Gunpowder Plots

Gunpowder Plots

BRENDA BUCHANAN

DAVID CANNADINE

JUSTIN CHAMPION

DAVID CRESSY

PAULINE CROFT

ANTONIA FRASER

MIKE JAY

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

ALLEN LANE

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First published 2005
1

‘The Fifth of November Remembered and Forgotten’ copyright © David Cannadine, 2005;
‘The Gunpowder Plot Fails’ copyright © Pauline Croft, 2005; ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’
copyright © Antonia Fraser, 2004, first published in What Might Have Been, edited by
Andrew Roberts; ‘Four Hundred Years of Festivities’ copyright © David Cressy, 1992,
first published in Myths of the English, edited by Roy Porter; ‘Popes and Guys and
Anti-Catholicism’ copyright © Justin Champion, 2005; ‘Bonfire Night in Lewes’
copyright © Mike Jay, 2005; ‘Making Fireworks’ copyright © Brenda Buchanan, 2005

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-14-190933-2

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Fifth of November
Remembered and Forgotten
DAVID CANNADINE

1 The Gunpowder Plot Fails
    PAULINE CROFT

2 The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds
    ANTONIA FRASER

3 Four Hundred Years of Festivities
    DAVID CRESSY

4 Popes and Guys and Anti-Catholicism
    JUSTIN CHAMPION

5 Bonfire Night in Lewes
    MIKE JAY

6 Making Fireworkss
    BRENDA BUCHANAN

List of Illustrations

INTRODUCTION

The Fifth of November Remembered and Forgotten

DAVID CANNADINE

Please to remember the Fifth of November,

Gunpowder Treason and Plot.

We know no reason why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

At first sight, it seems strange that across four hundred years our nation has been annually commemorating an event that did not happen: namely, the failed attempt by Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London at the beginning of a new legislative session on 5 November 1605. They were arrested, they were tortured, they were tried and they were executed. As such, they shared the fate of many conspirators who are labelled freedom fighters by their supporters, or derided as rebels and anarchists by their opponents, and who get caught by the very authorities they seek to overthrow. They lose, they suffer, they die, and their story ends, while the regime endures that they vainly sought to change. To be sure, the stakes were very high in November 1605: if the gunpowder had exploded, the entire Commons and Lords, plus King James I and his court, would have been blown to oblivion, in a destructive carnage that might have surpassed that of 9/11 in terms of numbers killed, and would certainly have exceeded it in terms of the collective might and power of those who had been taken out. Put in the Bush-and-Blair language of our own day, the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot was thus an outstandingly successful pre-emptive strike against what would now be described as the forces of organized, fanatical, religiously motivated terrorism.

But is this sufficient to explain why (and how) Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators have enjoyed four centuries of demonized immortality, rather than of ignominious oblivion? It seems unlikely, for during that period, England’s ritual calendar of commemorative events has been constantly evolving and transformed, and many once-secure festivals, commemorating what seemed to be important (indeed, iconic) national events, have subsequently fallen away: among them Armada Day, Oak Apple Day, Waterloo Day, Primrose Day, Empire Day, and so on. To be sure, Remembrance Day was successfully invented after the First World War, and it is still going strong; but it is not yet a hundred years old, and it may not survive the passing of the present queen’s reign. Thus regarded, the Fifth of November is the only major date, not directly derived from the lifecycle of Jesus Christ, which has endured in our popular national calendar for so long. It is, then, an occasion easily taken for granted, but also in need of historical explanation and analysis. The essays gathered here attempt to do just that, and in so doing, they demonstrate how it has survived and evolved across the centuries, and what has been remembered (and forgotten) during the course of that survival and evolution; and they also make plain what a many-sided and multifaceted occasion it has almost always been.

As Pauline Croft explains, the genesis of the Gunpowder Plot must be sought in the complex mixture of hopes and anxieties with which English Catholics greeted the accession of James I on the death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1603. Initially, it seemed as though the new king would treat his Catholic subjects with more kindly tolerance than his predecessor, but within little more than a year these anticipations had been disappointed. To a small group of committed Catholic conspirators, of whom Guy Fawkes was one, the only way forward now seemed to be to assassinate the king, and to proclaim his daughter Princess Elizabeth as (they hoped) a more malleable and pro-Catholic queen. What would have happened had they succeeded? Antonia Fraser’s imaginative essay in counter-factual history seeks to answer just that question, opening as it does with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (as the nominally Catholic Princess Elizabeth had now become) on 15 January 1606. Meanwhile, her surviving brother, Charles, who was nominally Protestant, had fled to Scotland, where he had been proclaimed king. Eventually, Catholic England and Protestant Scotland might well have gone to war, Charles might still have lost his head, a Catholic, pro-French monarchy would have been established in England, and the Fifth of November would have been celebrated as a very different sort of occasion from that with which later generations have been familiar.

But the plot failed, and as David Cressy points out, the Fifth of November subsequently became the most enduring anniversary in the nation’s Protestant calendar, taking on different meanings, and attracting the support of different groups, at different times, and for different purposes. During the seventeenth century, it was a Protestant celebration of providential deliverance, often enjoying both elite and popular involvement. Under the Hanoverians, elite observance was more dutiful than enthusiastic, while among the lower orders it became an occasion for riot, disturbance and displays of misrule which lasted well into the nineteenth century. Only at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, and on into the early twentieth century, did bonfires and fireworks become more respectable, with more children participating, and with shouts of ‘penny for

the Guy’. But despite these changes, there was, throughout, an underlying theme of militant, national Protestantism, which was always the key to its survival. Put the other way, as Justin Champion reminds us, this meant that the Fifth of November has always been an explicitly or latently anti-Catholic event: indeed, for well over the first hundred years of its existence, it was the Pope who was burned in effigy, and it was only in the late eighteenth century that Guy Fawkes became the central figure who was now consigned to the flames.

These national changes and developments are vividly illuminated in Mike Jay’s essay, which explores Bonfire Night in Lewes, a generally quaint and quiet market town in East Sussex, where the observances retain much of the riotous and oppositional character by which they have been characterized since the late eighteenth century. For reasons that are not wholly clear, the town remains to this day a ‘strong citadel of Bonfiredom’, and for this one night only it combines civic pride and civic disobedience in a particularly resonant combination: in addition to Guy Fawkes, other figures recently burned in effigy have included Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, John Major and Gordon Brown. But the Fifth of November needs to be understood not only in local but also in global terms, and this is the purpose of Brenda Buchanan’s concluding contribution. Fireworks and Bonfire Night are inextricably linked in the popular mind; but as she explains, this was not a pre-ordained union. Getting gunpowder from China to England was a complex and protracted business; and thereafter fireworks were more broadly associated with military triumphs, royal occasions and civic ceremonial. Only in the late nineteenth century did they become the indispensable accompaniment to the Fifth of November itself.

All of which is simply to say that the history of Bonfire Night is a long, complex, changing and contested one, which has rarely received the attention that it merits, and which may be approached in a variety of (not always compatible) ways. From one perspective, that history may be regarded as a consensual display of shared national values, collective identity and religious moderation; from another, it can be seen as a sustained display of establishment exclusiveness, national xenophobia and religious bigotry; from yet a third it can be looked at as a sign of vigorous popular protest, committed radical politics and technological cosmopolitanism. There are thus many narratives of the Fifth of November, and they do not all lead to the same conclusions. That, in turn, may help to explain its unique longevity: it has meant many things to many people in many places at many times. Nor is that history over yet. In recent years the growing concern about terrorism and about health and safety, the decline in a shared sense of national and Protestant identity, and the alternative, American allure of Hallowe’en, have led some to fear that the Fifth of November is on the way out. But such anxieties have often been expressed across the four hundred years since 1605, and they have never yet been borne out.

Are things different in 2005? How will Guy Fawkes Night look in 2010? If the varied, disputed, unpredictable history of this event is any guide, then it is impossible to predict how it will evolve in the future. As the bonfires burn, the fireworks fizzle and the sparklers sparkle in this anniversary year, they may seem the dying embers of an outmoded festival that no longer resonates in the secular, multicultural, globalized world we now inhabit, where the old national identities, built around (among other things) royalty and religion, have lost some of the significance they once had. But it may be, in an era when many Britons are hostile to ‘Europe’, with (as they see it) its historic and alien connotations of Catholicism and authoritarianism, and when others are no less opposed to what they regard (and regret) as the Americanization of our culture, of which the recent rise of Hallowe’en is but one more disturbing sign, that the Fifth of November will take on a new identity as a focus for protest against our nation’s precarious position, increasingly threatened by two powerful (and predatory?) continents. ‘Guy Fawkes for UKIP’ may not seem a wholly plausible slogan. But stranger things have happened during this remarkably long-lived festival of fun and fire, playfulness and patriotism, inclusion and exclusion. Only time will tell.

CHAPTER ONE

The Gunpowder Plot Fails

PAULINE CROFT

On 9 November 1605, four days after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot only hours before the state opening of Parliament, the shaken members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons were sent home. The government of James I wanted to concentrate on pursuing the terrorists and bringing them to justice, without the additional distractions of managing a parliamentary session. On 21 January 1606, after a lengthy Christmas break, the Lords and Commons reconvened. The prolonged holiday had done little to lessen the general sense of shock. Both Houses were still stunned by the near-miss of the planned atrocity which would have killed and maimed so many of their members. As the Attorney General, the great lawyer Sir Edward Coke, commented sombrely: ‘No Man can aggravate [exaggerate] the Powder Treason. To tell it, and know it, is enough.’ Coke’s words point to the immediate impact of the plot and help to explain its enduring place in British historical consciousness. However, ‘to tell it, and know it’ we must begin much earlier.

By 1590 Queen Elizabeth, born in 1533, had lived longer than either her father or her grandfather, and her subjects were ever more aware that her days were numbered. North of the Border, James VI of Scotland was manoeuvring energetically to maximize his chances of succeeding to her throne. James was the queen’s nearest blood relative, like her a direct descendant of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. After his birth in June 1566 his mother Mary Queen of Scots had publicly hoped that he would be the first ruler to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland. Elizabeth granted a pension to the impecunious Scottish king in 1586 and promised that she would not undercut any right or title that he possessed. Further than that she would not go. As the years passed James became increasingly agitated that he had never been officially proclaimed her heir.

To ensure his accession, the king planned both to build up English support and to disarm any foreign opposition. He corresponded with the young earl of Essex, Elizabeth’s last favourite, hoping that Essex’s inside information on court politics would ease his way to the throne. Many of the earl’s followers were Catholics, members of the post-Reformation religious minority in England that bore the burden of the recusancy laws (aimed at those who would not attend their Protestant parish churches). The laws were unevenly enforced, and many low-profile Catholics got off virtually scot-free, but the psychological burden was considerable and most Catholic males knew their career prospects were blighted if they adhered openly to the old religion. Within the small Catholic community was a much smaller group of proudly committed, faithful dévots to whom the recusancy laws might bring grave financial hardship and years in prison. For Catholic priests, particularly those belonging to the new Counter-Reformation order of the Jesuits, service in England meant disguise, the constant fear of betrayal and possibly a hideous death by hanging, drawing and quartering.

Essex occasionally indulged in a rhetoric of tolerance towards those Catholics who were politically loyal. As a result, many of them followed him in offering their service to the Scottish claimant to the English throne. In Europe, the Protestant regimes of the Dutch and the Scandinavian monarchies would not oppose James, but Spain, the leading power of Catholic Europe, might make trouble. In 1588, as the Armada sailed, Philip II had announced that his daughter, the Infanta Isabella, descended from the English King Edward III, would replace Elizabeth as queen. The Armada was defeated, but Isabella’s claim remained a part of official Spanish policy, although she had few if any Catholic supporters in England. In 1595 the Scottish Catholic gentleman John Ogilvy of Poury began a journey across Europe which included a visit to Spain, where he indicated that James might become a Spanish ally and possibly also a Catholic. This informal probe was followed after the death of Philip II in 1598 by the mission of another Catholic, Lord Robert Sempill, who hoped to persuade the new king, Philip III, to recognize James as Elizabeth’s heir. Neither of these diplomatic missions was successful but they convinced the Scottish Jesuits resident in Madrid that their king was a friend to Catholics.

The attitude of the papacy might be crucial in swinging the support of other Catholic states such as Savoy and Tuscany. Here, James turned to his advantage the conversion to Catholicism of his wife, Anne of Denmark, who had been a Lutheran on her arrival in Scotland in 1590. Anne came under attack from the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, which deplored her extravagance and love of court entertainments. The Kirk’s censorious hostility alienated the young queen from its dour Protestantism. Her close friend Henriette, the French-born wife of James’s supporter the marquis of Huntly, was influential in leading the queen to take instruction in Catholicism. In 1599 James wrote to Pope Clement VIII on a minor ecclesiastical matter, signing himself in Latin as ‘your most obedient son’. Then Queen Anne wrote to the Pope and to Cardinal Borghese, announcing her conversion. Her ambiguous use of the royal ‘we’ gave rise to hopes in Rome that the king would soon convert, and in 1602 Clement VIII urged James to do so. The king’s other Continental overtures were rather less successful. Ferdinand I, the wealthy grand duke of Tuscany, conducted a courteous correspondence but sidelined James’s suggestion that a Tuscan bride would be very acceptable for the king’s eldest son, Prince Henry. Once again, however, the news spread that James was a friend of Catholics, and neither the papacy nor Tuscany showed any interest in opposing his claim to succeed the English queen. The Infanta Isabella, by 1599 married to her cousin the Archduke Albert and resident in Brussels, was also hopeful of the king’s conversion. ‘The Archdukes’, as the royal couple were known, were keener than Philip III to end the stale Anglo-Spanish war that had begun nearly fifteen years earlier, and proved disastrous for the Netherlands’ commerce and prosperity. Isabella was averse to any Spanish attempt to prevent James’s ultimate accession to Elizabeth’s throne.

So the king’s strategy of making overtures to foreign powers was effective in deflecting any Catholic-led opposition to his claim. Much more important, however, was the quiet revolution that took place in Anglo-Scottish affairs in 1601. Sir Robert Cecil, who had succeeded his father Lord Burghley as Elizabeth’s chief adviser, was aware from dispatches sent from Scotland that the king was dangerously restive over the unresolved succession. Then in February the earl of Essex, in disgrace after his failure to put down a major revolt in Ireland, led a band of young malcontents into the streets of London in a rash attempt to evict his enemies from court. The chaotic rising failed. Essex was quickly tried and sent to the block, leaving James without a confidant at the English court. Cecil was deeply perturbed by the revolt, which suggested that England might become ungovernable in the queen’s declining years. In the spring, when Scottish envoys arrived in Whitehall, Cecil made it clear that, when the time came, he would support the Scottish claim. A discreet agreement was reached that he would write privately to the king, joining in a secret correspondence with James already being conducted by a group of pro-Scottish Englishmen, most notably the crypto-Catholic nobleman Lord Henry Howard. The rapprochement was a crucial turning point. After spring 1601 James, by far the strongest candidate for Elizabeth’s throne, was acting in concert with Cecil, the leading member of the English Privy Council. It would be virtually impossible to derail his accession. Reassured, the king stopped sabre-rattling and promised that he would follow Cecil’s advice, biding his time patiently until Elizabeth died.

The correspondence between James and Cecil inevitably touched on religion. In his book Basilicon Doron, the king made it plain that he regretted that the Presbyterian Reformation in Scotland had lacked ‘the prince’s order’, a compliment to the contrasting English experience of a royal Supreme Governor over the Church. To Cecil, James expounded his views on Catholics. ‘I will never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion,’ he wrote, ‘but I would be sorry that Catholics should so multiply as they might be able to practise their old principles on us.’ Unlike many Protestants, James accepted that the Roman Catholic Church was ‘our mother church’, but he also viewed it as corrupt, and he did not wish Catholic numbers to increase. Cecil admitted that he loathed seeing Catholic priests die by hanging, drawing and quartering, but his tolerance did not go quite so far as the king’s. To the earl of Northumberland, who wrote on behalf of the English Catholics (although denying he was one himself), James set out his future policies clearly. ‘As for the Catholics, I will neither persecute any that will be quiet and give but an outward obedience to the law, neither will I spare to advance any of them that will by good service worthily deserve it.’ This suggested that once he was in England, James would follow Elizabeth in requiring outward conformity, but would also follow the course he adopted in Scotland, where he angered the Kirk by his warm acceptance of Catholic nobles such as the Huntlys.

These carefully qualified royal remarks were often interpreted much more generously. Northumberland’s kinsman Thomas Percy, who often acted as a messenger for the earl, visited James at Holyrood palace in 1602 and was convinced that he would offer a general Catholic toleration on his accession. Percy spread the good news, and when Elizabeth finally died on 24 March 1603, English Catholics openly rejoiced. Some, like Sir Thomas Tresham in Northamptonshire and Lord Arundell of Wardour in Dorset, overrode local officials in their eagerness to proclaim the king ahead of official instructions. Others like the priest George Blackwell contributed barrels of wine to celebratory bonfire parties. Fr. Henry Garnet, Superior of the English Jesuits, wrote enthusiastically in April that ‘A golden time we have of unexpected freedom… Great hope is of toleration; and so general a consent of Catholics in the king’s proclaiming, it seemeth God will work much.’ Exiled priests and lay people began to flock back across the Channel. It was even suggested that the English Catholics would soon have a formal legal toleration comparable to that established for the French Huguenots in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes.

In April 1603 the king left Edinburgh for London. From Newcastle, he wrote to the Privy Council explaining that many came to him with grievances, and suggesting that a public acknowledgement might be made of ‘severities’ in the late queen’s time – clearly a gesture to Catholics. As he visited York he was petitioned for toleration by both a Benedictine priest in disguise and a Catholic layman. In June, as Queen Anne followed her husband south, a group of Catholic ladies gathered at York to urge her to use her influence towards a toleration. In July, just before his coronation, James received Tresham and other leading Catholic gentry at Hampton Court. They brought a petition urging a public debate on the position of Catholics, aiming to show that a toleration offered no threat to stability. Instead, the king told them that he would suspend the monthly recusancy fines so long as the Catholic community continued to support both king and state. Records of the fines show that they fell rapidly, proving that James kept his word.

So far everything had gone fairly well for the Catholics. Then in June and July came the revelation of the Bye and Main Plots. The Bye Plot, so called because it was the lesser in importance, was a mad attempt led by a priest named William Watson to hold the king to ransom until he declared a toleration. The Main Plot was more drastic, and more secular. Led by Lord Cobham and other notables including Sir Walter Ralegh, it aimed to get rid of the Scottish king and his ‘cubs’, instead placing his English-born cousin Lady Arbella Stuart on the throne. It was the first sign of English disenchantment with the new Scottish regime. Neither plot came anywhere near success, not least because two Catholic priests got wind of the Bye Plot and tipped off the Privy Council. English Catholics reacted with horror at the folly of the plotters, and James accepted that the community as a whole was not tarred by the disloyalty of Watson and the rest. Even so, it was the first sign that the king’s dealings with Catholics might rebound against him.

By winter 1604 James was securely settled in England and his earlier conciliatory stance was hardening. In January at Hampton Court he conferred with the other end of the religious spectrum, the Puritans, who petitioned for further reformation in the Protestant Church of England. They got little by way of concessions, with the king asserting his support for bishops and showing his distaste for what he saw as nitpicking on unimportant issues. Early in February he made a speech in which