The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (18 page)

It has to be said, however, that Guy Fawkes’ raging against the all-pervasive Scots was the one aspect of his memorandum which would have commended itself to the majority of his fellow Englishmen. It certainly gave notice of a new, potentially rebellious feeling among the English: deep resentment at being passed over in favour of the greedy new men from the north.

Although the Spanish Council did solemnly debate the propositions of Dutton and Guy Fawkes, a percipient point was made in the course of the discussion by the Duke of Olivares, the King’s chief minister. ‘Any increase in men to a Catholic faction is composed of the malcontents,’ he remarked.
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And the debate was not ultimately favourable to the Englishmen’s cause.

In the meantime Father Cresswell, Superior of the English College, who a year previously had been encouraging action, along with Tom Wintour, had now changed his tack. He begged the Council to send Dutton and Guy Fawkes away, on the ground that they were endangering the negotiation of a diplomatic peace. In Rome, the Pope was equally resolute in asserting that ‘the way of arms’, in the phrase of Philip III, would simply result in the destruction of those English Catholics that remained.
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The only real memento that Guy Fawkes took away from this unpromising mission was a change of name: henceforth he would be known universally as Guido, the name he also used for his official signature. It was a name which might be said by his enemies to make his foreign allegiances clear. But that was not how Guido Fawkes saw the matter. In his eyes, he was both a sincere Catholic and a patriotic Englishman, an Englishman abroad but with the true interests of his country at heart.

From the point of view of English Catholic liberty of conscience, one crucial journey did take place in the summer of 1603: not the expedition of that amateur diplomat and adventurer Guy – now Guido – Fawkes, but the important mission
of Don Juan de Tassis, from Spain to England. (The fact that Tassis could set out, travelling via Brussels, while the Spanish Council had still not officially ruled out providing armed support is characteristic of the ambiguity with which they operated.) Tassis’ brief was to pave the way for an Anglo-Spanish treaty and in so doing explore the whole matter of liberty of conscience for English Catholics.
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For example, should toleration be a precondition of any treaty? Should the Spanish King hold out for it at all costs? In any case, what was the nature of the English Catholic community? Strong, armed, rebellious? Or crushed, weak and disorganised? There had been many wild reports recently from visitors, including Wintour and Fawkes, and Tassis was going to test the truth of these claims.

A peaceful tide was flowing across Europe and King James was by temperament the right man to go with it. Guido’s denunciation of him as a militant was extremely wide of the mark. It was the personal motto in which King James would take pride,
Beati Pacifici
(Blessed are the Peacemakers), which expressed the truth. Although Spain and England were still technically at war, the immediate Anglo-Spanish ceasefire which James had ordered on his accession provided the diplomatic excuse for Tassis’ journey. It was now a matter of protocol that Spanish royal congratulations should be conveyed to James on his accession. Meanwhile the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella were so enamoured of the possibilities of the new reign that they despatched their own welcoming envoy without consulting Spain, the mother country. The new King’s friendship was precious, Isabella had written in April, ‘as a chance of peace’.
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The presence of an embassy from a foreign Catholic power had an important side effect for the Catholics of England. Traditionally the government did not interfere with the private celebration of the Mass in an embassy chapel, nor seek to question too closely the status of the embassy officials, some of whom might be priests: embassies were in theory foreign soil. Englishmen could therefore slip into the great warrens of
houses where such embassies were based and not only attend Mass but also enjoy Catholic contact. They could do so, if they were prepared to endure the ordeal of Cecil’s spies, eager to report who paid this kind of suspicious visit, as a method of discovering secret Papists. It was all part of the deadly game which Papists and their priests played, balancing the Mass against imprisonment.

The arrival of an envoy from the greatest Catholic power of all, Spain, produced incredible excitement. One of Don Juan de Tassis’ official escorts, Sir Lewis Lewkenor, thought it his duty to advise Cecil that ‘some gentlemen known to be recusants’ had rushed to greet him, and some of them in their eagerness even awaited his landing at Dover on 31 August.
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Tassis came from a family which (under the other version of the name, Taxis) had given nearly a century of service to the Habsburgs. He himself had acted as Court Chamberlain to Philip III since 1599. While Tassis clearly enjoyed the trust of his King, he was not a trained diplomat but a court official. Moreover his instructions betrayed a startling naivety concerning the English scene. He bore with him letters of greetings to many members of the English nobility, including ten dukes – but there were no dukes at all in England at the present time.
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Tassis was also supposed to greet ten marquesses which was slightly easier to achieve since there was actually one marquessate in England, that of Winchester.

Tassis’ stay in Brussels
en route
had been no more helpful in preparing him realistically for what he would find in England. Secret conferences were held ‘at a late hour to protect us from [English] spies’, with men like Sir William Stanley and Hugh Owen and a Jesuit, Father William Baldwin, who was part of their counsels. There was more talk of Catholic troops in waiting – the figure of twelve thousand men was mentioned. And Tassis’ card was marked concerning the English nobles he
would encounter, and how friendly they were to the Spanish (Catholic) cause. Even here the familiar anti-Scottish note struck. The new Scottish favourites at the English court, such as Sir George Home, were said to be unenthusiastic about Spain – but it was thought that they would change their opinions if bribed.
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Tassis, if not a trained diplomat, was shrewd and practical. It is to his credit that once in England he realised very quickly how false the picture was that he had been given. His letters back to Spain reflect a complete change of approach from the lofty militarism of the high summer. Lewkenor complained that the recusants continued to accost Tassis in the course of his ‘slow journey’ to Oxford, which was destined to be his first official resting-place. Some Spaniards in his train took the opportunity to slip into the prisons and visit ‘the seminary priests… detained prisoners’.
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Lewkenor, however – and Cecil – would have been gratified rather than angered if they had had the opportunity to read the reports despatched by Tassis back to Spain. For Tassis was not impressed by what he found.
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The recusants ‘go about in such a timid fear of one another’, he wrote, ‘that I would seriously doubt that they would risk taking to arms’ unless there was a clear and definite opportunity. A month after his arrival, he was expressing serious disappointment. The numbers of active Catholics had been grossly inflated. In short, he had no expectation of any Catholic ‘stir’ (a commonly used word for a rising).

One of the activists that Tassis did meet was Tom Wintour. He was privately of the opinion that Wintour was a Jesuit, although Wintour introduced himself merely as one that had kissed the hands of the King of Spain ‘less than two years ago’ in the course of negotiations with members of the Spanish Council. Wintour’s fluent Spanish was useful once more on this occasion since Tassis spoke no English. Even so, he failed to convince Tassis that ‘3,000 Catholics’ were ready, only needing the promised money from Spain to spur them forward.

Tassis was finally received by King James on 8 October in a series of ceremonies which lasted for three days. (Not only had the King been away hunting since his arrival, but there remained the persistent fear of plague which led him to avoid official duties.) Tassis presented the King with some fine Spanish horses – under the circumstances, a suitable gift – and for Queen Anne there were magnificent jewels. There was however one hitch. The King was disconcerted to find that Tassis did not have plenipotentiary powers to negotiate the coming treaty. These had been granted to a member of the Spanish Council known as the Constable of Castile, who was still in Spain.

Tassis also had to make an adjustment. Writing back to Spain he poured cold water on those rumours of King James’ conversion to Catholicism. James was a Protestant and likely to remain so, despite the hints so casually dropped by his emissaries in the 1590s. Even more to the point, James’ current attitude to Catholic ceremonies was not at all what Tassis had been led to expect. Great care was being taken to ensure that the King had no official knowledge of any Mass being said: it was a case of a discreet ‘Mass in a corner’ here and there in private (Northumberland’s term to James in Scotland), nothing more public. There was general doubt whether King James would ever ‘permit’ the Catholic religion to be practised, but it was also viewed as fatal if the Spanish King was seen to be trying to set up his own religion ‘in this country’. On 12 October, the day after he parted from King James, Tassis wrote quite frankly to Philip III to say that the question of the free exercise of the Catholic religion ‘should be left aside until the peace has been negotiated’.
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Disappointed by the quality of local Catholic support, Tassis now believed that the English Catholics should continue to play that passive role for which they seemed best fitted. They were not after all Spanish subjects. If they had been, King Philip would be obliged to help them as a matter of justice, but as Cardinal de Rojas y Sandoval, the Primate of Spain, succinctly expressed it, the present case of the Catholics of
England was ‘one of charity’ from the Spanish King ‘and not of justice’.
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This was a message appreciated by Philip III, who at long last gave up playing with the notion of a ‘stir’. In a letter the following February, he summed up the new official line: it was essential that ‘these Catholics’ (the English) should avoid arousing the suspicions of their sovereign at this crucial moment when there was a real prospect of a treaty.
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In short, the diplomatic solution was to prevail.

There was, however, some question of
buying
liberty of conscience for the Catholics. To some, including the Pope, this was an abhorrent idea: Clement VIII denounced it as ‘unworthy and scandalous’ since it would mean using unclean money to interfere with the divinely ordained timescale for these things. The Spanish Council was also worried by the proposition, not on moral grounds, but more pragmatically, because other religious minorities might request the same lavish treatment.
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In England, however, Tassis found himself entering the sweetly corrupt world of the Jacobean court, where bribery was not so much unworthy as a thoroughly worthy way of life. The promise of pensions – paid secretly by Spain – became a weapon in maintaining a pro-Spanish party at court. Of course the Spanish records of the money promised do not necessarily confirm that the money was actually received (Tom Wintour was after all still waiting for that promised Spanish subsidy). Whether all the promised money was paid over or not, it has to be said that very few names of prominent courtiers are missing from the Spanish pension records during the first decade of James’ reign. In general, the desire to amass money was like a fierce universal lust in the Jacobean period. (Both Cecil and Henry Howard Earl of Northampton had acquired large fortunes and great properties by their deaths, despite having begun, for different reasons, as poor men.) Most of James’ courtiers, as Tassis found, would have agreed with the aphorism of Francis Bacon, the lawyer and politician recently
knighted for his loyalty to the crown: ‘Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.’

Outstanding for her avarice was the beautiful, wilful Catherine Countess of Suffolk. Her husband, formerly known as Lord Thomas Howard, a son of the executed Duke of Norfolk, had been given his Suffolk title in July as part of King James’ rehabilitation of the Howard family that he loved. The new Earl of Suffolk was thus a nephew of Northampton and, like Northampton, he had tasted the bitterness of family disgrace in youth. As Lord Thomas Howard, however, he had won the Queen’s favour by his distinguished service as a naval commander both at the time of the Armada and after. To Queen Elizabeth, in consequence, he had been her ‘good Thomas’.

Now in his early forties, the Queen’s good Thomas was resolved to be the King’s good Suffolk, but the glory days of naval warfare were over for him and it was as a leading courtier that he intended to shine – a courtier and hopefully a rich man. He was given the post of Lord Chamberlain of the Household while Catherine Suffolk was made Keeper of the Jewels to Queen Anne.

The kindest thing that can be said about the Suffolks, as a couple, is that they had a huge family to maintain: Catherine Suffolk bore at least ten children, seven of whom were sons. But, even as parents, they cannot be said to have shone. A Suffolk daughter, Lady Frances Howard, would one day, with her second husband, the Earl of Somerset, be accused of conspiracy to murder Sir Thomas Overbury; she spent some years in the Tower. It is a story that lies outside the timescale of this narrative, as does the final fall of the Suffolks from grace, thanks to their amazing peculations. Even Catherine Suffolk’s famous beauty did not escape scot-free. As in a morality play, ‘that good face of hers’ which had brought much misery to others ‘and to herself greatness’ was ruined by smallpox in 1619.
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