The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (5 page)

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 priest 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.

PART ONE

Before the Fruit Was Ripe

It were very small wisdom… for pulling of unripe fruit to hazard the breaking of my neck…

KING JAMES
to the Earl of Northumberland

CHAPTER ONE

Whose Head for the Crown?

Thus you see this crown [of England] is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted.

THOMAS WILSON
The State of England, 1600

W
e now step back from the light of the new reign into the shadows of the 1590s: for that is where the story of the Gunpowder Plot begins. It is necessary to do so in order to explain how these significant Catholic expectations – the joyous ‘Papist’ welcome given to James I – came to be aroused.

The end of the sixteenth century was an uneasy time in England. Harvests were bad, prices were high. As the Queen grew old, men everywhere were filled with foreboding about the future. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 had removed one focus of Catholic plotting; yet the departure of Queen Mary as a candidate did nothing to simplify the complicated question of the English succession. That subject which Elizabeth would not have publicly discussed was nevertheless secretly debated high and low, in England, in Scotland, elsewhere in Europe, throughout the last fifteen years of her reign.

Furthermore, the launching of the Spanish Armada against England the year after Queen Mary’s death, with other armed Spanish intrusions during the decade, aroused an understandable paranoia on the subject of Spain and its Catholic monarch Philip II. In 1602 a play called
Alarum for London
recalled to
audiences the sacking of Antwerp twenty-five years earlier. Two small children ran on to the stage in a state of terror pursued by ‘Spaniards’ with drawn swords shouting ‘Kill, kill, kill!’
¹
From the Spanish point of view, the support which the Elizabethan government gave to the Protestant rebels in the Spanish-controlled areas in the Low Countries was intolerably subversive, given that England was geographically so well placed to make threats. But, as the English saw it, the narrow seas which divided England from the Low Countries could just as easily be crossed in the opposite direction by doughty Spaniards shouting ‘Kill, kill, kill!’ These same Spaniards might bring with them a Catholic monarch to succeed – or even replace – Elizabeth.

The reaction of the average English Protestant to Spain was well summed up by one of Cecil’s agents resident there. It was, he wrote, an ‘ill-pleasing country where a virtuous mind takes small delight, unless it be by learning to abhor vice by continually beholding the hideous face thereof’.
²
Of course English merchants continued to trade merrily with Spain, as merchants of all countries and all periods have defied ideological boundaries in the uplifting cause of commerce. Nevertheless, they shuddered, and with some reason, at the hovering vulture of the Spanish Inquisition, ready with its cruel claws to tear fine freedom-loving English Protestants to shreds.