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

by Hogge, Alice

  Elsewhere, James, too, was making promises. ‘As for the Catholics I will neither persecute any that will be quiet, and give but outward obedience to the law, neither will I spare to advance any of them that will by good service worthily deserve it’: so he wrote to the Earl of Northumberland in mid-March 1603. It was a statement of tolerance noticeably akin to those made by Elizabeth during the first few years of her reign, an indication of selective blindness towards the private practice of the Catholic faith. But whereas Elizabeth’s words had been received by a Catholic majority reeling at the speed with which it had been ousted from power and expectant of few favours from her, James’s were seized upon greedily by a minority desperate for signs of hope and full of expectation. Worse, the connection between that expectation and reality was soon being stretched to breaking point as Northumberland’s go-between with the King, an impoverished second cousin of the earl’s named Thomas Percy, began reporting more than just reasoned assurances from James. According to Percy, James had received him at court warmly and had spoken to him at length. Crucially, said Percy, James had sworn to free England’s Catholics from ‘bondage and persecution’, to ‘take them under his complete protection’ and to admit them ‘to every kind of honour and office in the state without making any difference between them and the Protestants’, all this on his word as a prince. It was heady stuff and Percy was quick to broadcast it upon his return home.10

  What Percy understood from his conversation with James and what James actually meant to convey are matters of dispute. The one was an unreliable witness: a comparatively recent convert to a hardline Catholicism on an embassy above his rank and with a track record of dishonesty (in his dealings with Northumberland’s estates). The other was a politician. In all likelihood James gave a series of vague verbal guarantees that could be interpreted favourably and Percy leapt, willingly, to just such an interpretation. But Percy was not the only one to whom James was speaking off the record that month. John Gerard would later write: ‘I am well assured that immediately upon Queen Elizabeth’s sickness and death, divers Catholics of note and fame, Priests also, did ride post into Scotland…At that time, and to those persons, it is certain [James] did promise that Catholics should not only be quiet from any molestations, but should also enjoy such liberty in their houses privately as themselves would desire.’ Here, again, was the talk of tolerance England’s Catholics longed for. Characteristically, Gerard fails to give the names of those to whom James spoke, a habit born out of the missionaries’ need for discretion, but his statement is backed up by an unlikely source: the Appellant priest and self-confessed enemy of the Jesuits, William Watson.11

  Watson had had a mixed mission so far. He had been arrested five times; he had seen the inside of five different prisons and had escaped from three of them (the first attempt occasioning the execution of the woman who had helped him, Margaret Ward). More recently his had been among the many voices raised in anger in the factional strife between seminary priests and Society men, most noticeably in the attacks on Robert Persons. In 1602 he had published his Decacordon of Ten Quodlibetical Questions, a bitter denunciation of the Jesuit order.* As an Appellant Watson had agitated for an oath of allegiance to Elizabeth. As an anti-Jesuit he had thrown his weight behind James’s candidacy for the English throne (in protest at Robert Persons’ involvement in the succession debate). Which was why, on Elizabeth’s death, he had sought out James in Scotland, to plead the seminary priests’ cause.

  James’s answer to Watson had been ‘gracious and comfortable’. It was an answer Watson duly passed on. ‘[H] is Majesty did bid me tell my friends’, he would later explain, ‘that himself was neither heretic, as Persons and other Jesuits had blazed him to be, neither would he afflict them as they had been; and therefore wished them by me not to be afraid.’ Despite the self-important tone and anti-Society bent, Watson’s belief in the ‘advancements’ coming to England’s Catholics was palpable and, like Percy before him, his reporting of his embassy filled his hearers with anticipation.12

  It was an anticipation that helped palliate the arrest, as James journeyed south, of the seminary priest Father Hill, allegedly for threatening the King. (Hill, acting without authority, had petitioned James to repeal the penal laws against Catholics, referring in this petition to the Israelites’ disobedience to King Jeroboam when he failed to grant them similar relief; he was quickly removed to London and the Gatehouse prison.) It was an anticipation that helped sweeten James’s refusal to empty the gaols of Catholic recusants. (At Newcastle, York, Durham, and Newark he had, in a gesture of political amnesty, ‘commanded all the prisoners to be set at liberty, except Papists and wilful murderers’.) It was an anticipation that flourished in ignorance of James’s recent correspondence with the man who would become his Principal Secretary of State, Robert Cecil. (The pair had exchanged letters in the build-up to Elizabeth’s death, in which James, though stressing his hatred of persecution, had expressed a far stronger hatred of the ‘Jesuits, seminary priests, and that rabble where with England is already too much infected’ and an overwhelming fear of Catholic numbers increasing. Bluntly, he wrote, ‘I [would not] wish to have their heads divided from their bodies, but…I would be glad to have both their heads and bodies separate from this whole land, and safely transported beyond seas, where they may freely glut themselves upon their imagined gods.’) It was an anticipation that grew daily, as James neared London, fed by a belief among Catholics that it simply made no sense for James to continue persecuting them.13

  As John Gerard explained, Elizabeth had had reason to outlaw the old faith: Catholic refusal to recognize her claim to the throne and the concomitant danger of foreign intervention that that refusal posed. James, on the other hand, had received messages of congratulation from the Pope and his main Catholic rivals on his succession. Indeed, his foreign policy promised to be singularly less fraught than that of Elizabeth: the new alliance between Scotland and England had closed the door on invasions from the north of the country and, as King of Scotland, James was at peace with Spain, even if England was not. So, wrote Gerard, ‘many Catholics…could not persuade themselves how it could be possible’ for James to turn against them. For so long now they had been arrested and punished not for their faith, they had been told, but for the safety of the realm. With England’s safety more assured than it had been for almost fifty years, surely there was little point in continuing this persecution?14

  On Saturday, 7 May 1603 James reached Stamford Hill, over-looking the English capital. Here the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London were waiting for him, to present him with the keys to the city. Witnesses reported ‘multitudes of people swarming in Fields, Houses, Trees, and highways, to behold the King’. By five o’clock that afternoon he was at the Charterhouse, the former Carthusian monastery just outside the city walls.

  His coronation had been fixed for Monday, 25 July, St James’s Day. In the end a summer downpour and an outbreak of the plague in the capital combined to do James out of the full pomp and circumstance of the anointing ceremony and the event was carried out in abbreviated style. Those same people who earlier had swarmed to meet him were now commanded to stay away in case they spread disease. Guards were posted at the city gates to keep back the crowds and anyone landing at Westminster from the river was threatened with the death penalty. Outside the Abbey, rainwater streamed through empty stands as the royal party was hurried in and out by an anxious escort. Historian William Camden recorded, with a succinctness that matched his subject, ‘The King and Queen are crowned, it being then very bad weather, and the pestilence mightily raging.’15

  Nothing, though, could dampen the reality of James’s triumph. As an infant he had survived the murder of his father and the overthrow of his mother. As a child-king he had survived successive attempts to kidnap him, still more attempts to intimidate him.* His palaces had been stormed, his servants murdered, his person threatened—and all by his own subjects. These traumas might have left their mark upon him—
all his life he would be scared of assassination and he was widely considered a physical coward—but they had also bred in him the instincts of a seasoned campaigner. Now, aged thirty-six, he had beaten off every rival to the English throne and disarmed a powerful European Catholic opposition, charming the Pope and pacifying France and Spain. He had played a cool and calculating game for England and he had won it. And, delighted at the way in which so many Englishmen ‘had so generally received and proclaimed him king’, he had turned, it was said, to a nobleman next to him, giving voice to his feelings. This nobleman had passed the comment on and, ripple-like, his words had spread out through the Catholic community. Whether the whispers corresponded to what James actually said made little difference in the end: it was what the hearers heard that mattered and the hearers, in this case, heard a sentiment that stunned them. ‘No, no, good faith,’ James was reported to have exclaimed, as the extent of his victory sank in, ‘we’ll not need the papists now!’16

  Queen Elizabeth, an astute judge of human nature, had summed the attitude up with painful accuracy. ‘As children dream in their sleep after apples and in the morning when they awake and find not the apples they weep, so every man that bore me good will when I was [princess]…imagineth himself that immediately after my coming to the crown every man should be rewarded according to his own fantasy and now finding the event answer not their expectation it may be that some could be content of new change.’ Change: within months of James’s succession this word had taken on fresh momentum.17

  On about 13 June 1603 two men met in secret on the north bank of the River Thames near the Horse Ferry, which crossed the river between Lambeth and Westminster. There, caught between the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace and Parliament, respective houses of Church and State, the one took an oath of loyalty to the other, swearing to assist him in a scheme to upset both those estates. The oath-taker was Anthony Copley, Robert Southwell’s cousin, active in the Appellant movement. The man behind the action was the seminary priest William Watson.

  The plot was farcical from the start. At its heart lay Watson’s vanity. Having returned from Scotland and his meeting with James promising imminent freedom of conscience for English Catholics (particularly those Catholics who were anti-Jesuit), the priest had been piqued to find his promises not immediately fulfilled. In May, for example, James, in session with his Council, had ordered the collection of recusancy fines. According to his subsequent testimony, Watson was now forced to suffer the indignity of ‘divers upbraiding speeches against [him],…as, “Lo! there was Watson’s king! There was he that was said to be so well affected to Catholics, as that he would grant toleration!”’ According to Copley, Watson returned to court to challenge James on the subject and received an unsympathetic hearing. It was at this point, testified Copley, that Watson learned of James’s comment about papist dispensability.18

  Now Watson began drawing in fellow malcontents: William Clark, a seminary priest and an active Appellant, Sir Griffin Markham, keeper of the royal hunting lodge in Sherwood Forest (and familiar to John Gerard), and George Brooke, brother to Lord Cobham. Their aim was to manhandle James into delivering Catholic toleration and it was Markham who gave them their modus operandi: he ‘had heard it was usual in Scotland for the king to be taken of his subjects, and kept in strong hold until he had granted his subjects’ requests’. Consequently, the plotters, to which group Watson said he was adding all the time, agreed to kidnap James at Greenwich, take him to the Tower of London (which they planned to use as their stronghold) and persuade him to accede to their demands. A date was set for the escapade, 24 June, a month before the coronation, and so that all the conspirators—for Watson was now promising a cast of thousands—were better able to recognize one another it was suggested they ‘wear stockings either of yellow or blue’. It was Markham who brought back the bad news that James would not, in fact, be at Greenwich on the day appointed for his kidnapping. Neither, it was soon apparent, were the hordes of plotters boasted of by Watson likely to put in an appearance: Anthony Copley spent a dispiriting day sitting in to wait for them, by the end of which his hopes of success had faded. At eleven o’clock the following day Watson called off the attempt, ‘affirming that he despaired of the action, and laying blame on all, that they had not complied with their promises’.19

  But others had been complying with their promises. It had been less than three months since Garnet had assured James of the Jesuits’ fidelity; now he and his men had a chance to keep their word, for some time in late May/early June an attempt was made to recruit John Gerard into the conspiracy. According to Gerard’s account of events, he had told his recruiter—probably Griffin Markham—that the intrigue was both ‘unlawful’ and ‘hurtful’ to the Catholic cause; then, he had written to Henry Garnet and the Archpriest George Blackwell, begging them to forbid ‘their acquaintances from entering the cause, and to stay it what they could’.* Watson would later complain that the Jesuits had prevented him from approaching potential plotters in Lancashire and Wales; and one who did join the plot, a Mr Harris of Pembroke-shire, would explain that ‘the Jesuit party…[had]…gotten some inkling of the action, and so laboured to cross it’. Meanwhile, George Blackwell was contacting all those in his charge, instructing them ‘to give stay and restraint’ to anyone wishing to join the conspiracy.20

  It was probably inevitable that Watson, with his near pathological hatred of the Jesuits and the Archpriest, should have ignored all these early warnings; and when Gerard and Blackwell saw 24 June approaching with no obvious sign of the action having been called off they both stepped up their response. Gerard told everything he knew to a Scottish courtier close to James, asking him to bring the matter to James’s attention. Blackwell passed on the same information, via a courier, to a priest in prison (a convoluted path, concealing his whereabouts), telling him to bring the matter to the Privy Council’s attention. It was Blackwell’s message that reached the Government first.* 21

  As news of the plot broke, Watson and company took flight and the Council began the slow process of reeling them back in again. Descriptions were issued of the wanted men; Watson was listed as ‘a man of the lowest sort…and very purblind, so as if he read anything, he puts the paper near to his eyes’. Anthony Copley was picked up some time in early July, George Brooke soon afterwards, and as the outbreak of plague intensified in the hot weather so, too, did the manhunt: failing to find Markham in London, the pursuivants now raided his Nottinghamshire estate. By early August Watson had been run to earth in Wales, Clark in Worcester, and all the plotters were in the Tower and talking freely.22

  Watson’s line of defence was singular: he had only devised his plot, he argued, in order to save James from a much deadlier Jesuit plot. The Jesuits might act as though ‘butter would not melt in their mouth’, they might be ‘extolling the king’s majesty’, but in reality, he claimed, they were even now massing arms, horses and men to assist in a Spanish invasion of the realm. This was why they had hindered him, this was why they had ‘sent down post-haste into the country, for all Catholics to beware of such and such priests, as were about a most dangerous conspiracy’. He, Watson, had merely been trying to save James from certain death. As justification for high treason it was not enough to save Watson: on 15 November 1603 he, Clark, Brooke, Markham and Copley were convicted of conspiring to raise rebellion, to alter religion and to subvert the state. In the end, only Watson, Clark and Brooke were executed: Watson went to the scaffold—significantly—asking the Jesuits’ pardon; Markham and Copley received the King’s pardon and were sent into exile.* 23

  Theirs had been a sorry, scrappy affair. That its fallout was no greater was down to the clumsiness of the plotting and the prompt action of Gerard, Garnet and Blackwell to stop it. James, who, before the discovery of the plot, had told a French envoy he was considering remitting some recusancy fines, continued with this remittance as part of his coronation festivities, reassuring a Catholic deputation led by Sir Thomas Tresham that his f
eelings towards them remained benign. Privately, though, he complained that in spite of his kindness England’s Catholics had still sought to harm him.24

  How much Watson’s plot played upon James’s terror of assassination (and brought back humiliating memories of his earlier kidnapping) is a matter of conjecture, so, too, the extent to which Watson’s talk of Jesuit scheming was taken seriously by the Government. His was not the only purported intelligence concerning the Society reaching Robert Cecil at this time. Sir John Popham, who operated a wide network of informants, told Cecil, ‘I do assure myself the Jesuit faction have their practice afoot as well as [Watson], though carried with more secrecy, and so the more dangerous.’ The spy reports coming in to him all agreed ‘something [would] be done’; an attempt would be made on James’s life; an invasion fleet would be launched: it was not a question of if, merely of when. If governments tend to listen best to the kind of intelligence they already hold to be true, then James’s Privy Council was listening to a steady stream of information, a constant chatter of anxiety, that satisfied its worst fears: the Jesuits were plotting. Watson’s explanation of his exploits was simply another prediction of future conspiracies, of future Spanish enterprises, of future unrest. Further, he, himself, had effectively demonstrated—to anyone wishing proof of it—that England’s hidden priests, and the Catholics in their thrall, were no more to be trusted under James’s Government than they had been under Elizabeth’s. Meanwhile, in a backhanded compliment to the Society, Anthony Copley (conferring with Griffin Markham about Watson and Clark’s inefficiency) remarked ‘how much more sufficiently the Jesuit party would have carried the like’.25