Bess Throckmorton, Walter Raleigh’s wife, was a formidable character who survived disgrace under Elizabeth I and her husband’s execution under James VI and I. Intrigued by her, Alexandra Walsh found that Bess’s connections to the wives of most of the Gunpowder Plotters would give Bess a central role in her novel, The Secrets of Cresswell Hall.
The thing I love writing about most are the women who have been lost from history. In my new dual-timeline novel, The Secrets of Crestwell Hall, I move between the present day and the early Jacobean period, where I reimagine the 1605 Gunpowder Plot as told by the wives and female relatives of the Plotters.
My contemporary characters have recently moved to the manor house, Crestwell Hall, which they are trying to save from having to be sold to be turned into a hotel. They want to discover its lost past and turn it into a place for people to visit to experience the restored grandeur of a bygone era.
Isabella Lacey and her ten-year-old daughter, Emily, join Isabella’s aunt, Thalia, in this venture as Isabella heals from an unpleasant divorce. They discover a Bible that once belonged to a previous owner, Elizabeth, Lady Raleigh, wife of Sir Walter Raleigh and better known by her maiden name, Bess Throckmorton, which has a remarkable tale to tell.
Bess was a real woman and a formidable character who had to cope with the difficulty of having a husband incarcerated in the Tower of London, guilty of treason.
I became interested in her in 2019 when I was researching The Arbella Stuart Conspiracy, particularly as through her Throckmorton family she was connected to a considerable number of the nobility. It was this which was most important for The Secrets of Crestwell Hall, because she is related to nearly all the Plotters’ wives.
It was even more intriguing because the wives were Catholic while Bess was a Protestant in the vast and influential Catholic Throckmorton family. This made her the perfect person to use as a rallying point for the other wives. Not only was she living with the difficulties of having a husband who was an attainted traitor – Sir Walter Raleigh – but her religion gave her protection the wives did not have.
Raleigh had been arrested in 1603 for his part in the Main Plot, one of two plots that took place in the aftermath of Elizabeth I’s death and the succession of James I. He was sentenced to death but this was commuted at the block to life imprisonment in the Tower of London. In the eyes of the law, he was legally dead, yet he remained very much alive.
I tried to imagine how difficult this must have made life for Bess. Her husband’s lands and houses were forfeit to the Crown, yet she had two sons and herself to support.
After the Gunpowder Plot was discovered, in the real version of events, both Bess and Walter fell under suspicion. However, with no evidence against them, the charges were dropped, yet for me, this was the hook I needed to draw together all the wives.
Of the 13 main plotters led by Robert Catesby, 11 were married. These women have been hiding in their shadows all along but now, I shall introduce you to them.
By the time of the plot Catesby was a widower. His Protestant wife, Catherine Leigh, had died in 1599. They had married in March 1593 and had two sons: William – who died as a baby – and Robert. The differing religions suggests various possibilities: it was a love match or, in his youth, Catesby was not such a zealous Catholic and political activist. It was after Catherine’s death he became more involved in politics.
The first person to join Catesby was John Wright, known to all as Jack. His wife was Dorothy Scott. They were teenage sweethearts, who married in 1588. Jack did not convert to Catholicism until the Essex Rebellion in 1601; then the family home of Twigmore Hall in North Lincolnshire became a safe house for Jesuit priests.
When he was in thrall to Catesby, Jack and Dorothy moved their six children to a house belonging to Catesby at Lapworth in Warwickshire. Dorothy was one of the wives arrested after the plot was discovered. Her family has been harder to trace and, at present, I am still searching.
Thomas Wintour, Catesby’s cousin, was next to join up but there are no records he was ever married. However, the same cannot be said for Guy Fawkes. The internet has a variety of theories and in her book, The Gunpowder Plot, Terror and Faith in 1605, Antonia Fraser suggests Fawkes may have been married to a Maria or Mary Pulleine and they had a son, Thomas.
My research revealed various documents linking Guy Fawkes to the Catholic Pulleine family of Scotton Hall, Yorkshire. There are signed notices concerning rents and land ownership giving Fawkes a clear connection to the Pulleine family and this may have been where the suggestion arose but, alas I found no conclusive proof of his marriage.
Two of the marriages of the plotters were known to be in tatters and the first of these was the marriage between Martha Wright and Thomas Percy. Martha was the sister of John and Christopher Wright, two of the plotters, and her mother, Ursula Rudston, was a convicted recusant.
At the time of the plot, Martha and her husband were barely on speaking terms with rumours abounding that he had bigamously taken another wife. Despite this, in the aftermath, Martha was one of the six wives arrested and taken to London for questioning.
The other couple having problems were Anne Tufton and Francis Tresham. He was another cousin of Catesby and well-known for his volatile nature. There are records detailing Tresham’s misdemeanours – assault, affray and general bad behaviour – and it’s possible this unreliability was the reason he was one of the last to be initiated into the Plot.
Tresham was accused of writing the Monteagle letter, the document that revealed the Plot to Robert Cecil, the Lord Privy Seal, but Catesby accepted his explanation that he was not the culprit. Tresham was arrested on 12 November and died of an unspecified illness while incarcerated in the Tower of London. Anne’s reaction appears to be undocumented but, as a Protestant, she would have been safe from the law and maybe she was relieved to be free from the suspicion and drama of being married to such an unpredictable man.
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The remaining wives (using their maiden names) were Gertrude Talbot (married to Robert Wintour), Margaret Ward (married to Christopher Wright), Dorothy Wintour (John Grant), Christina Browne (Robert Keyes), Elizabeth Tyrwhitt (Ambrose Rookwood), Mary Mulsho (Everard, Lord Digby) and Martha, the wife of Catesby’s loyal manservant, Thomas Bates. At present, I am still searching for her maiden name.
Of these women, Margaret Ward, Dorothy Wintour, Christina Browne and Elizabeth Tyrwhitt were also arrested. They were taken to London and held at the houses of various aldermen of the City.
Eventually, they were released without charge but their lives were damaged by their husbands’ traitorous behaviour. Homes were searched and goods looted by local militia. Mary Mulsho in particular was horrified at the violence with which her house was treated and the amount of goods claimed by law enforcement officers.
The Gunpowder Plot remains one of the most famous incidents from James I’s reign and, while the wives survived, their lives and the lives of their families would forever be tainted by the tang of gunpowder, treason and plot.
The Secrets of Crestwell Hall by Alexandra Walsh is published on 24 January, 2024.
Alexandra has written three other features about the backgrounds to her books:
Six godmothers of archaeology
The scandalous Seymours
The uncanny story behind my novel
You may also enjoy Historia’s interview with Alexandra Walsh
We’ve got more features connected to the Gunpowder Plot, too:
The women of the Gunpowder Plot by Nicola Cornick
People-smuggling in Tudor and Jacobean times by KJ Maitland
Review of the TV series Gunpowder by James Burge
And one about Walter Raleigh:
Walter Raleigh: stripping away the cloak of myth by RN Morris
Images:
- Bess Throckmorton, Lady Raleigh by William Segar: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Sir Walter Raleigh by William Segar: Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Gunpowder Plotters by Crispijn van de Passe the Elder: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Thomas Percy by Crispijn van de Passe the Elder: Picryl (public domain)
- The ‘Monteagle letter’ from The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605: Project Gutenberg (Project Gutenberg License)
- Gayhurst House from the maze: Brian Tomlinson for Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
