God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (47 page)

Now Watson began drawing in fellow malcontents: William Clark, a seminary priest and an active Appellant, Sir Griffin Markham, keeper of the royal hunting lodge in Sherwood Forest (and familiar to John Gerard), and George Brooke, brother to Lord Cobham. Their aim was to manhandle James into delivering Catholic toleration and it was Markham who gave them their
modus operandi:
he ‘had heard it was usual in Scotland for the king to be taken of his subjects, and kept in strong hold until he had granted his subjects’ requests’. Consequently, the plotters, to which group Watson said he was adding all the time, agreed to kidnap James at Greenwich, take him to the Tower of London (which they planned to use as their stronghold) and persuade him to accede to their demands. A date was set for the escapade, 24 June, a month before the coronation, and so that all the conspirators—for Watson was now promising a cast of thousands—were better able to recognize one another it was suggested they ‘wear stockings either of yellow or blue’. It was Markham who brought back the bad news that James would not, in fact, be at Greenwich on the day appointed for his kidnapping. Neither, it was soon apparent, were the hordes of plotters boasted of by Watson likely to put in an appearance: Anthony Copley spent a dispiriting day sitting in to wait for them, by the end of which his hopes of success had faded. At eleven o’clock the following day Watson called off the attempt, ‘affirming that he despaired of the action, and laying blame on all, that they had not complied with their promises’.
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But others had been complying with their promises. It had been less than three months since Garnet had assured James of the Jesuits’ fidelity; now he and his men had a chance to keep their word, for some time in late May/early June an attempt was made to recruit John Gerard into the conspiracy. According to Gerard’s account of events, he had told his recruiter—probably Griffin Markham—that the intrigue was both ‘unlawful’ and ‘hurtful’ to the Catholic cause; then, he had written to Henry Garnet and the Archpriest George Blackwell, begging them to forbid ‘their acquaintances from entering the cause, and to stay it what they could’.
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Watson would later complain that the Jesuits had prevented him from approaching potential plotters in Lancashire and Wales; and one who did join the plot, a Mr Harris of Pembroke-shire, would explain that ‘the Jesuit party…[had]…gotten some inkling of the action, and so laboured to cross it’. Meanwhile, George Blackwell was contacting all those in his charge, instructing them ‘to give stay and restraint’ to anyone wishing to join the conspiracy.
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It was probably inevitable that Watson, with his near pathological hatred of the Jesuits and the Archpriest, should have ignored all these early warnings; and when Gerard and Blackwell saw 24 June approaching with no obvious sign of the action having been called off they both stepped up their response. Gerard told everything he knew to a Scottish courtier close to James, asking him to bring the matter to James’s attention. Blackwell passed on the same information, via a courier, to a priest in prison (a convoluted path, concealing his whereabouts), telling him to bring the matter to the Privy Council’s attention. It was Blackwell’s message that reached the Government first.
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As news of the plot broke, Watson and company took flight and the Council began the slow process of reeling them back in again. Descriptions were issued of the wanted men; Watson was listed as ‘a man of the lowest sort…and very purblind, so as if he read anything, he puts the paper near to his eyes’. Anthony Copley was picked up some time in early July, George Brooke soon afterwards, and as the outbreak of plague intensified in the hot weather so, too, did the manhunt: failing to find Markham in London, the pursuivants now raided his Nottinghamshire estate. By early August Watson had been run to earth in Wales, Clark in Worcester, and all the plotters were in the Tower and talking freely.
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Watson’s line of defence was singular: he had only devised his plot, he argued, in order to save James from a much deadlier Jesuit plot. The Jesuits might act as though ‘butter would not melt in their mouth’, they might be ‘extolling the king’s majesty’, but in reality, he claimed, they were even now massing arms, horses and men to assist in a Spanish invasion of the realm. This was why they had hindered him, this was why they had ‘sent down post-haste into the country, for all Catholics to beware of such and such priests, as were about a most dangerous conspiracy’. He, Watson, had merely been trying to save James from certain death. As justification for high treason it was not enough to save Watson: on 15 November 1603 he, Clark, Brooke, Markham and Copley were convicted of conspiring to raise rebellion, to alter religion and to subvert the state. In the end, only Watson, Clark and Brooke were executed: Watson went to the scaffold—significantly—asking the Jesuits’ pardon; Markham and Copley received the King’s pardon and were sent into exile.
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Theirs had been a sorry, scrappy affair. That its fallout was no greater was down to the clumsiness of the plotting and the prompt action of Gerard, Garnet and Blackwell to stop it. James, who, before the discovery of the plot, had told a French envoy he was considering remitting some recusancy fines, continued with this remittance as part of his coronation festivities, reassuring a Catholic deputation led by Sir Thomas Tresham that his feelings towards them remained benign. Privately, though, he complained that in spite of his kindness England’s Catholics had still sought to harm him.
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How much Watson’s plot played upon James’s terror of assassination (and brought back humiliating memories of his earlier kidnapping) is a matter of conjecture, so, too, the extent to which Watson’s talk of Jesuit scheming was taken seriously by the Government. His was not the only purported intelligence concerning the Society reaching Robert Cecil at this time. Sir John Popham, who operated a wide network of informants, told Cecil, ‘I do assure myself the Jesuit faction have their practice afoot as well as [Watson], though carried with more secrecy, and so the more dangerous.’ The spy reports coming in to him all agreed ‘something [would] be done’; an attempt would be made on James’s life; an invasion fleet would be launched: it was not a question of if, merely of when. If governments tend to listen best to the kind of intelligence they already hold to be true, then James’s Privy Council was listening to a steady stream of information, a constant chatter of anxiety, that satisfied its worst fears: the Jesuits were plotting. Watson’s explanation of his exploits was simply another prediction of future conspiracies, of future Spanish enterprises, of future unrest. Further, he, himself, had effectively demonstrated—to anyone wishing proof of it—that England’s hidden priests, and the Catholics in their thrall, were no more to be trusted under James’s Government than they had been under Elizabeth’s. Meanwhile, in a backhanded compliment to the Society, Anthony Copley (conferring with Griffin Markham about Watson and Clark’s inefficiency) remarked ‘how much more sufficiently the Jesuit party would have carried the like’.
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What, then, would they have made of Henry Garnet’s private correspondence that summer? On 15 June, as he tried to prevent discontented Catholics from joining Watson, Garnet had written to Robert Persons, condemning the action as a ‘piece of impudent folly’; ‘it is by peaceful means’, he emphasized, ‘that his Holiness and other princes are prepared to help us’. His words chimed with those of Persons himself: a few weeks later Persons would write to Anthony Rivers (Garnet’s sometime secretary), urging English Catholics not to give way to their ‘passion’ and ‘break out’ in rebellion. ‘I do not see possibly here what may be counselled in the present case of our country…’ he wrote, ‘but only to have patience and to expect the event of things.’ The event that both men were expecting was an end to the war with Spain.
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Hostilities between England and Spain had rumbled on for almost twenty years; neither nation had the upper hand, both were facing creeping financial ruin. One of Robert Cecil’s first actions of the new reign had been to tot up the cost of Elizabeth’s conflicts. The figures said it all: £49,478,054 had been spent on military action during the reign; less than a tenth of that sum had been granted to the Queen in Parliamentary subsidy. James had inherited not only his cousin’s crown, but also her searching need for revenue and her debts. In light of this, his decision to rescind recusancy fines (to those willing to sue for pardon) spoke of a plausible desire for tolerance on his part in a way that his earlier vague promises to Catholics had suggested only political contrivance, for by now the notion that it could profit from papistry had become a mainstay of Government economic planning. The Exchequer receipts for the year 1604 reveal that James’s single act of generosity towards England’s Catholics would cost him almost £5,700, money he could ill afford to lose. Spain—though still Europe’s dominant power—was in not much healthier a condition, moving towards long-term imperial meltdown, haemorrhaging gold in pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy, ruled by a young and indecisive king. Philip II had once said, in reference to his heir, ‘God has given me so many kingdoms, but not a son fit to govern them.’ This was a harsh assessment. Philip III might not have inherited his father’s strengths as a statesman, but neither had he inherited his bottomless treasury. Over the years he would find himself increasingly unable to finance the armies necessary to hold his scattered territories together and wage his father’s wars. Which was why, in April 1603, just a month after James’s succession (and in answer to his immediate declaration of a cease-fire), Philip’s Council drew up its first instructions for peace.
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It was always likely that Spain, which for so long had given financial aid to English Catholic refugees and which had made the restoration of English Catholicism its official justification for the war, would explore measures designed to help the English Catholics in the peace. And when the Spanish envoy charged with paving the way to a treaty, Don Juan de Tassis, sailed for England, he carried with him the orders of his King, penned in the margin of the Council’s policy document, ‘to insist strongly on the liberty of conscience for Catholics’. This, wrote Philip, is ‘what I desire the most’. It was a simple wish, clearly stated. Sadly, all Philip’s Council did not share it. Set against the King and his call for religious toleration was a body of ministers aware that to demand concessions from England towards its troublesome Catholics risked similar concessions being demanded of Spain towards its troublesome Protestants in the Low Countries. To make any such concessions while the Dutch were still in open rebellion against their Spanish rulers was tantamount to granting them independence, a humiliating climb-down after decades spent fighting to keep them in the empire. So even before Tassis left to pursue the cause of religious tolerance, that cause had been weakened.
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In Brussels Tassis halted his journey north to talk with a group of English Catholic exiles about conditions at home. His meeting, he reported, took place ‘at a late hour of the night to protect ourselves from certain spies’ and, in keeping with this air of paranoia, he was warned that once he crossed the Channel ‘divers persons [might] attempt to insert themselves into [my] favour under pretence of being a Catholic’. Trust no one—this was the exiles’ message to him. Brussels buzzed with news from England. James was said to hate those he regarded as ‘Hispaniolated’ or ‘Jesuitised’, words that seemed interchangeable. This information, set beside dispatches reaching the Spanish Council from Rome that Robert Persons and his fellow authors of the Book of Succession were now ‘looked upon as lepers to be avoided by necessity’, suggested a worrying scenario. It was as though James could never forgive anyone who had challenged his right to the English throne. Spain had appeared to do so, so too the Jesuits: both linked to this challenge by Persons’ contribution to the succession debate. Persons might now be
persona non grata
in Rome—but at least he was in Rome and out of James’s reach. The Spanish had congratulated James on his succession and were now on their way to making peace with him. This left only the Jesuits to fill the role of James’s personal bogeymen.
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Warned to trust no one, Tassis was soon able to put this advice to the test. On 26 June he reported the arrival in Brussels—at the Court of the Archduke Albert, co-regent of the Spanish Netherlands—of a mystery informant, who declined to give his name, but who claimed to be carrying secret intelligence from England. According to this, Tassis told Philip, the English Catholics believed ‘themselves capable of mustering a total of 12,000 men and should your Majesty assist them in time with a similar number, they offer to expel [James] from England’. If this were true, added Tassis cautiously, showing a quick appreciation of the world in which he was now moving, it was ‘momentous’ news, demanding ‘very deep reflection’.
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Philip’s response to this news was as cautious as his envoy’s. ‘I charge you’, he wrote, ‘to investigate with great care and secrecy the basis and resources behind these Catholics.’ He had good reason to urge care and secrecy. Recently arrived at his Court were two Englishmen who appeared to be of the same confederacy as Tassis’ unnamed man, who were also making extravagant claims about the number of Catholics they could muster in the event of a Spanish invasion and who were even now begging him to launch such an invasion. One of the men was called Anthony Dutton, a name that fades from the records every bit as quickly as it appears. The other was a Yorkshire Catholic called Guy Fawkes.
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