God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (48 page)

Three years later Fawkes would be notorious all across Europe, but in the summer of 1603 he was just one more disenfranchised English Catholic pursuing another enterprise against his home-land. His journey would take him from Philip’s Court to a gunpowder-packed cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament, the desperate last fling of a desperate age. It had begun a year earlier in the spring of 1602 with the arrival in Spain of a Worcestershire man, Thomas Wintour, begging money from Philip for impoverished Catholics back home. Subsidiary to this Wintour offered Philip the ‘devotion’ of all those Catholics—some thousand horsemen or so—in the event of Spain launching an attack on England. So far, so predictable: Wintour’s was the standard promise of any exile unhappy with the government at home and eager for change. Spain’s response to his request was far from predictable, though. After a succession of surprise meetings with ministers Wintour was assured of the sum of 100,000 crowns and told that Philip ‘meant to…set foot in England’ the following year. The scene was set for invasion.
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By the spring of 1603, though, all bets were off. Elizabeth was dead, James was amenable to peace and the Spanish, if ever they had seriously considered a fresh assault on England, were now favouring negotiation. But Wintour had been given an assurance; moreover he had told others about the invasion plans. When Dutton and Fawkes arrived at Philip’s Court to hold him to the guarantees made in his name, they had about them the frantic air of men trying to alter destiny. Their claims were lavish, their invective coarse: Dutton promised that ‘with work, speed, secrecy and good weather we will have won the game in six days’; Fawkes launched into a bitter diatribe against the Scots. The Spanish Council demurred, then said little, committing to less and keeping its eye firmly fixed on Tassis’ progress. For good measure it placed Fawkes and Dutton under house arrest to prevent them derailing the peace process. Fawkes and Dutton had gone looking for Wintour’s warmongers among the Spanish Council and had found only doves. Their hopes of war had been raised, only to be dashed again as this new spirit of diplomatic pragmatism began to prevail.
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Of course no political transition is quite that abrupt. There were still enough hawks left both in Spain and England to make peace an option, not a certainty. So, while Fawkes and Dutton whiled away their detention writing lurid proclamations to be read out once the invasion had triumphed, Tassis, on Philip’s instructions, crossed to England, seeking to explore their claims every bit as much as he sought a solution to the hostilities. It took him just a month to decide that the plotters had overstated their case. England’s Catholics, he reported, ‘go about in such timid fear of one another, that I would seriously doubt that they would risk taking to arms’. So far as an invasion was concerned he was adamant: ‘I would not dare to trust these people in this question.’
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Plague kept the English Court on the move that summer and autumn and Tassis travelled with it, keeping his eyes and ears open. At Oxford he met with Thomas Wintour, who told him that his Catholic horsemen were ‘ready as requested’, but that none of the money promised to him had yet arrived. This information Tassis duly passed back to Spain, joining reports from Wintour, himself, which stated—ominously—that his fellow plotters could not ‘be restrained much longer’. As Tassis continued his delicate negotiations with the English Government, so the cracks in the Spanish position with regard to religious tolerance began to widen. In September the Archduke Albert—ruler of the territories in which so much of the war had been played out and a driving force for the peace—asked Philip not to insist on freedom for England’s Catholics until after the treaty was signed. If it were ‘placed on the agenda in the first instance,’ he wrote, ‘it [would] damage…negotiations’. Meanwhile, the Spanish Primate, Cardinal de Rojas y Sandoval, advised that the ‘present case of the Catholics of England is one of charity and not of justice’: Spain had no moral duty to assist them. Finding himself more isolated by the moment, Philip now authorized Tassis secretly to offer money to anyone in England prepared to push forward the cause of tolerance.
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James spent the close of 1603 at Hampton Court. Throughout the autumn he and his Government had been reading reports that, with the relaxation of the recusancy laws, Catholic numbers were growing again. In October Robert Cecil’s brother wrote from Lincolnshire: ‘The plague spreads here in divers places…So likewise does…popery.’ The following month James received a stern warning from Lord Sheffield in York: ‘As long as by the laws of this land [Catholics] were kept under, that affection of theirs bred no infection. But since of late the penalty of those laws has not so absolutely as before been inflicted…they begin to grow very insolent and to show themselves.’ Perception mattered more than fact in this instance, as two opposing viewpoints demonstrated. Tassis, investigating invasion, perceived only a demoralized English Catholic body of insignificant size; the English Government, still possessed of its siege mentality, perceived a worrying proliferation of a threat it had believed to be under control. Most likely England’s Catholics had become noticeable to those around them only because now they felt more able to worship openly, instead of behind bolted doors, but the talk surrounding the subject was dangerously heady: a few months later Thomas Wintour would be overheard declaring that there had been some 10,000 converts to Catholicism that year. It was precisely this anxiety that James had voiced to Robert Cecil in the run up to his succession. ‘I would be sorry’, he had written, ‘that Catholics should so multiply as they might be able to practice their old principles upon us.’ The liberality that had seen him declare ‘I will never allow…that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion’, and that had led him to ease recusancy laws, was now increasingly at odds with any fears he might have had about his safety and that of the realm. Liberality is a luxury for the fearful: on 15 December James instructed the Archbishop of Canterbury to compile a list of all popish recusants countrywide and to enforce the laws against them.
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In January 1604 James announced his first Parliament, to meet at Westminster in two months’ time. Days later he convened the Hampton Court Conference of Conformity, to discuss the state of the nation’s religion. After almost a year of anxious speculation as to James’s precise intentions towards them, England’s Catholics were about to learn their fate.

And the cruellest aspect of this fate was that they, themselves, were to play no part in the deciding of it. The Hampton Court Conference was to be an entirely Protestant affair, its purpose to address the issue of Puritanism within the official Church; the Catholics were not invited to attend: ‘we were put to silence, our mouth was shut’, reported John Gerard. In fact, what the conference revealed was that, with its numbers increasing, its powerbase widening and its muscles flexed against anything it saw as man-made hierarchy, Puritanism was replacing Catholicism as the greatest challenge to James’s authority. To his son, James had described Puritans as ‘very pests’. To the conference-delegates, particularly to the speaker who, rashly, used the term
presbytery
, he was even more forceful. A ‘Presbytery’, he exploded, ‘as well agrees with a monarchy as God and the Devil’. If the Puritans were agitating to replace the episcopacy, argued James, then what might they attack next? ‘It is my aphorism “No bishop, no King”’, was how he put it. But it was not just the Puritans who came under attack as James laid out his vision of the nation’s religious future. Catholics were soon reporting that James had spoken ‘emphatically and virulently’ against their faith, insults that only added to the injury of their non-attendance. The insults kept coming. On 19 February James talked publicly about ‘his utter detestation’ of the papist religion. On 22 February he issued a proclamation ordering every Catholic priest from the country. Back in September Robert Persons had urged the Vatican, on the advice of James’s own envoy to Rome, to send someone ‘to confer with the king…before his Majesty [was] definitely committed to’ a course of action. The Vatican had not responded and James, it seemed, was now committed to his predecessor’s anti-Catholicism despite all his promises to the contrary. The focus turned on Westminster.
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On 19 March James entered Parliament House. His address to the assembled MPs took an hour, time in which to set out his concerns for the nation. Foremost in his mind was peace: there was the predicted peace with Spain, which he had made possible ‘by [his] arrival’ in England, and there was the peaceful union between England and Scotland, a union ‘made in [his] blood’. Only then did he move on to the subject of religion, its place in his speech a prophetic illustration of its destined place in his and Parliament’s energies this first and fractious session. That New Year the Catholic poet Henry Constable had contacted the Vatican independently to reiterate James’s plea for a council for religious reconciliation, advising Rome to act before Parliament sat. But no one had acted and now the State’s priorities had become clear: sandwiched in between debates about the union (and amid unprecedented rows over the respective rights of monarch and Commons) were the customary anti-Catholic measures. It was James who had instigated them, complaining in May that Catholic numbers were up again and that laws were needed ‘to hem them in’. It was the Lords who had introduced the required bill in June, with the exception of the Catholic Lord Montague whose objection to the legislation put him in the Tower for a time. It was King, Lords and Commons who had rubber-stamped the new
Act for the due execution of the Statutes against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, Recusants, etc.
The act confirmed all the existing Elizabethan penal laws with some additions: anyone sending their child overseas to receive a Catholic education was to be fined, anyone going overseas for such an education was to be deprived of all possessions, anyone transporting such a person overseas was to forfeit job, goods and liberty. This agreed, King, Lords and Commons went back to arguing the subject of their respective rights and privileges and only the MP who wished to see all Catholics classed as outlaws can have been disappointed by the smooth and rapid passage of the new act.
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It is probable James’s willingness to extend the penal laws was as much a measure of his need to pacify a Puritan-dominated Commons refusing to grant him subsidies and fighting him on the issue of union as it was of his fears about Catholic increase. To an envoy of the Duke of Lorraine he would admit that he regretted Parliament’s actions; to the French ambassador he would say that he had no intention of putting the new penalties into effect. Then again, this may have been bluff—by now James had proved himself the master of the mixed message. But to England’s Catholics the message was clear: here was another reminder of their status as hostages to political expediency.
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This was further highlighted by the year’s other developments. That spring the Anglo-Spanish talks had ground to a halt, drowned in detail. In April Philip contacted Tassis after some four months’ silence, telling him to reassure English Catholics that Spain had not abandoned them. This was how it looked, though. Anthony Rivers, writing the same month, noted, ‘The Spanish Ambassador has yet done little for and in behalf of the Catholics.’
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In May the Archduke Albert’s commissioners arrived in London to inject new life into the proceedings and the final push for peace began. It took place over eighteen meetings from May to July and featured lengthy discussions about the rebel Dutch and about overseas trade agreements. England’s Catholics barely rated a mention. Toleration was now—officially—off the agenda. Henry Garnet, who had spent the previous autumn begging that, were Spain serious about buying relief for Catholics, then the money must be made available before Parliament sat, now found himself with one eye on the peace talks, the other on Westminster, where MPs were even now discussing the new anti-Catholic laws. By June he was in a gloomy mood, writing to Robert Persons on the fifth of that month, ‘I think…that it is highly probable the [penal] laws will be confirmed; and that there is little hope of…liberty of conscience.’
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In August the man formally charged with closing the deal for Spain, the Constable of Castile, landed at Dover and the negotiations moved towards a conclusion. The constable was a realist, so much so that his presents for James—jewels from Antwerp—had been bought sale or return, in case the talks collapsed even at this late stage. As a realist he had stood out against making religious tolerance a condition for peace, believing, as he told Philip, that the Vatican was ‘the true portal through which the affairs of the Catholics should be arranged’. The hallmarks of his realism were stamped all over the final peace treaty. It was a triumph for the diplomats. It had been hard fought. Money had changed hands and key members of the English Council, including Robert Cecil, would receive Spanish pensions for years to come in return for their willingness to negotiate. It had preserved just enough ambiguity in its phrasing to ensure that neither side felt it had compromised unduly. It had utterly failed England’s Catholics.
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The blame for this was swiftly apportioned. The Constable of Castile, writing to Philip, noted, ‘I see that the Pope himself, whose principal concern should be this very matter, is…silent.’ Philip, in response to a Vatican complaint that he had done nothing for the Catholic cause, fired off the testy response ‘there is a great difference in not attempting something and not succeeding in it’. Meanwhile, Pope Clement, who had refused publicly to endorse Spain’s efforts on behalf of English Catholics and who had dismissed as ‘scandalous’ all attempts to buy tolerance, reiterated his belief that God had His own time-scale for such matters and that everyone must simply be prepared to ‘await the Divine Will’.
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