The Gunpowder Plot

by Antonia Fraser

  The Papists’ Powder Treason, an allegorical engraving done for 5 November 1612 ‘in aeternal memory of the divine bounty in England’s preservation from the Hellish Powder Plot’, was careful to glorify the King, as the central feature of what had been preserved. A series of royal portraits, including Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, loom over much smaller vignettes of Monteagle receiving the anonymous letter from a stranger and the conspirators taking their sacramental oath. It was unfortunate that the divine bounty failed the next day, when Prince Henry died of his fever on 6 November. The engraving had to be withdrawn (although it emerged in 1679, another period of virulent anti-Popery).*5

  Such perturbation, personalised and focused on King James, was grist to the government’s mill in its campaign against the treacherous Catholics. First, these traitors paid allegiance to the Pope rather than to their King; then, their perceived leaders, the Jesuits, were actual ‘King-killers’. A rhyming pamphlet of 1606 on the subject of the Powder Treason by the playwright Thomas Dekker contains ‘The Picture of a Jesuit’:

  A Harpy face, a Fox’s head…

  A Mandrake’s voice, whose tunes are cries,

  So piercing that the hearer dies,

  Mouth’d like an Ape, his innate spite

  Being to mock those he cannot bite…6

  Like Francis Herring’s disquisition on ‘Satan’s policy’, this violent caricature was not atypical of the way Jesuits were portrayed henceforth. Not only were they ‘King-killers’, but they were also equivocators.

  The doctrine of equivocation continued to be seen, like the Jesuits themselves, as at once alien and diabolical. In Macbeth Shakespeare began by amusing himself on the subject, when the drunken Porter of Macbeth’s castle, awakened by knocking, imagined that he was at Hell’s Gate, welcoming the new arrivals. His language recalled the popular gibes made on the subject of Garnet’s death, including that jocular remark by Dudley Carleton to his correspondent John Chamberlain that Garnet would be hanged without ‘equivocation’ for all his shifting and faltering.* ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator,’ exclaimed the Porter, ‘that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O! come in, equivocator.’7

  Towards the end of the play, a more serious use of the word occurred. Macbeth began to suspect that ‘the equivocation of the fiend’ was responsible for two comforting prophecies which had been made to him. One Apparition, summoned by the witches, had told him: ‘Fear not, till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane’; the other Apparition had assured him that ‘none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’. But Birnam Wood did advance on Dunsinane – in the shape of Macbeth’s enemies disguised as branches – and Macduff did have the power to kill him, being ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’.8 Both prophecies were classic examples of equivocation, since Macbeth had understood them in one sense, while their hidden (sinister) meaning turned out to be very different. This use of equivocation was seen as an essentially evil process: ‘a monster shapeless, two-headed, two-horned, and also with a double mouth, and especially a double heart’, as William Gager described equivocation in Pyramis, a Latin poem of 1608 dedicated to the King.9 It was a shapeless mythical monster that bore little relation to the actual Catholic doctrine of equivocation – heroic if arguably ill-advised – which was intended to avoid the sin of lying when in dangerous conditions.

  Such propaganda accompanied the political measures taken by the government after the discovery of the Plot, and provided the correct climate for persecution. Much of this was directed at the blameless Catholic community, exactly as Father Garnet and others had feared. The Catholics, like the Protestants, trembled in the wake of the Plot, fearing a general massacre of their number inspired by a spirit of ‘vengeance and hatred’.10

  In April 1606 Henri IV of France decided to give King James a little lecture on the virtues of toleration – and who better to do it than the man who had changed his religion to secure a kingdom? ‘His master had learned from experience’, said the French Ambassador in London, ‘the strong hold which religion has on the human breast’ (if not perhaps on Henry IV’s own); it was a flame which tended to burn with increasing fierceness in proportion to the violence employed to extinguish it. Let King James, therefore, punish the guilty, but let him equally spare the innocent.11 These same admirable sentiments had in fact been expressed by James himself in his speech to Parliament of 9 November 1605. Now he saw things differently.

  The King told the French Ambassador that the English Catholics ‘were so infected with the doctrine of the Jesuits, respecting the subordination of the royal to the papal authority’, that he could do nothing. He would leave it to his Parliament. So another Oath of Allegiance was devised, with help from an Appellant Catholic priest, intended to increase the rift between those priests prepared to ‘compromise’ with the state, such as the Appellants, and those who could not, the Jesuits. It was an oath which resulted in a long propaganda war between King James and the defenders of the Pope’s spiritual supremacy.12 But from the point of view of the hapless recusants, such doctrinal wars were less important than the disabilities which came to burden their daily lives.

  As these disabilities multiplied, Catholics could no longer practise law, nor serve in the Army or Navy as officers (on pain of a hundred pounds fine). No recusant could act as executor of a will or guardian to a minor, nor even possess a weapon except in cases of self-defence. Catholics could not receive a university degree, and could not vote in local elections (until 1797) nor in Parliamentary elections until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. All this was on top of the spiritual penalties by which Catholics were ordered to marry in the Anglican Church, take their children there for baptism, and finally rest in its burial ground.

  In 1613 a bill was introduced into the House of Commons to compel Catholics to wear a red hat (as the Jews in Rome did) or parti-coloured stockings (like clowns did), not only so that they could be easily distinguished, but also so they could be ‘hooted at’ whenever they appeared. Wiser counsels prevailed and this unpleasant scapegoating was not carried through. Nevertheless a profound prejudice against Papists, with or without red hats and parti-coloured stockings, remained lurking in the popular consciousness after 1605, ready to emerge from its depths at any hint of leniency towards them. For many Protestants, a declaration of February 1606 on the subject of the Plot by Sir Thomas Smith summed the matter up: ‘this bloody stain and mark will never be washed out of Popish religion’.13

  It was a stain which could be passed on to unborn generations. It was the allegedly ‘foreign’ nature of Catholicism – ruled by an alien Pope based in Rome – which made it perennially vulnerable to attack. A political organisation could be denounced where genuine religious convictions might evoke sympathy. In 1651 Milton called Catholicism not so much a religion as ‘a [foreign] priestly despotism under the cloak of religion arrayed in the spoils of temporal power’.14 He was on firm ground that would not be surrendered by every Protestant until the late twentieth century (if then). Meanwhile, as the contents of the anniversary sermons on 5 November reveal, the notion of a conspiracy which was so frightful as to be directed by Satan himself only deepened with the passing of the years.

  Was the Plot really ‘Satan’s policy’ – that is, the work of Satan carried out by the Catholics? Or was some other agency responsible, rather closer to the King? The first rumours that the mastermind was in fact Salisbury, not Satan, occurred in November 1605. As early as 17 November, the Venetian Ambassador, Niccolò Molin, reported: ‘people say that this plot must have its roots high up’. Another cynical account described the fire which was to have ‘burnt our King and Council’ as being but ‘ignis fatuus [will o’ the wisp] or a flash of some foolish fellow’s brain’.15

  Such stories suited the Catholic powers abroad, because they shifted the embarrassing responsibility for the conspiracy away from their own co-religionists (Philip III, for example, on first heari
ng the news had hoped that Puritans would turn out to be involved). On 25 November Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels told Salisbury that he was ashamed to repeat the ‘daily new inventions at this court’ which were intended to exonerate the Catholics from scandal. An anonymous letter of December held it as certain that ‘there has been foul play’, that some members of the Council had spun the web which had embroiled the Catholics.16

  Not only were rumours of foul play convenient for the Catholic powers, they also offered (and still offer) the most convenient defence for those reluctant to face the fact that convinced, pious Catholics could also be terrorists. Bishop Godfrey Goodman’s memoir The Court of King James the First, written about forty years after the event, provided material for this approach, albeit of a somewhat flimsy nature (the whole memoir has little scholarly quality). Goodman was the son of the Dean of Westminster and rose to become Bishop of Gloucester, despite being suspected of holding ‘papistical views’. His special interest was in fact the reconciliation of the Anglican Church and Rome, which he described in his will as the ‘mother church’.17

  Goodman made Salisbury the clear villain of the piece. He began by drawing attention to the Catholics’ acute feelings of grievance after the death of the ‘old woman’ (Queen Elizabeth) when they did not receive ‘the mitigation’ that they had expected. Salisbury’s intelligence service had let him know all about this, whereupon he decided that in order to demonstrate his service to the state, ‘he would first contrive and then discover a treason’ – the more odious the treason, the greater the service. Thus Percy was an agent provocateur who was ‘often seen’ coming out of Salisbury’s house at 2.00 a.m. Salisbury was meanwhile giving specific instructions for the convenient deaths of Catesby and Percy: ‘Let me never see them alive.’ But Goodman produces no proof for any of this, beyond second-hand gossip.

  Nevertheless the sheer seductiveness of the story – from the Catholic point of view – prevented its dying away completely. In 1679, when the imaginary Popish Plot of Titus Oates created new waves of anti-Popery, Thomas Barlow, the fiercely anti-Catholic Bishop of Lincoln, saw fit to publish a fresh work on the Gunpowder Plot, which he called that ‘villainy so black and horrid… as has no parallel in any age or nation’. However, in the course of his narrative, Barlow also found it necessary to denounce the persistent ‘wicked’ rumours about Salisbury’s role. The Plot, he reiterated fiercely, had been ‘hatched in Hell’ by the Jesuits.18

  Of course Salisbury himself never tried to conceal the fact that he had had knowledge of some impending ‘stir’. He not only mentioned it in his official communication to the English ambassadors but told King James, who repeated it in his own account of the Plot. The reputation of Salisbury’s intelligence service demanded no less and it would have ill become the King’s chief minister to plead total ignorance of such a flagrant conspiracy under his very nose.

  Salisbury’s penetration of the Plot is one thing but the deliberate manufacture of the entire conspiracy with the aim of damning Catholicism for ever is quite another. There is far too much evidence of treasonable Catholic enterprises in late Elizabethan times for the Gunpowder Plot to be dismissed altogether as malevolent invention. It was, on the contrary, a terrorist conspiracy spurred on by resentment of the King’s broken promises. The wrongs of the persecuted Catholics were thus to be righted by the classic terrorist method of violence, which encompassed the destruction of the innocent as well as the guilty.

  The story told here has been of Salisbury’s foreknowledge – at a comparatively late stage – thanks to the revelations of Francis Tresham repeated to Monteagle and his subsequent manipulation of the King by the stratagem of the anonymous letter. This limited foreknowledge makes sense of the extraordinary ten-day delay in searching the House of Lords for gunpowder – otherwise quite incomprehensible in a responsible and security-minded minister. In his Cold War against the forces of Catholicism, Salisbury scented the opportunity for a coup, particularly when it turned out that he could very likely entangle the hated Jesuits in the same net.

  But foreknowledge is not fabrication, even if Salisbury, or perhaps Coke, did embellish the truth with certain vivid details afterwards, such as the celebrated – and infamous – mine which somehow vanished without trace. In the same way, the very different foreknowledge gained by Father Garnet, in the confessional, did not mean that he was, as Coke tried to suggest, the principal ‘author’ of the Plot. Neither Salisbury nor Father Garnet was the author of the Powder Treason, though both have been blamed for it. There is, however, a real difference between Salisbury and Garnet in that Salisbury gained by the Plot and Garnet suffered for it.

  Could the Gunpowder Plot have succeeded? For it is certainly true that regimes have been triumphantly overthrown by violent means throughout history. If Salisbury’s foreknowledge, albeit limited, is accepted, one must also accept that these conspirators never really had a chance once the Plot was in its last stages. Tresham’s betrayal and Monteagle’s eye to the King’s preservation (and his own) saw to that, quite apart from Salisbury’s industrious intelligence system.

  But Salisbury’s loyal activities, like the decisions of Tresham and Monteagle, were symptoms of a wider failure which was built into the scheme long before the last stages were reached. For the Gunpowder Plot to succeed, the conspirators needed to be sure of strong support at home and even stronger support abroad. King James understood the first point perfectly well, and expressed it eloquently when he said that the traitors had been ‘dreaming to themselves that they had the virtues of a snow-ball’ which would begin in a small way, but by ‘tumbling down from a great hill’ would grow to an enormous size, gathering snow all the way.19

  In fact the snow-ball, far from increasing as it went, melted away in the light of the Plot’s discovery. The Catholic community, whatever resistance it might have provided in the time of Elizabeth, had been cozened to believe that James, the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, would act as its deliverer once he ascended the throne. By the time the truth was discovered – James did not intend to keep the promises they thought he had made – it was too late. Two sorts of Catholic leaders, the peers and the priests, never gave encouragement to the violence of the Powder Treason.

  Any support abroad had vanished as a genuine possibility even before the death of Elizabeth. It vanished when the King of Spain, for all his diplomatic dallying, refused to back a specific Catholic candidate for the English throne (such as his sister Isabella – herself in any case a reluctant nominee). Thereafter the Anglo-Spanish Treaty confirmed the gloomy fact that there was to be no help from that quarter. Once again the Hapsburg – and Papal – belief in the impending Catholicism of King James was relevant. The King bamboozled two sets of Catholics into compliance by his slippery handling of his own religious convictions: English recusants and foreign potentates, including the Pope.

  Quite apart from the continuing battle between Pro-Plotters and No-Plotters, the conspiracy has developed a rich historiographical life of its own. One feature of this has been the concentration on the figure of Guy Fawkes. It is Guy Fawkes who has had to accept the odium of being the arch-villain of the piece. William Hazlitt, in an essay of 1821 to commemorate 5 November, described him as ‘this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about among his barrels of gunpowder, loaded with death…’20 It is Guy Fawkes who, in spite of having been generally known in his own time, including to the government, as Guido, has lent his forename to the stuffed, ragged figures on the pavement, whose placard solicits ‘a penny for the guy’, before being ritually burnt on 5 November. In all fairness, the reviled name should really be that of Robert Catesby, as leader of the conspiracy. But it may be some consolation to the shade of Guido, if it still wanders somewhere beneath the House of Lords, that Guy Fawkes is also the hero of some perennial subversive jokes as being ‘the only man to get into Parliament with the right intentions’.

  In me
mory of the failed endeavour of Guy Fawkes, the vaults of the House of Lords are still searched on the eve of the Opening of Parliament. The practice has become one of the many rituals which accompany and enhance British political procedures, connecting them to a vivid past. But the search has its origins in genuine panic about the Catholic menace. Nearly thirty-six years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the alleged massacres of Protestants by Irish Catholics aroused these fears. On 18 August 1641, Parliament, which was in a ferment over these supposed atrocities, believed that the threat might have moved closer to home. Orders were given to search ‘Rosebie’s House, the Tavern, and such other Houses and Vaults and Cellars as are near the Upper House of Parliament’ for powder, arms or ammunition.21

  A similar panic marked the period surrounding Titus Oates’ revelations of a Popish Plot in 1678. In late October, the House of Lords was told by the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod that coals and timber had been lodged in the cellars adjoining and that, even worse, ‘a great knocking and digging’ in the earth had been heard there. Seventy years after the Powder Treason, with Catholics still very much the prime suspects, this was enough to raise the alarm. The House of Lords set up a committee, which was to have the cellars cleared of firewood, so that sentinels, under the command of trusted officers, could patrol these dangerous areas day and night. A certain Mrs Dehaure, living in the Old Palace Yard, was ordered out of her home so that it could be filled with guards.22

  Again in 1690, following the accession of William III, there were fears of Jacobite insurrection on behalf of the exiled Stuarts. The Marquess of Carmarthen reported to the House of Lords that there was strong cause to believe that there was ‘a second Gunpowder Plot, or some such great Mischief’, since notorious ‘ill-wishers’ were resorting to the house of one Hutchinson in the Old Palace, Westminster.23 Nor were these fears totally imaginary. The assassination plot which led to the execution of Ambrose Rookwood the second occurred only six years later.