The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  So the crown fell at last upon the head of Scottish James. This peaceful accession was a political triumph for the King himself in terms of foreign relations, as it was for Robert Cecil in terms of English politics. But such triumphs are not always secured without leaving hostages to fortune. In the case of King James, he would have to deal with those men and women, the Catholics of England, who were now expecting, after nearly half a century, that ‘liberty’ of which Zuñiga wrote.

  * James was the sixth monarch of that name in Scotland (where he reigned from 1567 onwards) and the first in England. After 1603 he was thus technically King James VI and I; but since this term is confusing, he will be, where possible, described either as King James or James I.

  * Helena, wife of the fourth-century Emperor Constantine and mother of Constantine the Great, discoverer of the True Cross, was believed to have been born a British (Celtic) princess.

  * Not only during this period. Less than a hundred years later a Dutchman came to rule England in the shape of William III; a few years after that a German hardly speaking English arrived in the shape of George I, who established the Hanoverian dynasty on the English throne, although he was by no means the closest relation in blood.

  * J. H. Hurstfield suggested that the portraits may have been intended for Queen Elizabeth rather than Cecil himself (in which case it is difficult to see why the great secrecy underlined by both sides was necessary); even so, Hurstfield admitted that the request for portraits was a sign that the English government took seriously claims being put forward on behalf of the Infanta (Hurstfield, ‘Succession’, p.376).

  * In the late sixteenth century this would be through a secret diplomatic form of post – trusted messengers riding between England and Scotland.

  * Wilson, as an author, was not without importance, since he was also (like a few others) employed from time to time by Cecil as a foreign agent.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Honest Papists

  Papists might be honest folks and good friends to him, for his mother was a Catholic and yet he behoved to say she was an honest woman.

  KING JAMES

  in Scotland

  It is time to peer into the strange, hidden world of Elizabethan Catholic England, in order to understand the Papists’ expectations from King James. ‘Catholics now saw their own country, the country of their birth, turned into a ruthless and unloving land,’ wrote Father Weston of the persecutions they had endured. It was on the Catholics that all men fastened their hatred: ‘they lay in ambush for them, betrayed them, attacked them with violence and without warning. They plundered them at night, confiscated their possessions, drove away their flocks, stole their cattle.’ Lay Catholics, as well as priests, filled every prison, ‘no matter how foul or dark’. Father Weston recalled a prophecy of utter desolation made in the Bible: ‘Whosoever killeth you, will think that he doth a service to God.’1 His lament is that of the outcast minority throughout history who find a special cruelty in being persecuted in their native land.

  It is easy to understand Father Weston’s despair if we consider what it was like – in purely legal terms – to be a Catholic in England at the time of the death of Queen Elizabeth. In her long reign penalties had increased, at a pace which was sometimes slow, sometimes violently accelerated, always destined to make Catholic lives ever more painful, powerless and poverty-stricken.

  Let us begin with the central tenet of a devout Catholic’s life. The popular Cathechisme of Christian Doctrine Necessary for Children and Ignorant People by Laurence Vaux, a Lancashire schoolmaster turned monk, defined the commandments of the Church.2 The first and greatest of these was to hear Mass every Sunday, and additionally on holy days, the official festivals of the Church. But not in England in March 1603. Nowhere in England could the Mass be legally celebrated, neither in public nor in private; not in the great cathedrals which had once been part of the Catholic fabric, not in secluded chapels in remote country houses, not in upper rooms in taverns nor in secret chambers hidden behind the breast of a chimney. To hear the Mass was for a layman (or woman) a felony punishable by heavy fines and jail.

  For priests, the penalties were starker. If a Catholic priest was discovered, either in the act of saying Mass or otherwise compromised – in the possession of ‘massing clothes’ (vestments) or vessels – he would be flung into prison. If the charge was treason, the ultimate sentence was death: but not necessarily a straightforward death. He might be sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered, which involved cutting down the living body, emasculating it, cutting out the heart and finally dividing up – ‘quartering’ – the limbs. Even before that he might be tortured in order to secure his confession that he was indeed a Catholic priest. As a result, priests often lived under perpetual aliases, not only to cover their tracks but to protect their families.

  Lady Arundell was a Catholic widow who secretly housed Father John Cornelius, a priest renowned for his ‘sweet and plausible tongue’, in her manor at Chideock in Dorset. On Easter Sunday 1594 he was seized as a result of information laid by a treacherous servant. Father Cornelius was tortured before the Council until at last he admitted to being a Jesuit. He died with words invoking the Holy Cross on his lips. After the ritual dismemberment, Father Cornelius’ limbs were posted on the four gates of Dorchester town, until Lady Arundell boldly recovered them and gave them burial.3

  Catholics could not have their children baptised legally in the Catholic rite by a priest, or even by a Catholic midwife, as sometimes illegally happened. These same children, grown to adulthood, could not be married according to the Catholic rite. At the moment of death, they would be denied the sacrament of dying, known as Extreme Unction. As the vice tightened, Catholics were explicitly forbidden to keep not only Catholic servants but a Catholic schoolmaster: since every master had to have a licence to teach. Moreover it was forbidden to send children abroad to the Low Countries to be educated in convents such as those patronised by the Archduchess Isabella, or in the new schools such as Douai, which were founded there in response to the general need.

  It was a small mercy, but a mercy nevertheless, that a proposition put forward by Cecil’s father, Lord Burghley, in a pamphlet of 1583 was rejected: this was to take children of known Catholic parents away from them at the age of seven. Even so, Catholic parents often voluntarily despatched their children at sixteen to a distant neighbourhood; this was the age at which these children would incur fines of their own for not attending church, thus increasing the family burden. Local churchwardens would be on the look-out for the sixteenth birthday of parishioners, but strange officials might be fooled for a year or two. In order to keep the Catholics under further control, an Act against Popish Recusants was passed in 1593 forbidding the convicted gentry from travelling more than five miles from their estates. The Catholic serving and labouring classes were already policed by the strong contemporary laws against vagrancy and unlicensed travel in general.4

  These were all negatives, things that the law forbade Catholics to do. But there were also the positives: the things that the law obliged Catholics to do, if they were to keep clear of prison, or preserve themselves from fines. Babies had to be baptised in the Protestant church before they were a month old, just as adults had to be married in their local Protestant church. By the Act of Uniformity, passed at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, every person over the age of sixteen was compelled to attend his or her local (Protestant) church on Sundays or holy days. Protestant Communion had also to be taken at least twice a year. Failure to do so involved fines of a shilling a week in 1559, which was not an inconsiderable sum when the legal definition of a yeoman was someone who had forty shillings yearly at his disposal from his land. Continuous absence of a month or more led to heavier fines and finally to the seizure of goods in order to satisfy the courts. Such absentees were classed as ‘recusants’ – literally, those who refused (to attend Protestant services) and today might be termed refuseniks.

  Under these circumsta
nces, it may seem surprising that the Catholic community survived at all. The decision of Francis Swetnam, baker to Eliza Vaux and a good family man, is certainly understandable. For two years, he confessed, he had been a recusant, but then turned again to the Protestant Church, despite his personal convictions: ‘for that he had rather adventure his own soul than lose his five children’. There were many more exalted than Swetnam the baker who preferred their own advancement and that of their family, to the practice of the Faith in which they had been brought up. The fines, as they mounted, weighed like lead. Only the rich could afford them and even their fortunes began to dip as they were obviously pursued with more enthusiasm than the poor. As A. L. Rowse has written, a family like the Arundells of Cornwall were paying a vast amount of money every year for ‘the luxury of going to church’.5 Meanwhile, in a sinister development, the Exchequer began to see the recusants not so much as heretics to be converted but as a prime source of revenue to be exploited.

  And yet nothing was quite what it seemed. From the point of view of many Catholics, there were two worlds in England. One was the gallant world of the court, and those who ruled the country: a masterful, glittering world of honour where prizes were to be won, fortunes established. This was, essentially, the world of the Protestant Church since, by the Act of Supremacy at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, further tightened in 1563, allegiance to the sovereign as head of the Church had to be sworn by all office-holders and clergy. This Oath of Supremacy, specifically acknowledging that the (supreme) spiritual authority was vested in the crown, was one to which Catholics who acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Pope could not swear. Then there was the spectral world of their forbidden religion.

  Catholics – pious Catholics – often slipped silently between these two worlds. They were like ghosts, freed by the darkness to worship as they pleased, but compelled to become conforming Protestants at cockcrow. Hypocrites? Not necessarily. Survivors? Certainly. These were the men and women of whom King James had spoken approvingly while in Scotland – with the obligatory reference to Mary Queen of Scots. ‘Papists’, he said, ‘might be honest folks and good friends to him, for his mother was a Catholic and yet he behoved to say she was an honest woman.’6

  These ‘honest folks’ included some who had connections to the leading luminaries of the Elizabethan court, many of whom were themselves suspected, not without reason, of Papist sympathies. It was helpful that the Queen herself made personal loyalty more of a touchstone than doctrinal orthodoxy. Besides, she ‘was always slow to condemn without good proofs any man whatsoever’.7 She came of a generation which understood how the heart might remain Catholic even if the mind was politically correct – and Protestant. Not only had she herself been born a Catholic (although denounced in the womb by the Pope) but she had lived through some extremely tricky periods of religious change. Many of her own devotional tastes were in essence Catholic, and she disliked married clergy, even if their marriages were officially permitted by the Anglican Church. The Queen was always prepared to smile graciously on those Papists or fellow travellers whom she considered to be her loyal subjects.8

  The respected and apparently inviolable position of Magdalen Viscountess Montague was an example of how the most pious Catholic could survive if he (or she) did not challenge the accepted order. This remarkable and stalwart Catholic lady had as a girl walked in the bridal procession of Queen Mary Tudor when she married Philip II of Spain in Winchester Cathedral. Her husband died in 1592 but as a widow Magdalen Montague made no concessions where the practice of her religion was concerned. Her own mansion near Battle, in East Sussex, was so full of priests and chapels and secret chambers that it was known locally as ‘Little Rome’. What was more, Lady Montague, a tall and striking figure, had the habit of walking in public, ‘her gait full of majesty’, in clear possession of rosary beads and crucifixes, although these were strictly forbidden objects. Most of her ‘great family’ of eighty persons – that is, her household – were Catholics, according to her chaplain Richard Smith, who compared her to the fourth-century widow St Paula, friend and supporter of St Jerome. In Southwark there was another great house, with another big household which was similarly honeycombed with Papists, including priests.9

  None of this could have been unknown to the authorities. Nevertheless Queen Elizabeth chose to pay a ceremonial visit to Magdalen Montague at her Battle house in 1591. Afterwards the Queen sent a gracious message by a Lady of the Bedchamber to say that she was convinced ‘she fareth much better for your prayers, and therefore desireth you ever hereafter to be mindful of her’ in them.10

  So this dignified old matriarch (she had eight children) managed to combine piety and loyalty – helped along by that famous obstinacy which her chaplain wrote could be seen in her actual face: a short sharp nose held high, and a very strong chin. But, at the same time as Magdalen Montague jangled her rosary in public, it was an offence of Praemunire, punishable by life imprisonment and confiscation of goods, to import such hallowed tokens, let alone display them in public. To the government officially, this was nothing but ‘vain popish trish-trash’. A servant found in possession of a brass crucifix became (unlike Lady Montague) an object of immediate suspicion; he was compelled to acknowledge the Queen’s supremacy and declare that he abhorred ‘all popish trifles’.11 So thorough was the government detestation of the ‘trish-trash’ that during the searches gentlewomen were turned out of their beds in the middle of the night, in case anything of a subversive nature was concealed within the bedclothes.

  When a priest named Cuthbert Mayne was seized at Golden in Cornwall in 1577, he was wearing an Agnus Dei round his neck. This was a little wax oval made from the remains of an Easter candle blessed at St Peter’s by the Pope. At his trial, his Agnus Dei was one of the strong pieces of evidence against him.12 Father Cuthbert Mayne’s still-breathing body was hacked to pieces as the penalty for treason. For it was postulated by the English government that all Catholic priests were agents of a foreign power, either a spiritual one like the Pope (who had issued that Bull against their sovereign) or a temporal one like the King of Spain (who had attempted several invasions of their country).

  With such an emphasis on patriotism, many Papists attempted to ensure their survival by taking particular trouble to demonstrate their loyalty to the Queen. One Cornish Arundell, in prison for his faith, announced boldly at the time of the Armada that he would support the Queen, not the Pope. Two Catholic peers, Lord Montague (Magdalen’s husband) and Lord Dacre (her brother) attempted to make a subtle – and self-preserving – distinction. They declared that they had a duty to support the Pope if he came in peace, but would act against him in the field if he came in war. This division between the Pope’s spiritual powers and his temporal powers might not be good theology in Rome, but the Holy City and the Holy Father were a long way off. Sir Thomas Tresham was another of the leading Catholics who were anxious to paint themselves as ‘honest folks’. This Northamptonshire magnate spent many years in prison as a recusant. But, as he wrote in a petition of 1581 from the Fleet prison, he did not wish ‘to live one hour without her Majesty’s grace, and favour’. He held ‘nothing against her Majesty’s person and dignity’ – that is, her title to the crown – and, above all, nothing ‘against my dear and native country’.13

  How earnestly Henry Howard, who would be known to history as the Earl of Northampton, longed to be viewed as just such a patriot! It has to be said that the Howard/Norfolk family tree had some fearful blots on it where loyalty was concerned. His father, the poet Surrey, had been executed by Henry VIII for alleged royal pretensions when Howard was only six; his grandfather had been spared the axe only by the death of the King; his brother Thomas Duke of Norfolk had been executed by Elizabeth twenty-five years later for plotting the escape of Mary Queen of Scots. In Howard’s opinion he had been unfairly demoted not once but twice from that high place ‘by birth my due’, thanks to the wrongdoings of others. That made him a slippery, ambitious ma
n obsessed by his family heritage. But, although a Catholic by predilection – he thought it the natural religion for a gentleman – he was perfectly prepared to conform outwardly to the Anglican religion if he could worm his way back into royal favour.14

  Howard was not generally trusted at court, and with good reason, since while he fawned on the Queen he maintained connections to the Spanish Ambassador in case the wind should blow in that direction. (Even the Spanish, who provided Howard with a secret income, did not exactly trust him: the Spanish Ambassador described him as being ‘not as straight as he might seem in his speech’.) There is a story told of Howard’s attendance at the Queen’s chapel which sums up, albeit at the grandest level, the attitude of certain ambivalent Catholics. He could not, to be frank, endure the services there unless the Queen herself was to be present. Then Howard would hasten to arrive and ostentatiously ‘continue at prayers’.15

  A more edifying example of an Elizabethan Catholic who inhabited both worlds of sunshine and twilight is provided by William Byrd, described by Father William Weston as ‘the very famous English musician and organist’. Byrd’s patrons were Henry Howard as well as the Catholic Earl of Worcester and another important peer with Catholic sympathies, the 8th Earl of Northumberland (Byrd taught Northumberland’s daughter). Byrd was probably always a Catholic at heart, and his wife Juliana was indicted as a recusant as early as 1577.16 But given his dulcet talent, as a musician – an organist – and a composer, he was able to maintain his position at court by adequate public conformity.