The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (4 page)

By nightfall, bonfires were burning brightly throughout the capital. Although the French Ambassador was shocked by the ungrateful behaviour of the Londoners in lighting fires to celebrate their sovereign’s death, there is no doubt that these were flames of rejoicing, not lamentation. As John Isham, a law student from Northamptonshire, wrote to his father: the people were saluting ‘a prince of great hope’. And throughout the country, not only in London, the sound of trumpets and other music was heard in the market-place. Spectators rent the air with shouts, their cries chiming with the bells, and an
enormous amount of liquor was consumed around each bonfire. In the north, at York and Kingston-upon-Hull, in the east at Norwich, in the west at Bristol, where the sheriffs in their scarlet had the new King’s picture placed high over their heads, and in the south at Winchester, King James was proclaimed as ‘being royally and in the right line from both Houses of York and Lancaster’.
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It was significant that the man who investigated the proclamation at Winchester, hastening there in advance of the Council’s official notification with a speed worthy of Robert Carey, was a Catholic, Sir Robert Tichborne. Far from causing trouble as had been anticipated, the leading ‘Papists’ hastened to demonstrate their enthusiasm publicly, seeing in this moment an excellent opportunity to start the reign as they meant to go on, as loyal subjects of the new King, for all their dissident religious views. Even the Jesuit priests, whose mere presence in England was illegal and punishable by death, wanted to display their patriotism. Father Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuits in England, sent a letter to a prominent courtier, hoping that it would be shown to James, in which he expressed the Jesuits’ wish to be ‘dear and not unnatural subjects of the crown’.
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Catholics were ostentatiously among those who provided barrels of wine for public places and threw down money to the crowds from their windows. And no action was more presage-ful than that of the Catholic magnate Sir Thomas Tresham, who proclaimed King James at Northampton a mere day after the Queen’s death. Born at the end of the reign of Henry VIII, long regarded as a leader in the Catholic community, which depended on him for ‘advice, direction’, Tresham had spent over twenty years of his life in prison for his refusal to conform to the Protestant religion, as well as suffering enormous fines.
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Married to a member of another distinguished Catholic family, a Throckmorton, Sir Thomas had a vast brood of children. One of these, Francis Tresham, his heir, was a scallywag who had been mixed up in the anti-government Essex
conspiracy of 1601. The charismatic Robert Catesby, Francis’ first cousin on his mother’s side, had also been involved. Francis Tresham had cost his father dear to buy him out of trouble, and Sir Thomas had helped too with Catesby’s fine. The rest of Sir Thomas’ children were more satisfactory and had made a variety of matches among the Catholic-oriented nobility and gentry. When he stood at the cross at Northampton to proclaim King James, barracked by the local Puritans, but not by the local Protestants, his family’s rebellious tendencies curbed, Sir Thomas had reason to hope that he would enjoy a serene old age.

Some of that general English mood of rejoicing which had shocked the French Ambassador was due to the fact that the crown had passed to an adult male. James I, now aged thirty-six, had reigned since babyhood when his mother Mary Queen of Scots had been obliged to abdicate, and he had ruled since his majority. Such an experienced – masculine – hand at the helm had not been known since the death of Henry VIII over half a century previously. There was no doubt that for all the brilliant myth of Gloriana, for all the genius which Elizabeth had displayed at propaganda to turn her innate weakness of sex into a strength, a male ruler was regarded as the natural order of things.

Furthermore, that brilliant myth had itself begun to fade in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. And now that she was no longer alive to dazzle her subjects with splendour, it became easier to realise that the Queen had ended her life as an extremely querulous old woman. Popular ballads on her death tended to draw attention to her sex:

Oh she bore the sway of all affairs
And yet she was but a woman

or:

A wiser Queen never was to be seen
For a woman, or yet a stouter.
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The clear implication was that a male succeeding was a return to normality.

One must beware of hindsight in judging the relative popularity of Elizabeth I and James I in the first years of his reign. Just because the judgement of history has been to shower accolades upon the Queen rather than upon the King, it is important to realise how different the viewpoint was at his succession. There was now a great pack of Englishmen scurrying north: ‘good news makes good horsemen’, or, as James himself put it later, people ran, ‘nay, rather flew to meet me’. They liked what they saw. Here was a man who, it was generally agreed, was ‘of noble presence’. He was affable and intelligent, quick to get a point. What was more, for the patriotic English, it was important that he spoke their language perfectly (albeit with a strong Scottish accent). He also knew Latin, French and Italian.
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At his side was his Danish wife, Queen Anne, a graceful blonde beauty in her late twenties who had already borne the King five children, three of whom survived, and was once more pregnant. How different from the home life of their departed spinster Queen!

What the English courtiers did not immediately realise was that an exceptionally harsh, unloving upbringing, beset with violent incident, and aristocratic feuds had made of the canny Scots King a consummate politician; and perhaps the only one the Stuart dynasty had ever produced (or ever would produce). Nowhere was his political astuteness seen to greater effect than in the King’s presentation of himself as ‘the son of Mary Queen of Scots’. The only child of the exquisite doomed Queen, who lost her head at Fotheringhay, and the charming wastrel Henry Lord Darnley, blown up at Kirk o’Field, hardly resembled either of his glamorous parents. But for many Catholics, the spiritual dimension was the one that counted. The first Supplication of the English Catholics to King James, in 1603, thought it especially shrewd to drag in a reference to ‘Your Majesty’s peerless… martyred’ mother.
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Even more bizarre, perhaps, was the Catholic belief, sincerely maintained, that ‘the mother’s merits’ – that is, the spiritual merits gained by Mary Queen of Scots’ martyrdom – would shortly win from God the grace of the King’s
conversion to Catholicism.
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This belief, for which there was absolutely no basis in reality, was encouraged by the subtle diplomacy of the King himself. It was a view that was widely held not only amongst the modest and perhaps naive Catholic laity but also in the counsels of the Catholic great. These included an august pair of Habsburg regents, the Archduke Albert and his wife the Archduchess Isabella, sister of Philip III of Spain, who ruled in the so-called Spanish Netherlands.
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Here Protestant rebels had waged a thirty-year war against Spanish dominion. Despite English support (on religious grounds) these rebels had never succeeded in throwing off the Spanish yoke. Nor for that matter had Spain quelled them. The main result of this inconclusive contest was the financial exhaustion of all parties.

Nevertheless, King James received a friendly greeting from the Catholic Archduke in Brussels on his accession. The Archduke also informed Philip III that he had resolved to send an official envoy to James, without consulting his brother-in-law, so anxious was he to make friends with England (Albert had already released English prisoners following Elizabeth’s death).
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One of the important provinces of the Spanish Netherlands was Flanders, which had a long seaboard, including the coastal town of Ostend, not many miles across the water from Dover and England’s south-east coast. This geographical position made Flanders a kind of debatable land in the religious struggles of the times. From the vantage point of Flanders, Spain might contemplate the invasion of England; similarly England might despatch its own soldiers across the narrow crossing to support the Flemish Protestants.

Furthermore, the English Catholics might take refuge in Flanders against oppression at home. In this way, many young Englishmen, inspired by personal ambition and religious idealism, had become mercenaries in the Spanish armies in the Low
Countries. It was for them liberating to seek advancement in an atmosphere where Catholicism was no bar to success, and there was always the question of restoring the True (Catholic) Religion to England. One day the all-powerful King of Spain might use his armies to bring about this restoration by force. Despite the failure of the Spanish Armada to secure an invasion of England in 1588, the Catholic expatriate soldiers continued to bear such a possibility in mind.

Typical of such adventurers, at once devout and aggressive, was Guy Fawkes. He was a native of York, who had been fighting in Flanders for the last ten years and who had at least once gone to Spain as part of an intrigue to raise military help for the English Catholics. But in the joyous atmosphere of the new King’s reign, amid these rosy hopes of his conversion, and with the peace-loving Pope Clement VIII, who loved to mediate between great powers, making friendly overtures, maybe those days of lethal plotting had passed.

Moreover, unknown to Guy Fawkes, the slow-moving Byzantine council of Philip III had reached an important decision, even as Queen Elizabeth lay on her deathbed. There was to be no invasion, no imposition of a foreign Catholic sovereign of England: the English Catholics would reach their own solution to the subject of the succession. Thus Philip III approved instructions for a senior envoy Don Juan de Tassis to congratulate James even though Spain and England were still technically at war.
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Tranquillity in the Netherlands and a treaty with England, which had for so long supported their infuriating Protestant rebels, were the new aims of the Spanish high command. They were hardly aims which fitted into any pattern of violent conspiracy against the new English King.

In this atmosphere of general benevolence, both national and international, the Scottish King set out on 5 April to travel south to take possession of his new kingdom. He was, wrote the playwright Thomas Dekker, ‘our
omne bonum
[general goodness] from the wholesome north, Our fruitful Sovereign James’. In a further flight of the imagination, Dekker described
the King as accompanied by ‘silver clouds of blissful angels’.
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He might have been more accurate to describe the King’s retinue as a grasping crowd of greedy Scots – at least from the English point of view. But the xenophobic English crossness about James’ Scottish favourites had yet to find expression. For the time being, it was more significant that the host of English nobles who had rushed north had managed to join the triumphant procession south again.

Sir Robert Carey, his heroic feat underlined by the fact that he was still ‘bebloodied and with bruises’, was there. He was rewarded by being made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber of the King. It was, however, a position somewhat above his actual importance and he would indeed be demoted in the less sentimental atmosphere of the south, proving, alas, that the race was not after all to the swift. And not only the English were there: the French Ambassador came south from Edinburgh as a token of French friendship. He must, though, have seemed a dubious asset since his wife had to be carried all the way to London ‘in a chair with slings’ by shifts of perspiring porters.
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At the important stronghold of Berwick, the salutation was especially joyous. ‘Happy day,’ as a contemporary account had it, ‘when peaceably so many English Gentlemen went to bring in an English and Scottish King, both included in one person.’ They introduced him into a town that had for ‘many hundred years’ been ‘a Town of the Enemy’, or at the least held for one nation or the other. So much ordnance was shot off that the whole town lay in a mantle of smoke, as if there had been ‘an earthquake’. There were ancient soldiers settled there – ‘old King Harry’s lads’ – who must have been in their late seventies. These retired warriors vowed they had never seen a display to match this one.

So it was on to Newcastle (where the King admired the beauty of the Tyne Bridge), to Durham (after which, at a high spot outside Haughton-le-side, he enjoyed a ‘beautific vision’ of the country that was now his), and to York, where James was received by Lord Burghley, Lord President of the Council
of the North. Here the King insisted on walking to church: ‘I will have no coach; for the people are desirous to see a King, and so they shall, for they shall as well see his body as his face.’ Good cheer was universal – in the shape of red and white wine provided all day for the populace.

King James now passed on to those magnificent midland palaces, prosperous emblems of a powerful and settled nobility. The English lords were, as he believed, in marked contrast to the rough Scots lords who with their kidnappings, murders and threats to his person had made portions of his life a misery. The awkward fact that the old Queen had not yet been formally buried at Westminster Abbey (it was royal custom for this to happen a month after death) meant that the King was obliged to linger at this point. It would not do for his arrival to coincide embarrassingly with his predecessor’s obsequies.

James dallied for four or five days at Burghley in Northamptonshire. This great Renaissance edifice had been erected by Elizabeth’s servant, the first Lord Burghley, and had passed to his elder son. It could therefore be held to symbolise the rewards of loyal service in England, since the origins of the Cecil family were neither rich nor aristocratic. To the King from the north, however, the monumental exterior and the richly furnished interior ‘like to an Emperor’s’, with its Turkey carpets, long galleries, huge floor-to-ceiling portraits, spelt luxury and leisure. Unlike Scottish castles of this date, Burghley was not fortified against attack.
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There was no need.