The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  The presence of an embassy from a foreign Catholic power had an important side effect for the Catholics of England. Traditionally the government did not interfere with the private celebration of the Mass in an embassy chapel, nor seek to question too closely the status of the embassy officials, some of whom might be priests: embassies were in theory foreign soil. Englishmen could therefore slip into the great warrens of houses where such embassies were based and not only attend Mass but also enjoy Catholic contact. They could do so, if they were prepared to endure the ordeal of Cecil’s spies, eager to report who paid this kind of suspicious visit, as a method of discovering secret Papists. It was all part of the deadly game which Papists and their priests played, balancing the Mass against imprisonment.

  The arrival of an envoy from the greatest Catholic power of all, Spain, produced incredible excitement. One of Don Juan de Tassis’ official escorts, Sir Lewis Lewkenor, thought it his duty to advise Cecil that ‘some gentlemen known to be recusants’ had rushed to greet him, and some of them in their eagerness even awaited his landing at Dover on 31 August.16

  Tassis came from a family which (under the other version of the name, Taxis) had given nearly a century of service to the Habsburgs. He himself had acted as Court Chamberlain to Philip III since 1599. While Tassis clearly enjoyed the trust of his King, he was not a trained diplomat but a court official. Moreover his instructions betrayed a startling naivety concerning the English scene. He bore with him letters of greetings to many members of the English nobility, including ten dukes – but there were no dukes at all in England at the present time.* Tassis was also supposed to greet ten marquesses which was slightly easier to achieve since there was actually one marquessate in England, that of Winchester.

  Tassis’ stay in Brussels en route had been no more helpful in preparing him realistically for what he would find in England. Secret conferences were held ‘at a late hour to protect us from [English] spies’, with men like Sir William Stanley and Hugh Owen and a Jesuit, Father William Baldwin, who was part of their counsels. There was more talk of Catholic troops in waiting – the figure of twelve thousand men was mentioned. And Tassis’ card was marked concerning the English nobles he would encounter, and how friendly they were to the Spanish (Catholic) cause. Even here the familiar anti-Scottish note struck. The new Scottish favourites at the English court, such as Sir George Home, were said to be unenthusiastic about Spain – but it was thought that they would change their opinions if bribed.17

  Tassis, if not a trained diplomat, was shrewd and practical. It is to his credit that once in England he realised very quickly how false the picture was that he had been given. His letters back to Spain reflect a complete change of approach from the lofty militarism of the high summer. Lewkenor complained that the recusants continued to accost Tassis in the course of his ‘slow journey’ to Oxford, which was destined to be his first official resting-place. Some Spaniards in his train took the opportunity to slip into the prisons and visit ‘the seminary priests… detained prisoners’.18 Lewkenor, however – and Cecil – would have been gratified rather than angered if they had had the opportunity to read the reports despatched by Tassis back to Spain. For Tassis was not impressed by what he found.19

  The recusants ‘go about in such a timid fear of one another’, he wrote, ‘that I would seriously doubt that they would risk taking to arms’ unless there was a clear and definite opportunity. A month after his arrival, he was expressing serious disappointment. The numbers of active Catholics had been grossly inflated. In short, he had no expectation of any Catholic ‘stir’ (a commonly used word for a rising).

  One of the activists that Tassis did meet was Tom Wintour. He was privately of the opinion that Wintour was a Jesuit, although Wintour introduced himself merely as one that had kissed the hands of the King of Spain ‘less than two years ago’ in the course of negotiations with members of the Spanish Council. Wintour’s fluent Spanish was useful once more on this occasion since Tassis spoke no English. Even so, he failed to convince Tassis that ‘3,000 Catholics’ were ready, only needing the promised money from Spain to spur them forward.

  Tassis was finally received by King James on 8 October in a series of ceremonies which lasted for three days. (Not only had the King been away hunting since his arrival, but there remained the persistent fear of plague which led him to avoid official duties.) Tassis presented the King with some fine Spanish horses – under the circumstances, a suitable gift – and for Queen Anne there were magnificent jewels. There was however one hitch. The King was disconcerted to find that Tassis did not have plenipotentiary powers to negotiate the coming treaty. These had been granted to a member of the Spanish Council known as the Constable of Castile, who was still in Spain.

  Tassis also had to make an adjustment. Writing back to Spain he poured cold water on those rumours of King James’ conversion to Catholicism. James was a Protestant and likely to remain so, despite the hints so casually dropped by his emissaries in the 1590s. Even more to the point, James’ current attitude to Catholic ceremonies was not at all what Tassis had been led to expect. Great care was being taken to ensure that the King had no official knowledge of any Mass being said: it was a case of a discreet ‘Mass in a corner’ here and there in private (Northumberland’s term to James in Scotland), nothing more public. There was general doubt whether King James would ever ‘permit’ the Catholic religion to be practised, but it was also viewed as fatal if the Spanish King was seen to be trying to set up his own religion ‘in this country’. On 12 October, the day after he parted from King James, Tassis wrote quite frankly to Philip III to say that the question of the free exercise of the Catholic religion ‘should be left aside until the peace has been negotiated’.20

  Disappointed by the quality of local Catholic support, Tassis now believed that the English Catholics should continue to play that passive role for which they seemed best fitted. They were not after all Spanish subjects. If they had been, King Philip would be obliged to help them as a matter of justice, but as Cardinal de Rojas y Sandoval, the Primate of Spain, succinctly expressed it, the present case of the Catholics of England was ‘one of charity’ from the Spanish King ‘and not of justice’.21

  This was a message appreciated by Philip III, who at long last gave up playing with the notion of a ‘stir’. In a letter the following February, he summed up the new official line: it was essential that ‘these Catholics’ (the English) should avoid arousing the suspicions of their sovereign at this crucial moment when there was a real prospect of a treaty.22 In short, the diplomatic solution was to prevail.

  There was, however, some question of buying liberty of conscience for the Catholics. To some, including the Pope, this was an abhorrent idea: Clement VIII denounced it as ‘unworthy and scandalous’ since it would mean using unclean money to interfere with the divinely ordained timescale for these things. The Spanish Council was also worried by the proposition, not on moral grounds, but more pragmatically, because other religious minorities might request the same lavish treatment.23

  In England, however, Tassis found himself entering the sweetly corrupt world of the Jacobean court, where bribery was not so much unworthy as a thoroughly worthy way of life. The promise of pensions – paid secretly by Spain – became a weapon in maintaining a pro-Spanish party at court. Of course the Spanish records of the money promised do not necessarily confirm that the money was actually received (Tom Wintour was after all still waiting for that promised Spanish subsidy). Whether all the promised money was paid over or not, it has to be said that very few names of prominent courtiers are missing from the Spanish pension records during the first decade of James’ reign. In general, the desire to amass money was like a fierce universal lust in the Jacobean period. (Both Cecil and Henry Howard Earl of Northampton had acquired large fortunes and great properties by their deaths, despite having begun, for different reasons, as poor men.) Most of James’ courtiers, as Tassis found, would have agreed with the aphorism of Francis Bacon, the la
wyer and politician recently knighted for his loyalty to the crown: ‘Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.’

  Outstanding for her avarice was the beautiful, wilful Catherine Countess of Suffolk. Her husband, formerly known as Lord Thomas Howard, a son of the executed Duke of Norfolk, had been given his Suffolk title in July as part of King James’ rehabilitation of the Howard family that he loved. The new Earl of Suffolk was thus a nephew of Northampton and, like Northampton, he had tasted the bitterness of family disgrace in youth. As Lord Thomas Howard, however, he had won the Queen’s favour by his distinguished service as a naval commander both at the time of the Armada and after. To Queen Elizabeth, in consequence, he had been her ‘good Thomas’.

  Now in his early forties, the Queen’s good Thomas was resolved to be the King’s good Suffolk, but the glory days of naval warfare were over for him and it was as a leading courtier that he intended to shine – a courtier and hopefully a rich man. He was given the post of Lord Chamberlain of the Household while Catherine Suffolk was made Keeper of the Jewels to Queen Anne.

  The kindest thing that can be said about the Suffolks, as a couple, is that they had a huge family to maintain: Catherine Suffolk bore at least ten children, seven of whom were sons. But, even as parents, they cannot be said to have shone. A Suffolk daughter, Lady Frances Howard, would one day, with her second husband, the Earl of Somerset, be accused of conspiracy to murder Sir Thomas Overbury; she spent some years in the Tower. It is a story that lies outside the timescale of this narrative, as does the final fall of the Suffolks from grace, thanks to their amazing peculations. Even Catherine Suffolk’s famous beauty did not escape scot-free. As in a morality play, ‘that good face of hers’ which had brought much misery to others ‘and to herself greatness’ was ruined by smallpox in 1619.24

  At the beginning of James’ reign, however, the Countess of Suffolk was in her prime, and Tassis was mesmerised by her. She had already indicated Catholic sympathies and pro-Spanish feelings to an emissary from the Archdukes in Flanders before Tassis arrived in England; she had emphasised the prime importance of pensions and gifts in the delicate matter of establishing liberty of conscience. He allowed himself to be convinced that the key to ‘all the affairs of the bribes’ lay within her pretty grasp and that she was an essential ally in the preliminaries of the Anglo-Spanish negotiations.

  Here, in Tassis’ opinion, was ‘a person of great judgement’. Catherine Suffolk was also a Catholic, although not publicly so, and planned to die ‘within the Catholic Faith’. Furthermore, she was an advocate of a Spanish marriage between King James’ son Henry and a daughter of Philip III, who would of course be a Catholic. It may be that Tassis’ lack of diplomatic training blinded him to the faults in this charming harpy. Charm she certainly had: gossip linked her name to that of Robert Cecil, who would leave her a jewel worth one thousand pounds at his death, although Cecil scarcely shared her Spanish sympathies. However, when the Constable of Castile finally arrived in England to negotiate the treaty with Spain, he had no difficulty in seeing through ‘her excessively grand pretensions’. Far too much weight, thought the Constable, had been placed on ‘the word of a fickle woman’. But by that time Catherine Suffolk had thoroughly infiltrated herself into the process by which Spanish money was to be paid over in return for English influence at court. She received at the least twenty thousand pounds, possibly more, as well as certain wonderful jewels.25

  It was ironic that while Tassis bemoaned the weakness of the English Catholics, the Protestant English were equally indignant at the evident increase in Catholic strength since March 1603. King James’ generous relaxation of penalties, his friendly reception of Sir Thomas Tresham and his associates, was having exactly the effect which James himself had dreaded while in Scotland: the Catholics were beginning to ‘multiply’. That is, they were visibly multiplying.

  There must always remain some considerable doubt about the figures of increase which were bandied about in late 1603 and afterwards, given the ambiguous nature of Church Papistry. Father Persons, in Rome, believed that by 1605 the Catholics in England had almost doubled since the death of Elizabeth. Were there really all of a sudden far more Catholics in England – or were they just finding the courage (with due respect to Tassis) to declare themselves? What Tassis did not know was exactly how bad things had been before. There was a sensible point to be made that the Catholics appeared to be more numerous only because Mass could be said more openly.26

  Later Parliament declared that the number of priests in England had swollen from one hundred to one thousand within three years of the accession of King James. But this was inaccurate on two levels. There were probably already about two hundred and fifty priests present in 1603, while there were certainly not as many as a thousand, even in the deepest hiding, by 1606. Similarly, when King James arrived in England, he was told by the bishops that there were only 8,500 recusants in the country, whereas the true figure was more like 35,000. Yet by the end of 1603 it was believed that a hundred thousand people were attending Mass. The important point to the Protestant interest was not so much statistical as psychological. In the words of Sir Henry Spiller, in a subsequent speech in Parliament, ‘the strength of the Catholic body, with the suspension of persecution, at once became evident’.27

  Claudio Aquaviva, General of the Jesuits, had delivered a stern warning to Father Garnet in July 1603 on the continued need for circumspection. ‘By the unfathomable mercy of Christ, our Lord,’ wrote Aquaviva, ‘I implore you to be prudent.’ He reiterated the need for prudence at the end of his letter, passing on a similar message from the Pope.28 But for many of the English Catholics, buoyed up by the King’s favourable reception of Percy and others – surely in Scotland James had given ‘his promise of toleration’ – it was not so easy to be prudent. Then there was the spectacle of a court riddled with chic crypto-Catholics, high in the royal favour, which was hardly likely to encourage the rest to remain discreet. The difficulty of maintaining the ‘nil gain’ situation has been mentioned.* Most English Catholics were not even prepared to try.

  ‘It is hardly credible in what jollity they [the Catholics] now live,’ wrote Ralph Featherstonehalgh from Brancepeth in County Durham in mid-November. Among known Papists close to the King he instanced the eighteen-year-old Earl of Arundel, Suffolk’s nephew. From Lord Sheffield, the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, came a similarly outraged message: the Catholics were beginning ‘to grow very insolent and show their true intentions’ now that they were receiving ‘graces and favours’ from the King.29

  Already the Catholics were ‘labouring tooth and nail for places in Parliament’, wrote Lord Sheffield with disgust. And it was true. The fear of the plague which haunted everyone at this time because it made all crowds potentially lethal carriers had at last diminished. The first Parliament of the new reign was to be held in the spring of 1604. Many Catholics hoped for great things from it. After all, in private talks, King James had frequently mentioned the need to refer the question of liberty of conscience to Parliament. They were expecting justice from their sovereign. But like their adventurous co-religionists Guido Fawkes and Tom Wintour in Spain, the Catholics in England were to be cruelly disappointed.

  * His place of baptism is also the key to Guy Fawkes’ birthplace in his parents’ house. The site is now occupied by numbers 32–34 Stonegate next to the Star Inn (then as now a York landmark). York Civic Trust have placed a plaque on the eastern end of Blackwell’s bookshop frontage (number 32): ‘Hereabouts lived the parents of Guy Fawkes of Gunpowder Plot fame who was baptized in St Michael le Belfrey Church in 1570.’ A house in Petergate has also been suggested but it does not lie in the parish of St Michael; the entry of Fawkes’ baptism can still be seen in the York Minster Archives (S/2).

  * St Peter’s School, York, still survives. Although it has moved its site since the days of Guy Fawkes, the school retains a strong tradition of interest and even fondness for its best-known old boy. Guy Fawkes was however tactfu
lly described by a recent head boy as ‘not exactly a role model’ (The Times, 5 November 1992).

  * No entry concerning the marriage or baptism has been found in the register of Farnham Church, near Scotton, although the marriages of Fawkes’ sisters Elizabeth and Anne are recorded in 1594 and 1599 respectively.

  * The Dukedom of Norfolk was still under attainder [prohibited from use], following the execution of the 4th Duke in 1572, and was not restored until 1660; Prince Charles, the King’s younger son, was not created Duke of York till January 1605.

  * There is a comparison to be made with racist outcries in the 1960s against Asian immigrants from the former British Empire into Great Britain by those who professed themselves in favour of immigration but ended by saying: ‘If only they wouldn’t have such big families.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Catesby as Phaeton

  Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds

  Towards Phoebus’ lodging; such a waggoner

  As Phaeton would whip you to the west,

  And bring in cloudy night immediately.

  Romeo and Juliet

  The New English Parliament was summoned on 31 January 1604. Six weeks later, the King and Queen journeyed in splendour from the Tower of London for the official Opening ceremony. This was the first public procession of the reign. The fear of plague which had marred the coronation and restricted its pomp had now at last receded: so ‘the city and suburbs’ became ‘one great pageant’. Among those who walked from Tower Bridge to Westminster was Shakespeare’s company of players, wearing the King’s livery.