The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (22 page)

But then no one was in doubt by 1610. On 2 June a royal proclamation was issued with a lengthy but usefully detailed title: A proclamation for the due execution of all former laws against recusants, giving them a day to repair to their dwellings, and not afterward to come to the court, or within ten miles of London without special licence; and disarming them as the law requireth; and withal, that all Priests and Jesuits shall depart the land by a day, no more to return into the realm; and for administering the oath of allegiance according to the law. A statute reinforced the decree (7 Jac 1, c. 6, Statutes of the Realm) and required the oath be taken ‘by all and every person and persons’. This time no exemptions were made in favour of the nobility as had been done in 1606. The penalty of praemunire was called up for them as for all others who refused to submit within six months of the passage of the bill. No time was now wasted and the privy council had themselves immediately to take the oath in James’s presence as a way of setting things in motion. After them everyone within the palace was sought out, and all government officials in high as well as low positions, professional men and students were required to follow suit. Even servants of those in the House of Lords who took the oath were obliged to follow their employers, and anyone who refused was sacked.

Making an estimate of the number of Catholics in Parliament during the post-plot reign of James, has its pitfalls. Scrutiny of the parliamentary Journals suggests that very few Catholics sought a seat in the Commons. Apart from the fact that their faith made their chances of success rather meagre, there was another deterrent – the House rule that all MPs should receive communion in an Anglican church. But there was no requirement in law for this and quite often the matter was disregarded. Moreover, although the oath was administered at the beginning of every session, a nimble Catholic could avoid this and after occupy his seat. So in 1610 it was only after twenty members had simply repeated the formula which was read by the clerk that someone questioned the legality of such procedure. Discussion followed and although some remained dubious it was generally thought to have been lawfully administered. The first day of the session was always confused and buzzing, and as John Pym noted much later in his diary ‘Divers did escape without taking the Oath at all.’ It is similarly impossible to be exact about numbers of Catholic peers in the House of Lords, although early in the nineteenth century the figure of twenty was regarded as reasonable. Of these, eight subscribed sometime during the session of 1610, but an almost equal number stalled and took years to comply, while still others refused. Lord Lumley, who was listed as present in 1610, had died the previous year, so that leaves four, including the earls of Shrewsbury and Worcester, declining to take the oath in public. By 1624 the personalities had changed but the numbers remained the same, with four being expelled from the Lords for persistently refusing the oath. Before the end of the session three (Lords Morley, Montagu and the Earl of Arundel) were induced to submit, but Francis Manners, Earl of Rutland, held out for over two years. For years he had haunted the court and become something of a curiosity, even a privy councillor in 1617 when James was trying to impress the Spanish ambassador. But Rutland’s religion undoubtedly held back his public career as he profited little from his ambitions. Perhaps because of this he was ready to pay a very heavy price for the marriage of his daughter Katherine to James’s favourite, the Marquis of Buckingham, who got £10,000 in cash and the reversion of lands that had a yearly rental in thousands and an income of even more. Clearly some Catholic aristocrats could still muster huge sums even after years of legislation devised to be punitive.
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Those privileged by birth and great wealth could in some measure remove themselves from heavy scrutiny. As for the great majority of Catholics, Father George Birkhead, appointed in 1608 to replace the imprisoned Blackwell and writing in July 1610 to Rome, noted ‘The new oath is so pressed by the king that it causeth many to stagger.’ The Venetian ambassador thought the same: ‘They are proceeding against the Catholics with unusual vigour’ he wrote in December that year. Such anecdotal evidence was corroborated by many missionaries. At the March sessions of gaol delivery in 1612, twenty-two Catholics were imprisoned in Newgate, having been tried and condemned to praemunire for refusing the oath. Eleven other prisoners listed as ‘recusant papists’ seem to have been committed for the same offence, though not yet convicted. In the following year they were all still there and their number had increased by seven. Out of London – in, for example, Nottinghamshire – the majority of Catholics who were called to take the oath preferred instead to suffer the penalties rather than violate their consciences. In the southwest of England in contemporary calendars for Devonshire (which can be regarded as representative), there were many instances of people being imprisoned for praemunire stemming from refusal to take the oath. It was tendered without partiality to anyone who had given cause for suspicion, and the general picture formed from an examination of a variety of records has revealed that the oath was imposed with much greater rigour in the south than the north. For a brief period after the enactment of the legislation officials were mostly prompt in directing it as necessary. So in September 1607 the Bishop of Durham informed James that he had summoned more than twenty noted recusants of whom six took the oath at once, a few others promised to take it, and the rest were undecided. The following year in Yorkshire it was reported that ‘Thirty persons have been stripped of their goods and condemned to imprisonment for life for refusing this oath.’ Subsequently, however, the justices slackened so much in their duty that they were frequently called to task by the judges of assize. One of the most intriguing items of evidence in this period stems from a performance in Yorkshire in 1609 by a travelling company of provincial actors. Their play set out the life of St Christopher and the players and audience alike were Catholics. All responded robustly to the ridicule heaped on the state Church, and the play spread disaffection among its hearers.
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In one respect the legislation was even-handed, for women were treated no more lightly than men. In 1612, Thomas Chamberlain, who later became a judge, reported to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere on his efforts to enforce it.

‘I, with the Justices of the division beyond Oxon, went to Sir Francis Stonor’s house, [the Chamberlains and Stonors were kinsmen] when his lady, the Lady Lentall his daughter, Mrs Crouch his sister, and the Lady Lentall’s woman, refused to take the oath of allegiance, and thereupon we committed them all to prison.’ They went on to Henry Stonor’s residence and his wife had quit the home in advance of their arrival ‘because she would not take the oath’. From there they passed on to Mr Symonds, ‘a man of great estate’ who reported the same about his wife. Chamberlain and Sir George Tipping then continued their sweep to Mr Belson’s, where the husband and wife were both recusants. This time Belson had removed himself, and his wife, his mother, the wife of a Mr Lovatt and a Mrs Belson tactfully classed as ‘an ancient maid’, all refused to take the oath and were briskly sent to prison.
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There were many such instances of women being subjected to real suffering as a result of oath legislation. Catholic women married to non-Catholic men saw their families plunged into distress because they held firm to their beliefs. One woman (the story was told by John Chamberlain in a letter to Dudley Carleton) was so tormented by her husband’s unremitting insistence that she submit and ‘have her children otherwise educated’, that she killed them and was herself then condemned and executed. Even the courtroom gave such women no protection from ill-considered vilification, and on one recorded occasion when drunk, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Edward Philips, berated a woman by ‘calling her all the lewd names of whore, drab, queen, which he could devise’. Having asked if he could hang her, he settled eventually for praemunire ‘and committed her to perpetual imprisonment.’ The rigours of prison existence often hastened the death of those detained, and penalties were only rarely lightened in favour of the aged and infirm; Father Mush’s sister and brother, approaching seventy years, were likewise condemned ‘and suffered utter shipwreck of lands and goods . . .’.

In the period from 1607 to 1616 it is certain that thirteen Catholics lost their lives as a result of the oath. So it may be said that Catesby and his disciples to a very great extent accounted for one each. It seems, moreover, probable that there were cases that for various reasons went unrecorded, so the culpability of the plotters was even greater. In some instances refusal to take the oath was the principal or sole charge; in every case the condemned person was promised a remission of the death penalty if he (or she) would pronounce the prescribed formula. However, there is also abundant evidence that submission to it did not always, or even usually, bring relief from other penalties, and the government was not satisfied that it should merely be done once. The requirement that the oath be taken repeatedly often entailed great hardship and extended suffering. In 1615 it was reported of Coke (then Lord Chief Justice) that he was always rendering the oath. ‘He is said to have summoned to this time 16,000’; no doubt an exaggerated figure since he would not have had time for other duties. Not content with these high-handed proceedings Coke compelled them ‘under most grievous penalties to give bail for their good behaviour’. Aside from the financial losses to Catholics there was also the incalculable damage done to communities and families by the activities of pursuivants who inspired a culture of fear. That they were highly effective in ferreting out suspected Catholics is clear from the numerous complaints made about them in the letters and reports of the missionaries. ‘The pursuivants, by apprehending priests and catholics, are grown so rich that they hire spies to serve their turn, in so much as there is not a host, chamberlain, or ostler which is not ready to inform them of the behaviour of their guests. If they see a man modest and civil, it is enough to set the pursuivant upon him.’
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T
he public theatres of Elizabethan London were built and occupied for one over-riding purpose – to offer varied entertainment to those who would pay for it. So much is clear, but it scampers over the question of why within a generation of the first openings in the 1570s the city had more of these private enterprises than any other place in Europe. One reason may have been that they offered a notable variety of new drama and hence drew a very large, variously responsive, mixed public audience hankering for novelty and diversion. ‘No longer subject to the propagandistic requirements of pre-Elizabethan factionalism, the companies now found that professionalism was replacing partisanship as the crucial virtue of their trade.’
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Privy councillors tolerated the public theatre because it provided a useful testing-ground for court entertainment, and of course sometimes it was literally necessary to divert Elizabeth from some self-inflicted policy absurdity. What worries they had were (for the most part) about public order and public health. The city fathers had rather more to consider and their opposition was a significant factor in the development of the theatre during the last quarter of the century. They had a particular fretting concern that people at the playhouse by day were not working productively, and since a capacity house at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell was some three thousand spectators, and it was only one of a large cluster, this notion is not entirely risible.
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Lurid stories and instances of sin at the playhouse also perturbed them, and some held that playing incurred the wrath of God.

Both court and city regulators could also be troubled by the rapid development of a coincidence between the language of poetry and that of the law and politics. In theatres it became possible to give vent to matters of public concern, or controversy – which had in some measure been the situation before Elizabeth’s accession. In that tense and difficult period between the Henrician sundering of the connection with Rome and the consolidation of Protestant power under Elizabeth players often got to present one view or another in the religious controversy.
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The way in which late Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights took on matters of public concern can confuse us today, just as it may have done their immediate audiences. But what a succulent bait controversy can be, especially when there were views to be formed in retrospect of the late queen and prospect of the new king. An example would be Thomas Dekker’s political pageant
The Whore of Babylon
(1607), which hailed the towering virtues of Elizabeth and vituperatively condemned the ‘continual bloody stratagems, of that Purple whore of Rome’. In this allegorical celebration of past but memorable Elizabethan triumphs, there is only one allusion to James couched in flattering terms. Yet this alone has suggested to some commentators that the play was a pro-Jacobean piece written to chime with the collective sigh of relief in the country for the failure of the gunpowder plot.
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The plot brought anti-papal feeling to the surface because Pope Paul V was widely blamed for prompting treason by licensing Catholic subjects not to obey a heretical ruler and by granting pardons for crimes committed in the Roman cause. Even so, unlike his predecessor, James had negotiated peace in 1604 with the great and still hated enemy, while in the aftermath of the plot Salisbury had carefully modified the severity once exhibited by his own father in the aftermath of the rebellion of the northern earls. This time the Secretary narrowed the focus of retribution to plotters and remoter Jesuits whom he could not reach without covert efforts. So praise of Elizabeth by Dekker, the idealization of her legacy, lends itself to the view that the play is a disguised criticism of the milder Jacobean way. The ‘political valence’ of such plays is decidedly wobbly, and in addition it is almost impossible to ascertain the level of attention and response of an audience then.