Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (18 page)

T
ODAY WE ASSOCIATE SEWAGE DISPOSAL
with water — the push of a button, the pull of a chain and whoosh… But conveniences were rarely so convenient in Tudor times.
A few castles had‘houses of easement’ situated over the waters of the moat, and Dick Whittington’s famous‘Longhouse’ (see
p.13) had been built over the River Thames. One of the advantages of occupying the hundred or so homes built on the sixteenth-century
London Bridge was the straight drop from privy to river — though this was also a hazard for passing boatmen.

For most people, a hole in the earth did the job — inside
a fenced enclosure or little hut at the back of the house, Moss or leaves served for toilet paper and a shovelful of earth
for a flush. When the hole was full, you simply upped sticks and found, or made, a new hole,

At the other end of the social scale, Henry VIII had a private throne to suit his style and status. Decorated with ribbons,
fringes and two thousand gold nails, his‘close stool’ was a black velvet box concealing a pewter chamber pot whose regular
clearing and cleaning was the job of the groom of the stool’.

His daughter Queen Elizabeth probably had a similar device, but in 1592 she was offered a novel alternative. While staying
with her godson Sir John Harington at Kelston near Bath, she was invited to test his invention — the first modern water closet,
complete with a seat and a lever by means of which you could flush water down from a cistern above. The Queen liked it so
much she had one installed in her palace at Richmond.

Harington publicised his invention in a joke-filled book,
The Metamorphosis of Ajax.
The title itself was a pun — Jakes’ was the Elizabethan slang for lavatory — and the author supplied a helpful diagram for
do-it-yourselfers showing how, for 30s 8d (around £250 today), you could build your own WC. It would make‘your worst privy
as sweet as your best chamber’, he promised — and his drawing showed that you could even keep your pet goldfish in the cistern.

Harington’s WC was not the first. The Romans had flushing cisterns. But his design does seem to have been the original product
of a lively mind. Elizabeth’s multi-gifted
godson amused her court with his translations of risque foreign verses and, not surprisingly, bold wit that he was, he was
never afraid to mention the unmentionable:

If leeks you leake, but do their smell disleeke, eat onions and

you shall not smell the leek.

If you of onions would the scent expel,

Eat garlic—that shall drown the onion smell.

But against garlic’s savour, if you smart,

I know but one receipt. What’s that? A fart.

B
Y MARCH 1603 IT WAS CLEAR THAT ELIZABETH
was dying. The faithful Doctor Dee had looked at the stars and advised her to move from Whitehall to her palace at airy Richmond.
There she sat on the floor for days, propped up with embroidered cushions. With her finger in her mouth and her features,
as ever, plastered with white, lead-based make-up, the sixty-nine-year-old monarch refused to eat, sleep or change her clothes.

’Madam, you must to bed,’ urged Robert Cecil, who had become her chief minister following the death of his father William,
Lord Burghley, in 1598.

’Little man! Little man!’ retorted the Queen.’Your father
would have known that “must” is not a word we use to princes/

The closing years of her reign had not been happy ones. The great triumph of the Armada had been followed by still more warfare
— with Spain, in Ireland, in France and in the Netherlands. War cost money, and three times more taxes had been levied in
the fifteen years since 1588 than in the first thirty years of her reign. Harvests had been poor, prices high, trade depressed.
Parliament complained bitterly at the growth of’monopolies’, the exclusive trading licences the Queen granted to favourites
like Ralegh, who controlled the sales of tin and playing cards, and also the licensing of taverns. Steel, starch, salt, imported
drinking glasses… the list of these privately controlled and taxed commodities was read out one day in Parliament.‘Is not
bread there?’ called out a sarcastic voice.

In 1601 discontented citizens had marched through the streets of London in support of the Earl of Essex, the arrogant young
aristocrat who had dared to criticise and defy Elizabeth. She sent him to the block — a last flourish of the standard Tudor
remedy for troublemakers — but that did not stop people laughing at her behind her back. Even her godson John Harington, the
Jakes inventor, sniggered uncharitably at the out-of-touch monarch‘shut up in a chamber from her subjects and most of her
servants… seldom seen but on holy days’. Sir Walter Ralegh put it more gallantly. The Queen, he said, was‘a lady whom time
had surprised’.

Elizabeth had always refused to nominate an heir. She had no wish, she said, to contemplate her‘own winding
sheet’. But by 1603 it was clear there could be only one successor — King James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots.
Now thirty-six, James had proved himself a canny ruler north of the border, and his bloodline was impeccable. He was the great-great-grandson
of the first Tudor, Henry VIL

Robert Cecil had been corresponding secretly with James for months, and all through February and March the horses stood ready,
staged at ten-mile intervals so that news of the Queen’s death would reach Scotland without delay. On the evening of 23 March
she fell unconscious and, waking only briefly, she died in the small hours of the 24th. As the messenger headed north, trumpeters,
heralds, judges and barons were already processing through the streets of London to proclaim the new King James I.

Elizabeth I, Queen of Shakespeare, Ralegh, Drake and the Armada, had presided over one of the most glorious flowerings of
English history and culture, and her success owed not a little to the adroitness with which she had avoided marriage. But
this also meant that she was the last of her line. Her successor James Stuart and every subsequent English and British monarch
has taken their descent not from Gloriana, but from Elizabeth’s hated rival, Mary Queen of Scots.

W
ITH HIS FLOWING MOUSTACHE AND LUXU
rious beard, Guy Fawkes cut an elegant figure — he looked like anything but a household servant as he lurked in one of the
cellars-to-rent below the Houses of Parliament on the afternoon of 4 November 1605, He was wearing a dark hat and cloak, and
had strapped his spurs on to his riding boots, ready
for
a quick escape. But when the Lord Chamberlain’s guards came upon Guy in the candlelit cellar, they believed his story He was
a domestic servant, he told them — John Johnson was the cover name he had prepared — and he had been checking on the piles
of firewood
stacked against the wall The search party went on their way, not thinking to rummage behind the dry kindling, where, if they
had looked, they would have discovered thirty-six large barrels of gunpowder…

The notorious Gunpowder Plot was born of the injustice and disappointment that many English Catholics came to feel at the
beginning of the reign of King James I. Their hopes had been high that the son of Mary Queen of Scots, their Catholic champion
and martyr, would ease the legal persecution from which they suffered — and James duly had his mother’s body dug up and reburied
in Westminster Abbey. Mary lies there to this day, in a splendid tomb alongside Elizabeth — the two cousins, Catholic and
Protestant, honoured equally in death.

But James knew he must live with the reality of a nation that defined itself as Protestant, and soon after his arrival in
England he summoned a conference at Hampton Court to submit the Church of England to review by the growing number of evangelicals
who wanted to weed out the‘impure’ practices left over from Catholicism. As far as doctrine was concerned, the new King gave
these’Puritans’ less than they wanted, but he did bow to their demands to enforce the anti-Catholic laws that Elizabeth had
applied with a relatively light touch.

These laws were fierce. Anyone caught hearing the mass could be fined and sent to jail. Priests — many of whom survived in‘priest
holes’ hidden behind the panelling in the homes of rich Catholics — were liable to be punished by imprisonment or even death.
Catholic children could not be
baptised. The dying were denied the ceremony of extreme unction, their crucial step to heaven- Catholics could not study at
university. If they failed to attend their local Anglican church they were classed as’recusants’ (we might say Ve-fuseniks’),
and became liable to fines of £20 a month. The enforcement of recusancy fines was patchy, but £20 was a quite impossible penalty
at a time when a yeoman, or‘middling, farmer was legally defined as someone whose land brought him forty shillings, or £2,
per yean

’Catholics now saw their own country,’ wrote Father William Weston,‘the country of their birth, turned into a ruthless and
unloving land.’

State-sponsored oppression, frustration, hopelessness — from these bitter ingredients stemmed the extravagant scheme of Guy
Fawkes and a dozen aggrieved young Catholics to blow up the King, his family, the Royal Council and all the members of the
Protestant-dominated Houses of Parliament in one spectacular blast. Modern explosives experts have calculated that Guy’s thirty-six
barrels (5,500 pounds) of gunpowder would have caused‘severe structural damage’ to an area within a radius of five hundred
metres. Not only the Houses of Parliament, but Westminster Abbey and much of Whitehall would have been demolished in a terrorist
gesture whose imaginative and destructive power stands comparison, for its time, with the planes that al-Qaedas pilots crashed
into New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001,

But as the Gunpowder Plotters’ plan for scarcely imaginable slaughter became known in Catholic circles, someone felt they
had to blow the whistle:

My Lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation… [read an anonymous letter sent
to a Catholic peer, Lord Monteagle, on 26 October 160$] I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse
to shift of your attendance at this Parliament
…
[and] retire yourself into your country where you may expect the event in safety.

Delivered at dusk by a tall stranger to a servant of Monteagle’s outside his house in Hoxton on the north-east outskirts of
London, this‘dark and doubtful letter’ can be seen today in the National Archives, and has inspired fevered debate among scholars:
who betrayed the plot? The letter’s authorship has been attributed to almost every one of Guy Fawkes’s confederates — and
even to Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, James’s chief minister, who organised the investigation after Monteagle handed over
the letter.

’John Johnson’ fooled the first search party on the afternoon of 4 November, but not the second, who, lanterns in hand, prodded
their way through the cellars in the early hours of the 5th, the very day Parliament was due to assemble. Once arrested, he
made no secret of his intention to blow up King and lords. His only regret, he said, was that his plan had not succeeded.
It was the devil and not God’ who had betrayed the plot.

Torture soon extracted from Guy Fawkes that he was a thirty-four-year-old Catholic from York who had fought in the Netherlands
on the Spanish side against the Dutch Protestants. Like the letter that betrayed him, his successive confessions can be read
today: his signature starts off firm and black, then degenerates to a tremulous and scarcely legible
scratching as the rack does its dreadful work. Once Parliament had been destroyed, it turned out, the conspirators were planning
to seize the Kings nine-year-old daughter Princess Elizabeth, and install her as their puppet rulen

Guy and his fellow-plotters suffered the ghastly penalties prescribed for traitors: they were hung, drawn and quartered. When
Parliament reassembled, the first order of business was to institute’a public thanksgiving to Almighty God every year on the
fifth day of November’ — the origin of our modern‘Bonfire Night’. But furious Protestants were not content with executions
and prayers.