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Passage Illustrated: Catesby the Catholic Martyr

"Fear nothing," replied Percy. "I will never quit this spot alive."

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when he fell to the ground mortally wounded, and the same shot that had pierced his breast had likewise stricken Catesby. It was fired by the trooper, John Streete, who has just been mentioned.

Collecting all his force, Catesby struck a few terrible blows at his opponents, and, dashing through them, made for the house. Just as he reached the door, which was standing open, his strength failed, and he fell to the ground. In this condition, he dragged himself into the vestibule, where there was a large wooden statue of the Virgin, and clasping his arms around it pressed his lips to the feet of the image. He was followed by Streete, with his drawn sword in one hand and a petronel in the other, prepared to finish his work. But ere he could reach him, Catesby had expired. [Book the Third, "The Conspirators," Chapter V, "The Close of the Rebellion," p. 303]

Commentary: "Stand by me, Mr. Tom," said Catesby, "and we will die together."

Thus, at the manor house of Holbeach in Staffordshire on 9 November 1605, Robert Catesby, the chief instigator of the Gunpowder Plot, died from the same pistol shot that had despatched Thomas Percy, effectively destroying the clandestine plot's leadership. The action shot, so to speak, leads off the July 1841 instalment of the novel, facing page 1 in Volume 10 of Bentley's Miscellany. As the fighting rages in the courtyard outside the open door, trooper Streete, one of a loyalist force of two hundred soldiers, has pursued Catesby into the entrance-way, where he has fallen, lifeless, beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary — who bears a marked resemblance to Fawkes's earlier vision of St. Winifred.

In the actual historical event, forty-five-year-old Percy was buried near the scene of his death, but the authorities, eager to make examples of the plotters, ordered his body exhumed, and his head exhibited outside Parliament in Westminster. Robert Catesby, felled by the same bullet that killed Percy, met a similar fate: Catesby, found dead, clutching a picture of the Virgin Mary (rather than, as in Cruikshank and Ainsworth, the feet of her life-sized statue), was subsequently exhumed and subsequently decapitated, and his head exhibited outside Parliament.

Cruikshank has chosen to illustrate the climactic moment when the loyalist trooper discovers the lifeless body of Catesby, even as hand-to-hand combat engulfs the courtyard. The three loyalists without employ different weapons: one uses his musket butt as a club, one wields a sword, and a third a halberd. Cruikshank uses the Dutch-tiled checkered flooring of the interior to draw the eye upward to the conflict which the thirty-odd rebel force is losing, amidst great discharges of gunpowder. Cruikshank does not depict Catesby as having singed hair and blackened visage, even though he had been engulfed by the flames of the gunpowder he had ordered dried the night before.

Although the trooper should be looking down at Catesby for signs of life as he steps on the corpse, Streete looks directly at the readers, as if they may constitute a threat and are more than mere spectators over two hundred years later. Cruikshank presents the loyalist trooper as the binary opposite of Catesby physically, for he strides forward, heavily armed and wearing a helmet, whereas Catesby is supine, inert, clutching his sword in death as he expresses his devotion to the central figure of Catholicism, the Blessed Virgin. The arched Gothic window reinforces the sense that Catesby, regarding himself as a Catholic martyr, has died on hallowed ground. One might argue that the window merely shows that the illustrator had never visited the Jacobean mansion, since the leaded-pane windows of the house to either side of the entry-way do not resemble Cruikshank's version of the foyer. However, with his single Gothic window and arches, and his adding a wall beyond the gun-smoke Cruikshank is implying that Holbeach House (i. e., Holbeche House) is a hold-over from the middle ages, with has a fortified courtyard; it has no such courtyard, and was only five years old at the time of the action. In short, Cruikshank has dressed the set for dramatic (indeed, one might say "stagey") effect.

Guy Fawkes on the Boards and Celluloid

The Fawkes story was converted into pantomimes throughout the nineteenth century; for example, even before Ainsworth published the novel, Harlequin and Guy Fawkes: or, the 5th of November, was performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on 16 November 1835. Prolific stage adaptor Albert Smith and William Hale converted the Ainsworth novel into the pantomime Guy Fawkes, or a Match for a King, in 1855. The adaptation Guido Fawkes: or, the Prophetess of Ordsall Cave, playing up the supernatural and sensational effects, relied on the early episodes of the serialised version of Ainsworth's 1841 novel in the production at the Queen's Theatre, Manchester, in June 1840. Charles Hermann's play Ordsall Hall appeared in provincial playhouses in the 1880s. Despite the centrality of Fawkes in the titles, most of these dramatisations assign Robert Catesby a leading role.

Director Maurice Elvey translated Ainsworth's novel into film in the 1923 production of Guy Fawkes, starring Matheson Lang as Fawkes. In August 2005, the play 5/11, which analyzed the social, social, and political context of the Gunpowder Plot, appeared on the festival stage at Chichester, starring Hugh Ross as spymaster Sir Robert Cecil, Stephen Noonan as Catesby, and Alistair McGowan as King James the First.

References

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason: An Historical Romance. With 22 illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: Cunningham & Mortimer, 1841 (first edition). Rpt., London: George Routledge & Sons, n. d. [See the text and images of the novel posted in May 2013 at Project Gutenberg Australia's website: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1302021h.html .]

O'Brien, Jennifer, and David Herber. "Holbeche House, Staffordshire.". Online version available from Encyclopedia Britannica: Britannia.com. Web. 1999. Retrieved 30 August 2018.

Vann, J. Don. "Guy Fawkes in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1840-November 1841." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. P. 20.

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Last modified 31 August 2018