The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) Read online

  The shock of the Throckmorton plot with its links to Mary, Queen of Scots, the Pope and Philip II had been strong. The assassination of Prince William of Orange, leader of the Dutch patriots, added a further layer of distress and anger, since Leicester had long been advocating armed intervention to assist him. In October 1584 he, Walsingham and Burghley formed the Bond of Association which allowed the gentlemen who took the oath freedom to kill anyone who came to the English throne following the assassination of Elizabeth.10 It was an emotional piece of propaganda since in effect it sanctioned civil war, but it remains understandable given the lowering atmosphere that had settled over the country. In addition the government decided to hammer the clandestine Jesuits again, and, like the proclamation of January 1581, the main item in the new bill made the presence of a Jesuit or seminary priest, whatever his purpose, a treasonable offence. It became a felony to succour them, and anyone with knowledge of their presence who did not inform against them incurred a fine and imprisonment. All the queen’s subjects being educated abroad were to return home within six months and take the oath of supremacy – thus denying his Catholicism – while those who failed to do this incurred the penalties of treason. Not everyone in Parliament was entirely at ease with such draconian measures, but still the bill became law early in 1585, despite the willingness of some of the Catholic gentry to declare their allegiance to Elizabeth. Nor did these measures lie idle as many previous pieces of law-making had done; enforcement became the rule and in the next three years or so some 120 people were condemned by the statute.

  Yet among the Catholic gentry there were still those who were not to be cowed by such battering legislation. The wealthy squire’s son, Anthony Babington, had been distributing Catholic books, supporting the new Catholic clergy and sheltering priests even before he took up the cause of the exiled and imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, who symbolized for young men of his ilk their stricken and unfortunate faith.11 Mariolatry had two sides, and her lambency became even stronger after the execution of Campion and the enforcement of the recusancy laws ‘had brought home to them the bitterness of their sufferings, which in royal patience she shared and surpassed’. Indeed, it has even been suggested that if Mary had been a Protestant the conspiracies on her behalf would have occurred just the same, because then the aim would have been simply a change of ruler, not a change of religion (and ruler). Young men of a romantic or chivalrous cast of mind then were often responsive to the somewhat obvious pathos of her dim situation; a peculiar misfortune, as it happened, since it could lead them into conflict with a swarm of spies and intelligencers reporting to Elizabeth’s severe and puritaninclined spy master, Sir Francis Walsingham. Given his position in the government as Secretary of State they were right to be frightened of him and his aides, yet they persisted with a passion in their swordhilt protestations of loyalty to Mary, a tall woman with an interesting personal history. This devotion lodged itself in the core of the strike against Elizabeth first envisaged by John Ballard, the bustling exiled priest who easily and convincingly disguised himself as a soldier. Babington was initially reluctant to get involved, but when his feelings about it shifted and the plan began to evolve, it is possible to see a shadowy prefiguring of the gunpowder plot itself. Both plots were held together by a strongly felt male bond that could override the loyalties of marriage and fatherhood. For example, young Thomas Salusbury, the owner of Lleweni in North Wales and a gentleman in the service of his guardian, the Earl of Leicester, was devoted (for no clear reason) to Babington. Salusbury had been forced into a marriage when aged ten to his stepfather’s daughter, an arrangement intended to secure financial advantages, and it was some years before he was reconciled to his bride.12 Beside Salusbury in the taverns of London, where gentlemen (perhaps at the Inns of Court) met for conviviality, was the young Welsh squire Edward Jones of Plas Cadwgan. He seems to have been an uncritical admirer of his compatriot whose style of clothes and beard marked him out as something of an exquisite, like the nonchalant and elegant young man in Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait miniature Young Man among Roses. Even so, Salusbury gave Jones only passing attention being altogether taken with Babington, whose charm, like that of Robert Catesby, was ultimately fatal. Another who centred his life on Babington was the minor poet Chidiock Tichborne, as did to a less marked degree John Travers and Edward Abington (sometimes given as Habington) whose fortunate brother Thomas managed to escape the brutal denouement of both the Babington and Gunpowder plots. Was this because the second plot unravelled so sweetly for the government through the effect of the famous anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle, which one writer has ascribed to the pen of his lordship’s sister Mary – the wife of Thomas Abington? While no women took part in the plot, it was frequently associated with the supposed sneaky cunning of women, so many were imprisoned and questioned.

  The more dangerous of the two plots was certainly Catesby’s, because unlike the somewhat naïve Babington, who was compromised virtually at all points by government spies, he managed to exclude them. Still the similarities are striking for both men saw their efforts develop with the support of swordsmen with reputations as such, preliminary to a specific localized reaction in the country. For Babington this was intended to be the release of Mary, Queen of Scots and the gift of another crown and country to her. For Catesby, the culmination of his plot would come after the detonation of the gunpowder and would take place around Stratford-upon-Avon, with a general insurrection and a new government. At the head of this was to be placed the young Princess Elizabeth who at that time was also living in Warwickshire – at Combe Abbey, some four or five miles east of Coventry. In the case of neither man is it now possible to state with absolute certainty down to the last detail in what degree he shared his full plans with his supporters. In Babington’s case this may well have been due to a clumsy effort to throw off the government; in sociopath Catesby’s, to dissembling rooted in unconsidered, even anarchic, ambition. Perhaps he thought he could transform the former errors into positive action and so manufacture a triumph.

  One of the secondary but not negligible effects of the Babington plot was to infuriate the Earl of Leicester. This was unfortunate for Catholics since in that frame of mind, as he proved repeatedly, he could be a very troublesome enemy. He had been trying for months to give the Dutch rebels direct support after they had sought the assistance of Elizabeth following the unexpected deaths of Prince William and François, Duke of Anjou. Leicester had been stuck in the Low Countries, piling up errors, both civil and military, during the period when Babington’s plot was taking place. While Burghley and Walsingham could point to a sharp demolition of treason, he had managed to upset Elizabeth by his blunders abroad. Back in England to rest and take stock Leicester trumpeted his hostility to Mary, pushed for her execution and harried the friends of the dead plotters. Catholics now found the fiscal retribution meted out to them began to hurt more than hitherto. If they defaulted on the £20 fine for recusancy the government was now permitted to take two-thirds of their estates. Babington’s – from which he had drawn an income stated to have exceeded £1,000 per annum (a modern equivalent might be close to £500,000) – passed to Sir Walter Ralegh, and in a period when the estates of gentlemen usually grew larger, Catholics saw theirs contract, sometimes quite brutally. Taxes on the gentry before 1640 were generally negligible, but the penal levies caused deliberate hardship and a burden that passed down the generations. It was this squeeze on property that was most likely to convince a family (at least its public figures) that the mass was not worth the attendant ruin that could follow. Even so, there were sterner spirits than the Salusburys and Bulkeleys, who had settled to erasing the memory of the errant Thomas whose estate was yet preserved by an old entail. One in whom the spirit of resistance lived on was Sir William Catesby of Lapworth in Warwicksire, with a lineage described as ‘ancient, historic and distinguished’. Reconciled to Catholicism by the mission of Persons and Campion, married to a Throckmorton, he suffered imprisonment and
the plundering of his wealth. His acceptance of this (whether troubled or indifferent) and the snubbing of his traditional patriotism tilted his son Robert towards armed resistance despite abundant evidence that it would fail. The gunpowder plot used the template of Ballard and Babington, drawing its participants from ‘the pupils and converts of the Jesuit mission’.13 But it was necessarily flawed because it never achieved the critical mass that made its progress unstoppable. The unlucky thirteen main gunpowder plotters had a freight of personal conviction that was quite unmatched among contemporary lay Catholics. With a foundation of striking presumption they held fast to the view that death in the cause was nothing and ultimately they embraced their end as the prelude to eternal life. A wafer-thin fiction destroyed them. Perhaps it is possible still to find some explanation for this in developments after the execution of Mary and before that of the hapless Earl of Essex in 1601.

  A mere six priests had fallen foul of the laws of England and had been executed themselves before the beheading of Mary. But in the following year, 1587, with the country in a state of edgy passivity, waiting for an attack from Spain, the tempo of executions was stepped up and thirty-one died. Also in that year the work of rounding up recusants and valuing their lands was taken from the local authorities and given to operatives of the privy council. Lacking inhibitions based on personal familiarity they went about their business with an unyielding vigour; a procedure enhanced by a promise of an ‘allowance out of the forfeitures’ they should secure, and also by the first chance to purchase from the queen the lease of confiscated lands. The early missionary successes proved to be temporary and collapsed as the war against Spain continued after the Armada crisis into the next decade. There remained a pervasive fear of attack and a national preoccupation with war. The efforts to dissolve lay Catholic allegiance to Elizabeth, which were mounted at home and abroad, led to further executions in the 1590s – eighty-eight in all. The estrangement of the majority of the population from the old faith was now certain, and the government’s measures to counter the vituperation of Father Persons and the pro-Spanish party abroad were accepted. ‘Policy and ideology converged in England’s national energies, which were largely directed to defensive as opposed to aggressive or interventionist ends.’ Not everyone favoured the brisk efforts of Essex in his leadership of the Cadiz expedition (1596) and the Islands voyage (1597). As Thomas Wilson noted in The State of England, Ann. Dom. 1600, the ‘common soldiers that are sent out of the realm be of the basest and most inexperienced, the best being reserved to defend from invasion.’ But laws to prohibit could also entice, and in court circles Catholicism had a fluttering fitful glamour as the late cult of Eliza took on a rather desperate air. The sort of scepticism about Rome that finds voice in Marlowe’s spiritual drama Dr Faustus, could yet open the way to a nostalgic conversion.

  There were tensions, too, within the upper levels of government, involving the tugging of policy by factions. Lord Burghley, ageing and sometimes infirm, came increasingly to rely on the administrative skills of his younger son Sir Robert Cecil. They shared not only the primary tasks of office as ministers, but also an identical dislike of minorities, the improvident and dissident. In what seems like a deliberate contrast there was Essex who benignly gave such provocative elements neglected space, jobs and support whenever he identified an opportunity – and if it ruffled the Cecilians that was a pleasurable bonus. As the heir of his stepfather Leicester (d. 1588), the young earl had puritan support as well, and he married Walsingham’s daughter, the widow of the great Protestant hero Sir Philip Sidney just before Walsingham’s death. But among Essex’s closest friends were the dashing Earl of Southampton, an unsteady Catholic, and Sir Oliver Manners, who had turned back to the old faith. The convert cast of mind found expression in the works of Henry Constable, who had been at St John’s College, Cambridge, and yet had Catholic kinsfolk, including priests and nuns from the large Babthorpe family; the conversion of Constable himself seems to have taken place in 1591.14 A letter that he wrote to Essex in October 1595 is revealing, for in it he declared that ‘he was more affectionate to him than to any’ and although there was a gap between them on religious matters, the fact that this had forced him to depend on others had been against his will. He then claimed – as many of his co-religionists would have done – that although passionately devoted to Catholicism, he did not wish its restoration in England, nor the servitude of his country to a foreign tyranny, and that he had on several occasions dissuaded some of his Catholic countrymen from violence ‘and such as be in authority in the church from approving of them’.

  Writing on the same day to Anthony Bacon who had returned to England from a lengthy (and not untroubled) sojourn in France to take control of Essex’s intelligence operations, Constable wrote: ‘An honest man may be a Catholic and no fool.’ Some time later the poet wrote again to Essex in terms that suggest the growth of a friendly understanding between them. He renewed his protests of lawful affection for his country and said that he had written to Rome to dissuade the Pope from believing that English Catholics actually favoured Spanish designs against Elizabeth who had just passed her ‘climacteric’ of sixty-three years (a number loaded with significance for Elizabethans). Sir Robert Cecil and Essex were both advised of Constable’s movements and apparent intentions, and on 12 September 1598 Sir Thomas Edmondes wrote to the former from Paris that there was a project afoot to send Constable to Scotland to encourage James VI to allow Catholics there ‘a toleration of Religion’, and to assure him of the devoted support of English Catholics. In March of the following year George Nicholson reported to Cecil from Edinburgh that Constable had arrived from France, and the Laird of Boniton, another Catholic, had travelled with him. Yet several days after, Roger Aston informed Cecil that James had refused Constable an audience; the king rejected the notion of toleration. However, despite a summons before the Lords of Sessions, by August of that year Constable and Boniton were indeed negotiating on behalf of the Pope with the king. The object, cited in a despatch from the London ambassador of France to Henri IV, was to win liberty of conscience for Catholics ‘et declarer la guerre à la Royne d’Angleterre, lui offrant pour cest affect grand denier et l’assistance de tous les Princes catholiques de la Chrestienté et d’ung grand nombre de Catholiques de ce royaume.’15

  The mission was not a success and there was some disbelief in political circles in London, rather more closely informed than the French ambassador after long years of monarch watching, that James had ever seriously considered cutting ‘the grass under Her Majesty’s feet’. When Henry Constable returned to Antwerp from Scotland, Thomas Phelippes, sometime spy coordinator and code-breaker to Walsingham, received a letter from his agent in Brussels who used the alias John Petit. He reported Constable now keeping company with a priest named Tempest and the Earl of Westmorland. One day when out walking they met a young English lad who worked for an exiled printer (probably the gifted and indefatigable Richard Verstegen), ‘and asked him what books are printing against the King of Scotland’s title; he said he knew of none.’ Constable’s view of James had evidently shifted and he thought now that the king relied on ‘no party in England but the Puritans, and will enter with that pretence, and before the tree falls, if he can find opportunity.’

  Evidently Constable was far from elated by his contacts with James, retreating from his former position of supporting him and making some rather disparaging comments. Petit again to Thomas Phelippes (alias Peter Halins): ‘he has been as backward for the King of Scots as he was forward before; he speaks of him as little better than an atheist, of no courage nor judgment, and says he and his intend to make havoc of England when the day comes.’ Even so, with no other significant candidate to succeed the childless Elizabeth remotely acceptable to his countrymen Constable thought to persevere with James, and he may have been the author of a book the king received that denounced the notorious Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, which appeared earlier in the deca
de with the alias R. Doleman for its author. This name was actually a cover for a collaboration between its essential author, Richard Verstegen, and its reviser Father Persons, a master of style in English and Latin. A text which Constable along with many others ascribed solely to him, it had repercussions in the succession debate that the stiff old queen tried to ward off. It was circulated on the continent late in the autumn of 1593, and a larger edition was printed in 1594 in Antwerp with a dedication to Essex. Optimism or an exile’s impertinence?

  The book’s first purpose was to discredit the principle of legitimism ‘in favour of a contractual theory of sovereignty’, and then secondly to rubbish the claims of all save one person. James might briefly have hoped that the emotion generated by the execution of his mother would rally her Catholic supporters to his side. However, Verstegen and others in exile wanted a genuinely Catholic candidate to oust all others. Their book ‘brought together arguments for a Spanish successor which had been circulating since 1571’.16 Their choice was the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II, based on what we might regard as a rather strained ancestral argument, but she was a princess whose faith was unimpeachable. As far as James was concerned it was the most dangerous book of its time. More moderate Catholics looked to Lady Arabella Stuart, cousin of James, since she had been born in England and he had not. After the publication of Doleman her name was regularly noted high on the list of claimants, and there was also talk of her being married to Ranuccio Farnese, one of the sons of the Duke of Parma. Commentators and many politicians did take Doleman very seriously too, and the book naturally became the prized handbook of the Spanish party. James was advised that there was an urgent need for a Protestant pro-Stuart counter to this insidious text, and he was urged as well to woo the common lawyers in England. This was because they were rich and influential in government and held the key to his legal status. Men trained in law had been solid servants of the queen and they had to be convinced of his right to be considered native born, and of a chiming of interests.