The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  And there was more comfort to come, apart from the engaging Prince and the pretty Princess. For James did not delude himself about his daughter Bessie, who at just on seven years old was indeed an exceptionally attractive child, a natural enchanter like her grandmother Mary Queen of Scots. There was known to be another little princeling still in Scotland, Prince Charles, who would be four in November. True, Queen Anne had miscarried, in May, of the child she was bearing at the death of Queen Elizabeth, and another son, Prince Robert, had recently died at four months old. But there was every hope that she would continue to justify her reputation as ‘a most fruitful and blessed vine’.8 She was after all only twenty-eight.

  It was notable how the congratulatory addresses to King James on his arrival stressed the importance of his family. A speech, given in the name of the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex by one Master Richard Martin of the Middle Temple, referring to ‘this fair inheritance from the loins of our ancient Kings… your Princely offspring’, hailed the return of ‘the sacred royal blood’ which had been lent for a hundred years to adorn the north.9 And that was the point. It was indeed a hundred years since England had enjoyed the spectacle of a king and queen living in public amity, with a quiverful of young children: for Master Martin was referring to King James’ great-great-grandparents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.

  The rhetoric of royal addresses and the ceremonial investiture of the young Prince Henry were both intended to focus the nation’s mind on the amazing fact that after roughly a century of uncertainty on this vital question of the royal succession, there were now two heirs and one heiress in direct line to the throne, with the possibility of more. This was a radical change, and a politically important one, quite apart from the sentimental delights of a young Royal Family as a public spectacle. It was a change which meant that further changes could not be expected, or, if so, they would not be brought about by a change of dynasty.

  This was an aspect of the new reign fully appreciated, for better or worse, by the Catholics. Gone were the days of eager speculation on the subject of the Archduchess Isabella or even that reputed Papist sympathiser, Lady Arbella Stuart. As Father Tesimond succinctly put it, the succession was now assured by the King’s ‘numerous progeny’. And it was to be a Protestant succession: for these were children ‘raised and thoroughly instructed in the opinions and doctrines of the father’. In Father Garnet’s words, not only the King ‘but the son that follows him’ had to be reckoned with, in regard to Catholic grievances. Father John Gerard also pinpointed a new feeling among the Catholics that things were now set in an unalterable pattern, given ‘the likelihood of continuance of that flourishing issue’ with which God had blessed the King.10

  This power of instant ‘continuance’ was (and is) one of the theoretical strengths of hereditary monarchy as a system of government. It was a system which Gibbon would describe memorably two hundred years later as presenting at first sight ‘the fairest scope for ridicule’ yet establishing none the less an admirable rule of succession ‘independent of the passions of mankind’.*11 Certainly, the presence of a young prince, a direct heir, concentrated everybody’s attention.

  The late sixteenth century, like our own, was an age when the assassination of leaders featured as a much dreaded phenomenon (these deaths included that of Henri III, King of France, who died at the hands of a fanatic in 1589; Elizabeth I had been considered by the government to be the target of a series of assassination attempts). For many years England had not enjoyed the particular strength of a hereditary monarchy, the possibility of instant ‘continuance’. But from 1603 onwards, if James departed, it would be once more a case of: ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

  This vision of an endless line of Protestant Stuart monarchs might induce enthusiasm among loyal subjects. (Macbeth, with its ghostly procession of Banquo’s descendants, ending with King James, was written in the first years of the new reign.) But in some Catholics it might induce melancholy.

  In a further striking aspect to the subject, any effort to change the government of England by force would have to reckon with this materialisation of ‘Princely offspring’. For one thing, it would not be feasible (even if desirable) to destroy the entire family. Quite soon, according to custom, Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth would be given their own vast households, providing new employment for many beaming courtiers. Princess Elizabeth was given Lord Harington (Lucy Bedford’s brother) and his wife as governors, and set up in state at Coombe Abbey in the midlands near Rugby.

  Prince Charles was brought down from Scotland late in 1604, and the Queen gave birth to another princess, Mary, in April 1605.† By then, you might say that the Royal Family to its enemies had become that mythical beast, the Hydra with whom Hercules struggled, growing a new head for each one cut off. There was an alternative way of thinking. A multiplicity of heirs could also mean that one or other was adopted to front a new regime. But of course, in the high summer of 1603, a time of rising Catholic expectations, the royal children were not so much hydra heads as ‘young and hopeful olive plants’.12 (The allusion, as with the description of Queen Anne as a vine, was to Psalm 128: ‘Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.’)

  At this early period there was still much Catholic confidence in the active piety of the Queen. This confidence, like so many other Catholic dreams, did however gradually fade. Perhaps more should have been deduced from Queen Anne’s treatment of some Catholic ladies of Lancashire who came to York to ‘put up supplications’ in order to have ‘by her means’ toleration of their religion. The Queen’s answer was, from the Protestant point of view, ‘wise enough’: that is, gracious but non-committal.13 Cecil’s notoriously anti-Catholic brother Lord Burghley heaved a sigh of relief.

  In Spain, however, Queen Anne was referred to openly as the ‘Catholic wife’, a description she herself seems to have done nothing to discourage, at least where the Catholic powers abroad were concerned. The emissary of the Grand Duke of Tuscany was assured by the Queen that she wished to live and die a Catholic. The French Ambassador, Comte de Beaumont, believed that Queen Anne was speaking to the King ‘very frequently’ on the subject of the Catholics. The Papal Nuncio in Brussels, Ottavio Frangipani, became over-excited. He even suggested that the ancient English-born Duchess of Feria, who as young Jane Dormer had been the play-fellow of Edward VI, should be brought back from Spain to her native country to act as an unimpeachably Catholic lady-in-waiting to the new Queen. It was an unrealistic plan not only because of the good lady’s advancing years and failing health, but because Rome, ever ambivalent towards Spanish political influence, gave the notion a chilly welcome.14

  The coronation of King James and Queen Anne took place on 25 July, one of those days which give English summers a bad name. It bucketed down with rain throughout. It was additionally depressing that fear of the plague had led to any unessential pomp being omitted. Common spectators, seen as carriers of the plague to mighty persons, were judged to come into this category of unessential pomp, and so the stands to house them at Westminster were abandoned. The deluge fell upon a mass of half-finished scaffolding.

  But the Catholics were gleeful when it became known that the Queen had declined to take the Protestant Communion during the ceremony. Here was one who, as the Venetian Ambassador reported, might attend Protestant services in public as part of her queenly duties, but went thankfully to Mass in private.15

  The optimistic quiescence of the English Catholics in general was thrown into sharp contrast by the emergence in this first summer of the reign of a conspiracy among certain ‘discontented priests and laymen’ which was both desperate and foolish. Father Watson, the manic Appellant priest, was involved, as was another priest, Father William Clarke. The laymen included George Brooke, brother of Lord Cobham, and Sir Griffin Markham. Father Watson was one of those who had been received by James in Scotland before his accession and given that kind of ‘
gracious and comfortable answer’ on the subject of Catholic toleration in which the King specialised. However, the answer he brought back to England was even more gracious and comfortable, as he admitted later to the English Council. To boost his own standing among the English Catholics, he spoke of instant toleration, exaggerating much as Thomas Percy had done.16 In 1603 Watson felt personally humiliated by the failure of this instant toleration to appear and turned to conspiracy.

  The plan, apparently, was to hold the King prisoner in the Tower of London until he granted a wide series of demands to the Catholics, including, of course, full toleration. The King’s advisers particularly associated with the persecution of Catholics – notably Cecil – were to be removed. This plot became known as ‘the treason of the Bye’ to distinguish it from another conspiracy of the same period, also involving George Brooke, dignified as ‘the treason of the Main’.

  The Main Plot, which involved Lord Cobham, the Puritan Lord Grey de Wilton and in some manner Sir Walter Ralegh as well, had as its aim the far more drastic elimination of ‘the King and his cubs’. In place of the Royal Family, Lady Arbella Stuart was to be elevated to the throne, since now that the succession had been settled in favour of the Stuart line, Arbella, as King James’ first cousin, was fourth in line for the crown, after his three existing ‘cubs’. However, Lady Arbella was much enjoying her new glorious precedence as the first (adult) lady in the land after Queen Anne and had become, according to an ill-wisher, ‘a regular termagant’ on the subject.17 She found it all so much more gratifying than the spiteful treatment she had received from the old Queen Elizabeth, and was wise enough to refuse any overtures from Lord Cobham.

  All those concerned in both Bye and Main Plots were arrested in July, held prisoner and tried in the autumn. Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh were both sentenced to death but subsequently reprieved (the former when he was actually on the scaffold). In the event, Cobham was held in the Tower of London. Sir Walter Ralegh was also kept in prison. Sir Griffin Markham, like Cobham, was given a last-minute reprieve on the scaffold, but George Brooke was executed. Naturally both priests, Fathers Watson and Clarke, were put to death in the usual grim way.

  The English Catholic community as a whole, including priests, reacted with absolute horror to all this. Could anything be more criminally reckless – and more ill-timed? It was, wrote Father Garnet to Rome of the Bye Plot, ‘a piece of impudent folly, for we know that it is by peaceful means that his Holiness [the Pope] and other princes are prepared to help us’. This verdict of ‘impudent folly’ was certainly likely to be well received in Rome. Here, Claudio Aquaviva, General of the Jesuits, was himself advocating prudence: there was to be no meddling by priests in anything ‘that did not concern their apostolate’. As for the Papacy, there were still happy dreams of King James’ conversion: a Mass had just been celebrated to mark his ‘happy entrance’ into England.18

  Further communications on the same subject came from Garnet in July and August. The message was the same. The Pope should instruct the English Catholics to behave peacefully: ‘quiete et pacifice’. (Such letters were always in Latin, the international language of the Catholic Church.) Meanwhile the Archpriest, Father George Blackwell, was equally forthright to his flock. As the chief Catholic pastor in England, he forbade the priests under his authority to participate in any such enterprise in the future.

  Pleas and prohibitions after the event were all very well. Even so, the Catholic reputation for loyalty would have inevitably suffered in England had it not been for the bold action of two priests, one of whom was the Jesuit Father John Gerard. It was these priests who, on hearing something of the projected Bye Plot, along the Catholic network, hastened to tip off the Privy Council. This action to dissociate the Catholics from the conspirators was approved by the Archpriest and Father Garnet. One may conjecture that the Jesuit dislike of the Appellant played its part here: but then the Bye Plot showed, did it not, how dangerous Appellants could be… In any case, there was absolutely no question that this tip-off was the correct, indeed the vital, move to make, from the point of view of the Catholic future. Gerard had acted ‘with care and fidelity’ to save the King, as a fellow Catholic wrote.19 At a stroke – or so it seemed – the situation had been saved.

  King James was grateful. Furthermore, he gave his gratitude practical expression. As part of his coronation festivities, he allowed pardons to those recusants who would sue for them. In a gesture which can hardly have pleased the Exchequer, but relieved and delighted the burdened recusants, he remitted their fines for a year. The consequences of this generosity are borne out by the figures concerned. The receipts from these fines for the previous year had totalled something over seven thousand pounds, whereas for 1604 they were just under fifteen hundred pounds: a prodigious drop.20

  A protestation of loyalty on behalf of leading Catholics headed by Sir Thomas Tresham was received by King James at Hampton Court. In 1602 Sir Thomas had been hailed for his leadership as ‘another Moses’ by a Catholic priest on the eve of execution: ‘if thou hadst not stood in the breach of the violators of the Catholic faith, many… would not have battled so stoutly in the Lord’.21 Now the Catholic Moses, who had suffered long imprisonment and vast fines in the previous reign, was leading his people, as he hoped, towards a more tranquil, less financially straitened future – if not yet towards the promised land.

  The financial point was especially important to Sir Thomas Tresham, since his fortune – that fortune which Francis Tresham would inherit on his death – had been depleted by more than fines. For Sir Thomas was that fatally expensive component of any family history: a lavish host, as we have seen, but also an energetic builder. Rushton Hall in Northamptonshire was a vast monument to this energy, and there were other projects, including Triangular Lodge, constructed on architectural principles to commemorate the Holy Trinity.* He was also immensely litigious (another expensive taste). More attractively but equally extravagantly, Sir Thomas gave generous portions to his daughters on marriage, way beyond the norm of his generation.

  Sir Thomas Tresham’s predominant instinct was to get benign control, as he saw it, of his fellow men and women, whether as a host, builder, litigator or leader of the English Catholics. This was particularly true of his wide family circle: he had eight children (three more died in infancy) and then there was the Vaux connection, among the numerous links to other recusant families. Not everyone accepted the leadership of the patriarch with quite the submissiveness which Sir Thomas considered to be his due. That formidable pair, Anne Vaux and her sister-in-law Eliza Vaux, the Dowager of Harrowden, stood up to him, as we have seen, and Francis Tresham, his eldest son, was not easy to handle.

  A modern psychologist would have no difficulty in explaining why Francis Tresham grew up both resentful of his father’s authority and profligate with his father’s money. While he was quite young, Francis Tresham had committed a brutal assault on a man and his pregnant daughter, on the ground that the family owed his father money. For this he did time in prison. Later he became involved in the Essex imbroglio, for which his father had to buy his freedom. Sir Thomas, however, lacking these psychological insights, simply expected that his son, like the other Catholics, would follow his peaceful example in the new reign. It would – for the Tresham family as a whole – be yet another expensive error of judgement.

  A psychologist might also have made something of a solemn new public thanksgiving to which the English were introduced by King James on 5 August 1603. It celebrated the King’s deliverance three years earlier – while in Scotland – from a situation of acute physical danger. The sacred royal person had been held captive in a locked room in a hostile castle by Earl Gowrie and his brother, only to be rescued in the nick of time. Whatever the final truth of the Gowrie Conspiracy, as this murky plot was known, the sense of a miraculous deliverance from physical peril was so important to King James that he insisted on its annual remembrance.

  Since both Gowrie brothers were trouble
some and both were killed during the King’s rescue, there were Scottish critics who suggested that the Gowrie Conspiracy was a set-up, a means of getting rid of the family. King James himself rebutted this charge. He told a Scottish minister who tackled him on the subject that he was not a bloodthirsty man, and in any case he had plenty of reasons to have the Gowrie brothers put to death by others without risking his personal safety: ‘I needed not [to] hazard myself so.’22 Both parts of his answer were true: King James was not in love with violence and he was in one crucial respect, his obsession with assassination, a physical coward.

  We should not perhaps judge King James too harshly for his cowardice when we bear in mind his early history. Even the ante-natal influences were violent: when Mary Queen of Scots was six months’ pregnant with James, daggers were pointed at her womb by her leading nobles who, having threatened her unborn child, proceeded to murder her secretary Riccio. As a five-year-old boy James saw the bloodstained body of his dying grandfather the Regent being carried past him at Stirling Castle. The new Regent Morton, an old ruffian, terrified the little King. At the age of eleven, James was kidnapped as a result of a feud between rival gangs of nobles and was – not surprisingly – said by the English Ambassador to be ‘in great fear’.23 There were plots and counter-plots throughout the King’s adolescence to seize him or rescue him, since in a lawless country possession of the royal person was considered to be at least nine points of the law, if not the whole of it. Worst of all was the campaign of physical threat carried on against the King by Francis Earl of Bothwell (nephew of the noble who had been his mother’s nemesis). At one point Bothwell set fire to the King’s door, having pursued him through the castle to a remote room, leaving James, who could not afford armed guards, cowering inside.