The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (7 page)

When Grey was brought to the scaffold his countenance was so cheerful ‘that he seemed a dapper young bridegroom’. When he declared ringingly that he did not deserve to die the crowd may have anticipated a moment or two of high drama, but what they got was a dull interlude in the rain while for half an hour Grey prayed for the king’s health. Then the sheriff again intervened and Grey was escorted to the castle as well. Finally Cobham was brought out, and Carleton evidently expected a farcical end for him, only again the sheriff held up the business, and this time both Grey and Markham were brought back to confront Cobham looking ‘strange one upon the other, like men beheaded and met again in the other world’. The climax of the day came with the sheriff announcing the king’s pardon. This brought hoots and cheers from the crowd which echoed round the town, while Ralegh, watching the scene and anticipating his own death the following Monday, must have ‘had hammers working in his head to beat out the meaning of this stratagem’. In London the announcement from the throne stirred applause from those nearest the king and it made its way around the court. The reprieved men after had various fortunes. Grey remained in prison until his death in 1614; Cobham was imprisoned until shortly before his death in 1619, by which time Ralegh had been executed on the old conviction. As for Markham, he was held in prison for a short time, until paroled and exiled to the Low Countries. This routine is a very familiar one and certainly suggests that he went as a spy for Cecil even though he joined the ‘English’ regiment. Lady Markham evidently thought it was worth staying in England and she spent some time lobbying hard for the rehabilitation and return of her husband, until patience exhausted she ended up making a bigamous marriage.

Dudley Carleton made a mordant quip about the execution of Watson and Clarke when he noted that ‘the priests led the dance’. Among Catholics abroad their fate seems to have elicited a certain grim relish. Robert Owen thought they had failed to obey their spiritual superiors and merited their fate. His brother Hugh writing to Captain Elyot thought it God’s justice that those who had accused the Jesuits of being perturbators of kingdoms should be the first to offend against ‘him whom themselves set up’. Even Clement VIII condemned the two priests without equivocation and even sent a secret envoy to the English court expressing his abhorrence of all acts of disloyalty. In addition he offered to withdraw any missionary from England and Wales who was unacceptable to the king and council. For a time James seemed to be benignly influenced by this gesture and as part of his coronation festivities allowed pardons to all Catholics who came forward to seek one. The momentum for a change seemed to be underlined by a meeting at some time between March and July 1603; Cecil met Sir Thomas Tresham, a prominent Catholic from one of the leading families of Northamptonshire, whose brother William had become a captain in the service of Spain. However, Sir Thomas himself was loyal, and a week before his coronation on St James’ day, the king met him and a group of Catholics. For a time the fines were halted and the income from the two-thirds of goods and property fell sharply. Evidently James and his councillors, familiar and new, thought it politic to try to buy off opposition; and the shift may have tempted men like the exiled Stanley who had begun to hanker for his estates. Even so, in despatches from Brussels to Spain, James was still described as truly hostile to Jesuit sympathizers and Stanley himself at this time was a member of the archducal Council of War.

Early in July 1603, Stanley, Hugh Owen and Father Baldwin accompanied a young special messenger from England called Robert Spiller to a meeting with the new envoy of Spain to England, Juan de Tassis.
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To try to avoid being observed by spies the four exiles arrived late at the ambassador’s lodgings and Tassis wrote notes as they discussed conditions in England as well as the political leanings of Jacobean politicians. Essentially this aspect of the conversation was about who might usefully be bribed and who not. Robert Cecil was viewed as anti-Spanish, but Owen still hoped to see about James a cluster of royal councillors favouring Spain and Rome. For a clandestine mission to London to further this notion he selected Dr Robert Taylor, like Guy Fawkes a Yorkshireman, but one who had quit England after the accession of Elizabeth. During this visit Taylor had aid and advice from Anthony Skinner, at one time a servant of Cardinal Allen who had thoughtfully excluded him from the Jesuits. Skinner’s career in the Spanish navy had also been cut short, apparently because of sea-sickness, but he did receive a pension of 40 escudos when in the Low Countries.
⁸
As yet unable to settle he chose to return to London where his income was supposedly some 3,000 escudos (£750 then, or circa £37,500 today). Given the sometimes testy rivalry between the spy services of the Earl of Essex and the Cecils in the early 1590s after the death of Walsingham, it is not surprising that Skinner was soon under arrest. Imprisoned and tortured he confessed a part in a plot (later retracted) to murder Elizabeth, and Richard Verstegen, in the newsletter he produced, reported Skinner’s trial in August 1592. Although condemned the payment of £500 by his friends led to the substitution of a prison sentence, and since Sir Thomas Heneage was his saviour we may infer that the young man was then recruited as a spy – Heneage having taken on some of the intelligence work of the late Walsingham. Skinner’s sentence may have been shortened by apostasy, and certainly he gained the confidence of the capable (if rather expensive) English government spy based in Antwerp, William Sterrell (alias H. St. Main or Robert Robinson). He had fairly frequent dealings with Hugh Owen, and on three occasions he asked that Skinner be sent to Liège for meetings.

At the time of Dr Taylor’s secret visit to London, Father Henry Garnet, who met him, wrote to Robert Persons decrying the stupidity of Watson and Clarke. Persons wrote back on 6 July in a gloomy frame of mind, lamenting missed opportunities in the previous decade, and offering no hope that James might yet be converted. He did not think anything dramatic or of galvanizing immediacy could be done, and he simply advised those who resisted diaspora to hold tight and ‘to expect the event of things’. The ‘retrospective’ and the letter Persons addressed to James in October 1603 indicate that for an option he still had not given up the idea of resistance and that it was simply a matter of seizing the moment. ‘This is not to say that in 1603 [he] was threatening to blow up the king and Parliament. But it does suggest that Parsons [
sic
] wanted James to know that he and others were watching . . . very carefully and that they intended to leave all options open.’
⁹
Persons was a constant source of irritating propaganda and the English government could not ignore his connections. Early on James sent the ageing and retired spy Sir Anthony Standen on a diplomatic mission to the Duke of Lorraine, to Venice and then to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The sometime intelligencer made the curious mistake, for a man with his past, of being indiscreet, communicating with Persons, and indicating when finally he got to Rome that he was acting on behalf of Queen Anne whose Catholic leanings were growing. Sir Thomas Parry intercepted mail from Standen who committed the sin of being candid in a letter, and so it was that Cecil learnt Standen was returning with a rosary from the Pope to the queen. James was incensed at the opinion that he could be converted through the agency of a woman and on his return Standen was arrested and placed in the Tower for some ten months.

On 19 February 1604 James protested ‘his utter detestation of their superstitious religion’. So he and his bishops agreed. In asserting and defending the true faith there was the inevitable conclusion that all others were false, heretical and hence condemned. The rider to that was that they should be suppressed. So in his arguments against the Roman Church and its doctrines he followed the lead of Elizabethan divines in regarding those who were elected Pope as embodying Antichrist. This brittle antipathy was reflected in such books as George Downame’s
A Treatise affirming the Pope to be Antechrist
(1603) or Robert Abbot’s
Anti-Christi Demonstratio
of the same year. The tedium of such arguments was not felt then, moulding as they did the thoughts of salvation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the Anglo-Catholicism of Whitgift and Lancelot Andrewes that James was quick to defend because personally he hated the Puritans more than he did the Catholics. Even so it was the missal and its threat that immediately seized his attention. The powerful surge of the Counter-Reformation was unmistakable, and Catholics had a particular advantage over the Puritans – a centralized organization and a man at the top whose authority was pan-European (even partially global) and temporal; one whose claims, in fact, no ‘supreme governor’ could ever allow.
¹⁰

This led James on 22 February 1604 to take up the challenge with a proclamation that ordered all Jesuits and seminary priests to leave the country before the opening of Parliament on 19 March. On the same day the recusancy fine was again activated and by the following month the direction was obviously heading towards a reimposition of the Elizabethan code. The Bye plot, ineffective and blundering, had indicated the extraordinary speed with which optimism on both sides had decayed. On 16 July a priest, John Sugar, and his harbourer Robert Grissold were executed at Warwick in the locale that became crucial to the gunpowder plotters. Grissold’s brother John was one of Garnet’s servants, using the alias James Johnson. The following year he was in charge at White Webbs and was subsequently almost racked to death. It may have been a matter of zeal in local magistrates rather than the government in London, but then in August two laymen were executed at Lancaster at about the time James was staying with the Catholic Lord Mordaunt at Drayton (Northants). The hospitality must have been exceptional but it did not prevent Mordaunt from having frequent contacts with the plotters. It did, however, delay James’s return to London even though there had arrived Juan de Velasco, Constable of Castile and Duke of Frias, the representative of Philip III, to sign the formal peace agreement negotiated between England and Spain (Scotland had never been at war) in eighteen sessions between 20 May and 6 July. It was while gathering himself for the crossing to Dover that the Constable had been visited in April by Thomas Winter, whose account records that one of his objectives was to ram home the case of English Catholicism and so influence the negotiations that were held at Somerset House. The meeting had been arranged by Hugh Owen, but it proved to be a distinct failure. Even so, Winter did not totally waste his time for he renewed his acquaintance with Guy Fawkes and managed to persuade him of the utility of a visit to England in May. Sir William Stanley was also consulted when in camp at Ostend and he recommended Fawkes while still deprecating any project during the time of peace negotiations. Winter told Stanley that nothing had been decided and repeated this to Fawkes when he met him in Dunkirk. Even at this distance the assertion seems hollow.

The hopes of Philip III, his Council of State and his negotiators who sat on one side of the turkey-carpeted table opposite the leading figures of Jacobean politics led by Cecil, the hopes of a peace, were strikingly fulfilled. One curiosity did fall – the notion of the strongly anti-Spanish Prince Henry marrying an Infanta, although the gift of a Spanish horse and embroidered velvet tackle did please the young man.
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In his disinclination to marry outside his religion Henry was only following his father’s advice, though it sits oddly with the comically desperate efforts to secure later the Spanish match for his other son. As for the English Catholics, nervously expectant, their case was nudged into limbo and proved to be the great topic on which the diplomats chose to remain mute. Any covert expressions of mild sympathy for their situation by Northampton (who like Cecil spoke Spanish) was more than offset by the stern attitude of the House of Commons, where any relaxation of statute and its enforcement was regarded with abhorrence. They did not want Catholicism treated as ‘tolerated vice’. Indeed, after only four sessions of the Somerset House conference, a bill requiring the imposition of statutes (of which there were plenty) against Jesuits, priests, recusants etc., not only re-enacted the Elizabethan code but extended it to penalize those who sent children or adults overseas to study at the seminaries, and those who remained in such institutions. In September, while the Constable was slowly returning to Spain via Flanders, a commission was created to execute the laws for the banishment of Jesuits and seminary priests. The government ignored their protests and also began to enforce the recusancy fines upon the laity, more strictly than they might have done because James needed money to placate courtiers and servants. Royal extravagance and failures in collection of taxes would eventually lead to a crisis, and in the meantime the archduke hoped to exploit matters by seeking to buy the cautionary towns in the territory of the Estates General.

The prophetic analysis of Hugh Owen with regard to James was being fulfilled.
¹²
He noted the onerous conditions of his co-religionists in England, and he assumed (or was told by his couriers) that the plot first talked of earlier in the year was advancing. Cecil’s spy Thomas Allyson, who was in the Low Countries about the time the peace was concluded, reported hints from Owen about the Infanta’s claim; angry references to Cecil, Bancroft and Sir John Popham, and venom directed at James. Allyson followed this a little later by offering to procure for Cecil a copy of the plot against James drawn up by Owen and his Jesuit friends, with reasons advanced for the archdukes, the Pope and Philip III to reject the peace treaty. The exiled spy master evidently had hopes for a breakdown in Anglo-Scottish relations leading to civil war over the question of union, with the consequent intervention of Spain. In England there were signs of real disappointment in James and a growing sense of despondent unease among Catholics. A minor revolt broke out in Herefordshire during the summer, and there were rumours of guns, armour and horses being collected for some violent activity. Like all such rumours the numbers tended to multiply in the telling. In September, twenty-one priests and three laymen were banished, and the notorious case against old Thomas Pound(e) reached star chamber in December. Since the arrival of Campion in England whom he had befriended, Pound had spent much of the last twenty-five years in gaols and was arraigned at this time for protesting against the cruelty of the law and recent executions. The new sentence he received was bizarre; one ear was to be severed in London and the other in Lancaster, while his term in prison was extended to coincide with the length of his life. In addition, a fine of £1,000 was imposed. The mutilation was later commuted to standing in the pillory in each place for one day, his ears nailed but not cut off.