The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (21 page)

The oath was to be taken without equivocation or mental reservation, and no one, not even the Pope, had any power to grant absolution from it. If a recusant refused to take the oath when it was tendered to him by a bishop or two justices of the peace, he/she was to be gaoled and held there without bail until the next court session. Refusal to take the oath then incurred the penalty of praemunire: deprivation of all civil rights; loss of all property, and perpetual imprisonment.* That those who were punished for refusing to submit to these laws could not in James’s opinion be considered as suffering ‘for conscience in matter of religion’ was made clear a decade later in his speech to the judges in star chamber. There was the usual gratuitous protest that he was loath to hang a priest only for religion’s sake and saying mass; ‘but if he refuse the oath of allegiance which (let the Pope and all the devils in Hell say what they will) . . . is merely civil, those that so refuse the oath and are polypragmatic recusants I leave them to the law; it is no persecution but good justice.’ As James had said, the point of the legislation was to make a distinction between Catholics with quiet dispositions who were good subjects, and those who thought (and might even act) along the lines of the plotters. The oath formula, approved by Parliament and with royal sanction was positioned within a framework of over seventy articles. It was designed to achieve multiple objectives and evidently one aim was the application of a veneer of legality to the plundering of private Catholic wealth. How much still there was of that has already been outlined in various individual cases.

To go after such wealth was not simply greedy opportunism – although it was also that. The parlous state of royal finances was always a profound concern to James’s ministers. Whatever his protestations they were too often at variance with his actions for a buoyant reserve. James was both unwilling and unable to check his liberality – kingship required an open purse, and in the first four years of his reign he distributed £68,000 in gifts, £30,000 in pensions, and debts to the Crown of £174,000 had been pardoned. Between 1603 and 1612 James also managed to spend £185,000 on jewels.
⁷
Not surprising then that all monetary sources had to be squeezed and that Catholics figured prominently on the list. Among those who suffered were Anne Vaux and her nephew, Lord Vaux. She was ‘called to the sessions at Newgate and there for refusing that oath, was condemned in a praemunire, to lose all her goods and lands during her life, and to perpetual imprisonment.’ In March 1612, John Chamberlain wrote to Carleton that Lord Vaux was lately committed to the Fleet by the privy council for following her example. What happened was that in May he was condemned and imprisoned in King’s Bench and only the entreaties of influential friends brought a diminution of his punishment, so that by October he had been pardoned of the praemunire and delivered to the custody of the Dean of Westminster ‘to see what good may be done with him’. Efforts to influence Lord Vaux did not in fact succeed until February 1626. Long before that it was Salisbury who deliberately yoked the need of the state for money to the danger of the Church from the recusants. He took an active part in pushing through the oath legislation and was probably not above mild massaging of threats to his own person for political ends. The result was a fiscal triumph because in a unique sign of loyalty in time of peace Parliament granted James three subsidies and six fifteenths.

* A papal nuncio to Spain in the 1580s had called praemunire ‘bestial’. It was among laws in England ‘most prejudicial to the apostolic authority’ and he longed to see it abolished, ‘when by God’s grace we get the upper hand.’

T
he Oath of Allegiance was very cannily drafted and at least one historian who probed its recesses thought it ‘a masterpiece of political wizardry’.
¹
The ingenuity of its phrasing suggests collaboration between the king, the earls of Salisbury and Northampton and Archbishop Bancroft. The Secretary of State had by that time achieved a rare regard (popularity would be too strong a word) among the public that was manifested in the great concourse of people who attended him as he made his way to be installed as a Knight of the Garter. Sir Henry Neville attributed this swell to Salisbury’s ‘constant dealings in matters of religion . . .’ and since admission to the oldest and most prestigious chivalric order was within the monarch’s gift, it is certain that James was now well pleased with his chief minister. On advice (Perkins may have helped with the wording) Salisbury and those about him had devised an oath wherein ‘the supremacy of the king would be practically acknowledged and the connection of the English Catholics with the Papacy dissolved’. It will be remembered that the popes in the Middle Ages had been granted by common consent a certain authority over civil rulers and that under special conditions this included the right of deposition.
²
With only a few exceptions theologians of the early seventeenth century recognized the legitimacy of these rights. Even so, there was no unanimity on their origin and limits or the advisability of using them. The Appellants’ ‘Protestation of Allegiance’ (1603) had been condemned by the theological faculty of Louvain precisely because it expressed a denial of the indirect powers of the Pope in temporal matters. No Catholic could deny a doctrine so widely taught; to swear the oath would be to go way beyond this.

‘I do from my heart abhor, detest and abjure, as impious and heretical, this damnable doctrine and position, that princes which be excommunicated or deprived by the pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other whatsoever.’

This is a typical example of the perplexing ambiguities contained in the formula, since a Catholic was bound by his faith to deny that a prince could be murdered. Refusal to swear then would mark a person as potentially a denizen of evil, while the clause is threaded with other decidedly objectionable declarations. To pronounce the sentence cited, without qualification, would be tantamount to declaring that for centuries the Church had taken a benign view of heretical doctrine. Moreover, since the oath was sanctioned by the monarch and administered in his name, the juror seems to be locked into acknowledging a Protestant monarch’s right to set the bounds of orthodoxy. James could and did scoff at this reading, but Catholics had no reason to be optimistic that such would not be the official response once they had submitted. The immediate reaction of the laity to the proclamation of the oath ranged from desperation to uneasy bewilderment. We have seen how Sir Henry James flung himself into the effort to quit an already persecuted minority, but according to the view of the French ambassador ‘[Catholics] are still incredibly numerous, and are resolved for the most part to suffer anything rather than give up their religion.’
³
Yet the harshness of the new laws was a profound shock to most of them and caused widespread fear and anxiety. Boderie again: ‘Many Catholics are preparing to go into exile, and among them some so old that I think they are seeking foreign shores merely to find there a peaceful grave.’ He admired those who stalwartly remained, feeling a surge of pride that they showed so much fervour and zeal. He recorded too some surprise at unexpected signs of religious vitality, with clandestine Catholics declaring themselves openly every day. It was a resolute response that fell away somewhat during the summer months, for a different assessment was recorded in August by the Venetian ambassador who described the courageous efforts of the majority of the clergy to stiffen the shrinking Catholic resistance. The retreat from confrontation was apparent to Father Jones writing to Robert Persons in October: ‘It is scarce credible what difficulty we have to keep up and underprop poor afflicted souls from ruin, and falling into errors and disorders, and all by reason of these late cruel laws.’
⁴

This shift of opinion and resolution among lay Catholics requires some explanation. The agent for such a transmutation was Archpriest George Blackwell, one of whose assistants, Father John Mush, arrived in London shortly after the prorogation of Parliament. Mush found his co-religionists in turmoil over the oath legislation with divisions in their opinions as to whether Catholics could in good conscience pronounce the formula. In a series of conferences Blackwell strongly resisted the opinion of some he canvassed that there had to be a way of satisfying the government without compromising their own tenets of faith, and he was supported by Mush, the Benedictine Thomas Preston and the Jesuit superior, Richard Holtby. By Mush’s account he tried to persuade Blackwell at this time to send a delegation to Rome for papal scrutiny of this and other matters causing woe, or to hold a conference of representatives of the secular clergy, Jesuits and Benedictines to fashion a binding response for all. Blackwell refused these courses, saying it was too dangerous for him personally. This did not sit well with the others who naturally protested that they too were in jeopardy. With the whole future of the Catholic Church in England under threat, they were willing to risk arrest and exile for the sake of ensuring a united sacerdotal cluster against a hostile government.
⁵

What a shock then for all, perhaps even for the agent of it, when Blackwell suddenly shunned his former ardently held position, and presented the reverse view. Having inveighed against the oath he now equally vigorously defended taking it. Much persuasion was required to get him round now to the idea of a conference – which actually meant a roundtable discussion with three of his assistants, Bishop, Broughton and Mush – together with Preston and Holtby. To them Blackwell explained his dramatic volte-face: the Church would be harmed rather than helped as a result of a pontifical declaration of deposition against the king, so the Pope had not the power to depose him. With this in mind they could swear that the Holy See was without authority and jurisdiction. Not so, said Mush, Holtby and Preston, as Bishop and Broughton sided with the archpriest, now very reluctant to hear any arguments that contradicted his view. Evidently the exchanges went on for some time and the encounter finally petered out with the opposing parties still divided over how to proceed. It was a muddled business that had dangerous elements of future schism in it unless promptly resolved by an authoritative pronouncement, so Mush and his colleagues put the business before Rome.

There was in the interim no possibility of a news blackout in London where word spread rapidly that the archpriest had now sanctioned the taking of the oath. It was a source of wonder to many and to ease the flap the three priests who had opposed Blackwell felt obliged for the sake of peace and unity to explain the superior’s attitude to anyone seeking advice and comfort. They were, of course, permitted to follow him if they chose, but within a few days Blackwell was taken aback by reports that many of the secular clergy, all of the Jesuits and Benedictines, as well as a hefty number of the laity found his interpretation of the oath quite unfathomable. It was an impressive response and so Blackwell edged back to a more neutral position – that Catholics would do better to refrain from taking the oath until the Pope’s decision was known to London. But in the matter of timing of his earlier pronouncement something unlooked for had happened, and now it was too late to counteract as effectively as he would have wanted the second response to his original statement. Already the Catholics who had journeyed to London for the Trinity session of the law courts were on their way home spreading the first report through the country. In a surge of relief, many Catholics, particularly those geographically isolated, took the oath without faltering when it was first administered to them. Those in doubt about their duty were naturally inclined to accept the report of the archpriest’s decision as final and conduct themselves accordingly. Even those who had determined not to take the oath would be strongly counter-inclined if pushed to change their mind, by the thought of protecting themselves against the heavy penalties. In addition all of them had to be very cautious in using the few means of communication that were open to them to circulate the reversed decision, which many were slow to believe. Indeed, Blackwell seems to have skipped official notification of his people of the new plan, which is surely very suggestive of the way he was thinking. When Holtby wrote to Persons in Rome on 30 October he remarked: ‘The customer [code for Blackwell] doth now insinuate unto his friends that his opinion is contradicted, and excuseth his error: yet doth he not apprehend it so sensitively that he thinketh himself bound to reveal it, though it hath caused an exceeding scandal, and will do still until the breve come: until which time he will rest quiet.’

The keenly awaited papal letter of Paul V must have arrived shortly after, since it was dated 22 September 1606. In it, the Pope declared that Catholics could not lawfully take the oath because it contained ‘many things contrary to faith and salvation’. Holtby, who had sent a copy of the oath formula to Rome immediately after its publication, seems to have been the first to have received an authentic copy of the papal document. He passed it to Blackwell who showed it to a few of his friends, but declined to act despite the restrained clamour of others. His excuse was that at seventy he was unwilling to thrust his head knowingly into a noose. He made this statement to Archbishop Bancroft and a panel of bishops at a Lambeth Palace examination in the summer of 1607. The many intelligencers and spies who sought sensitive information and items for the government were busy, and someone came upon a copy of the papal brief as the Catholic population entered a period of severe anxiety. They were waiting for a dramatic and crushing enforcement of the new laws. Yet for weeks on end nothing happened and the imagined oppression was held off. The likeliest explanation for this mild hiatus appears to be that Bancroft had won over James, inducing him to hold the laws in suspension until he could prevail upon a sufficiently large number of the secular clergy, with whom he had clandestine contacts, to approve the oath, hoping after to mop up the laity. The progress of this faltered early in 1607 when Bancroft was alerted to evidence that the missionaries had succeeded in persuading many to stand firm in their deep coupling to Rome. The archbishop tried then to counter this by inducing an unhappy and agitated archpriest to write to his clergy: ‘I persuade myself that you, my assistants and dear brethren, will take the oath as I have done, and that you will instruct the lay Catholics that they may do so when it is offered to them.’ So when Zorzi Giustinian wrote a despatch in August of that year it is no surprise to read: ‘The Catholics here are in a flutter since the archpriest has taken the oath of supremacy [i.e. allegiance] and has exhorted others to do the same, a step that is directly contrary to the brief which was addressed to the English Catholics. Everyone is in doubt about the matter. . . .’