Elizabeth I's Secret Agents (2017) s01e03 Episode Script

Britain at the time of
Queen Elizabeth I was divided,
unstable and violent.
Despite this, Elizabeth stayed in power
for over 40 years.
The secret of her incredible reign
is hidden in this portrait.
Detailed in the folds of her dress,
these eyes and ears
represent a spy network.
The world's first secret service
run by a father-and-son team.
Both exceptionally intelligent,
and given the job of protecting
Queen and country.
This series tells their story
over five decades,
and reveals
how the secret state was born.
Elizabethan England as it really was,
with a network of spies battling
a terrorist threat.
And both sides will stop at nothing.
The Elizabethan state
is mirrors within mirrors,
the double-crossings, the conspiracies.
It's an endless labyrinth.
Leading historians
have researched these events
from different individual perspectives.
Elizabeth was ineffably different.
She was exceptional, she was holy,
she was magical.
They'll take us inside the mind
of each of the key players,
dissecting their motives and actions,
while the course of British history
hangs in the balance.
You have to wonder
what personal cost comes with that.
That there must be some kind of
damage to somebody's soul
to commit that kind of crime.
We'll see how history is really made,
in the corridors of power
from just behind the throne.
In this episode, a new king,
a Catholic extremist on the loose,
and the most infamous
terrorist conspiracy in British history,
the Gunpowder Plot.
It's the dawn of the 17th century.
For hundreds of years,
England has been
a separate country from Scotland.
But on the 23rd of March, 1603,
when Queen Elizabeth dies,
her crown passes to her cousin,
King James VI of Scotland.
The task of installing him
as James I of England
falls to this man,
England's spy master, Robert Cecil.
Robert Cecil has an exceptional
combination of talent and drive
and intelligence and cunning,
and a willingness
to go to any length
in order to succeed.
But he now has to get
the unknown quantity
of a foreign king,
king of a country which has
usually been an enemy country.
He has to get him down from Scotland,
down to London, get him crowned,
get him installed, and see
if he can get the King in harness.
And he doesn't really know
who James is by this point.
James is a mystery to him.
James has a reputation
for being obsessed with the occult,
for promiscuity and extravagance.
James believes that
the king's authority
comes directly from God.
He is not to be legitimately challenged
by any earthly authority.
God had particularly
smiled upon and blessed him,
and he intends to enjoy this.
James has been King of Scotland
since he was a year old
and he's rather spoilt.
In a favourite phrase of James's,
"Kings are little gods,
"they exercise a manner
of divine power."
So, in early 1603,
Cecil has a lot on his plate.
It's not just that he has to deal with
a boss who thinks he's God
Cecil is also trying to capture
someone he regards
as the most dangerous man in England.
Catholic priest John Gerard
is Cecil's archenemy.
Gerard was not like other priests.
He was a maverick, he was brazen,
he was flamboyant.
You've got this cockiness,
this swagger to him,
but also this absolute certainty
that what he's doing
is the right thing.
Cecil and Gerard are more than just
opponents in a bitter religious war,
this has become personal.
[SHOUTING]
Ten years ago,
Cecil had Gerard in his grasp,
threw him in the Tower of London,
and tortured him
only for the priest to escape.
Getting Gerard back behind bars
is a top priority.
Cecil sincerely believed
that the defence of Protestant England,
it was a sacred cause.
And, with that belief, there came,
in this age of religious warfare,
the equally sincere conviction
that Catholicism was
a perfidious doctrine,
and that English Catholic priests
were agents of a hostile
and dangerous foreign power.
I think Robert Cecil would have said
that Gerard was a traitor
and he was a plotter and he was
a risk to national security.
But Gerard would say that
the terror is coming from the state,
not the other way around.
Cecil puts his spy network
on to finding Gerard.
He has agents
in every port and market town,
in the prisons
and inside every suspect household.
Despite their efforts,
Cecil can't find the priest.
Four weeks into the new reign,
King James is still travelling south.
Cecil needs to get some control
over him,
so he travels north to meet James.
Cecil is England's Principal Secretary,
effectively Prime Minister,
and he's used to getting his way.
But from James's point of view,
it would have been unthinkable
that Cecil should dominate.
He's not an equal.
No, he's not an equal.
What James wants
is for the two to slot into
an appropriate relationship
between master and servant.
Cecil comes out
of this intense meeting with James
and sends a letter saying,
"I've made a discovery of his
"royal perfections and I see
the greatest felicity for the nation."
But Cecil must be thinking
that in English terms,
James is not a perfect king at all
and that the coming years
will be full of panics and surprises.
One of James's first acts as King
rocks Cecil badly.
Although James himself is Protestant,
while still en route to London,
he knights a Catholic.
And not just any Catholic,
but Thomas Gerard,
the brother of Cecil's old enemy,
John Gerard.
So, for Gerard, this is hope.
This King, you know,
he must be their friend,
and augur in a golden age.
Finally, a golden age
for the Catholics in England.
Though himself a Protestant,
James is the son of a Catholic.
He's married to a Catholic.
Now, he's sending a blatant signal
that his reign will be
friendly to Catholics.
But to Robert Cecil
to normalise the situation
of English Catholics
runs the risk of creating a bridgehead
for foreign influence.
He sees them as an enemy within,
and therefore he won't do anything
to allow them to fortify themselves.
Two days later,
Cecil's situation gets even worse.
A source in his network tells him
they've finally tracked down
John Gerard.
He's on his way to meet James.
This raises the nightmare
scenario that James may be going
behind Cecil's back to strike a deal
with Gerard and the Catholics.
Everything that Cecil
has spent his life working for,
everything that Cecil's father,
and his father before him
spent his life working for,
building up the English state
with the Tudors,
everything is now in the balance,
because the real danger is that Cecil
will be caught on the wrong side
of that kind of change.
And so it is in Cecil's interest
to polarise the whole issue of religion
into the good and the bad,
into loyal Protestants
and disloyal Catholics
and a picture
of us-versus-them conflict.
Cecil knows the surest way to stop
the King befriending the Catholics
is to show James
the Catholics are plotting against him.
One of Cecil's agents
passes on some chatter
in the Catholic underground
that someone is recruiting desperados
for an extraordinary mission.
They're plotting an armed raid
on a royal palace,
with the aim of kidnapping the King.
A captured priest is tricked
into giving up the location
of the snatch
and the leader of the kidnap gang,
an ex-soldier
on the fringes of the royal household.
Cecil can even identify
the secretive ringleader,
a Catholic priest with the belief
that if he can get him alone,
he can convert James to Catholicism.
That's why he wants to kidnap the King.
For Cecil, this is manna from heaven.
We don't know how much
of the intelligence Cecil believed,
but we do know that he reacted
as if all of it and more was true.
And this is seen in the way
that he uses every asset
at his personal disposal
to maximise the intelligence value
and also the political value
of his response.
Two months
after inheriting the English crown,
James finally reaches London.
He installs himself at Greenwich,
just one of the dozen vast palaces
at his disposal now he's King here.
But James has barely begun
to enjoy himself
when Cecil drops his bombshell.
Cecil tells the King some Catholics
are plotting to raid the palace
and kidnap him.
And any deal
between the King and the Catholics
is stopped dead in its tracks.
The discovery that
he was going to be abducted
helps to shape his views
on religion and kingship.
That is that Catholic extremists are
wasps, vipers, firebrands of sedition.
[DOG BARKS]
The priest behind the kidnap plot
is hunted down by Cecil's men.
Within a fortnight of his arrest,
he's executed.
Another Catholic priest,
convicted of being his accomplice,
follows him to the scaffold.
Then James signs a bill
reaffirming all of Protestant England's
laws against Catholicism.
Their rights remain banned.
Priests like Gerard are ordered
out of the country on pain of death.
When the law
banning Catholic priests is renewed,
this is a victory for Cecil.
You have to admire
the coldness and the skill
with which he does all this.
It makes me think that
Cecil is the supreme political operator
of his day,
but it is chilling as much as cold.
Gerard's brief glimpse
of a golden future is snuffed out.
It's worse than ever.
They'd had this hope,
and it's the hope that kills you.
And Gerard likened it
to being in a dark room
for a very, very long time
and then there's a flash of lightning
and then there's a pale light
and then it goes out.
And then that room feels darker
than it's ever been before.
But, even now, Cecil isn't finished.
He uses the kidnap plot's ringleader
as a pawn in a move against rivals
at James's court.
Under interrogation,
the ringleader was forced to implicate
one of the King's courtiers.
The man is Cecil's own brother-in-law,
but he's thrown in the Tower.
He gives up Sir Walter Raleigh,
Cecil's real target.
Raleigh's poetry and exploration
have made him a national treasure,
but he's made the mistake
of trading on his fame
to compete for power with Cecil.
It takes just one dodgy confession
for Cecil to get Raleigh
convicted of treason,
and thrown in the Tower
to await execution.
Cecil is utterly merciless.
You cannot help but admire his skill,
you cannot wish
that you'd had the chance to meet him
and find out what made him tick.
But you wouldn't want to cross him.
And by meeting Robert Cecil,
you have the feeling
that you would have somehow
compromised yourself,
you'd have exposed yourself
to his intelligence, to his sharp eye.
And it's because of that
that he is a terrifying figure.
Father John Gerard is forced
to go on the run again
when the law against priests
is renewed.
He disguises himself
as a country gentleman.
Though hidden in his luggage
is all he needs
to practise Catholic ceremonies.
For Gerard,
this fight will never be over.
John Gerard sees himself
as a soldier of Christ.
This is a holy war for him.
That is Gerard's vision,
and he is utterly single-minded
and ruthless in his pursuit of it.
Gerard becomes an expert
at living undercover.
He has many false names.
Gerard knew that Cecil was after him
and after him specifically.
He probably saw it as a vendetta.
You know, for Cecil,
it's always Gerard first.
What Gerard needs is a base
where he can hide out safely,
somewhere beyond
the spy master's grasp.
And that brings him here
to Harrowden Hall in Northamptonshire,
the home of a wealthy Catholic widow,
Eliza Vaux.
Eliza Vaux was 29 when she was widowed,
left with a large family,
and was devastated,
refusing even to go
into the part of the house
where her husband had died,
and engulfed completely in misery.
In her sorrow,
she turns to John Gerard.
He helped Eliza out of her grief,
he helped her out
of that period of mourning.
Gerard comes along
and it kind of seems godsend to her
and he becomes her spiritual confessor.
They're incredibly close.
A well-connected aristocrat,
Eliza Vaux is potentially
very useful to Gerard.
The Catholic women were vital
to the success of the mission,
and Gerard never underestimated
their worth.
16th-century women were perceived
to be inferior to men in this period,
they just weren't as important.
But what it did mean is that
they could fly under the radar
in a way that men just couldn't.
And women,
especially widows who had money,
they're absolutely vital.
Eliza Vaux was previously
a friend of Robert Cecil,
but now it's Gerard she wants to help.
Eliza seems to have got along
fairly well with being a Catholic,
but wasn't a particularly fervent one.
But it was the death of her husband
and her introduction to John Gerard,
who helped to turn her grief
into a real burning passion
for her faith
and replace the grief
with a sense of purpose.
Though it's an offence
punishable by death to shelter Gerard,
Eliza Vaux invites him to make Harrowden
his base of operations.
He takes complete control
over her house,
installs secret passageways
and gets rid of any servant
he considers not Catholic enough.
But John Gerard
is only just getting started.
Via Eliza Vaux's
friends and neighbours,
he replicates Harrowden
in other grand households nearby.
Soon, much of the Catholic gentry
across the English Midlands
is secretly assisting Gerard.
All the ladies
want to be converted by him,
all the men
want to be friends with him.
And so it goes on and on,
almost like he's a sort of
octopus with tentacles.
He was so effective, and he had
so many friends and followers
latterly,
that he said that
he could travel 150 miles or so
without ever once
having to stop in a tavern.
Gerard even gives some of those
in his network code names.
Through trusted couriers,
he can communicate with
other Catholic networks.
Cecil is receiving
fragments of intelligence about Gerard.
Gerard is moving from house to house
amongst the Catholic gentry
of the Midlands,
and Cecil is watching these houses,
he knows that they're against him.
He doesn't know
how it's going to fall into a shape.
He has, in other words,
a known unknown.
And it is his task now
to try and identify
the extent of that unknown,
what kind of threat it represents,
and how,
as he brings it to the light,
he can turn it to his advantage.
A year into his reign,
King James begins to reveal
the scale of his ambitions.
With the dream
of bringing Christians together,
he commissions the King James Bible.
It'll become the most widely read book
in the history
of the English language.
And he has a bold thought
about how he will rule
his joint kingdoms
of England and Scotland.
His big idea began when English crowds
cheered his coronation.
James mistakes such celebrations
for a popular appetite,
and a political appetite for union
beyond their having a king,
who happened to be
King of Scotland, as well.
The idea of a union
of England and Scotland
into another entity, Britain,
I think then starts to gain shape
in James's mind.
Cecil feels a union
could actually create
deep instability in a country
which, as he knows, under a new king,
under a new royal house,
is not on a stable footing
to start with.
Cecil fears
that if James unites England and Scotland
against the wishes of the people,
there's a risk of a popular revolt.
But though the King has come
to appreciate Cecil the spy master,
he's much less respectful
of Cecil the politician.
James refers to Cecil quite often as
"my little beagle".
Sometimes there are other nicknames
that feature, "parrot-monger",
"monkey-monger",
but the most common one is
"my little beagle".
His little beagle in Cecil is loyal
and good at sniffing out
what he has to sniff out.
It's probably better
than being called a lapdog,
but it's still a mocking reference
to his dependency
and the fact
that he survives by serving.
But Cecil's doubts about union
are shared by the English Parliament.
They turn down James's request
to be called King of Great Britain.
James ignores Parliament.
He issues a coin called the Unite.
It describes James
as King of Great Britain,
a title he has now adopted
in open defiance of Parliament.
There's also a declaration.
"I shall make them one people."
From Robert Cecil's point of view,
this is making trouble.
It is putting James's ambitions
literally on show, in circulation.
Cecil's greatest successes have come
when he has been able
to watch from the side of events
as the forces have clashed,
and been able to steer the conflict
one way or another.
He is now in the middle
and the great force
of the will of the Scottish King
versus the resistance
of the English Parliament
threatens to crush him.
James makes Cecil even more vulnerable
by diluting his power.
Cecil becomes just one voice
in a council
of the King's closest advisers.
These men form
the nucleus of a new court
that will do whatever James wants.
It's not possible for Cecil
to have a final victory
in which he is the most
powerful individual
at the court.
He'll never be supreme, in that sense,
but there is no way out now
for Robert Cecil.
He's been someone
who's been born in this game,
has risen to the top of it,
so he can only carry on playing.
And his willingness
to stop at nothing
is his last and greatest asset
in this game.
Meanwhile,
Father John Gerard arrives in London.
He stays in a Catholic safe house
next-door to a pub.
Here, he meets up with a splinter cell
in the Catholic underground.
It contains five young men.
Among them,
a mercenary called Guy Fawkes.
Guy Fawkes is a Yorkshireman.
He's got a Protestant father
and a Catholic mother.
And, for some reason, he decided early
to go for the Catholicism.
He's become a fanatic.
And what he wants to do
is to destroy the English government.
All the men with Fawkes
are of the same desperate mould.
They are wild by temperament,
they're young,
quite a few of them
have had careers of violence,
either as soldiers or
notable for their use of arms.
Second thing is that
most of them have had a conversion
experience in the recent past,
having either been
Protestant for a bit,
or being lukewarm Catholics.
They're burning with a new sense
of the importance of their religion.
So, they're people
who've suddenly found God
and they're letting rip.
They've got faith for the first time
and now they want to show it.
Minutes before they meet with Gerard,
Fawkes and his friends agreed a plan
to get rid of the entire Protestant state
in one moment.
They will blow up
the Houses of Parliament
with the King inside.
But they want their lethal violence
to have God's blessing
and that's why they've come to Gerard.
It's important to the conspirators
that the priest who administers
the sacrament to them is John Gerard,
because he's a man in the same mould.
He's relatively young,
he's incredibly daring,
he's forever escaping
from the authorities
and he's one of them.
John Gerard has just set in motion
the Gunpowder Plot.
The May meeting is the key meeting.
This is the moment
when the Gunpowder Plot
becomes a real thing
and this is the moment when,
from the plotters' point of view,
the mass seals the Gunpowder Plot
in the blood of Christ.
It's late autumn, 1605.
Tensions that have been building
for almost half a century,
since Queen Elizabeth
came to the throne,
are about to come to a head.
Parliament has been asked to meet
to discuss the huge challenges
that lie ahead.
King James will attend
the State Opening
on the fifth of November.
But just ten days
before Parliament is due to open,
something catches the eye
of Robert Cecil.
This is the actual piece of paper
that crosses Cecil's desk that day.
It comes from one
of his Catholic informants,
who has been given
an anonymous tip-off.
Cecil picks up on one crucial phrase
What does it mean? That there shall be
a terrible blow delivered to
the Parliament from some unseen hand?
This is a piece of paper
saying something quite worrying.
So Cecil has to find out
the extent and the reality
at what might lie behind it.
With so little time before
the State Opening of Parliament,
Cecil knows he must act fast.
But there's a problem.
The Privy Council is the official body
for dealing with threats
against Parliament and the King,
but it's dominated by men
who've learnt to be wary
when Cecil cries wolf.
Everybody knows that Cecil is a man
perfectly happy to take the whiff of
a plot and produce
a great cloud of supposition from this
and to exploit it to his advantage,
even putting Walter Raleigh
in the Tower.
So the Privy Council
is not going to give Cecil a free hand
to run with this,
to increase his power
by producing the full plot.
The threat is as serious
as it could possibly be,
but Cecil's investigation appears
to be making no progress at all.
Meanwhile, the plotters are at work.
One of them, Thomas Percy,
is a minor aristocrat
with a position at court.
He gets them access
to the Palace of Westminster
and rents them a cellar beneath it,
in what's known as the undercroft.
They store 36 barrels here,
all of which Guy Fawkes has filled
with gunpowder.
And if they go off at once,
they're going to have the impact of,
in modern terms,
a small-scale nuclear bomb.
[EXPLOSION]
It's going to be a hell of a bang.
The blast range will spread
across almost a mile of Central London.
Everything within 40 metres
will be razed to the ground
and anybody inside those buildings
killed.
And the cellar is
right underneath the House of Lords,
which, on the fifth of November,
will be packed with
the 300 most important people
in the British state,
including all of Parliament,
the King and both his young sons.
There's no way of killing like overkill
and to make the biggest possible bang
ensures the greatest possible number
of deaths among the people
at whom you're aiming.
Guy knows exactly what he's up to.
The bomb will create a power vacuum
that will most likely lead
to a civil war, in which
both Protestant and Catholic
will die in their tens of thousands.
At no point do I find any evidence
that the conspirators worried
unduly about innocent deaths
in the whole process.
After all, it's a glorious cause,
and this life is a short vale of tears
and the real point is
the everlasting glory
to which a good Catholic
is going to go.
With just four days left
to prevent catastrophe,
Cecil goes to Whitehall Palace
to see James.
He plans to bypass the Privy Council
by getting the King
to kick-start his investigation.
And we have James's account
of what happened.
James is given the letter
without a word from Cecil.
He reads it,
pauses, presumably for thought,
and reads it again.
And at this point, according to James,
Cecil says,
"The letter
must've been written by a fool."
Cecil understands
that the King will only become involved
if he thinks
he has ownership of the investigation.
So Cecil lets James work out for himself
that this is a tip-off
about a terrorist attack
on the State Opening of Parliament.
James himself interprets the wording
as the use of gunpowder.
He revels in how clever he has been
in working this out.
He says,
"I did upon the instant interpret
"some dark phrases therein."
You know, he talks about
how he worked this out in a means
that couldn't have been worked out
by any theologian or lawyer
in any university.
So, he's ever so clever
to have worked it out and
James is like that.
So, he leaves this meeting with James
with the King's endorsement,
effectively, to set to work.
And also, as he always tries to do,
to take charge of events,
to start planning for the triumph
that he hopes will produce itself,
magically, like a rabbit from the hat,
out of a threat to the state,
a victory for the King,
and also for Cecil.
Cecil's network is put on the case.
A double agent
in the Catholic underground
comes up with a name, Guy Fawkes,
and connects him
with a leading Catholic conspirator,
Robert Catesby.
But where are these men?
And what is their plan?
Cecil is running out of time.
It is a test of Cecil.
It's a test of his intelligence,
the fact that he's ready for this.
The situation is
so advanced and so desperate,
it's also a test of his nerve.
The evening before
the State Opening of Parliament,
Fawkes enters the cellar beneath it
to lay the fuse for his bomb.
This is not a suicide mission
and Fawkes's fuse will be long enough
to allow his escape.
But a search party approaches.
The game should be up,
but Fawkes proves quick-witted.
He acts the innocent,
he gives a fake name, John Johnson,
and they then go away.
Fawkes can barely believe his luck,
to have had so simple an escape.
So, it must look to him
as though God is blessing his venture.
The place has been searched,
it's been given the all clear,
and all he has to do
is just wait to light the fuse.
But he doesn't realise
he's dealing with Robert Cecil.
The search party go
back to Whitehall Palace
to make their report
direct to the King.
Cecil is there, too.
The search party describes
stumbling on someone
calling himself John Johnson.
They've also found out
who is renting the cellar he's in.
Thomas Percy.
Thomas Percy.
That the tenant of the undercroft
is Thomas Percy.
The name Percy probably
doesn't mean much to James,
but Cecil has a file on Percy.
Because Percy is part of this network
of Catholic families,
of gentry who are unwilling
to accommodate to a Protestant state,
who are hiding priests and who are,
according to the chatter
that Cecil's agents are picking up,
discussing a change of regime.
Cecil can connect Percy to the men
he thinks are behind the plot,
Catesby and Fawkes.
It's midnight
in the Palace of Whitehall by now.
Parliament will open
in a matter of hours, just after dawn.
There are just hours to go.
On Cecil's advice,
a second search is ordered
into the undercroft.
[SHOUTING]
Fawkes is found beside his barrels,
with matches to hand.
The Gunpowder Plot has been foiled
just in time.
And, at this point,
he throws the disguise aside, and says,
yes, there is a plot.
Yes, I was about
to blow you all to smithereens,
and, hey, you know what?
I'm still proud of this.
As soon as Fawkes is arrested,
his fellow plotters run for the hills,
chased by Cecil's men.
The plotters get
as far as the remote Holbeche House
in Staffordshire.
This will be their last stand,
because this is where
Cecil's men catch up with them.
The plotters only have
a small amount of gunpowder left
for their muskets,
but it's got wet on the road.
So they dry it out by the fire.
That's the first no-no with gunpowder -
you don't put it near a fire.
It blows up
and seriously injures a couple of them.
And then,
when they actually are surrounded,
there is no shoot-out.
They take up swords,
they put themselves on full view
at the entrance,
and prepare to go hand-to-hand.
And, of course, they're shot down.
So they don't even make
a decent job of a last stand.
It has that essential silliness,
combined with tragedy
which is the keynote of the plot.
The day after the plotters' last stand,
the State Opening of Parliament
finally takes place.
The arguments about James's plan
for union of England and Scotland
are set aside and the King receives
a hero's welcome for having saved
the entire ruling elite
from being blown to smithereens.
From this point on,
James doesn't fear the threat
of a violent overturning of his right
or of a diverting of his claim
to the English throne.
And to that extent,
James can feel more secure.
James will begin designs
for a flag for his new kingdom
of Great Britain, the Union Jack.
Cecil is also sitting pretty.
James rewards him for
breaking the Gunpowder Plot
by ennobling him
as Viscount Cranborne.
The uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot
and Cecil's handling of it
certainly doesn't do Cecil a disservice
in James's eyes.
So, it confirms
I think it's one of those
many things that confirms
Cecil's utility to James.
But not everyone believes
it's safe to relax.
Something is niggling away
at the spy master.
Parliament is safe, the King is safe,
but Cecil doesn't know
the extent of this conspiracy.
Robert Cecil does not like loose ends,
he doesn't like mess.
He needs a storyline for a plot,
if he is to make something of this.
Cecil now knows all of the five
original gunpowder plotters.
Only Fawkes and Thomas Wintour,
who has somehow
survived the last stand,
are still alive.
Both are interrogated
in the Tower of London.
Though they don't give Cecil
a mastermind behind the plot,
they do give him something he can use.
They confess to knowing
certain priests
and that these men of God
are part of the Catholic underground.
Cecil has confessions which say
that there are priests
involved in the plot.
He then spins this information
in the direction of his preferred
narrative of events, which is,
as there were priests in the plot,
the plot is made by priests.
Fawkes even admits
the name of the priest
who gave them God's blessing.
And the name which comes up
early in the narrative of the plot
is that of Cecil's old enemy,
John Gerard.
For Cecil,
the story behind the Gunpowder Plot
now becomes starkly clear.
This unparalleled act of terror
was part of a holy war led by priests.
These are men he sees
as the greatest danger
to peace and security
and the worst of them is Gerard.
You have to wonder, by this point,
why Cecil
is pursuing the old enemies?
You have to wonder how much of this
is rooted in Cecil's background,
and how much of this is confirmed
by his political experience.
That you should treat everybody
as an enemy,
that sooner or later
it'll come to bloodshed.
And it is better to be giving it out
than receiving it.
The need to prove oneself,
to always assume that you start
in a position of weakness,
but he's actually now
in a position of unparalleled power.
Cecil is like a man who has a shovel
and believes he's digging himself out,
but he's actually getting
deeper and deeper in.
In the Tower of London,
in the chamber where
Fawkes and Wintour were interrogated,
is a trophy board
commemorating Cecil's unravelling of
the Gunpowder Plot.
It lists the conspirators
he's brought to justice.
But one key figure remains at large.
Cecil needs to find John Gerard
and he's using
every resource that he has.
Gerard is the most wanted man
in England at the moment.
You know, if you think about
the manhunt for bin Laden after 9/11,
it's a bit like that.
He's a dead man walking.
During the week
after the plot has failed,
Gerard remains at Harrowden Hall
with Eliza Vaux,
but both know there is no way out.
Gerard stays put.
He knows he's comparatively safe
in Harrowden Hall
and he knows that
there will be watchers everywhere.
Eliza would have known
that they would come for her.
It was well known in Catholic circles
that John Gerard
was staying with her.
So she would have known
that they were coming for him
and that they would come for her also.
It was Tuesday the 12th of November,
it was midday,
and about 100 armed men
surrounded Harrowden Hall.
This is huge. This is probably
the biggest raid that's happened to date.
The cordon stretched for three miles.
Gerard has prepared for this
by having a hideout installed
at Harrowden, called a priest-hole.
Gerard hears the hooves,
he gets into his priest-hole
and the door is opened.
They fan out all the searches,
they interrogate Eliza Vaux,
they interrogate her family,
her children, her servants.
They go through everything.
She must have been terrified,
but she was very sensible
and level-headed,
and she decided to take to her bed.
And act the, "Oh, my goodness me.
Poor sick woman. I'm only a widow
"and all you gentlemen are in my house
"and of course I'll help and cooperate,
"but I'm having a fit of the vapours
and I'll have to go and lie down."
The search goes on for nine days.
And Gerard, all this time,
is in his priest-hole.
It's cold, it's dark, he's cramped,
he can't stand up,
he can't stretch his legs.
This intense meditative focus
on Christ's suffering
helped him get through, he said,
those dark moments when he feared
for his soul and his body.
Cecil's men are unable to find Gerard.
Instead,
they take Eliza Vaux back to London,
accused of sheltering
a Catholic priest.
The only way she can save her skin
is to give up Gerard.
She had his life in her hands,
but Gerard absolutely trusts
Eliza Vaux.
Eliza Vaux arrives in a London
gripped by an atmosphere of terror.
The only two of the original
five plotters still alive,
Wintour and Fawkes, endure
a brutally violent public punishment.
Tied to wooden boards, they're dragged
through the crowded streets
to a scaffold
that has been specially erected
in the heart of the city.
The two main surviving conspirators,
that's Guy and Thomas Wintour,
die together and they get
the grandstand executions.
Their fates are rather different.
The hangman cuts Wintour down
while he's still very much alive,
so he can experience the full,
appalling experience of being
cut to pieces while still living.
Wintour is castrated, disembowelled,
and then cut into quarters.
Guy is different,
he's in such bad shape after torture
that the executioner actually has to
push him up the ladder.
But,
like the efficient ex-soldier he is,
Guy throws himself off
with such violence,
he breaks his neck immediately.
He has a much easier death.
Eliza Vaux is brought before
a council
of Gunpowder Plot investigators
and asked to reveal
the whereabouts of John Gerard.
I think that the interrogation
before the council must have been
one of the most terrifying moments
of Eliza's life.
Her old friend Cecil is on the council.
He demands she give up Gerard
or die in agony on the scaffold.
Cecil is using these uncompromising,
merciless methods
in trying to extract information
from Elizabeth Vaux,
who is meant to be a friend.
We have a sudden flash,
as it were, where we see
the willingness of Robert Cecil
to go to any extent
in order to defeat his enemies,
to achieve his objectives.
Because you could argue
that by this point,
James is secure, the plot is broken,
the country is secure.
And Robert Cecil
is still driving forward
to try and tie up
every last detail.
So Eliza Vaux has a choice -
to save her own life or Gerard's.
And she said, "Well, then, I will die.
"Then I will go to the scaffold.
"Nothing worse can happen,
other than death."
And in that death,
although the act of being executed is
awful and vile and dreadful,
but through that,
if she manages
to hold her nerve through that,
she would gain the crown of martyrdom,
a place in heaven.
So, in a way,
she had already accepted that
the worst that could happen to her
would be a great, a great crowning
of somebody of her faith
and that would have strengthened her.
For once, Cecil relents.
He lets Eliza Vaux go home.
In the aftermath
of the Gunpowder Plot,
the Protestant-Catholic divide
calms somewhat.
Britain even signs
a peace treaty with Spain,
Europe's Catholic superpower.
The turbulence that began
when Elizabeth came to the throne
45 years earlier has given way
to a kind of peace.
And the English Parliament agrees
to let James pursue his designs
for a flag of Great Britain.
It's at this time
that Shakespeare writes of England,
"This sceptred isle,
this other Eden, demi-paradise,
"this happy breed of men,
this little world, this precious stone
"set in the silver sea."
But the somewhat shameful truth is
that our modern world was partly
formed and kept alive
by men like Robert Cecil.
It's in Robert Cecil's lifetime
that Great Britain comes into focus.
He's not a poet like Shakespeare,
who can say, "This is who we are
and who we've always been."
But this is because Cecil,
by what he does,
is actually making this sceptred isle.
And the final chapter of the story,
James is congratulated
for foiling the Gunpowder Plot.
Among those
who come to pay their respects
is a Spanish diplomat.
He arrives with a golden cup for James
and jewels for Cecil.
And he departs
with the King's best wishes.
But, as he leaves,
the Spaniard's retinue of attendants
has grown by one.
This is how Father John Gerard
escapes Cecil's clutches once again.
It's a really interesting dynamic
between Gerard and Cecil, in a way.
There's this sense for both of them
that they are absolutely
on the right side.
You know, there's good and evil,
there's Christ and Antichrist,
there's freedom and tyranny,
there's truth and falsehood.
And one will be hubris,
one will be Nemesis.
So, in a way, they are
the perfect foil to each other.
Nobody knows
just how embarrassing it is for Cecil
that Gerard escapes
as Gerard.
Cecil and Gerard are tied together
in this conflict.
And Gerard, by escaping,
delivers a humiliating
private injury to Cecil.
And it is a failure, ultimately,
to capture and execute
one of his greatest enemies.
In other words, however strong he is,
he's not safe
and he can never be certain.
Re-synch & corrections by basiadora