir Adrian, had a marginal involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. But the man who arrested Guy Fawkes, Sir Thomas Knyvett, married the daughter of Sir Adrian's widow. The lantern that Fawkes was using at the time of his arrest can be seen in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Early on 20 January 1606 more than a hundred armed men surrounded Hindlip Hall, a Catholic safe house near Worcester. Inside, in a secret hiding place, were Fr Henry Garnet and another Jesuit, Fr Edward Oldcorne. In another hide were Nicholas Owen, the Oxfordshire master builder of priest-holes, and a fellow Jesuit lay brother, Ralph Ashley.

After a week the two lay brothers surrendered and tried to pass themselves off as the priests. This ploy was foiled by the informer Anthony Sherlock, who had been Dame Cecily Stonor's chaplain and who knew Fr Garnet. The search therefore continued until the priests were eventually captured.

Nicholas Owen had ruptured himself while single-handedly building priest-holes. An iron plate was therefore fitted around his body so that he could be racked without ripping his body open. It did not work. In early March 1606 his bowels burst and he died, taking his secrets with him.

Two months later Fr Garnet was executed as an accessory to the Gunpowder Plot . He had known of its existence but had warned Robert Catesby against 'rushing headlong into mischief'.

Since the Harleyford conference Fr Garnet and Nicholas Owen had worked solidly for twenty years to establish mission bases in country houses. The government may have rid itself of this troublesome pair, but it could not undo their work.