Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night

by Antonia Fraser

  The other aspect of the new queen’s appearance noted by all the spectators both along the route and in the Abbey itself – but not mentioned publicly – was her extraordinary air of melancholy. It did not pass during the crowning itself, when it was as though the actual crown was weighing her head down; and it did not pass when the Lord Protector, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, escorted her back down the aisle of the Abbey. Yet her composure remained complete; it was with an air of philosophic sadness rather than tempestuous grief that Elizabeth II accepted her destiny. She showed only one moment of animation, although so fleeting that many missed it, and that was in response to a shout from someone in the crowd outside the Abbey. Instead of the huzzas, the cheers and the ‘Vivat Elizabethas’ so carefully orchestrated by the new government, a voice had the temerity to call out: ‘Long live the Protestant king over the border, long live King Charles.’ Perhaps a tear shone in the new queen’s eye. But Elizabeth II quickly recovered her melancholy composure; there was a scuffle and the audacious dissenter was dragged away by soldiers. The usual penalties for anti-government protest, the stocks and mutilation of the ears, were no doubt exacted.

  The tragic air of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Great Britain, was hardly to be wondered at. For this scenario of her accession and coronation proposes that her father, mother and elder brother Henry, prince of Wales, as well as the preponderance of the nobility, higher clergy and many members of the House of Commons had died in a colossal explosion at the opening of Parliament less than three months before, on 5 November 1605. Elizabeth, at the house of her governor the Lord Harington, Coombe Abbey in the Midlands near Rugby, had escaped the blast.

  Of the surviving members of what had once been the most flourishing young royal family in recent British history, Elizabeth’s younger sister Princess Mary, seven months old at the time of the disaster, was a delicate child who would in fact shortly succumb to one of the many common infant illnesses. Then there was Prince Charles, recently created duke of York, the usual title of the king’s second son: under-sized, a late walker and talker, he was not yet five at the time of the explosion. Prince Charles had not in the end been at the opening of Parliament, although the possibility had been discussed. He had been considered too young and, frankly, too lacking in the kind of glamour which princes and princesses were supposed to display to impress the people with their favourite ‘exterior shows’. It was Charles’s elder brother Henry, prince of Wales, whose appearance, tall, handsome and martial, had incarnated everything a nation might hope for in its future ruler. Charles on the other hand was believed to be such a liability that he had only been brought down from Scotland to join his brother and sisters in late 1604, and then courtiers had not rushed to join the new royal household for fear the puny little prince would die and leave them stranded.

  How ironic it was, then, that of King James’s ‘cubs’, as he proudly called them, boasting happily of the royal nursery which the late Virgin Queen had never been able to provide, it was the despised Charles who had survived the blast, and that because of his own weakness. After that, Charles’s destiny was to be strange indeed: rescued by loyal Scottish servants from the mayhem of Westminster, he was rushed north to the safety of Scotland and there proclaimed king by the Scottish nobles, who were only too anxious to recover the independence they had so recently lost with the accession of their king to the mightier English throne.

  In January 1606, in the immediate aftermath of the successful Gunpowder Plot, there were thus two sovereigns within the British Isles: one, nominally Catholic, at any rate heavily supported by Catholic France, Elizabeth II; the other, nominally Protestant or rather Calvinist, Charles I, upheld in Scotland and upheld by the Scottish nobility – for the time being without foreign support.

  The Plot had its genesis in the despair in the hearts of the Catholic community after the new king, James I, had – in their view – broken the promises he made to them while in Scotland. The persecution of Catholics, involving fines, imprisonments, barbarously carried out deaths of priests, deaths for those who harboured priests, had been horribly severe in the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign. The Mass itself was an illegal act, and the various other disabilities imposed upon Catholics for even the discreet practice of their religion make harrowing reading. It was on the Catholics that all men fastened their hatred, wrote a priest who was himself imprisoned in the Tower, Fr. William Weston: ‘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.’ In a way even more harrowing to devout Catholics was the fact that they were not allowed to baptize their children Catholics but were compelled to do so in a Protestant church, just as adults had to marry in a Protestant church. Protestant churchgoing on Sundays was also compulsory for fear of fines.

  All this meant that the Catholic recusant population – the word comes from refusal, the refusal of Catholics to attend Protestant services – had largely gone underground by the time Elizabeth I died. The head of the family and his male heir might profess the Protestant faith, to avoid fines and loss of properties, while the rest of the family, especially the mother, remained Catholic, carrying the torch forward to future generations in secret. In general, the Catholic women took advantage of their presumed weakness and virtually non-existent status at law, to protect priests and generally preserve the network of the faithful. People turned Catholic on their deathbeds when it could no longer damage them materially, having probably been Catholic in their hearts all along.

  It was therefore especially significant in terms of the Gunpowder Plot (and its possible success) that no one really knew for sure, nor could know, how many Catholics there were in England in 1603 and whether their numbers would remain static in the months that followed. The Anglican bishops assured their new king at his accession that there were only 8,000 recusant adults, whereas it has been suggested that the true figure was more like 35,000. Three years later this figure was said to have risen to 100,000 under the comparatively mild regime with which James started – something which fatally aroused Catholic hopes before dashing them again with severer penalties. (As a contemporary percipiently observed of the Gunpowder Plot, ‘hope deferred maketh the heart sick’.)

  This emergence of the Catholics from the shadows did not pass without comment – hostile comment. In the words of Sir Henry Spiller in a speech in Parliament, ‘The strength of the Catholic body, with the suspension of persecution, at once became evident.’ Yet the idea of 65,000 adults becoming suddenly convinced of the truth of Catholic religion in a short space of time is evidently ludicrous. The true picture is of a large if unquantifiable body of people ready and willing to worship according to the faith of their Catholic ancestors, provided they could do so with impunity for their families and their properties. King James, following the (real-life) failure of the Plot, referred to the conspirators’ vain hopes of a ‘snowball’ effect: they had been ‘dreaming to themselves that they had the virtues of a snowball’ which would begin in a small way, but by ‘tumbling down from a great hill’ would grow to an enormous size, ‘gathering snow all the way’. But it was the fire of failure which melted the snowball; victory would surely have produced a very different result, with Catholics in large numbers coming out.

  The basic elements of the Gunpowder Plot were as follows: a soldier of fortune named Guy Fawkes, a Catholic who had been serving in the (Spanish-ruled) Netherlands for some time and had indeed adopted the foreign version of his name, Guido, was brought back into his native country. This was for the purpose of placing an enormous quantity of gunpowder in the so-called ‘cellar’ of the House of Lords. The cellar was in fact on the ground floor rather than underground (as generations of myths about Fawkes as the sinister mole-in-the-black-vault would go on to pretend). Used sometimes for the coal and firewood needed for heating and cooking, it had also over the years accrued detritus such as pieces of masonry and was in gene
ral untidy and very dirty: in fact more of a storehouse than a cellar.

  The cellar belonged to the house of one John Whynniard which lay conveniently enough right in the heart of Westminster, at right angles to the House of Lords, parallel to a short passage which was known as Parliament Place. This led on to Parliament Stairs, which gave access to the river some forty yards away. The cellar itself happened to be directly under the chamber of the House of Lords where the opening of Parliament was always held. It was rented in advance – without any difficulty at all – by one of the chief conspirators. This was Thomas Percy, a kinsman of the powerful earl of Northumberland who had been involved in Catholic intrigues even before the accession of James I to the throne.

  One should emphasize, odd as it may seem to a highly security-conscious age like our own, especially where the seat of government is concerned, that there was nothing at all odd about this rental; Thomas Percy simply explained that he needed additional accommodation for his servant with his wife in London, paid his £4 rental and that was that. Nor was the potentially lethal position of the cellar itself a problem. The palace of Westminster, at this date and for many years to come, was a warren of meeting-rooms, semi-private chambers and apartments as well as commercial enterprises of all sorts (as the diaries of Pepys sixty years later amply attest). Still less did the inhabitants of Westminster show any signs of recognizing the servant ‘John Johnson’ for what he was: a Catholic conspirator under an assumed identity. Fawkes had been abroad for some years and although the busy government intelligence service had his actual name in their sights, the connection was never made (in real life) until Fawkes himself confessed under torture.

  Providing the gunpowder, at this period, was not a problem either, another pertinent if surprising fact. The government in theory had the monopoly but it meant little in practical terms when gunpowder was part of the equipment of every soldier, including the militia and trained bands, and every merchant vessel had a substantial stock. Proclamations from the government forbidding the selling-off of ordnance and munitions, including gunpowder, show how common the practice was. A total of thirty-six barrels were acquired without difficulty and introduced into the cellar by the easy river route. This was the common means of communication between the two banks of the Thames at this time, the chief conspirator Robert Catesby having his lodgings on the south side of the river. Although estimates of the amount of gunpowder have differed due to the many unreliable testimonies which followed the (real-life) dénouement, 10,000 pounds is the highest figure and 2,000 the lowest; no one has ever disputed that this was more than enough to blow the House of Lords and its wretched denizens sky-high.

  A conveniently placed cellar, a huge quantity of explosive, an obscure conspirator ready to touch the fuse and then escape by the river: all these elements were well and truly in place in November 1605 with no particular reason why they should have been discovered before the big bang itself took place – had it not been for treachery by an insider. But of course no conspiracy of this sort exists in a vacuum and it was the motivation which was the crucial element here, bringing with it many complications including natural human resistance to the shedding of blood of innocent people for some higher cause.

  The charismatic leader Robert Catesby, who had called his companions to a meeting in a London tavern in May 1604 with the words ‘The nature of the disease requires so sharp a remedy’, was by now in the Midlands. In Warwickshire and elsewhere – Shakespeare’s country, remembering Shakespeare’s own strong recusant origins – Catholic feeling had never been suppressed. It was probably the fine young horseman Sir Everard Digby, a familiar figure at the court, who was deputed to seize the Princess Elizabeth before proclaiming her queen and it was almost certainly the earl of Northumberland who was intended to act as her regent or Protector during her childhood.

  Although nothing of this nature was ever proved against Northumberland and he was actually among those peers who attended the opening of Parliament, it was not for nothing that he was imprisoned subsequently in the Tower of London. Logic told the government that the conspirators must have had a prominent figure in mind to lead the regime in the name of Elizabeth (as Protector Somerset had done for the nine-year-old Edward VI). On the night of 4 November Northumberland, at his base near London at Syon House, suddenly announced that he was ‘sleepy because of his early rising that day’ and would not attend. It is true that this spasm of fatigue – if it was fatigue and not self-preservation – passed; but the fact that Northumberland changed his mind yet again and did attend may have been due to someone tipping him off that (in real life) the gunpowder had been discovered in the vaults and removed… in which case Northumberland needed to act quickly in order to establish his innocence.

  So far there was nothing in the Plot itself which guaranteed failure – and with its sheer daring, there was a great hope of a triumphant if gruesome success. The human element which led to the discovery a few days in advance of the intended explosion was the mixed reaction of Lord Monteagle to the news of what was intended. He was probably informed of what was planned by one of the conspirators, his brother-in-law Francis Tresham. Monteagle on the one hand revolted at the thought of the deaths of the innocent and on the other hand saw a splendid opportunity for personal advancement by warning the Chief Minister Salisbury (and the king) of what was threatening. There have been many proposed explanations of the anonymous Monteagle letter, which was delivered in a suitably mysterious fashion under cover of darkness. It began: ‘My Lord… devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament… For though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them…’ However, the obvious theory, that Monteagle wrote it himself, is not easily contradicted, since he was the enormous beneficiary of the whole business. If Monteagle had not succumbed to the temptation of treachery for a mixture of motives, noble and material, there is no reason to suppose that the Plot would have been detected in advance.

  Let us suppose, then, that the Gunpowder Plot, with its avowed aim of ending the persecution of the Catholics, is successful in nearly all its elements – with one tiny failure or rather bungle, seemingly unimportant in the general confusion (and conspiratorial rejoicing) but with, it is suggested, momentous consequences. The plotters had never really grappled with the question of little Prince Charles, the runt of the litter who had arrived so late on the royal family scene. After assuming that he would attend the House of Lords like his elder brother, they had vaguely considered abducting him if he did not. Subsequent to the discovery of the Plot one of Prince Charles’s servants deposed that Thomas Percy had come to the little prince’s lodgings and ‘made enquiries as to the way into his chamber’ and ‘where he rode abroad’ and with how many attendants. What Percy might have contemplated could, however, easily have been carried out in the immediate aftermath of the explosion by some of the many loyal Scots who had come south with the prince’s father.

  The notion of Prince Charles being proclaimed king of Scotland (he was after all by royal rules the rightful heir after the deaths of James and Henry, having precedence as a male over his older sister) and educated as a Calvinist, as James had been with stern tutors, is perfectly plausible. His childhood would indeed have had remarkable parallels with that of the young James, ruler from an even younger age, with a series of regents. Many royal children in history had to endure new religious orientations which may have been originally unwelcome (although at under five, and being backward, Charles would not have suffered as much as Elizabeth, already at nine publicly pious as well as Protestant).

  I shall return to the question of how the future of King Charles I of Scotland and Queen Elizabeth II of England might have worked out in the years to come. But in the meantime what of England? It is now that the issue of foreign support or the lack of it becomes crucial. The two most powerful European countries – France and Spain – were both Catholic, Henri IV of France havi
ng converted from Protestantism twelve years earlier in order to ascend the throne, with the celebrated quip: ‘Paris is worth a Mass’. Spain in addition ruled the so-called Spanish Netherlands, an area that very roughly approximated to modern Belgium, in the persons of the joint governors, ‘the Archdukes’, as the married couple were known, Albert and Isabella, respectively nephew and daughter of the king of Spain.

  Although in real life all the Catholic powers, including the Pope himself, hastened to express absolute horror at the devilish conspiracy which had been planned, a different result might have brought very different reactions. Northumberland’s regime (he was not technically a Catholic, although obviously he had strong Catholic sympathies) might have concentrated on binding manifest wounds. With the spirit of the shared religious past invoked he might have attempted to unite loyal Anglicans and Catholics, with persecution for the latter of course ended. (Puritans would have been another matter and would surely have looked yearningly towards Scotland.) Under the circumstances Spain, which had actually cooled on supporting yet another attempt at invasion on behalf of the English Catholics, taking part in a treaty with James I in 1604, might have discovered very different sympathies in the interests of realpolitik. Spain would certainly not have contemplated an invasion on behalf of the English Protestant interest and it may be that the supportive troops from Spanish Flanders, on which the conspirators (remembering Guy Fawkes had served there) pinned such hopes, would actually have arrived.

  Still less would the France of the ultra-pragmatic Henri IV have refrained from trying to win the new game of alliances. The researches of John Bossy have shown that around the turn of the seventeenth century France took a new interest in the plight of the English Catholics, attempting (not with total success) to sort the internal disputes between the Jesuits and the so-called Appellants, priests who were more accommodating with the civil order. There were connections there already and it is difficult to believe that Henri IV would not have played the game to the top of its bent.