The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  Oh she bore the sway of all affairs

  And yet she was but a woman

  or:

  A wiser Queen never was to be seen

  For a woman, or yet a stouter.15

  The clear implication was that a male succeeding was a return to normality.

  One must beware of hindsight in judging the relative popularity of Elizabeth I and James I in the first years of his reign. Just because the judgement of history has been to shower accolades upon the Queen rather than upon the King, it is important to realise how different the viewpoint was at his succession. There was now a great pack of Englishmen scurrying north: ‘good news makes good horsemen’, or, as James himself put it later, people ran, ‘nay, rather flew to meet me’. They liked what they saw. Here was a man who, it was generally agreed, was ‘of noble presence’. He was affable and intelligent, quick to get a point. What was more, for the patriotic English, it was important that he spoke their language perfectly (albeit with a strong Scottish accent). He also knew Latin, French and Italian.16 At his side was his Danish wife, Queen Anne, a graceful blonde beauty in her late twenties who had already borne the King five children, three of whom survived, and was once more pregnant. How different from the home life of their departed spinster Queen!

  What the English courtiers did not immediately realise was that an exceptionally harsh, unloving upbringing, beset with violent incident, and aristocratic feuds had made of the canny Scots King a consummate politician; and perhaps the only one the Stuart dynasty had ever produced (or ever would produce). Nowhere was his political astuteness seen to greater effect than in the King’s presentation of himself as ‘the son of Mary Queen of Scots’. The only child of the exquisite doomed Queen, who lost her head at Fotheringhay, and the charming wastrel Henry Lord Darnley, blown up at Kirk o’Field, hardly resembled either of his glamorous parents. But for many Catholics, the spiritual dimension was the one that counted. The first Supplication of the English Catholics to King James, in 1603, thought it especially shrewd to drag in a reference to ‘Your Majesty’s peerless… martyred’ mother.17

  Even more bizarre, perhaps, was the Catholic belief, sincerely maintained, that ‘the mother’s merits’ – that is, the spiritual merits gained by Mary Queen of Scots’ martyrdom – would shortly win from God the grace of the King’s conversion to Catholicism.18 This belief, for which there was absolutely no basis in reality, was encouraged by the subtle diplomacy of the King himself. It was a view that was widely held not only amongst the modest and perhaps naive Catholic laity but also in the counsels of the Catholic great. These included an august pair of Habsburg regents, the Archduke Albert and his wife the Archduchess Isabella, sister of Philip III of Spain, who ruled in the so-called Spanish Netherlands.* Here Protestant rebels had waged a thirty-year war against Spanish dominion. Despite English support (on religious grounds) these rebels had never succeeded in throwing off the Spanish yoke. Nor for that matter had Spain quelled them. The main result of this inconclusive contest was the financial exhaustion of all parties.

  Nevertheless, King James received a friendly greeting from the Catholic Archduke in Brussels on his accession. The Archduke also informed Philip III that he had resolved to send an official envoy to James, without consulting his brother-in-law, so anxious was he to make friends with England (Albert had already released English prisoners following Elizabeth’s death).19

  One of the important provinces of the Spanish Netherlands was Flanders, which had a long seaboard, including the coastal town of Ostend, not many miles across the water from Dover and England’s south-east coast. This geographical position made Flanders a kind of debatable land in the religious struggles of the times. From the vantage point of Flanders, Spain might contemplate the invasion of England; similarly England might despatch its own soldiers across the narrow crossing to support the Flemish Protestants.

  Furthermore, the English Catholics might take refuge in Flanders against oppression at home. In this way, many young Englishmen, inspired by personal ambition and religious idealism, had become mercenaries in the Spanish armies in the Low Countries. It was for them liberating to seek advancement in an atmosphere where Catholicism was no bar to success, and there was always the question of restoring the True (Catholic) Religion to England. One day the all-powerful King of Spain might use his armies to bring about this restoration by force. Despite the failure of the Spanish Armada to secure an invasion of England in 1588, the Catholic expatriate soldiers continued to bear such a possibility in mind.

  Typical of such adventurers, at once devout and aggressive, was Guy Fawkes. He was a native of York, who had been fighting in Flanders for the last ten years and who had at least once gone to Spain as part of an intrigue to raise military help for the English Catholics. But in the joyous atmosphere of the new King’s reign, amid these rosy hopes of his conversion, and with the peace-loving Pope Clement VIII, who loved to mediate between great powers, making friendly overtures, maybe those days of lethal plotting had passed.

  Moreover, unknown to Guy Fawkes, the slow-moving Byzantine council of Philip III had reached an important decision, even as Queen Elizabeth lay on her deathbed. There was to be no invasion, no imposition of a foreign Catholic sovereign of England: the English Catholics would reach their own solution to the subject of the succession. Thus Philip III approved instructions for a senior envoy Don Juan de Tassis to congratulate James even though Spain and England were still technically at war.20 Tranquillity in the Netherlands and a treaty with England, which had for so long supported their infuriating Protestant rebels, were the new aims of the Spanish high command. They were hardly aims which fitted into any pattern of violent conspiracy against the new English King.

  In this atmosphere of general benevolence, both national and international, the Scottish King set out on 5 April to travel south to take possession of his new kingdom. He was, wrote the playwright Thomas Dekker, ‘our omne bonum [general goodness] from the wholesome north, Our fruitful Sovereign James’. In a further flight of the imagination, Dekker described the King as accompanied by ‘silver clouds of blissful angels’.21 He might have been more accurate to describe the King’s retinue as a grasping crowd of greedy Scots – at least from the English point of view. But the xenophobic English crossness about James’ Scottish favourites had yet to find expression. For the time being, it was more significant that the host of English nobles who had rushed north had managed to join the triumphant procession south again.

  Sir Robert Carey, his heroic feat underlined by the fact that he was still ‘bebloodied and with bruises’, was there. He was rewarded by being made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber of the King. It was, however, a position somewhat above his actual importance and he would indeed be demoted in the less sentimental atmosphere of the south, proving, alas, that the race was not after all to the swift. And not only the English were there: the French Ambassador came south from Edinburgh as a token of French friendship. He must, though, have seemed a dubious asset since his wife had to be carried all the way to London ‘in a chair with slings’ by shifts of perspiring porters.22

  At the important stronghold of Berwick, the salutation was especially joyous. ‘Happy day,’ as a contemporary account had it, ‘when peaceably so many English Gentlemen went to bring in an English and Scottish King, both included in one person.’ They introduced him into a town that had for ‘many hundred years’ been ‘a Town of the Enemy’, or at the least held for one nation or the other. So much ordnance was shot off that the whole town lay in a mantle of smoke, as if there had been ‘an earthquake’. There were ancient soldiers settled there – ‘old King Harry’s lads’ – who must have been in their late seventies. These retired warriors vowed they had never seen a display to match this one.

  So it was on to Newcastle (where the King admired the beauty of the Tyne Bridge), to Durham (after which, at a high spot outside Haughton-le-side, he enjoyed a ‘beautific vision’ of the country that was now his), and to York, where James was receiv
ed by Lord Burghley, Lord President of the Council of the North. Here the King insisted on walking to church: ‘I will have no coach; for the people are desirous to see a King, and so they shall, for they shall as well see his body as his face.’ Good cheer was universal – in the shape of red and white wine provided all day for the populace.

  King James now passed on to those magnificent midland palaces, prosperous emblems of a powerful and settled nobility. The English lords were, as he believed, in marked contrast to the rough Scots lords who with their kidnappings, murders and threats to his person had made portions of his life a misery. The awkward fact that the old Queen had not yet been formally buried at Westminster Abbey (it was royal custom for this to happen a month after death) meant that the King was obliged to linger at this point. It would not do for his arrival to coincide embarrassingly with his predecessor’s obsequies.

  James dallied for four or five days at Burghley in Northamptonshire. This great Renaissance edifice had been erected by Elizabeth’s servant, the first Lord Burghley, and had passed to his elder son. It could therefore be held to symbolise the rewards of loyal service in England, since the origins of the Cecil family were neither rich nor aristocratic. To the King from the north, however, the monumental exterior and the richly furnished interior ‘like to an Emperor’s’, with its Turkey carpets, long galleries, huge floor-to-ceiling portraits, spelt luxury and leisure. Unlike Scottish castles of this date, Burghley was not fortified against attack.23 There was no need.

  The King’s happiness was further increased by finding that he was able to indulge his obsessive love of hunting in the neighbourhood. This passion for a sport, in which the King tried to elude the cares of state while the stags tried to elude him, rapidly became a feature of the English courtiers’ lives. It was first evinced to them on the royal journey. James suddenly caught sight of some deer outside Widdrington and, rushing out, killed two of them. He returned ‘with a good appetite’ to the house. It was not the only portent which might have provided a useful guide to the future. The other was the release of prisoners at the royal command en route.

  The liberation of prisoners to celebrate an auspicious occasion had a long tradition, not only in English history but in antiquity too, the release of the robber Barabbas by Pontius Pilate to celebrate the Jewish Passover being one obvious example. At Newcastle the King had ordered all prisoners to be freed, and even paid up for those imprisoned for debt. The only exceptions were those held for treason, for murder – and ‘for Papistry’. At York, too, all prisoners were released ‘except Papists and wilful murderers’.24

  It was at York on Sunday 17 April that a petition was presented on behalf of the English Catholics by ‘a gentleman’. In fact this so-called gentleman was a Catholic priest in disguise, Father Hill. His petition, which asked for the full removal of all the penal laws against his co-religionists, unfortunately contained a tactless Biblical reference. King James was reminded that, when the Israelites sought relief from King Jeroboam and none was granted, they took ‘the just occasion’ to refuse to obey him in the future.

  This kind of threat was exactly what the King did not want to hear. Hill’s identity was rumbled and he was arrested. James’ zest for theological discourse, another phenomenon to which his English subjects would have to accustom themselves, compelled him to have ‘some conference’ with the priest, after which Father Hill was put firmly in prison.25

  Nevertheless the Catholic community felt perfectly justified in ignoring such minor unpleasantnesses, which could be regarded as hangovers from the previous reign. Hill was not a particularly savoury character, having led a dissolute life in Rome for some years before his return to England without permission. Besides, far more significant to the King was the fact that it was in York that he first encountered Robert Cecil. King James chose to celebrate their meeting with a royal quip, which he probably found more amusing than Cecil did: ‘Though you are but a little man, we will shortly load your shoulders with business.’ Cecil’s appearance was certainly against him. In an age when the masculine leg, featured in tight-fitting hose, was the arbiter of elegance, his were exceptionally short. He also had ‘a wry neck, a crooked back and a splay foot’, in the derisive words of one of his enemies.26

  The King continued on his merry, sporting way on horseback, at least until a bruised arm from a hunting fall condemned him to a coach. At the approach to London, loud were the huzzas from the gathering crowds who threw their hats in the air at the sight of their new sovereign (many of these hats, unfortunately, vanished for ever into a multitude which turned out to be loyal but light-fingered). There were spectators ‘in highways, fields, meadows, closes and on trees’, so numerous that they ‘covered the beauty of the fields’. This curiosity – among more intellectual types – had the unexpected if pleasing effect of making King James a best-seller. Thousands of copies of Basilikon Doron, a scholarly treatise which the King had written several years earlier on the art of government, were sold within the first weeks of his arrival.27

  On Saturday 7 May, the Lord Mayor of London, accompanied by aldermen draped in velvet and gold chains, presented the King with the keys to the city of London, two miles outside its boundaries. Four days later, the King arrived at the Tower of London in a barge, the traditional method of access for monarchs. Here he admired such sights as the great armoury, the mint and the little zoo of lions within its precincts. All the way from Berwick, the King had been creating new knights – at least 230 of them. While he was at the Tower, he created new lords, chief among them Robert Cecil, who became Baron Cecil of Essendon.*

  John Chamberlain, that percipient commentator, wrote to Dudley that ‘these bountiful beginnings raise all men’s spirits, and put them in great hopes, insomuch that not only Protestants, but Papists and Puritans, and the very Poets… promise themselves great part in his [King James’] favour’. As for the Poets – or rather the Playwrights – the favour was quick to come. A licence would be granted to a company, newly baptised the King’s Servants, shortly after James’ arrival in London. This enabled them to present ‘comedies, tragedies, histories, interludes, morals, pastorals, stage-plays and such like’ at ‘their now usual place’ the Globe Theatre.28 This company included Richard Burbage and an actor–playwright called William Shakespeare.

  Where the Papists were concerned, Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior in England, himself testified to the mood of optimism when he wrote in mid-April: ‘a golden time we have of unexpected freedom… great hope is of toleration’.29 Up until now, the proscribed priests had been crucially dependent on the support and hospitality of heroic Catholic women who concealed them in their households at great danger to themselves. Garnet derived especial support from a pair of courageous sisters, members of the Vaux family: Anne Vaux, who was unmarried, and her sister Eleanor Brooksby, who was a widow with children. Another Jesuit, the ebullient Father John Gerard, was protected over many years by their sister-in-law, another widow with a young family, Eliza Vaux of Harrowden. In all these refuges in the spring of 1603 there was an anticipation that the heavy yoke of penalties imposed upon Catholics under Elizabeth would soon be lifted.

  Father Gerard, for example, came from a distinguished Lancashire family, preeminent in the past for its support of Mary Queen of Scots. So far, imprisonment and fines had been their only reward. In 15 94 Father Gerard himself had been not only imprisoned but severely tortured. Now things had evidently changed. His brother Thomas was among the new knights created by James I at York.

  The King – not for the first or last time – chose to allude to his relationship with Mary Queen of Scots, identifying himself with her supporters. ‘I am particularly bound to love your blood,’ said the King to Sir Thomas Gerard, ‘on account of the persecution you have borne for me.’ The news of such graciousness – surely prophetic of more favours to come – spread. Even more remarkable, even more exhilarating, was the release of Father William Weston from his prison in the Tower of London on 14 May. The pri
est who had been struck by the silence which had marked the old Queen’s passing had been informed shortly after the accession that his case had become ‘obsolete with the passage of time’. However, his jailer insisted on a written release, so that it was not until 14 May, by which time the King himself had reached the Tower, that Weston at last gained his freedom on condition that he went abroad. His warder made up for the extra weeks of incarceration by giving Weston a magnificent dinner in his own lodgings.30

  As Weston sallied forth, free after five years in the Tower and seventeen years altogether in prison, he found a crowd gathered to see him emerge. Various Catholics in its ranks then dropped to their knees and begged his blessing. No one hindered them. Yet, less than three years after these ‘bountiful beginnings’, the whole English Catholic world would be blasted apart by that conspiracy known to history as the Gunpowder Plot, and many Catholics would die bloodily at the hands of the state.

  * Henry III, whose reign spanned fifty-six years, 1216–72, had succeeded to the throne as a child of nine.

  * According to family tradition, preserved by Carey’s great-granddaughter, this precious ring could not be passed to Carey while he was still within Richmond Palace, but had to be thrown out of a window to him, by his sister Lady Scrope (Carey, p. 63 note).

  * This draft, in Cecil’s handwriting, still exists in his family papers (H. M. C. Salisbury, xv, p. 1).

  * The sixteenth-century Spanish Netherlands are to be equated, very roughly, with modern Belgium; the modern (Dutch) Netherlands were then known as the United Provinces or Holland, after the chief province.

  * The swift progression of Robert Cecil’s titles from 1603 onwards creates some problem of clarity during the period covered by this book. He became Viscount Cranborne in August 1604, and Earl of Salisbury in May 1605. To avoid confusion, he will be described as Cecil until he becomes Salisbury.