The Gunpowder Plot:
Filling in the gaps
Who wrote the Monteagle letter?
I began with the Great Unsolved Mystery: the anonymous letter that warned the Catholic Lord Monteagle to avoid Parliament on the day it was due to be blown up.
The most popular candidate for the writer is Monteagle’s cousin Francis Tresham, a Catholic gentleman who may have initially been involved in the plot but then got cold feet. Some sources say – with equal certainty – that the Catholic peer’s own sister wrote the warning. The trouble is: both she and Tresham saw Monteagle often. Why not just whisper a warning in his ear rather than write down such dangerous knowledge – and then hire someone to deliver it?
Other historians, including Antonia Fraser, have suggested that Robert Cecil – lord privy seal and the most powerful man in England after the king – wrote the letter.
I went to the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) at Kew. After a bit of wheedling, I was given special permission to examine the letter itself – PRO ref: SP14/216 – instead of the microfiche on which valuable historical documents are usually offered to the public.
The original revealed a clear personality that is blurred on fiche and in those often-illegible copies you see reproduced in books. The handwriting struck me first – a blocky, upright print, not at all like the elegant script of educated men such as Tresham or Cecil. The lines begin straight but soon wander on the page – another possible sign of an inexperienced writer.
In copies, there’s what looks like an ink splodge in the first line. With the real letter in front of me, I could see for certain that it’s a crossed-out spelling mistake:
My Lord, out of the love I bear two to some of your friends …
‘Two’ instead of ‘to’ seems like an odd mistake. The other way round seems more likely – unless the writer is someone used to dealing with numbers.
Together, the handwriting and the error suggested to me a tradesperson, schooled just enough to write invoices and keep accounts – not gentry like Tresham nor a courtier like Cecil. To have learned about the threat to Parliament, it’s likely that he or she would also have been a Catholic.
Therefore, I offer yet another candidate. The character in my book who writes the Monteagle letter is a woman. She is fictional. But she is also exactly the sort of anonymous, secret Catholic of modest station who, from clues in the letter itself, seems to me a most likely suspect in the Monteagle mystery.
