The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (8 page)

Genuine tolerance, where his own safety was not at stake, was one of the virtues of King James. Having been brought up to adhere to the strictest Calvinist doctrines as a child, he had come to see them as threatening the position of a sovereign. Elders of such a Church granted him no special ‘divine right’ or authority. A Church with a proper hierarchy of bishops and clergymen, on the other hand, had the monarch at its apex, duly supported by the whole structure.

It is true that James remembered with bitterness that the Catholic Church had supported his mother’s claims to the Scottish throne over his own during her long English captivity. Yet James was personally pragmatic. Furthermore, in historical terms he was inclined to view Rome as the Mother Church, though much corrupted since. Not only were the Catholic Huntlys petted but Catholic priests such as Father Abercromby
were permitted at his court if suitably disguised as a keeper of hawks or something incongruous which did not challenge the Kirk. King James even enjoyed disputing with them. He was certainly not prepared to take issue over a mere woman taking comfort in Papist practices.

The Queen’s conversion, details of which inevitably leaked out in Catholic circles, gave the King another excellent opportunity for the kind of ambivalent diplomacy at which he excelled. The Queen’s letter to Rome of 1601 was ostensibly an answer to the Pope’s communication to her husband. The King could not reply himself, Anne explained, since he had to be circumspect. Not only could the Pope be assured of the Queen’s own devotion, and her care to educate her children in the Catholic Faith, but Anne went further and hinted that King James might soon grant liberty of conscience to Catholics. As for herself, if she publicly had to attend ‘the rites of heretics’, she asked for the Pope’s absolution and blessing in advance. Such attendance was hardly her own desire, but due simply ‘to the hostile times which we have to endure’.
²⁸

This letter was almost certainly written with James’ knowledge, which made the reference to the royal children especially cynical. Anne had already clashed with her husband over the despatch of her eldest son Prince Henry away from her own care to the guardianship of the Earl of Mar, according to Scottish royal tradition which the Danish Queen greatly disliked. There was at the present time no question of these Scottish princes and princesses receiving Catholic instruction, much as the Queen would have liked it. But Queen Anne wrote out of wishful-thinking, an optimism based on a fantasy which came to be shared by Rome.

By July 1602, Pope Clement, already happy at the news about Queen Anne, was urging the conversion of her husband. There had in fact been a rumour of this conversion – which must have seemed a miraculous development – on the continent as early as 1599. A Scottish visitor to the Spanish court brought the glad tidings. In Spain in July 1600, King James was said to be on the verge of submitting to the Pope’s religious
authority in order to have his English claim confirmed. In the following November even Father Robert Persons thought it a serious possibility that the Scottish King would be converted. In the summer of 1601, Henri IV of France joined in the act. He was after all an expert on the subject of royal conversion, having become a Catholic specifically to ascend the throne of France. As he put it with his usual light touch: ‘Paris is worth a Mass.’ Henri IV assured his new pastor the Pope that he would do everything in his power to assist in his brother monarch’s conversion.
²⁹

The Pope now privately offered to champion King James against anyone who tried to deny him the English throne. Clement VIII, elected Pope in 1592, was, unlike Pius V, by temperament a conciliator. He prided himself on having mediated between France and Spain to bring about peace. Perhaps he could now repeat this triumph by securing peace between Spain and England, if only to bring succour to the beleaguered English Catholics.

King James’ diplomatic manoeuvring with regard to the Papacy was certainly successful. It was also carefully calculated. The King wrote no letters of his own; it was better like that. On the one hand Queen Anne – with her repeated use of the royal ‘we’ – would be believed by the Catholics to speak for him; on the other hand he could deny to their opponents that he had any share in her views.

James’ agents in Rome were able to have a field day along similar lines. They encouraged the tall tales, one of which reached as far as the Spanish King Philip III. Not only, apparently, was James becoming a Catholic but his son and heir would be brought up in Rome. When one particular letter did emerge later under James’ own signature, addressing the Pope in Latin as ‘Most Holy Father’, and signed ‘your most obedient son’, the King was more than capable of dealing with the challenge. He blandly announced that he must have signed the paper quickly, without looking at it closely, on his way out hunting.
³⁰

From James’ point of view there was no need to emulate
Henri IV and change his religion. It was far better to travel hopefully towards conversion – or to be seen to do so – than actually to arrive there. And, as we shall see, rumours of this famous conversion continued to circulate as late as 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot.

In 1600, Thomas Wilson wrote concerning the succession in
The State of England:
‘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.’ He went on to list twelve competitors.
*
Yet by 1602 the picture had entirely changed. In the Spanish Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella were working out ways of assisting James which would leave him under an obligation to them when he arrived in the south. As Don Baltasar de Zuñiga, the Spanish Ambassador in Brussels, wrote at the end of July: ‘His James’] game for the crown of England is almost won.’
³¹
It was therefore essential to give support to the monarch who ‘would at the last, give liberty to the Catholics’.

This remarkable turnaround would allow the Archduchess Isabella to exclaim ecstatically over the accession of King James, in a letter of April 1603 to her brother’s favourite, the Duke of Lerma. Surely the blood of the martyred Mary Queen of Scots must have ‘cried out towards Our Lord’ at the moment of her son’s proclamation! The memory of Queen Mary’s death would certainly spur on James’ conversion to Catholicism: towards which Isabella felt ‘strong signs’ were already pointing. A Scot, resident in London, put the whole matter more phlegmatically in a report back to James in the winter of 1602: ‘Wherever I passed and lodged they called your Majesty their young lord, which within a few years [back] no man durst speak.’
³²

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

I
t 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.