The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (54 page)

N
early four hundred years have passed since that dark night in November when searchers found a ‘desperate fellow’ with explosives in the vaulted room beneath the House of Lords. In the time that has elapsed, the Gunpowder Plot has meant many different things to many different people – including many different historians. The propaganda war has been long and vigorous and shows no signs of abating, given that the most recent scholarly works on the subject have taken diametrically opposite points of view.

Father Francis Edwards, S.J., in
Guy Fawkes: the real story of the Gunpowder Plot?
(1969), maintains that the entire conspiracy was devised by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, hereditary foe to the moderate English Catholics, who used double-agents including Robert Catesby himself (deliberately killed at Holbeach to stop his mouth), Guy Fawkes and Thomas Percy. Mark Nicholls in
Investigating Gunpowder Plot
(1992) believes that ‘it is surely more realistic to see the treason as one of the greatest challenges that early modern state-security ever faced…’
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These two totally irreconcilable positions have in fact been present in the historiography of the Gunpowder Plot from the very beginning. Taking the government’s official stance first, its invective on the subject (including the vituperative language of Sir Edward Coke) was based on the premise of an appalling danger narrowly averted. Succeeding writers and pamphleteers built energetically upon these foundations in what came to be a prolific body of literature. An extract from a work of 1610 entitled
Popish Pietie
by a physician named Francis Herring is a characteristic reflection of it, rather than an exaggerated version of the genre. For Herring, the Powder Treason – ‘that monstrous birth of the Roman harlot’ – was ‘the quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach and stain of human malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled among the savage Turks, the barbarous Indians, nor, as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals’.
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In such estimates, there was an additional
frisson
in the status of the proposed victim. A King – God’s chosen representative on earth – had been menaced. That meant that the conspiracy was not only wicked but actually sacrilegious.
Macbeth
, first performed in 1606 (possibly at Hampton Court in August to mark the state visit of Queen Anne’s brother King Christian of Denmark),
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is a work redolent with outrage at the monstrous upsetting of the natural order, which is brought about when subjects kill their lawful sovereign.

O horror! horror! horror!
Tongue nor heart cannot conceive, nor name thee!

Macduff’s appalled cry when he discovered the bloodstained body of the murdered King Duncan would have certainly reminded his hearers in that summer of 1606 of the recent conspiracy against their own King. Macduffs words of
shocked expostulation even echoed the government indictment against the conspirators, which found the Gunpowder Plot to be a treason such as ‘the tongue of man never delivered, the ear of man never heard, the heart of man never conceived…’.
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Rumours concerning the King’s safety – a monarch who was once threatened in such an appalling manner could always be threatened again – continued to rustle in the nervy months following the discovery of the Plot. At the end of March a story spread that James had been stabbed by a poisoned knife at Okingham, twenty miles from London, ‘Which treason, some said, was performed by English Jesuits, some by Scots in women’s apparel, and others by Spaniards or Frenchmen’ (showing an even-handed list of contemporary prejudices).
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The story was a complete fantasy, but it demonstrated the continued perturbation on the subject of the King’s personal safety; he was ‘the life o’th’ building’, as Macbeth described Duncan, whose presence guaranteed order.

The Papists’ Powder Treason,
an allegorical engraving done for 5 November 1612 ‘in aeternal memory of the divine bounty in England’s preservation from the Hellish Powder Plot’, was careful to glorify the King, as the central feature of what had been preserved. A series of royal portraits, including Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, loom over much smaller vignettes of Monteagle receiving the anonymous letter from a stranger and the conspirators taking their sacramental oath. It was unfortunate that the divine bounty failed the next day, when Prince Henry died of his fever on 6 November. The engraving had to be withdrawn (although it emerged in 1679, another period of virulent anti-Popery).
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5

Such perturbation, personalised and focused on King James, was grist to the government’s mill in its campaign against the treacherous Catholics. First, these traitors paid allegiance to the Pope rather than to their King; then, their perceived leaders,
the Jesuits, were actual ‘King-killers’. A rhyming pamphlet of 1606 on the subject of the Powder Treason by the playwright Thomas Dekker contains ‘The Picture of a Jesuit’:

A Harpy face, a Fox’s head…
A Mandrake’s voice, whose tunes are cries,
So piercing that the hearer dies,
Mouth’d like an Ape, his innate spite
Being to mock those he cannot bite…
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Like Francis Herring’s disquisition on ‘Satan’s policy’, this violent caricature was not atypical of the way Jesuits were portrayed henceforth. Not only were they ‘King-killers’, but they were also equivocators.

The doctrine of equivocation continued to be seen, like the Jesuits themselves, as at once alien and diabolical. In
Macbeth
Shakespeare began by amusing himself on the subject, when the drunken Porter of Macbeth’s castle, awakened by knocking, imagined that he was at Hell’s Gate, welcoming the new arrivals. His language recalled the popular gibes made on the subject of Garnet’s death, including that jocular remark by Dudley Carleton to his correspondent John Chamberlain that Garnet would be hanged without ‘equivocation’ for all his shifting and faltering.
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‘Faith, here’s an equivocator,’ exclaimed the Porter, ‘that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator.’
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Towards the end of the play, a more serious use of the word occurred. Macbeth began to suspect that ‘the equivocation of the fiend’ was responsible for two comforting prophecies which had been made to him. One Apparition, summoned by the witches, had told him: ‘Fear not, till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane’; the other Apparition had assured him that ‘none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’. But Birnam Wood
did advance on Dunsinane – in the shape of Macbeth’s enemies disguised as branches – and Macduff did have the power to kill him, being ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’.
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Both prophecies were classic examples of equivocation, since Macbeth had understood them in one sense, while their hidden (sinister) meaning turned out to be very different. This use of equivocation was seen as an essentially evil process: ‘a monster shapeless, two-headed, two-horned, and also with a double mouth, and especially a double heart’, as William Gager described equivocation in
Pyramis,
a Latin poem of 1608 dedicated to the King.
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It was a shapeless mythical monster that bore little relation to the actual Catholic doctrine of equivocation – heroic if arguably ill-advised – which was intended to avoid the sin of lying when in dangerous conditions.

Such propaganda accompanied the political measures taken by the government after the discovery of the Plot, and provided the correct climate for persecution. Much of this was directed at the blameless Catholic community, exactly as Father Garnet and others had feared. The Catholics, like the Protestants, trembled in the wake of the Plot, fearing a general massacre of their number inspired by a spirit of ‘vengeance and hatred’.
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In April 1606 Henri IV of France decided to give King James a little lecture on the virtues of toleration – and who better to do it than the man who had changed his religion to secure a kingdom? ‘His master had learned from experience’, said the French Ambassador in London, ‘the strong hold which religion has on the human breast’ (if not perhaps on Henry IV’s own); it was a flame which tended to burn with increasing fierceness in proportion to the violence employed to extinguish it. Let King James, therefore, punish the guilty, but let him equally spare the innocent.
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These same admirable sentiments had in fact been expressed by James himself in his speech to Parliament of 9 November 1605. Now he saw things differently.

The King told the French Ambassador that the English
Catholics ‘were so infected with the doctrine of the Jesuits, respecting the subordination of the royal to the papal authority’, that he could do nothing. He would leave it to his Parliament. So another Oath of Allegiance was devised, with help from an Appellant Catholic priest, intended to increase the rift between those priests prepared to ‘compromise’ with the state, such as the Appellants, and those who could not, the Jesuits. It was an oath which resulted in a long propaganda war between King James and the defenders of the Pope’s spiritual supremacy.
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But from the point of view of the hapless recusants, such doctrinal wars were less important than the disabilities which came to burden their daily lives.

As these disabilities multiplied, Catholics could no longer practise law, nor serve in the Army or Navy as officers (on pain of a hundred pounds fine). No recusant could act as executor of a will or guardian to a minor, nor even possess a weapon except in cases of self-defence. Catholics could not receive a university degree, and could not vote in local elections (until 1797) nor in Parliamentary elections until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. All this was on top of the spiritual penalties by which Catholics were ordered to marry in the Anglican Church, take their children there for baptism, and finally rest in its burial ground.

In 1613 a bill was introduced into the House of Commons to compel Catholics to wear a red hat (as the Jews in Rome did) or parti-coloured stockings (like clowns did), not only so that they could be easily distinguished, but also so they could be ‘hooted at’ whenever they appeared. Wiser counsels prevailed and this unpleasant scapegoating was not carried through. Nevertheless a profound prejudice against Papists, with or without red hats and parti-coloured stockings, remained lurking in the popular consciousness after 1605, ready to emerge from its depths at any hint of leniency towards them. For many Protestants, a declaration of February 1606 on the subject of the Plot by Sir Thomas Smith summed the matter up: ‘this bloody stain and mark will never be washed out of Popish religion’.
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It was a stain which could be passed on to unborn generations. It was the allegedly ‘foreign’ nature of Catholicism – ruled by an alien Pope based in Rome – which made it perennially vulnerable to attack. A political organisation could be denounced where genuine religious convictions might evoke sympathy. In 1651 Milton called Catholicism not so much a religion as ‘a [foreign] priestly despotism under the cloak of religion arrayed in the spoils of temporal power’.
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He was on firm ground that would not be surrendered by every Protestant until the late twentieth century (if then). Meanwhile, as the contents of the anniversary sermons on 5 November reveal, the notion of a conspiracy which was so frightful as to be directed by Satan himself only deepened with the passing of the years.

Was the Plot really ‘Satan’s policy’ – that is, the work of Satan carried out by the Catholics? Or was some other agency responsible, rather closer to the King? The first rumours that the mastermind was in fact Salisbury, not Satan, occurred in November 1605. As early as 17 November, the Venetian Ambassador, Niccolò Molin, reported: ‘people say that this plot must have its roots high up’. Another cynical account described the fire which was to have ‘burnt our King and Council’ as being but
‘ignis fatuus
[will o’ the wisp] or a flash of some foolish fellow’s brain’.
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Such stories suited the Catholic powers abroad, because they shifted the embarrassing responsibility for the conspiracy away from their own co-religionists (Philip III, for example, on first hearing the news had hoped that Puritans would turn out to be involved). On 25 November Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels told Salisbury that he was ashamed to repeat the ‘daily new inventions at this court’ which were intended to exonerate the Catholics from scandal. An anonymous letter of December held it as certain that ‘there has been foul play’, that some members of the Council had spun the web which had embroiled the Catholics.
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Not only were rumours of foul play convenient for the Catholic powers, they also offered (and still offer) the most
convenient defence for those reluctant to face the fact that convinced, pious Catholics could also be terrorists. Bishop Godfrey Goodman’s memoir
The Court of King James the First
, written about forty years after the event, provided material for this approach, albeit of a somewhat flimsy nature (the whole memoir has little scholarly quality). Goodman was the son of the Dean of Westminster and rose to become Bishop of Gloucester, despite being suspected of holding ‘papistical views’. His special interest was in fact the reconciliation of the Anglican Church and Rome, which he described in his will as the ‘mother church’.
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