John Wright
WRIGHT, John (1568?-1605), conspirator, was a grandson of John Wright of Ploughland
Hall, Yorkshire, who had been seneschal to Henry VIII, and migrated thither from Kent
in the thirty-third year of that king’s reign. His son Robert had by his second wife
Ursula Rudston of Hayton, two sons, John and Christopher (see below), both gunpowder
plotters, and two daughters, one of whom married Thomas Percy (1560-1605) [q.v.]. who
was engaged in the same conspiracy.
John, the elder brother, was baptised at Welwick on 16 Jan 1568 (Poulson,
Holderness, ii. 516). He is said to have been a schoolfellow of Father Tesimond
[q.v.] the jesuit, and of Guy Fawkes (Cal. State Papers, Dom. James I, xvii. 18).
Father Gerard, his contemporary, describes him as ‘a strong, stout man, and of very
good wit, though slow of speech.’ He was an excellent swordsman and much disposed
to fighting. Camden, writing to Sir R. Cotton in 1596 when Queen Elizabeth was sick,
says that both the Wrights, with Catesby, Tresham, and others, were put under arrest
as men likely to give trouble in case of the queen’s death (Birch, Orig. Letters, 2nd
ser. iii.179).
However, according to Gerard, John Wright became a catholic only about the time
of Essex’s rising, in which he was implicated (1601), and after that a change came
over him. He became ‘staid and of good sober carriage.’ He kept much in the company
of Catesby, who esteemed him for his valour and secrecy. His house at Twigmore in
Lincolnshire, where he now chiefly resided, became the resort of priests, who went
to him for his spiritual and their own corporal comfort (Gerard, Narrative, p. 59).
John was one of the first initiated into the plot by his friend Catesby, probably
at he same time as Thomas Winter [q.v.], i.e. January 1604. He now removed his family
from Twigmore to a house belonging to Catesby at Lapworth in Warwickshire. He took
an active part in all the operations of the conspirators, and on the eve of the actual
discovery of the plot (on the afternoon of 4 Nov). He fled from London with Catesby.
At Holbeche on the morning of the 8th, when an accident took place with some
gunpowder, he wished in his despair to ignite the rest so as to blow up the house
and all. In the fight which followed with Sir Richard Walsh’s men he and his brother
fell mortally wounded. Sir Thomas Lawley, who was in this affair assisting the
sheriff of Worcester, wrote to Salisbury: ‘I hasted to revive Catesby and Percy and
the two Wrights, who lay deadly wounded on the ground, thinking by the recovery of
these to have done unto his majesty better service than by suffering them to die,’
but the people standing by roughly stripped the bodies naked, and, no surgeon being
at hand, they soon died (Brit, Mus. Addit. MS. 617, p. 565, quoted in ‘Life of a
Conspirator,’ 1895, p. 230).
Christopher Wright (1570?-1605), the younger brother,
before the plot was projected had been sent into Spain in March 1603, in accordance
with the arrangement made with Thomas Winter, to inform Philip of the queen’s death
and to solicit the aid of the Spanish forces. He was, like Winter, furnished with
letters of recommendation by Garnet to Creswell, and was followed two months later
by Fawkes, who came into Spain from Brussels on a similar errand (Tierney, iv. 8,
liii). Christopher was not called upon to take part in the power conspiracy till
Lent 1605, when the five workers at the mine, finding ‘the stone wall very hard to
beat through,’ needed fresh hands. His fortunes were thenceforward linked with
those of his brother, and he was mortally wounded with him on 8 Nov. 1605.
[Jardine’s Narrative; condition of Catholies in the Reign of James I; Father
Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris, S.J., 1871; Traditional
History and the Spacish Treason, articles in the Month, May 1896, by the Rev. John
Gerard, S.J. the Gunpowder Plot? By Father Gerard, 1897; What Gunpowder Plot was, by
S.R. Gardiner, 1897.]
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