The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (4 page)

Clement VIII resisted being an instrument for the policy of the Jesuits and the Spanish monarchy. His settlement of the Archpriest controversy in England had led him to rebuke the former for intemperance, and as the pontiff who had absolved Henri IV he was anxious to find a candidate for the English throne who would be acceptable to France as well as Spain and the English Catholic laity. Lady Arabella Stuart had been considered, but given the delicacy of the situation with her it was still easier to negotiate with James. In 1602 Clement VIII made him a firm offer of support on condition that Prince Henry was raised as a Catholic. Other less elevated men than the Pope had also to assess their positions in the fading light of the last Tudor. One such was Hugh Owen, the renegade Welsh spy master for the archdukes and Spain, who had had his pension renewed by Philip III in 1601 because the king looked to him to nurture the Spanish cause in England. Not the easiest task, especially since the Infanta Isabella – now married to Archduke Albrecht and so co-ruler of the Spanish Netherlands – was herself highly sceptical of any such proposition. Owen in secret reviewed the matter again, taking account of papal preferences, the attitude of the secular priests in England, as well as the majority of the laity. Towards the end of 1602 he received a clandestine visit from his brother Robert, a canon in the French church, and sent by the French government on a brief to pull together measures on the succession. Their exchanges on the political shape of things-to-come were soon marginalized by the long anticipated death of Elizabeth in March 1603, at which point, since she left no heir and no formally designated successor, any Catholic effort to establish a regime friendly to Catholics (if not Catholic) could not be treason. But it was James VI who became king, being better prepared than anyone else, aided by Sir Robert Cecil and the privy council. The country willed it although some well-placed individuals showed no great enthusiasm, and the intervention of the Earl of Northumberland in his approach to the council, many retainers in tow, certainly upset Cecil and those who stood beside him. This success for James was achieved without any foreign aid and more crucially ‘without the need for any active help from his Catholic supporters at home’. It swamped any prospect of real change for them. Blood royal carried the Crown and the day.

It was to be expected that the response of the exiles would not be unanimous; no chorus of approval or disapprobation. Dr Gifford, who had helped to spread the hope of converting James and so offended the pro-Spanish cluster, conveyed to the rapturous king a friendly message from the papal nuncio in Brussels. Hugh Owen later took the view that if Gifford had not persuaded Clement VIII of this supposed impending conversion then the accession would have been a much more disorderly business. Father Henry Garnet, soon to become a prominent figure in the gunpowder conspiracy, wrote to Persons while James was travelling from Edinburgh to London, and was quite buoyant about the prospects for the new regime. His hope that no foreign power would intervene was duly fulfilled. In the seminaries where Persons had many admirers and supporters, Douai and Rome, there was a pause for reflection and for the time being rueful acceptance of the new situation. At Douai the college diary made no comment, although Dr John Worthington who was in charge there was a devoted follower of Persons. The latter had taken on the administration of the English College in Rome five years before the accession of James which was publicly celebrated by a mass on Trinity Sunday. Privately Persons was acutely sceptical about the king in his two realms. In July 1603 in a letter to Garnet he regretted that lack of unified purpose had prevented Catholics from imposing definite terms, but there was some pleasurable relief in the death at last of a hated queen. His comment several months before had been that ‘the doubt conceived of the king’s religion has cast much water into the wine’.
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As for Clement VIII, he still hoped that James or Prince Henry would be reconciled, and this was perhaps allowable while he waited for a reply to his offer. The response from James was drafted in October 1602, but the messenger fell ill so that it reached Paris months later for forwarding to Rome. In it James rejected the proposed course, and although his tone was mild no concessions were trailed as they had been previously. Prince Henry was not going to be educated as a Catholic, even if his mother, Queen Anne, was retreating from her childhood Lutheranism.

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t was a striking coincidence not lost upon his contemporaries that James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth on what was then New Year’s Eve, 24 March 1603, thus restoring the Golden Age as they imagined with the new year. But the character, pronouncements and publications of his reign beyond the sometimes turbulent border did not disarm or even greatly encourage English Catholic exiles. Their judgments of him varied and the conspiratorially inclined could not be easily persuaded that he would make a principled and generous response to their hurts. The deformities of spirit remained, though after 1598, when the Edict of Nantes in France seemed to show that toleration was a benign option for countries with profound religious divisions, some discerned a faint light of hope. This did not touch James, whose real attitude towards Catholicism derived from the same roots as his views on Puritanism – a hostility that was much more political than religious.
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He hated toleration and this matched the view of the man who emerged as his chief minister – Sir Robert Cecil. No doubt sensitive adjudication between Catholics and James was possible, but Cecil was not the man to do it, and the notion of armed resistance by the religious minority had an allure for some before 1605. A soldier in exile like Sir William Stanley, whose name was synonymous in England with treachery, certainly preferred bullets to compromise. For years he had sought ‘to promote his own standing and prestige in the Spanish military service by playing a prominent part in an invasion to some part of the British Isles’.

With their royal blood, the Stanleys had inevitably a somewhat bumpy relationship with Elizabeth, especially after the plot in 1570 led by Sir Thomas and Sir Edward Stanley, to free Mary, Queen of Scots from Chatsworth and take her to the Isle of Man. A cousin of the Earl of Derby, William Stanley (b. 1548) had earned a brilliant reputation as a soldier, first serving with the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, and then in Ireland under the Deputy, Lord Grey, being knighted in September 1579. Stanley won further acclaim for his martial acumen during the first part of the fitful campaign of the Earl of Leicester to assist the Dutch rebels against Spain. From late 1585–6 Stanley organized a levy in Ireland that sent over a thousand troops to assist, and he fought in the Zutphen engagement that became infamous for the wound taken by Sir Philip Sidney which led to an abominable lingering death. By December 1586, while Elizabeth deliberated over Stanley’s promotion to Viceroy of Ireland, he was frantically drawing attention to his situation and that of his men in the Low Countries. On the 26th of that month he wrote to Walsingham: ‘I am at his time driven to lay all my apparell to pawn in the Lombard, for money to pay for meat and drink . . . Were it not in respect of my duty to her Majesty I could as well run my head into a stone wall as endure it.’ The captains with him were subsisting on bread and cheese, while the ordinary soldiers were reduced to half a pound of cheese a day, unrelieved by bread or even an onion. This meant that many became sick and Stanley had no money to help. ‘We have not received a month’s pay since our coming into these countries, which is now almost six months.’
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Driven to exasperated revolt by his immediate situation, which did not seem likely to improve, Stanley made the remarkable decision to surrender the town of Deventer to the Spanish in January 1587. This was what we might call a gut decision, but ironically it made no difference as agents and spies almost gleefully reported to London. About a year after the surrender Sir Ralph Sadler noted the atrocious condition of the regiment under Spanish control, forced to winter in the field and subsist on dry acorns. One of Stanley’s Irish captains, Oliver Eustace, upbraided him for this, saying that Stanley had brought them to a parlous situation and was duty bound to relieve their suffering. In the meantime, Stanley was applauded by the Jesuits and finely defended in print by Dr William Allen. As for the beneficiary of the defection – Philip II – he was reported to have commented rather grudgingly that he liked the act of handing over the town but not the traitor. Stanley was excluded from the Armada preparations against England, and this went on for years afterwards; the Spanish attitude had a stubborn hold and being unable to shift it Stanley set much greater store by the efforts of the English Catholic exiles, and the regiment became identified with these. It may have been called the ‘English regiment’, but it was actually a multi-national mercenary force of some 700 Irish, English, Welsh, Scots, Italians, Burgundians and later, Walloons. The Spanish sources were remarkably clear in saying 626 soldiers and 90 officers (mostly English) defected to them, and were later joined by Captain Sir Rowland Yorke’s group and some 200 Catholic refugee gentlemen. But very soon this figure of some 1,200 officers and men had plummeted, and by 1589 it was in danger of being disbanded. Morale was not assisted by the self-serving efforts of one of Stanley’s own officers who saw a chance to redirect his rickety career as a soldier and double agent.

The man was Jacomo di Franceschi, more often known by his contemporaries as Captain Jacques. According to a report in the papers of Sir Ralph Sadler, this violent and subversive soldier was born in Antwerp of Italian parents, but had been brought up in England since early childhood.
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There is a reference to him in the confession of Anthony Babington where he says he met Franceschi some three years before in France and he calls him a soldier of Ireland. Certainly Franceschi had been a subordinate of Sir John Perrot in Ulster, and simultaneously he seems to have acted as an intelligencer for Sir Christopher Hatton in London. By 1585 Franceschi was lieutenant to Stanley, but late in the year he was mixing freely with the Babington conspirators in London whose activities were known to Stanley and the privy council, so that Walsingham and his agents knew every move of the plotters and probably the boast of Franceschi to Edward Windsor that he would raise an insurrection in Ireland whence he had lately returned. While there Franceschi received a letter from Stanley, now in the Low Countries with his Irish Kernes, inviting him to join him, and this may add a little weight to the suggestion that Stanley’s betrayal of Deventer was less occasioned by suffering than premeditated treachery. Franceschi did not immediately join him and when Stanley had done his best to head off the fast-approaching execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the privy council in London wrote to the Lord Deputy in Ireland to keep a watchful eye on all Stanley’s secret friends and dependants. In particular they marked out Franceschi for being ‘a stranger ill-affected in religion’ and for his contacts with the Babington conspirators. Following this Franceschi seems to have spent some time in the Fleet prison, while maintaining a correspondence with a young Irishman of noble birth, Florence MacCarthy. The two fought together in Munster against Desmond, and it seems likely that ‘servants and retainers’ of MacCarthy had gone as a group with Stanley. When the young man aspired to make a grand marriage alliance (which took place in 1588) he was encouraged by Franceschi.
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The President of Munster suggested to London that Franceschi’s complicity in this thoroughly misliked nuptial should be ‘boulted’ out of him. As it happened, MacCarthy was arrested and sent to the Tower, while at length Franceschi was freed to go to the Low Countries in 1589 where on becoming lieutenant-colonel of Stanley’s declining regiment he launched very promptly into mischief. According to the imprisoned Catholic informer Anthony Copley, ‘Jacques, I supposed wisheth himself in Ireland again, seeing how much his hope of advancement in Flanders . . . is coming to nothing.’ By August 1590 Franceschi was working up an elaborate plan to disperse the regiment with Sir Thomas Morgan, commander of the English forces in the Low Countries fighting for the Dutch. With secret assistance from Franceschi, Morgan was to take over the fort of Ordam, where Stanley’s regiment was stationed. The plan folded because Morgan went down with a fever and Stanley removed to another place.
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It was, incidentally, a plan approved by Elizabeth on the advice of Burghley, who after the death of Walsingham in April 1590 took on the direction of secret agents in the Low Countries. Probably he was persuaded to give responsibilities to Franceschi by Sir Christopher Hatton who had long favoured him with ‘courtesies which for ever would have tied a thankful mind’.

There was now a bitter rift between Stanley and Franceschi, and while the former planned an invasion of Alderney in the Channel Islands for 1591, the latter waylaid English Catholic refugees and spun out talk of assassinating Elizabeth. One who met him in Antwerp in 1592 wrote: ‘One day a Mr Jacques came to dinner, whom I never saw before that time. He was attired in black satin, with a man attending on him. He uttered these, or the like words, at the table: “By God, they say in England I would have killed the Queen, but, by God, belie me.” What he was I am not able to say; he was slender and reasonably tall of stature, and had a black beard; and had been, as he said, a follower of the deceased Lord Chancellor’ (Hatton). Rifts in Stanley’s regiment, which naturally drifted towards being the armed extension of the English Catholic exiles, rather than an active service unit of the Spanish armies in Flanders, stemmed for the most part from want of money and the rivalry for Spanish and papal funds. Not having secure financial resources for all, the perceived urgent work was doubly tormenting because not only were the Spanish haphazard in allocations, but the wealth and estates left behind in England benefited their enemies. The letters of the exiles are crammed with references to privation and political inconsequence. They could freeze in winter and starve at any time, although 1587–9 was particularly terrible because of a famine there. If the Baltic grain ships and Spanish treasure fleets did not deliver then their situation became parlous. So an old campaigner like Sir Thomas Markenfeld, who lived in a Brussels tenement, was found dead of starvation during the summer of 1592 ‘lying on the bare floor of his chamber, no creature being present at his death’.
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