The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (55 page)

Goodman made Salisbury the clear villain of the piece. He began by drawing attention to the Catholics’ acute feelings of grievance after the death of the ‘old woman’ (Queen Elizabeth) when they did not receive ‘the mitigation’ that they had expected. Salisbury’s intelligence service had let him know all about this, whereupon he decided that in order to demonstrate his service to the state, ‘he would first contrive and then discover a treason’ – the more odious the treason, the greater the service. Thus Percy was an
agent provocateur
who was ‘often seen’ coming out of Salisbury’s house at 2.00 a.m. Salisbury was meanwhile giving specific instructions for the convenient deaths of Catesby and Percy: ‘Let me never see them alive.’ But Goodman produces no proof for any of this, beyond second-hand gossip.

Nevertheless the sheer seductiveness of the story – from the Catholic point of view – prevented its dying away completely. In 1679, when the imaginary Popish Plot of Titus Oates created new waves of anti-Popery, Thomas Barlow, the fiercely anti-Catholic Bishop of Lincoln, saw fit to publish a fresh work on the Gunpowder Plot, which he called that ‘villainy so black and horrid… as has no parallel in any age or nation’. However, in the course of his narrative, Barlow also found it necessary to denounce the persistent ‘wicked’ rumours about Salisbury’s role. The Plot, he reiterated fiercely, had been ‘hatched in Hell’ by the Jesuits.
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Of course Salisbury himself never tried to conceal the fact
that he had had knowledge of some impending ‘stir’. He not only mentioned it in his official communication to the English ambassadors but told King James, who repeated it in his own account of the Plot. The reputation of Salisbury’s intelligence service demanded no less and it would have ill become the King’s chief minister to plead total ignorance of such a flagrant conspiracy under his very nose.

Salisbury’s penetration of the Plot is one thing but the deliberate manufacture of the entire conspiracy with the aim of damning Catholicism for ever is quite another. There is far too much evidence of treasonable Catholic enterprises in late Elizabethan times for the Gunpowder Plot to be dismissed altogether as malevolent invention. It was, on the contrary, a terrorist conspiracy spurred on by resentment of the King’s broken promises. The wrongs of the persecuted Catholics were thus to be righted by the classic terrorist method of violence, which encompassed the destruction of the innocent as well as the guilty.

The story told here has been of Salisbury’s foreknowledge – at a comparatively late stage – thanks to the revelations of Francis Tresham repeated to Monteagle and his subsequent manipulation of the King by the stratagem of the anonymous letter. This limited foreknowledge makes sense of the extraordinary ten-day delay in searching the House of Lords for gunpowder – otherwise quite incomprehensible in a responsible and security-minded minister. In his Cold War against the forces of Catholicism, Salisbury scented the opportunity for a coup, particularly when it turned out that he could very likely entangle the hated Jesuits in the same net.

But foreknowledge is not fabrication, even if Salisbury, or perhaps Coke, did embellish the truth with certain vivid details afterwards, such as the celebrated – and infamous – mine which somehow vanished without trace. In the same way, the very different foreknowledge gained by Father Garnet, in the confessional, did not mean that he was, as Coke tried to suggest, the principal ‘author’ of the Plot. Neither Salisbury nor Father Garnet was the author of the Powder Treason, though
both have been blamed for it. There is, however, a real difference between Salisbury and Garnet in that Salisbury gained by the Plot and Garnet suffered for it.

Could the Gunpowder Plot have succeeded? For it is certainly true that regimes have been triumphantly overthrown by violent means throughout history. If Salisbury’s foreknowledge, albeit limited, is accepted, one must also accept that these conspirators never really had a chance once the Plot was in its last stages. Tresham’s betrayal and Monteagle’s eye to the King’s preservation (and his own) saw to that, quite apart from Salisbury’s industrious intelligence system.

But Salisbury’s loyal activities, like the decisions of Tresham and Monteagle, were symptoms of a wider failure which was built into the scheme long before the last stages were reached. For the Gunpowder Plot to succeed, the conspirators needed to be sure of strong support at home and even stronger support abroad. King James understood the first point perfectly well, and expressed it eloquently when he said that the traitors had been ‘dreaming to themselves that they had the virtues of a snow-ball’ which would begin in a small way, but by ‘tumbling down from a great hill’ would grow to an enormous size, gathering snow all the way.
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In fact the snow-ball, far from increasing as it went, melted away in the light of the Plot’s discovery. The Catholic community, whatever resistance it might have provided in the time of Elizabeth, had been cozened to believe that James, the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, would act as its deliverer once he ascended the throne. By the time the truth was discovered – James did not intend to keep the promises they thought he had made – it was too late. Two sorts of Catholic leaders, the peers and the priests, never gave encouragement to the violence of the Powder Treason.

Any support abroad had vanished as a genuine possibility even before the death of Elizabeth. It vanished when the King of Spain, for all his diplomatic dallying, refused to back a specific Catholic candidate for the English throne (such as his sister Isabella – herself in any case a reluctant nominee).
Thereafter the Anglo-Spanish Treaty confirmed the gloomy fact that there was to be no help from that quarter. Once again the Hapsburg – and Papal – belief in the impending Catholicism of King James was relevant. The King bamboozled two sets of Catholics into compliance by his slippery handling of his own religious convictions: English recusants and foreign potentates, including the Pope.

Quite apart from the continuing battle between Pro-Plotters and No-Plotters, the conspiracy has developed a rich historiographical life of its own. One feature of this has been the concentration on the figure of Guy Fawkes. It is Guy Fawkes who has had to accept the odium of being the arch-villain of the piece. William Hazlitt, in an essay of 1821 to commemorate 5 November, described him as ‘this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about among his barrels of gunpowder, loaded with death…’
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It is Guy Fawkes who, in spite of having been generally known in his own time, including to the government, as Guido, has lent his forename to the stuffed, ragged figures on the pavement, whose placard solicits ‘a penny for the guy’, before being ritually burnt on 5 November. In all fairness, the reviled name should really be that of Robert Catesby, as leader of the conspiracy. But it may be some consolation to the shade of Guido, if it still wanders somewhere beneath the House of Lords, that Guy Fawkes is also the hero of some perennial subversive jokes as being ‘the only man to get into Parliament with the right intentions’.

In memory of the failed endeavour of Guy Fawkes, the vaults of the House of Lords are still searched on the eve of the Opening of Parliament. The practice has become one of the many rituals which accompany and enhance British political procedures, connecting them to a vivid past. But the search has its origins in genuine panic about the Catholic menace. Nearly thirty-six years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the alleged massacres of Protestants by Irish Catholics aroused these fears. On 18 August 1641, Parliament, which was in a
ferment over these supposed atrocities, believed that the threat might have moved closer to home. Orders were given to search ‘Rosebie’s House, the Tavern, and such other Houses and Vaults and Cellars as are near the Upper House of Parliament’ for powder, arms or ammunition.
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A similar panic marked the period surrounding Titus Oates’ revelations of a Popish Plot in 1678. In late October, the House of Lords was told by the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod that coals and timber had been lodged in the cellars adjoining and that, even worse, ‘a great knocking and digging’ in the earth had been heard there. Seventy years after the Powder Treason, with Catholics still very much the prime suspects, this was enough to raise the alarm. The House of Lords set up a committee, which was to have the cellars cleared of firewood, so that sentinels, under the command of trusted officers, could patrol these dangerous areas day and night. A certain Mrs Dehaure, living in the Old Palace Yard, was ordered out of her home so that it could be filled with guards.
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Again in 1690, following the accession of William III, there were fears of Jacobite insurrection on behalf of the exiled Stuarts. The Marquess of Carmarthen reported to the House of Lords that there was strong cause to believe that there was ‘a second Gunpowder Plot, or some such great Mischief’, since notorious ‘ill-wishers’ were resorting to the house of one Hutchinson in the Old Palace, Westminster.
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Nor were these fears totally imaginary. The assassination plot which led to the execution of Ambrose Rookwood the second occurred only six years later.

In the calmer weather of the eighteenth century, the search became progressively ritualised. In 1760 an agreeable new piece of ceremony was introduced, as is demonstrated by the accounts of a wine-merchant named Old Bellamy who was allowed to rent the vaults. The searchers ended their search by drinking the loyal toast in port which he supplied. By 1807 it had become the regular practice, supported by custom, for ‘The Lord Chamberlain of England’ to make a search for
‘combustibles’ under or near either House of Parliament before its Opening. After the fire which demolished much of the Palace of Westminster, Bellamy’s wine-shop moved to nearby Parliament Street – but happily the custom of port-drinking continued.
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From the beginning of the twentieth century, a detachment of ten men of the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard was accustomed to perform the search just before the Opening of Parliament by the sovereign and it still does. The Yeomen of the Guard, in their splendid scarlet uniforms and black Tudor hats, carrying lanterns, weave among the large modern pipes which heat the Palace of Westminster. Port is still drunk at the end of the search (after a lapse, the custom was revived, but without the loyal toast, in 1976).
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So far as is known, however, the one successful search ever made – in the sense that perilous substances and a perilous person actually turned up – occurred on the night of 5 November 1605.

A second feature of the historiography of the Gunpowder Plot has been the attention paid to the date itself, variously known as Guy Fawkes Day and Bonfire Night.
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Unlike many English celebrations, 5 November was not invented by the Victorians with their talent for conjuring up instant, rich, immemorial traditions. Nor for that matter are its origins lost in antiquity, linked over centuries to the Celtic fire festival at the beginning of winter (which later merged into the Catholic Feast of All Saints also on 1 November). As David Cressy has written in his study of the subject, there has been ‘much speculative nonsense’ floated along these lines: the English Bonfire Night comes directly from the date of the Opening of
Parliament in 1605, and the proximity to 1 November is purely coincidental.
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Nevertheless this emphasis on the day itself has, like the opposing arguments, been present since the beginning. The first bonfires were lit on 5 November 1605 itself, the first sermon preached soon after. An analysis of the Gunpowder sermons (those preached on the anniversary) shows a concentration on the day which is almost mystical in its fervour. In 1606 Bishop Lancelot Andrewes preached from the text ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ He went on, ‘The day (we all know) was meant to be the day of all our deaths… It is our Passe-over,’ and made an even more solemn comparison to the Day of Resurrection. Altogether Andrewes, a fervent preacher of King James, would preach ten Gunpowder sermons. In 1618 he summed up the national feeling of patriotism mixed with religion: ‘Here we have the making of a new Holy-day (over and above those of God’s in the laws).’
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Predictably enough, celebrations waxed or waned according to the waves of anti-Catholicism which periodically shook England. Any apparent support given to that dangerous foreign-based religion, any renewed threat from its supporters, was enough to make the annual bonfires burn brighter. The marriage of Charles I to a French Catholic princess, the so-called Popish Plot of 1679, the Catholicism of James II – how convenient that his supplanter William III landed in England on 5 November! – all these events met with outbursts of conflagration.
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Yet there was one element present in the celebrations of the anniversary which would need diplomatic handling as the years passed. The original 5 November had been a date of royal deliverance: essentially it was a monarch who had been saved from destruction. Yet in 1647 – two years before the execution of Charles I – Parliament abolished all feasts
except
the 5 November celebration, on the ground that the day stood for
the foiling of Papists, regardless of its other implications. Fifth of November continued to be celebrated under the Commonwealth, the only national feast to survive. This was despite a certain illogicality in commemorating the saving of a King from destruction by a people who had recently put their own King to death.
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Still stranger, in a sense, was the transmutation of Bonfire Night after it had crossed the Atlantic. Here were men and women who had come, very many of them, to throw off the chains of royalist absolutism: it might be questioned whether the annual memory of an English King’s deliverance was really such an appropriate occasion for rejoicing. If celebrating a royal anniversary was too negative, the answer was to emphasise the positive: that is, to burn a Pope of Rome, still in charge, rather than Guy Fawkes, long vanished. Thus Pope Day, a rumbustious occasion of mob revelry and mob rivalries, came to be celebrated, mainly in New England, on 5 November. It was a special feature of Boston life among the ‘lower elements’, but spread as far south as Charleston.
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