God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot

by Hogge, Alice

  What, then, would they have made of Henry Garnet’s private correspondence that summer? On 15 June, as he tried to prevent discontented Catholics from joining Watson, Garnet had written to Robert Persons, condemning the action as a ‘piece of impudent folly’; ‘it is by peaceful means’, he emphasized, ‘that his Holiness and other princes are prepared to help us’. His words chimed with those of Persons himself: a few weeks later Persons would write to Anthony Rivers (Garnet’s sometime secretary), urging English Catholics not to give way to their ‘passion’ and ‘break out’ in rebellion. ‘I do not see possibly here what may be counselled in the present case of our country…’ he wrote, ‘but only to have patience and to expect the event of things.’ The event that both men were expecting was an end to the war with Spain.26

  Hostilities between England and Spain had rumbled on for almost twenty years; neither nation had the upper hand, both were facing creeping financial ruin. One of Robert Cecil’s first actions of the new reign had been to tot up the cost of Elizabeth’s conflicts. The figures said it all: £49,478,054 had been spent on military action during the reign; less than a tenth of that sum had been granted to the Queen in Parliamentary subsidy. James had inherited not only his cousin’s crown, but also her searching need for revenue and her debts. In light of this, his decision to rescind recusancy fines (to those willing to sue for pardon) spoke of a plausible desire for tolerance on his part in a way that his earlier vague promises to Catholics had suggested only political contrivance, for by now the notion that it could profit from papistry had become a mainstay of Government economic planning. The Exchequer receipts for the year 1604 reveal that James’s single act of generosity towards England’s Catholics would cost him almost £5,700, money he could ill afford to lose. Spain—though still Europe’s dominant power—was in not much healthier a condition, moving towards long-term imperial meltdown, haemorrhaging gold in pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy, ruled by a young and indecisive king. Philip II had once said, in reference to his heir, ‘God has given me so many kingdoms, but not a son fit to govern them.’ This was a harsh assessment. Philip III might not have inherited his father’s strengths as a statesman, but neither had he inherited his bottomless treasury. Over the years he would find himself increasingly unable to finance the armies necessary to hold his scattered territories together and wage his father’s wars. Which was why, in April 1603, just a month after James’s succession (and in answer to his immediate declaration of a cease-fire), Philip’s Council drew up its first instructions for peace.27

  It was always likely that Spain, which for so long had given financial aid to English Catholic refugees and which had made the restoration of English Catholicism its official justification for the war, would explore measures designed to help the English Catholics in the peace. And when the Spanish envoy charged with paving the way to a treaty, Don Juan de Tassis, sailed for England, he carried with him the orders of his King, penned in the margin of the Council’s policy document, ‘to insist strongly on the liberty of conscience for Catholics’. This, wrote Philip, is ‘what I desire the most’. It was a simple wish, clearly stated. Sadly, all Philip’s Council did not share it. Set against the King and his call for religious toleration was a body of ministers aware that to demand concessions from England towards its troublesome Catholics risked similar concessions being demanded of Spain towards its troublesome Protestants in the Low Countries. To make any such concessions while the Dutch were still in open rebellion against their Spanish rulers was tantamount to granting them independence, a humiliating climb-down after decades spent fighting to keep them in the empire. So even before Tassis left to pursue the cause of religious tolerance, that cause had been weakened.28

  In Brussels Tassis halted his journey north to talk with a group of English Catholic exiles about conditions at home. His meeting, he reported, took place ‘at a late hour of the night to protect ourselves from certain spies’ and, in keeping with this air of paranoia, he was warned that once he crossed the Channel ‘divers persons [might] attempt to insert themselves into [my] favour under pretence of being a Catholic’. Trust no one—this was the exiles’ message to him. Brussels buzzed with news from England. James was said to hate those he regarded as ‘Hispaniolated’ or ‘Jesuitised’, words that seemed interchangeable. This information, set beside dispatches reaching the Spanish Council from Rome that Robert Persons and his fellow authors of the Book of Succession were now ‘looked upon as lepers to be avoided by necessity’, suggested a worrying scenario. It was as though James could never forgive anyone who had challenged his right to the English throne. Spain had appeared to do so, so too the Jesuits: both linked to this challenge by Persons’ contribution to the succession debate. Persons might now be persona non grata in Rome—but at least he was in Rome and out of James’s reach. The Spanish had congratulated James on his succession and were now on their way to making peace with him. This left only the Jesuits to fill the role of James’s personal bogeymen.29

  Warned to trust no one, Tassis was soon able to put this advice to the test. On 26 June he reported the arrival in Brussels—at the Court of the Archduke Albert, co-regent of the Spanish Netherlands—of a mystery informant, who declined to give his name, but who claimed to be carrying secret intelligence from England. According to this, Tassis told Philip, the English Catholics believed ‘themselves capable of mustering a total of 12,000 men and should your Majesty assist them in time with a similar number, they offer to expel [James] from England’. If this were true, added Tassis cautiously, showing a quick appreciation of the world in which he was now moving, it was ‘momentous’ news, demanding ‘very deep reflection’.30

  Philip’s response to this news was as cautious as his envoy’s. ‘I charge you’, he wrote, ‘to investigate with great care and secrecy the basis and resources behind these Catholics.’ He had good reason to urge care and secrecy. Recently arrived at his Court were two Englishmen who appeared to be of the same confederacy as Tassis’ unnamed man, who were also making extravagant claims about the number of Catholics they could muster in the event of a Spanish invasion and who were even now begging him to launch such an invasion. One of the men was called Anthony Dutton, a name that fades from the records every bit as quickly as it appears. The other was a Yorkshire Catholic called Guy Fawkes.* 31

  Three years later Fawkes would be notorious all across Europe, but in the summer of 1603 he was just one more disenfranchised English Catholic pursuing another enterprise against his home-land. His journey would take him from Philip’s Court to a gunpowder-packed cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament, the desperate last fling of a desperate age. It had begun a year earlier in the spring of 1602 with the arrival in Spain of a Worcestershire man, Thomas Wintour, begging money from Philip for impoverished Catholics back home. Subsidiary to this Wintour offered Philip the ‘devotion’ of all those Catholics—some thousand horsemen or so—in the event of Spain launching an attack on England. So far, so predictable: Wintour’s was the standard promise of any exile unhappy with the government at home and eager for change. Spain’s response to his request was far from predictable, though. After a succession of surprise meetings with ministers Wintour was assured of the sum of 100,000 crowns and told that Philip ‘meant to…set foot in England’ the following year. The scene was set for invasion.32

  By the spring of 1603, though, all bets were off. Elizabeth was dead, James was amenable to peace and the Spanish, if ever they had seriously considered a fresh assault on England, were now favouring negotiation. But Wintour had been given an assurance; moreover he had told others about the invasion plans. When Dutton and Fawkes arrived at Philip’s Court to hold him to the guarantees made in his name, they had about them the frantic air of men trying to alter destiny. Their claims were lavish, their invective coarse: Dutton promised that ‘with work, speed, secrecy and good weather we will have won the game in six days’; Fawkes launched into a bitter diatribe against the Scots. The Spanish Council demurred, then said lit
tle, committing to less and keeping its eye firmly fixed on Tassis’ progress. For good measure it placed Fawkes and Dutton under house arrest to prevent them derailing the peace process. Fawkes and Dutton had gone looking for Wintour’s warmongers among the Spanish Council and had found only doves. Their hopes of war had been raised, only to be dashed again as this new spirit of diplomatic pragmatism began to prevail.33

  Of course no political transition is quite that abrupt. There were still enough hawks left both in Spain and England to make peace an option, not a certainty. So, while Fawkes and Dutton whiled away their detention writing lurid proclamations to be read out once the invasion had triumphed, Tassis, on Philip’s instructions, crossed to England, seeking to explore their claims every bit as much as he sought a solution to the hostilities. It took him just a month to decide that the plotters had overstated their case. England’s Catholics, he reported, ‘go about in such timid fear of one another, that I would seriously doubt that they would risk taking to arms’. So far as an invasion was concerned he was adamant: ‘I would not dare to trust these people in this question.’34

  Plague kept the English Court on the move that summer and autumn and Tassis travelled with it, keeping his eyes and ears open. At Oxford he met with Thomas Wintour, who told him that his Catholic horsemen were ‘ready as requested’, but that none of the money promised to him had yet arrived. This information Tassis duly passed back to Spain, joining reports from Wintour, himself, which stated—ominously—that his fellow plotters could not ‘be restrained much longer’. As Tassis continued his delicate negotiations with the English Government, so the cracks in the Spanish position with regard to religious tolerance began to widen. In September the Archduke Albert—ruler of the territories in which so much of the war had been played out and a driving force for the peace—asked Philip not to insist on freedom for England’s Catholics until after the treaty was signed. If it were ‘placed on the agenda in the first instance,’ he wrote, ‘it [would] damage…negotiations’. Meanwhile, the Spanish Primate, Cardinal de Rojas y Sandoval, advised that the ‘present case of the Catholics of England is one of charity and not of justice’: Spain had no moral duty to assist them. Finding himself more isolated by the moment, Philip now authorized Tassis secretly to offer money to anyone in England prepared to push forward the cause of tolerance.* 35

  James spent the close of 1603 at Hampton Court. Throughout the autumn he and his Government had been reading reports that, with the relaxation of the recusancy laws, Catholic numbers were growing again. In October Robert Cecil’s brother wrote from Lincolnshire: ‘The plague spreads here in divers places…So likewise does…popery.’ The following month James received a stern warning from Lord Sheffield in York: ‘As long as by the laws of this land [Catholics] were kept under, that affection of theirs bred no infection. But since of late the penalty of those laws has not so absolutely as before been inflicted…they begin to grow very insolent and to show themselves.’ Perception mattered more than fact in this instance, as two opposing viewpoints demonstrated. Tassis, investigating invasion, perceived only a demoralized English Catholic body of insignificant size; the English Government, still possessed of its siege mentality, perceived a worrying proliferation of a threat it had believed to be under control. Most likely England’s Catholics had become noticeable to those around them only because now they felt more able to worship openly, instead of behind bolted doors, but the talk surrounding the subject was dangerously heady: a few months later Thomas Wintour would be overheard declaring that there had been some 10,000 converts to Catholicism that year. It was precisely this anxiety that James had voiced to Robert Cecil in the run up to his succession. ‘I would be sorry’, he had written, ‘that Catholics should so multiply as they might be able to practice their old principles upon us.’ The liberality that had seen him declare ‘I will never allow…that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion’, and that had led him to ease recusancy laws, was now increasingly at odds with any fears he might have had about his safety and that of the realm. Liberality is a luxury for the fearful: on 15 December James instructed the Archbishop of Canterbury to compile a list of all popish recusants countrywide and to enforce the laws against them.36

  In January 1604 James announced his first Parliament, to meet at Westminster in two months’ time. Days later he convened the Hampton Court Conference of Conformity, to discuss the state of the nation’s religion. After almost a year of anxious speculation as to James’s precise intentions towards them, England’s Catholics were about to learn their fate.

  And the cruellest aspect of this fate was that they, themselves, were to play no part in the deciding of it. The Hampton Court Conference was to be an entirely Protestant affair, its purpose to address the issue of Puritanism within the official Church; the Catholics were not invited to attend: ‘we were put to silence, our mouth was shut’, reported John Gerard. In fact, what the conference revealed was that, with its numbers increasing, its powerbase widening and its muscles flexed against anything it saw as man-made hierarchy, Puritanism was replacing Catholicism as the greatest challenge to James’s authority. To his son, James had described Puritans as ‘very pests’. To the conference-delegates, particularly to the speaker who, rashly, used the term presbytery, he was even more forceful. A ‘Presbytery’, he exploded, ‘as well agrees with a monarchy as God and the Devil’. If the Puritans were agitating to replace the episcopacy, argued James, then what might they attack next? ‘It is my aphorism “No bishop, no King”’, was how he put it. But it was not just the Puritans who came under attack as James laid out his vision of the nation’s religious future. Catholics were soon reporting that James had spoken ‘emphatically and virulently’ against their faith, insults that only added to the injury of their non-attendance. The insults kept coming. On 19 February James talked publicly about ‘his utter detestation’ of the papist religion. On 22 February he issued a proclamation ordering every Catholic priest from the country. Back in September Robert Persons had urged the Vatican, on the advice of James’s own envoy to Rome, to send someone ‘to confer with the king…before his Majesty [was] definitely committed to’ a course of action. The Vatican had not responded and James, it seemed, was now committed to his predecessor’s anti-Catholicism despite all his promises to the contrary. The focus turned on Westminster.37

  On 19 March James entered Parliament House. His address to the assembled MPs took an hour, time in which to set out his concerns for the nation. Foremost in his mind was peace: there was the predicted peace with Spain, which he had made possible ‘by [his] arrival’ in England, and there was the peaceful union between England and Scotland, a union ‘made in [his] blood’. Only then did he move on to the subject of religion, its place in his speech a prophetic illustration of its destined place in his and Parliament’s energies this first and fractious session. That New Year the Catholic poet Henry Constable had contacted the Vatican independently to reiterate James’s plea for a council for religious reconciliation, advising Rome to act before Parliament sat. But no one had acted and now the State’s priorities had become clear: sandwiched in between debates about the union (and amid unprecedented rows over the respective rights of monarch and Commons) were the customary anti-Catholic measures. It was James who had instigated them, complaining in May that Catholic numbers were up again and that laws were needed ‘to hem them in’. It was the Lords who had introduced the required bill in June, with the exception of the Catholic Lord Montague whose objection to the legislation put him in the Tower for a time. It was King, Lords and Commons who had rubber-stamped the new Act for the due execution of the Statutes against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, Recusants, etc. The act confirmed all the existing Elizabethan penal laws with some additions: anyone sending their child overseas to receive a Catholic education was to be fined, anyone going overseas for such an education was to be deprived of all possessions, anyone transporting such a person overseas was to forfeit job, goods and liberty. This a
greed, King, Lords and Commons went back to arguing the subject of their respective rights and privileges and only the MP who wished to see all Catholics classed as outlaws can have been disappointed by the smooth and rapid passage of the new act.38

  It is probable James’s willingness to extend the penal laws was as much a measure of his need to pacify a Puritan-dominated Commons refusing to grant him subsidies and fighting him on the issue of union as it was of his fears about Catholic increase. To an envoy of the Duke of Lorraine he would admit that he regretted Parliament’s actions; to the French ambassador he would say that he had no intention of putting the new penalties into effect. Then again, this may have been bluff—by now James had proved himself the master of the mixed message. But to England’s Catholics the message was clear: here was another reminder of their status as hostages to political expediency.39

  This was further highlighted by the year’s other developments. That spring the Anglo-Spanish talks had ground to a halt, drowned in detail. In April Philip contacted Tassis after some four months’ silence, telling him to reassure English Catholics that Spain had not abandoned them. This was how it looked, though. Anthony Rivers, writing the same month, noted, ‘The Spanish Ambassador has yet done little for and in behalf of the Catholics.’40