The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (2 page)

In the mid-1570s the effort of William Allen at Douai, then Rheims and later Rome, in the English colleges for seminarians, began to mature. The clandestine return to England of enthusiastic young priests in disguise led to some gains, but the grip of the government remained severe. Nor was there anyone among the opposition with sufficient political weight to negotiate for toleration of dissident religion, and with the secret arrival of the first Jesuit mission a new and unnerving political component was suddenly thrust into the exchanges. It was assumed that the provisions of
Regnans in Excelsis
had a meaning beyond the papal court, especially in Spain, which was set on a course of expansion, absorbing Portugal by force of arms and threatening to crush the Dutch rebels. Remove practical leadership or block its growth and the void is inevitably filled by heedless enthusiasts whose prescriptions are moulded by fanaticism. Such a man at the end of the sixteenth century was Father Robert Persons (or Parsons) of the Society of Jesus who mesmerized the eager and impressionable after returning to England in company with Father Edmund Campion and others.
⁶
Persons was a yeoman’s son and scholarship boy whose formidable abilities had allowed him to better himself. The former fellow and dean of Balliol College, Oxford, was as covertly political as any Jesuit was allowed to be by the rules of the order. The
Instructions
to the returners said that they were not to become involved in affairs of state, nor write to Rome about political matters, nor speak, nor allow others to speak in their presence, against the queen – except perhaps with those whose fidelity had been long and steadfast, and even then not without strong reasons.

Still, the agenda of the Jesuits was not a mystery.
⁷
They intended the reversal of Protestant gains and capitulation to Rome, and though Edmund Campion, whose covert preaching aroused such tender admiration and fervour, might be regarded as less obviously political than Persons, he belonged to an order that was meshed with the enemies of England, and the Spanish party, supported by Persons as an active and able member, did not confine itself entirely to writings. In order to defeat the Jesuit mission which was noted by English spies of the privy council even before the covert landing in England, the government set out new legislation in the third session of the fourth Elizabethan Parliament: two anti-Catholic measures ‘to make provision of laws more strict and more severe’ in order to force them ‘to yield their open obedience’. The bill introduced by Sir Francis Knollys, father-in-law of the Earl of Leicester whose puritanism had an increasingly political slant, raised the fine for absence from Sunday communion from 1
s.
to a startling and potentially ruinous £20 per lunar month. This put pressure on the gentry of whom Burghley was most suspicious, and it met his demand for a weapon against ‘the socially influential and politically dangerous’. It became treason to convert anyone to Catholicism, and even to be present at mass meant a year’s imprisonment as well as a fine. To ensure that the Act worked as intended informers were rewarded. The second measure stiffened penalties for seditious words and rumours spoken against Elizabeth, with a second offence leading to execution. It was also made a felony to write or print material regarding the possible longevity of the queen and the acutely interesting matter of the succession. Even the puritans in the House of Commons flinched at this since they wondered if the government had them in its sights as well.

Meanwhile, Burghley was concerned with hunting down the Jesuits, particularly Campion who declared mildly he had come to preach the faith and not as an agent of the papacy to meddle in politics. The challenge for the energetic Persons was to do his work and evade all efforts to take him by scampering from one hideout to another. He succeeded triumphantly, but Campion was less fortunate and was eventually seized at the Yate family home, Lyford Grange in Berkshire. This was the result of the persistent efforts of a pursuivant George Eliot – known as ‘Judas’. After a spell in the Little Ease in the Tower of London (a cell that cramped the body as well as the spirit by restricting movement), Campion was subjected to several examinations, including one by Elizabeth herself and another by ecclesiastical commissioners.
⁸
He was willing to defer to the queen’s temporal power – she was his ‘lawful governess’ – but he must pay to God what was his, including the supremacy of the Church, a view that he maintained with sublime conviction after torture on the rack. On trial with the absent Allen and Persons (who had taken refuge at Michelgrove in Sussex, the home of the Shelley family, before taking a boat to exile), charged with a cluster of crimes against the state, Campion pleaded not guilty. Evidence against him was woefully thin, but he was still convicted by the jury under the terms of the Treason statute of 1352, because the government did not want the trial to slide into a forum for debate on the relationship ‘between political allegiance and religious conversion’. It was difficult after Campion’s execution on 1 December to brand him as a traitor – to many he was a martyr and Burghley thought it necessary to counter this with a special publication after the capture by Walsingham of Francis Throckmorton, and the discovery of Somerville’s plan in the same year to assassinate Elizabeth. He developed his views (and those of the government) in the ominously titled pamphlet
The Execution of Justice in England
(1583) in which he affirmed ‘the states right to take whatever measures it thought necessary in its own defence’. Only if England could be isolated from the phenomenon called the Counter-Reformation (and martyrs for the Church were martyrs for the Pope and his allies), would Catholicism in England be effectively held up and then stifled. As it has been pointed out by a biographer of Burghley, where political Catholicism was concerned he was ruthless because he was fighting for the survival of the Tudor realm, but somewhat surprisingly he was also capable of charity towards recusants as the leading Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham noted in his own correspondence with him.
⁹

Both Father Persons and Dr Allen responded to Burghley’s pamphlet, the former also using the opportunity to attack another privy councillor, the Earl of Leicester, in a lengthy diatribe published in 1584 and known under the short title of
Leicester’s Commonwealth.
Copies began to appear in England in the autumn of that year after the text had been assembled by a group of English lay Catholic exiles in France, with abundant help from Persons who organized its distribution from his bases in Rouen and Paris. In September Ralph Emerson, one of Persons’ aides, for the second time smuggled copies into England before being arrested and committed to the Counter prison in Poultry Street. Leicester’s self-esteem was wounded by the vitriolic text and he soon persuaded the privy council that it was not merely a personal squib aimed at his public and private reputation, but, more insidiously, an attack on the regime. However, the main effort to refute Burghley came in Allen’s
A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of English Catholics,
which reiterated the claim that the prosecution of Catholics was actually for religous reasons; they suffered death only for ‘cogitations and inward opinions’ and ‘never took arms in all England upon the bull of Pius V’. Against this the government was able, through its spy clusters and agents provocateurs, to offer apparent evidence that Allen was lying.

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.