The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (16 page)

But the Catholics were gleeful when it became known that the Queen had declined to take the Protestant Communion during the ceremony. Here was one who, as the Venetian Ambassador reported, might attend Protestant services in public as part of her queenly duties, but went thankfully to Mass in private.
¹⁵

The optimistic quiescence of the English Catholics in general was thrown into sharp contrast by the emergence in this first summer of the reign of a conspiracy among certain ‘discontented priests and laymen’ which was both desperate and foolish. Father Watson, the manic Appellant priest, was involved, as was another priest, Father William Clarke. The laymen included George Brooke, brother of Lord Cobham, and Sir Griffin Markham. Father Watson was one of those who had been received by James in Scotland before his accession and given that kind of ‘gracious and comfortable answer’ on the subject of Catholic toleration in which the King specialised. However, the answer he brought back to England was even more gracious and comfortable, as he admitted later to the English Council. To boost his own standing among the English Catholics, he spoke of instant toleration, exaggerating much as Thomas Percy had done.
¹⁶
In 1603 Watson felt personally humiliated by the failure of this instant toleration to appear and turned to conspiracy.

The plan, apparently, was to hold the King prisoner in the Tower of London until he granted a wide series of demands to the Catholics, including, of course, full toleration. The King’s
advisers particularly associated with the persecution of Catholics – notably Cecil – were to be removed. This plot became known as ‘the treason of the Bye’ to distinguish it from another conspiracy of the same period, also involving George Brooke, dignified as ‘the treason of the Main’.

The Main Plot, which involved Lord Cobham, the Puritan Lord Grey de Wilton and in some manner Sir Walter Ralegh as well, had as its aim the far more drastic elimination of ‘the King and his cubs’. In place of the Royal Family, Lady Arbella Stuart was to be elevated to the throne, since now that the succession had been settled in favour of the Stuart line, Arbella, as King James’ first cousin, was fourth in line for the crown, after his three existing ‘cubs’. However, Lady Arbella was much enjoying her new glorious precedence as the first (adult) lady in the land after Queen Anne and had become, according to an ill-wisher, ‘a regular termagant’ on the subject.
¹⁷
She found it all so much more gratifying than the spiteful treatment she had received from the old Queen Elizabeth, and was wise enough to refuse any overtures from Lord Cobham.

All those concerned in both Bye and Main Plots were arrested in July, held prisoner and tried in the autumn. Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh were both sentenced to death but subsequently reprieved (the former when he was actually on the scaffold). In the event, Cobham was held in the Tower of London. Sir Walter Ralegh was also kept in prison. Sir Griffin Markham, like Cobham, was given a last-minute reprieve on the scaffold, but George Brooke was executed. Naturally both priests, Fathers Watson and Clarke, were put to death in the usual grim way.

The English Catholic community as a whole, including priests, reacted with absolute horror to all this. Could anything be more criminally reckless – and more ill-timed? It was, wrote Father Garnet to Rome of the Bye Plot, ‘a piece of impudent folly, for we know that it is by peaceful means that his Holiness [the Pope] and other princes are prepared to help us’. This verdict of ‘impudent folly’ was certainly likely to be well received in Rome. Here, Claudio Aquaviva, General of the
Jesuits, was himself advocating prudence: there was to be no meddling by priests in anything ‘that did not concern their apostolate’. As for the Papacy, there were still happy dreams of King James’ conversion: a Mass had just been celebrated to mark his ‘happy entrance’ into England.
¹⁸

Further communications on the same subject came from Garnet in July and August. The message was the same. The Pope should instruct the English Catholics to behave peacefully: ‘quiete et pacifice’. (Such letters were always in Latin, the international language of the Catholic Church.) Meanwhile the Archpriest, Father George Blackwell, was equally forthright to his flock. As the chief Catholic pastor in England, he forbade the priests under his authority to participate in any such enterprise in the future.

Pleas and prohibitions after the event were all very well. Even so, the Catholic reputation for loyalty would have inevitably suffered in England had it not been for the bold action of two priests, one of whom was the Jesuit Father John Gerard. It was these priests who, on hearing something of the projected Bye Plot, along the Catholic network, hastened to tip off the Privy Council. This action to dissociate the Catholics from the conspirators was approved by the Archpriest and Father Garnet. One may conjecture that the Jesuit dislike of the Appellant played its part here: but then the Bye Plot showed, did it not, how dangerous Appellants could be… In any case, there was absolutely no question that this tip-off was the correct, indeed the vital, move to make, from the point of view of the Catholic future. Gerard had acted ‘with care and fidelity’ to save the King, as a fellow Catholic wrote.
¹⁹
At a stroke – or so it seemed – the situation had been saved.

King James was grateful. Furthermore, he gave his gratitude practical expression. As part of his coronation festivities, he allowed pardons to those recusants who would sue for them. In a gesture which can hardly have pleased the Exchequer, but relieved and delighted the burdened recusants, he remitted their fines for a year. The consequences of this generosity are borne out by the figures concerned. The receipts from these
fines for the previous year had totalled something over seven thousand pounds, whereas for 1604 they were just under fifteen hundred pounds: a prodigious drop.
²⁰

A protestation of loyalty on behalf of leading Catholics headed by Sir Thomas Tresham was received by King James at Hampton Court. In 1602 Sir Thomas had been hailed for his leadership as ‘another Moses’ by a Catholic priest on the eve of execution: ‘if thou hadst not stood in the breach of the violators of the Catholic faith, many… would not have battled so stoutly in the Lord’.
²¹
Now the Catholic Moses, who had suffered long imprisonment and vast fines in the previous reign, was leading his people, as he hoped, towards a more tranquil, less financially straitened future – if not yet towards the promised land.

The financial point was especially important to Sir Thomas Tresham, since his fortune – that fortune which Francis Tresham would inherit on his death – had been depleted by more than fines. For Sir Thomas was that fatally expensive component of any family history: a lavish host, as we have seen, but also an energetic builder. Rushton Hall in Northamptonshire was a vast monument to this energy, and there were other projects, including Triangular Lodge, constructed on architectural principles to commemorate the Holy Trinity.
*
He was also immensely litigious (another expensive taste). More attractively but equally extravagantly, Sir Thomas gave generous portions to his daughters on marriage, way beyond the norm of his generation.

Sir Thomas Tresham’s predominant instinct was to get benign control, as he saw it, of his fellow men and women, whether as a host, builder, litigator or leader of the English
Catholics. This was particularly true of his wide family circle: he had eight children (three more died in infancy) and then there was the Vaux connection, among the numerous links to other recusant families. Not everyone accepted the leadership of the patriarch with quite the submissiveness which Sir Thomas considered to be his due. That formidable pair, Anne Vaux and her sister-in-law Eliza Vaux, the Dowager of Harrowden, stood up to him, as we have seen, and Francis Tresham, his eldest son, was not easy to handle.

A modern psychologist would have no difficulty in explaining why Francis Tresham grew up both resentful of his father’s authority and profligate with his father’s money. While he was quite young, Francis Tresham had committed a brutal assault on a man and his pregnant daughter, on the ground that the family owed his father money. For this he did time in prison. Later he became involved in the Essex imbroglio, for which his father had to buy his freedom. Sir Thomas, however, lacking these psychological insights, simply expected that his son, like the other Catholics, would follow his peaceful example in the new reign. It would – for the Tresham family as a whole – be yet another expensive error of judgement.

A psychologist might also have made something of a solemn new public thanksgiving to which the English were introduced by King James on 5 August 1603. It celebrated the King’s deliverance three years earlier – while in Scotland – from a situation of acute physical danger. The sacred royal person had been held captive in a locked room in a hostile castle by Earl Gowrie and his brother, only to be rescued in the nick of time. Whatever the final truth of the Gowrie Conspiracy, as this murky plot was known, the sense of a miraculous deliverance from physical peril was so important to King James that he insisted on its annual remembrance.

Since both Gowrie brothers were troublesome and both were killed during the King’s rescue, there were Scottish critics who suggested that the Gowrie Conspiracy was a set-up, a means of getting rid of the family. King James himself rebutted this charge. He told a Scottish minister who tackled him on the
subject that he was not a bloodthirsty man, and in any case he had plenty of reasons to have the Gowrie brothers put to death by others without risking his personal safety: ‘I needed not [to] hazard myself so.’
²²
Both parts of his answer were true: King James was not in love with violence and he was in one crucial respect, his obsession with assassination, a physical coward.

We should not perhaps judge King James too harshly for his cowardice when we bear in mind his early history. Even the ante-natal influences were violent: when Mary Queen of Scots was six months’ pregnant with James, daggers were pointed at her womb by her leading nobles who, having threatened her unborn child, proceeded to murder her secretary Riccio. As a five-year-old boy James saw the bloodstained body of his dying grandfather the Regent being carried past him at Stirling Castle. The new Regent Morton, an old ruffian, terrified the little King. At the age of eleven, James was kidnapped as a result of a feud between rival gangs of nobles and was – not surprisingly – said by the English Ambassador to be ‘in great fear’.
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There were plots and counter-plots throughout the King’s adolescence to seize him or rescue him, since in a lawless country possession of the royal person was considered to be at least nine points of the law, if not the whole of it. Worst of all was the campaign of physical threat carried on against the King by Francis Earl of Bothwell (nephew of the noble who had been his mother’s nemesis). At one point Bothwell set fire to the King’s door, having pursued him through the castle to a remote room, leaving James, who could not afford armed guards, cowering inside.

King James of course expected the horse of St George to be infinitely more tractable than the wild unruly colt which was Scotland.
*
Yet these Scottish experiences had left an indelible impression upon him. The Spanish envoy took note that the
King was a ‘timorous character’. Plague – ‘God’s devouring Angel’ as James termed it – was a further morbid fear: another silent assassin which might come at him out of a crowd.
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It was ironic that the King on the hunting field was fearless in pursuit, reckless of his own safety. His courtiers might have preferred him to lose himself less on the hunting field and cut more of a martial figure in public.

One should not underestimate the depth of the trauma which the Bye conspiracy caused the King, for all the unrealistic nature of the plot itself. Despite the fair words King James spoke to the recusants led by Sir Thomas Tresham at Hampton Court, despite the efforts of the Jesuits and others to tamp down their explosive co-religionists, the fact remained that the first evil threats to the royal safety – and that of ‘the cubs’ – had come from the Catholics. It was an association of Catholicism with menace which a King haunted by fears for his own safety was not likely to forget.

*
Gibbon commented: ‘we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous… power of giving themselves a master.’

†
Princess Mary, born on 9 April 1605, was the first royal child actually born in England since the future Edward VI, child of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, in October 1537. Theoretically at least this English birth set her apart – favourably – from her siblings, born in Scotland.

*
Triangular Lodge is still standing, as is Lyveden ‘New Bield’ near Oundle, an unfinished shell begun in the 1590s, in the shape of a Greek cross. Rushton Hall (now an R.N.I.B. School for the Blind) preserves much of the stately atmosphere created by Sir Thomas. An aperture in the cellar leads to a hiding-place, using the drainage system of the house which lies in a direct line below what would have been the chapel on the top floor. It was discovered in 1979 by a local archaeologist: a small
Sanctus
bell dated 1580 and other objects consonant with recusant practice were found inside the hole.

*
One only has to remember that Essex committed a major crime in interrupting Queen Elizabeth at her
toilette
(on his unauthorised return from Ireland, before he rebelled) to understand the vast differences in attitude towards
lèse-majesté
between the two countries.