The Gunpowder Plot: Classic Histories Series E-Book

Alan Haynes

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Classic Histories Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 346

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Every child has heard of Guy Fawkes and will most likely have watched a 'guy' being burnt on a bonfire and fireworks lighting up the night sky on Bonfire Night. This book answers the questions of history that lie behind the celebrations of 5 November. Who was Guy Fawkes and how to did he come to be below the chamber of the House of Lords in the first hour of 5 November 1605? What desperation drove those involved to plan a horrific massacre of the Protestant royal family and government? Alan Hayne's probing analysis offers the clearest, most balanced view yet of often conflicting evidence, as he disentangles the threads of disharmony, intrigue, betrayal, terror and retribution. In this updated edition he gathers together startling evidence to uncover the depth and extent of the plot, and how close the plotters came to de-stabilising the government in one of the most notorious terrorist plots of British history. This enthralling book will grip the general reader, while the scope of its detailed research will require historians of the period to consider again the commanding importance of the plot throughout the seventeenth century.

Leseprobe

THE

GUNPOWDER

PLOT

ALAN HAYNES

In loving memory of my parents Eve and William Haynes

First published in 1994

This edition published in 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Alan Haynes, 1994, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2011

The right of Alan Haynes, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7616 2

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7615 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

1 The Politics of Salvation

2 Plotters in Exile

3 The Failed Plots

4 The Gentlemen of the Sword

5 The Hand of Providence

6 Spies and Soundings

7 Treason’s Discovery

8 After Midnight

9 Transgression on Trial

10 The Second Wave

11 ‘Sharp Additions’

12 Postlude: The Plot, the Playwright and the Poets

Appendix I The Gunpowder Commemorative Painting

Appendix II The Swords of the Gentlemen

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

God forbid that we should give

out a dream of our own imagination

for a pattern of the world.

Francis Bacon

In conjectures I durst not be too bold,

but when they seem to offer themselves,

they deserve the choice of judgment.

John Selden

ONE

The Politics of Salvation

It was a defensive and angry King Henry VIII with his compliant ministers, clerics and a complacent Parliament who had snatched the English church from papal control. In the years after this sensational event, the struggle for the soul of England and Wales was conducted variously with dignity, acrimony and cunning cruelty, as well as raging conviction. Religion remained ‘the motive power of the age’. The puzzled and beleaguered English Catholic community of clerics and laymen struggled to find a secure place in a challenging, discordant Protestant society in which some Protestant reformers heaped scorn on Catholicism, calling the Catholic Church ‘the Pope’s playhouse’ and endeavouring to prove that the pontiffs had in the later ages fulfilled the prophecy of St John in regard to the Antichrist. The chronological and historical sense of identity and obligation became severely distorted. The Elizabethan calendar year for the Church, law and government began late in March, generally coinciding with the major festival of Easter and the timeless, visible hope of spring. Popular usage continued to call 1 January ‘new year’s day’. Protestants and puritans alike shifted their religious observance away from the quotidian cycles of the land and the old liturgical cycle, because they lived in towns and there were clocks to rival bells. The disconnection had profound consequences. ‘The Protestants took upon themselves in different spirits the robes of the prophets.’1 For those of the old faith an arhythmic and unnatural tugging at the spirit took place, engendering simultaneous feelings of belonging and estrangement. These were especially disturbing for the lesser peerage and gentry class of landowners; from the Humber to the Severn there stretched a solid belt of opulent and obstinate followers of the old religion.

Pressure on Catholics was immediate under Elizabeth since the religious settlement effected by and for her in 1559–60, which smothered the flames of Protestant martyrs, also completed the ‘institutional wreckage begun with the monasteries, advanced by the chantries acts and furthered by the conversions of the priesthood’. Even a mild resistance to this was hard to muster after the crashing failure in 1569 of the rebellion of the northern earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. From then on, Catholicism, like a great lake subject to a newly hostile climate, began to shrink to areas remote from London and the privy council, to country villages, sometimes to just a great seigneurial house and its environs, where observation and obligation fast tethered it. Lord Vaux made the point in 1581 when he claimed that his house had become his parish.2 The rituals of the old faith could be conducted indoors with some trepidation, but public expressions of it were normally held to be too risky. Even so, there were those for whom its importance overrode disquiet at the possible consequences. The Rookwoods in Suffolk, for example, kept Corpus Christi, the greatest feast of the late medieval church, with great solemnity and music ‘and the day of the Octave made a solemn procession about a great garden’,3 but ventured no further. The most unhappy pendant to the woeful failure in 1569, and the fierce government repression that then followed, on the instigation of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was the insidious growth of self-pity.

This erratic growth could lead to a lack of realism as the government pressed their advantage and devised an auxiliary policy of seeking to impoverish Catholics materially. As their wealth was gnawed away, so too was their chief spiritual resource – the priesthood. Out of this dismal jam of oppression and self-repression (a key component in the growth of a conspiracy) came elements of resistance and among the clerics in exile there was the notable Dr (later Cardinal) William Allen to give voice and funds to their efforts. His initial leanings to Protestantism had been swamped and he regarded the Elizabethan Settlement as an affront to believers.4 When he at length founded the English College at Douai in Flanders it was ‘so that English seminarians could return home to gentry households, primarily in London and the Thames valley where Catholicism was not the strongest, in order to provide pastoral care and, in some cases, engage in soul-saving.’ Since the gentry household was a supportive institution for an extended ‘family’ of blood relations and servants, the government saw no option but to apply pressure. The looming problem was now to extirpate Catholicism by statute without provoking a sequence of bloody stirs that would have to be put down with rigour. It was a problem given another twist by the maverick presence in England of a Catholic claimant to the English throne – Mary, Queen of Scots. Moreover, the end of the rebellion in 1569 had not been instantly achieved, and the government doubtless reflected ruefully on their good fortune that the earls were incompetents.

Nor had their external sympathizers proved much wiser, it has to be said, and the publication of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis (25 February 1570) confirmed this. The purity of intention of Pope Pius V need not be doubted for he had a mode of thinking unblemished by low political considerations. He held Elizabeth to be an open, avowed heretic, who had broken her solemn promise, and all that was necessary was this bull which would restore the faith. It excommunicated her from the Roman Catholic Church without warning because of her manifestations of heresy, and it immediately deposed her from the throne without the usual formal delay of one year following excommunication. The people were hence released from obligation or allegiance to this ruler and commanded to flout her laws. Even without a clear call to Catholics to rebel, such risings as happened were condoned, so encouraging those who previously might have held back from such an extreme tactic. So the bull polarized domestic matters in an international context when it was made public in England by John Felton, the Catholic barrister who nailed it to the door of the Bishop of London’s residence in a wry parody of Luther. It suggested to many ‘that patriotism could not permit them to follow so extreme a religion’. But others recoiled because if they took the Pope at his word it was likely that they too would die like Felton on the gallows. Papal support of the Ridolfi plot against Elizabeth was equally ill-advised; the vision of a saint in the making in Rome did no harm for the time being to Mary Stuart, but her ally the Duke of Norfolk was tried and executed in 1572.5

It is worth recalling that in its particulars the Elizabethan Settlement never had been lenient. To accelerate acceptance and flush out dissenters a parliamentary statute was passed in the spring of 1563. Known as An Act for the assurance of the Queen’s Majesty’s royal power . . . it was directed ‘against those that extol the power of the Bishop of Rome and refuse the oath of allegiance’. The dilemma for Catholics was underscored by the retributive element: on the first refusal to take the oath they were liable to loss of lands and imprisonment, and a second refusal was regarded as treason and punishable by death. After the 1569 rebellion, which had so shaken confidence, the government issued Queen Elizabeth’s Defense of Her Proceedings in Church and State which outlined her authority in the Church. It made claims for royal authority that were modest when compared to the statements of her father, while still declaring the intention to oversee ‘the laws of God and man which are ordained to that end to be duly observed, and the offenders against the same duly punished . . .’. New legislation was passed in 1571 by Elizabeth’s third Parliament. In the Treasons statute there was a direct borrowing of a phrase from the earlier statute of 1534 which prohibited any speech of writing that labelled the monarch a ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or an usurper’ – all things that the more reckless of the animated disciples of Mary Stuart were liable to example. To buttress the statute there was now a prohibition on spoken words or texts that denied Elizabeth’s lawful occupation of the throne. A second statute made the attempt to execute a papal bull treason, as was any attempt to lure to Rome anyone willing to jettison their obedience to the queen. The third statute was directed against the property of Catholic exiles, especially those who had scattered after the disaster of late 1569 – the rebellion being followed by summary trials and many executions.

In the mid-1570s the effort of William Allen at Douai, then Rheims and later Rome, in the English colleges for seminarians, began to mature. The clandestine return to England of enthusiastic young priests in disguise led to some gains, but the grip of the government remained severe. Nor was there anyone among the opposition with sufficient political weight to negotiate for toleration of dissident religion, and with the secret arrival of the first Jesuit mission a new and unnerving political component was suddenly thrust into the exchanges. It was assumed that the provisions of Regnans in Excelsis had a meaning beyond the papal court, especially in Spain, which was set on a course of expansion, absorbing Portugal by force of arms and threatening to crush the Dutch rebels. Remove practical leadership or block its growth and the void is inevitably filled by heedless enthusiasts whose prescriptions are moulded by fanaticism. Such a man at the end of the sixteenth century was Father Robert Persons (or Parsons) of the Society of Jesus who mesmerized the eager and impressionable after returning to England in company with Father Edmund Campion and others.6 Persons was a yeoman’s son and scholarship boy whose formidable abilities had allowed him to better himself. The former fellow and dean of Balliol College, Oxford, was as covertly political as any Jesuit was allowed to be by the rules of the order. The Instructions to the returners said that they were not to become involved in affairs of state, nor write to Rome about political matters, nor speak, nor allow others to speak in their presence, against the queen – except perhaps with those whose fidelity had been long and steadfast, and even then not without strong reasons.

Still, the agenda of the Jesuits was not a mystery.7 They intended the reversal of Protestant gains and capitulation to Rome, and though Edmund Campion, whose covert preaching aroused such tender admiration and fervour, might be regarded as less obviously political than Persons, he belonged to an order that was meshed with the enemies of England, and the Spanish party, supported by Persons as an active and able member, did not confine itself entirely to writings. In order to defeat the Jesuit mission which was noted by English spies of the privy council even before the covert landing in England, the government set out new legislation in the third session of the fourth Elizabethan Parliament: two anti-Catholic measures ‘to make provision of laws more strict and more severe’ in order to force them ‘to yield their open obedience’. The bill introduced by Sir Francis Knollys, father-in-law of the Earl of Leicester whose puritanism had an increasingly political slant, raised the fine for absence from Sunday communion from 1s. to a startling and potentially ruinous £20 per lunar month. This put pressure on the gentry of whom Burghley was most suspicious, and it met his demand for a weapon against ‘the socially influential and politically dangerous’. It became treason to convert anyone to Catholicism, and even to be present at mass meant a year’s imprisonment as well as a fine. To ensure that the Act worked as intended informers were rewarded. The second measure stiffened penalties for seditious words and rumours spoken against Elizabeth, with a second offence leading to execution. It was also made a felony to write or print material regarding the possible longevity of the queen and the acutely interesting matter of the succession. Even the puritans in the House of Commons flinched at this since they wondered if the government had them in its sights as well.

Meanwhile, Burghley was concerned with hunting down the Jesuits, particularly Campion who declared mildly he had come to preach the faith and not as an agent of the papacy to meddle in politics. The challenge for the energetic Persons was to do his work and evade all efforts to take him by scampering from one hideout to another. He succeeded triumphantly, but Campion was less fortunate and was eventually seized at the Yate family home, Lyford Grange in Berkshire. This was the result of the persistent efforts of a pursuivant George Eliot – known as ‘Judas’. After a spell in the Little Ease in the Tower of London (a cell that cramped the body as well as the spirit by restricting movement), Campion was subjected to several examinations, including one by Elizabeth herself and another by ecclesiastical commissioners.8 He was willing to defer to the queen’s temporal power – she was his ‘lawful governess’ – but he must pay to God what was his, including the supremacy of the Church, a view that he maintained with sublime conviction after torture on the rack. On trial with the absent Allen and Persons (who had taken refuge at Michelgrove in Sussex, the home of the Shelley family, before taking a boat to exile), charged with a cluster of crimes against the state, Campion pleaded not guilty. Evidence against him was woefully thin, but he was still convicted by the jury under the terms of the Treason statute of 1352, because the government did not want the trial to slide into a forum for debate on the relationship ‘between political allegiance and religious conversion’. It was difficult after Campion’s execution on 1 December to brand him as a traitor – to many he was a martyr and Burghley thought it necessary to counter this with a special publication after the capture by Walsingham of Francis Throckmorton, and the discovery of Somerville’s plan in the same year to assassinate Elizabeth. He developed his views (and those of the government) in the ominously titled pamphlet The Execution of Justice in England (1583) in which he affirmed ‘the states right to take whatever measures it thought necessary in its own defence’. Only if England could be isolated from the phenomenon called the Counter-Reformation (and martyrs for the Church were martyrs for the Pope and his allies), would Catholicism in England be effectively held up and then stifled. As it has been pointed out by a biographer of Burghley, where political Catholicism was concerned he was ruthless because he was fighting for the survival of the Tudor realm, but somewhat surprisingly he was also capable of charity towards recusants as the leading Catholic Sir Thomas Tresham noted in his own correspondence with him.9

Both Father Persons and Dr Allen responded to Burghley’s pamphlet, the former also using the opportunity to attack another privy councillor, the Earl of Leicester, in a lengthy diatribe published in 1584 and known under the short title of Leicester’s Commonwealth. Copies began to appear in England in the autumn of that year after the text had been assembled by a group of English lay Catholic exiles in France, with abundant help from Persons who organized its distribution from his bases in Rouen and Paris. In September Ralph Emerson, one of Persons’ aides, for the second time smuggled copies into England before being arrested and committed to the Counter prison in Poultry Street. Leicester’s self-esteem was wounded by the vitriolic text and he soon persuaded the privy council that it was not merely a personal squib aimed at his public and private reputation, but, more insidiously, an attack on the regime. However, the main effort to refute Burghley came in Allen’s A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of English Catholics, which reiterated the claim that the prosecution of Catholics was actually for religous reasons; they suffered death only for ‘cogitations and inward opinions’ and ‘never took arms in all England upon the bull of Pius V’. Against this the government was able, through its spy clusters and agents provocateurs, to offer apparent evidence that Allen was lying.

The shock of the Throckmorton plot with its links to Mary, Queen of Scots, the Pope and Philip II had been strong. The assassination of Prince William of Orange, leader of the Dutch patriots, added a further layer of distress and anger, since Leicester had long been advocating armed intervention to assist him. In October 1584 he, Walsingham and Burghley formed the Bond of Association which allowed the gentlemen who took the oath freedom to kill anyone who came to the English throne following the assassination of Elizabeth.10 It was an emotional piece of propaganda since in effect it sanctioned civil war, but it remains understandable given the lowering atmosphere that had settled over the country. In addition the government decided to hammer the clandestine Jesuits again, and, like the proclamation of January 1581, the main item in the new bill made the presence of a Jesuit or seminary priest, whatever his purpose, a treasonable offence. It became a felony to succour them, and anyone with knowledge of their presence who did not inform against them incurred a fine and imprisonment. All the queen’s subjects being educated abroad were to return home within six months and take the oath of supremacy – thus denying his Catholicism – while those who failed to do this incurred the penalties of treason. Not everyone in Parliament was entirely at ease with such draconian measures, but still the bill became law early in 1585, despite the willingness of some of the Catholic gentry to declare their allegiance to Elizabeth. Nor did these measures lie idle as many previous pieces of law-making had done; enforcement became the rule and in the next three years or so some 120 people were condemned by the statute.

Yet among the Catholic gentry there were still those who were not to be cowed by such battering legislation. The wealthy squire’s son, Anthony Babington, had been distributing Catholic books, supporting the new Catholic clergy and sheltering priests even before he took up the cause of the exiled and imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, who symbolized for young men of his ilk their stricken and unfortunate faith.11 Mariolatry had two sides, and her lambency became even stronger after the execution of Campion and the enforcement of the recusancy laws ‘had brought home to them the bitterness of their sufferings, which in royal patience she shared and surpassed’. Indeed, it has even been suggested that if Mary had been a Protestant the conspiracies on her behalf would have occurred just the same, because then the aim would have been simply a change of ruler, not a change of religion (and ruler). Young men of a romantic or chivalrous cast of mind then were often responsive to the somewhat obvious pathos of her dim situation; a peculiar misfortune, as it happened, since it could lead them into conflict with a swarm of spies and intelligencers reporting to Elizabeth’s severe and puritaninclined spy master, Sir Francis Walsingham. Given his position in the government as Secretary of State they were right to be frightened of him and his aides, yet they persisted with a passion in their swordhilt protestations of loyalty to Mary, a tall woman with an interesting personal history. This devotion lodged itself in the core of the strike against Elizabeth first envisaged by John Ballard, the bustling exiled priest who easily and convincingly disguised himself as a soldier. Babington was initially reluctant to get involved, but when his feelings about it shifted and the plan began to evolve, it is possible to see a shadowy prefiguring of the gunpowder plot itself. Both plots were held together by a strongly felt male bond that could override the loyalties of marriage and fatherhood. For example, young Thomas Salusbury, the owner of Lleweni in North Wales and a gentleman in the service of his guardian, the Earl of Leicester, was devoted (for no clear reason) to Babington. Salusbury had been forced into a marriage when aged ten to his stepfather’s daughter, an arrangement intended to secure financial advantages, and it was some years before he was reconciled to his bride.12 Beside Salusbury in the taverns of London, where gentlemen (perhaps at the Inns of Court) met for conviviality, was the young Welsh squire Edward Jones of Plas Cadwgan. He seems to have been an uncritical admirer of his compatriot whose style of clothes and beard marked him out as something of an exquisite, like the nonchalant and elegant young man in Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait miniature Young Man among Roses. Even so, Salusbury gave Jones only passing attention being altogether taken with Babington, whose charm, like that of Robert Catesby, was ultimately fatal. Another who centred his life on Babington was the minor poet Chidiock Tichborne, as did to a less marked degree John Travers and Edward Abington (sometimes given as Habington) whose fortunate brother Thomas managed to escape the brutal denouement of both the Babington and Gunpowder plots. Was this because the second plot unravelled so sweetly for the government through the effect of the famous anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle, which one writer has ascribed to the pen of his lordship’s sister Mary – the wife of Thomas Abington? While no women took part in the plot, it was frequently associated with the supposed sneaky cunning of women, so many were imprisoned and questioned.

The more dangerous of the two plots was certainly Catesby’s, because unlike the somewhat naïve Babington, who was compromised virtually at all points by government spies, he managed to exclude them. Still the similarities are striking for both men saw their efforts develop with the support of swordsmen with reputations as such, preliminary to a specific localized reaction in the country. For Babington this was intended to be the release of Mary, Queen of Scots and the gift of another crown and country to her. For Catesby, the culmination of his plot would come after the detonation of the gunpowder and would take place around Stratford-upon-Avon, with a general insurrection and a new government. At the head of this was to be placed the young Princess Elizabeth who at that time was also living in Warwickshire – at Combe Abbey, some four or five miles east of Coventry. In the case of neither man is it now possible to state with absolute certainty down to the last detail in what degree he shared his full plans with his supporters. In Babington’s case this may well have been due to a clumsy effort to throw off the government; in sociopath Catesby’s, to dissembling rooted in unconsidered, even anarchic, ambition. Perhaps he thought he could transform the former errors into positive action and so manufacture a triumph.

One of the secondary but not negligible effects of the Babington plot was to infuriate the Earl of Leicester. This was unfortunate for Catholics since in that frame of mind, as he proved repeatedly, he could be a very troublesome enemy. He had been trying for months to give the Dutch rebels direct support after they had sought the assistance of Elizabeth following the unexpected deaths of Prince William and François, Duke of Anjou. Leicester had been stuck in the Low Countries, piling up errors, both civil and military, during the period when Babington’s plot was taking place. While Burghley and Walsingham could point to a sharp demolition of treason, he had managed to upset Elizabeth by his blunders abroad. Back in England to rest and take stock Leicester trumpeted his hostility to Mary, pushed for her execution and harried the friends of the dead plotters. Catholics now found the fiscal retribution meted out to them began to hurt more than hitherto. If they defaulted on the £20 fine for recusancy the government was now permitted to take two-thirds of their estates. Babington’s – from which he had drawn an income stated to have exceeded £1,000 per annum (a modern equivalent might be close to £500,000) – passed to Sir Walter Ralegh, and in a period when the estates of gentlemen usually grew larger, Catholics saw theirs contract, sometimes quite brutally. Taxes on the gentry before 1640 were generally negligible, but the penal levies caused deliberate hardship and a burden that passed down the generations. It was this squeeze on property that was most likely to convince a family (at least its public figures) that the mass was not worth the attendant ruin that could follow. Even so, there were sterner spirits than the Salusburys and Bulkeleys, who had settled to erasing the memory of the errant Thomas whose estate was yet preserved by an old entail. One in whom the spirit of resistance lived on was Sir William Catesby of Lapworth in Warwicksire, with a lineage described as ‘ancient, historic and distinguished’. Reconciled to Catholicism by the mission of Persons and Campion, married to a Throckmorton, he suffered imprisonment and the plundering of his wealth. His acceptance of this (whether troubled or indifferent) and the snubbing of his traditional patriotism tilted his son Robert towards armed resistance despite abundant evidence that it would fail. The gunpowder plot used the template of Ballard and Babington, drawing its participants from ‘the pupils and converts of the Jesuit mission’.13 But it was necessarily flawed because it never achieved the critical mass that made its progress unstoppable. The unlucky thirteen main gunpowder plotters had a freight of personal conviction that was quite unmatched among contemporary lay Catholics. With a foundation of striking presumption they held fast to the view that death in the cause was nothing and ultimately they embraced their end as the prelude to eternal life. A wafer-thin fiction destroyed them. Perhaps it is possible still to find some explanation for this in developments after the execution of Mary and before that of the hapless Earl of Essex in 1601.

A mere six priests had fallen foul of the laws of England and had been executed themselves before the beheading of Mary. But in the following year, 1587, with the country in a state of edgy passivity, waiting for an attack from Spain, the tempo of executions was stepped up and thirty-one died. Also in that year the work of rounding up recusants and valuing their lands was taken from the local authorities and given to operatives of the privy council. Lacking inhibitions based on personal familiarity they went about their business with an unyielding vigour; a procedure enhanced by a promise of an ‘allowance out of the forfeitures’ they should secure, and also by the first chance to purchase from the queen the lease of confiscated lands. The early missionary successes proved to be temporary and collapsed as the war against Spain continued after the Armada crisis into the next decade. There remained a pervasive fear of attack and a national preoccupation with war. The efforts to dissolve lay Catholic allegiance to Elizabeth, which were mounted at home and abroad, led to further executions in the 1590s – eighty-eight in all. The estrangement of the majority of the population from the old faith was now certain, and the government’s measures to counter the vituperation of Father Persons and the pro-Spanish party abroad were accepted. ‘Policy and ideology converged in England’s national energies, which were largely directed to defensive as opposed to aggressive or interventionist ends.’ Not everyone favoured the brisk efforts of Essex in his leadership of the Cadiz expedition (1596) and the Islands voyage (1597). As Thomas Wilson noted in The State of England, Ann. Dom. 1600, the ‘common soldiers that are sent out of the realm be of the basest and most inexperienced, the best being reserved to defend from invasion.’ But laws to prohibit could also entice, and in court circles Catholicism had a fluttering fitful glamour as the late cult of Eliza took on a rather desperate air. The sort of scepticism about Rome that finds voice in Marlowe’s spiritual drama Dr Faustus, could yet open the way to a nostalgic conversion.

There were tensions, too, within the upper levels of government, involving the tugging of policy by factions. Lord Burghley, ageing and sometimes infirm, came increasingly to rely on the administrative skills of his younger son Sir Robert Cecil. They shared not only the primary tasks of office as ministers, but also an identical dislike of minorities, the improvident and dissident. In what seems like a deliberate contrast there was Essex who benignly gave such provocative elements neglected space, jobs and support whenever he identified an opportunity – and if it ruffled the Cecilians that was a pleasurable bonus. As the heir of his stepfather Leicester (d. 1588), the young earl had puritan support as well, and he married Walsingham’s daughter, the widow of the great Protestant hero Sir Philip Sidney just before Walsingham’s death. But among Essex’s closest friends were the dashing Earl of Southampton, an unsteady Catholic, and Sir Oliver Manners, who had turned back to the old faith. The convert cast of mind found expression in the works of Henry Constable, who had been at St John’s College, Cambridge, and yet had Catholic kinsfolk, including priests and nuns from the large Babthorpe family; the conversion of Constable himself seems to have taken place in 1591.14 A letter that he wrote to Essex in October 1595 is revealing, for in it he declared that ‘he was more affectionate to him than to any’ and although there was a gap between them on religious matters, the fact that this had forced him to depend on others had been against his will. He then claimed – as many of his co-religionists would have done – that although passionately devoted to Catholicism, he did not wish its restoration in England, nor the servitude of his country to a foreign tyranny, and that he had on several occasions dissuaded some of his Catholic countrymen from violence ‘and such as be in authority in the church from approving of them’.

Writing on the same day to Anthony Bacon who had returned to England from a lengthy (and not untroubled) sojourn in France to take control of Essex’s intelligence operations, Constable wrote: ‘An honest man may be a Catholic and no fool.’ Some time later the poet wrote again to Essex in terms that suggest the growth of a friendly understanding between them. He renewed his protests of lawful affection for his country and said that he had written to Rome to dissuade the Pope from believing that English Catholics actually favoured Spanish designs against Elizabeth who had just passed her ‘climacteric’ of sixty-three years (a number loaded with significance for Elizabethans). Sir Robert Cecil and Essex were both advised of Constable’s movements and apparent intentions, and on 12 September 1598 Sir Thomas Edmondes wrote to the former from Paris that there was a project afoot to send Constable to Scotland to encourage James VI to allow Catholics there ‘a toleration of Religion’, and to assure him of the devoted support of English Catholics. In March of the following year George Nicholson reported to Cecil from Edinburgh that Constable had arrived from France, and the Laird of Boniton, another Catholic, had travelled with him. Yet several days after, Roger Aston informed Cecil that James had refused Constable an audience; the king rejected the notion of toleration. However, despite a summons before the Lords of Sessions, by August of that year Constable and Boniton were indeed negotiating on behalf of the Pope with the king. The object, cited in a despatch from the London ambassador of France to Henri IV, was to win liberty of conscience for Catholics ‘et declarer la guerre à la Royne d’Angleterre, lui offrant pour cest affect grand denier et l’assistance de tous les Princes catholiques de la Chrestienté et d’ung grand nombre de Catholiques de ce royaume.’15

The mission was not a success and there was some disbelief in political circles in London, rather more closely informed than the French ambassador after long years of monarch watching, that James had ever seriously considered cutting ‘the grass under Her Majesty’s feet’. When Henry Constable returned to Antwerp from Scotland, Thomas Phelippes, sometime spy coordinator and code-breaker to Walsingham, received a letter from his agent in Brussels who used the alias John Petit. He reported Constable now keeping company with a priest named Tempest and the Earl of Westmorland. One day when out walking they met a young English lad who worked for an exiled printer (probably the gifted and indefatigable Richard Verstegen), ‘and asked him what books are printing against the King of Scotland’s title; he said he knew of none.’ Constable’s view of James had evidently shifted and he thought now that the king relied on ‘no party in England but the Puritans, and will enter with that pretence, and before the tree falls, if he can find opportunity.’

Evidently Constable was far from elated by his contacts with James, retreating from his former position of supporting him and making some rather disparaging comments. Petit again to Thomas Phelippes (alias Peter Halins): ‘he has been as backward for the King of Scots as he was forward before; he speaks of him as little better than an atheist, of no courage nor judgment, and says he and his intend to make havoc of England when the day comes.’ Even so, with no other significant candidate to succeed the childless Elizabeth remotely acceptable to his countrymen Constable thought to persevere with James, and he may have been the author of a book the king received that denounced the notorious Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, which appeared earlier in the decade with the alias R. Doleman for its author. This name was actually a cover for a collaboration between its essential author, Richard Verstegen, and its reviser Father Persons, a master of style in English and Latin. A text which Constable along with many others ascribed solely to him, it had repercussions in the succession debate that the stiff old queen tried to ward off. It was circulated on the continent late in the autumn of 1593, and a larger edition was printed in 1594 in Antwerp with a dedication to Essex. Optimism or an exile’s impertinence?

The book’s first purpose was to discredit the principle of legitimism ‘in favour of a contractual theory of sovereignty’, and then secondly to rubbish the claims of all save one person. James might briefly have hoped that the emotion generated by the execution of his mother would rally her Catholic supporters to his side. However, Verstegen and others in exile wanted a genuinely Catholic candidate to oust all others. Their book ‘brought together arguments for a Spanish successor which had been circulating since 1571’.16 Their choice was the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II, based on what we might regard as a rather strained ancestral argument, but she was a princess whose faith was unimpeachable. As far as James was concerned it was the most dangerous book of its time. More moderate Catholics looked to Lady Arabella Stuart, cousin of James, since she had been born in England and he had not. After the publication of Doleman her name was regularly noted high on the list of claimants, and there was also talk of her being married to Ranuccio Farnese, one of the sons of the Duke of Parma. Commentators and many politicians did take Doleman very seriously too, and the book naturally became the prized handbook of the Spanish party. James was advised that there was an urgent need for a Protestant pro-Stuart counter to this insidious text, and he was urged as well to woo the common lawyers in England. This was because they were rich and influential in government and held the key to his legal status. Men trained in law had been solid servants of the queen and they had to be convinced of his right to be considered native born, and of a chiming of interests.

The sustained and sometimes furious bickering of the ‘Spanish’ and ‘Scottish’ factions among the exiled Catholics reached its climax during the years 1596–1601. Each grouping was then busy denouncing the other to the Pope, the archduke and the King of Spain. The whole thing became merged in the deeper-seated strife between Jesuits and seculars which found expression in 1598 in the domestic exchanges known as the Archpriest controversy. Persons and those who thought as he did, infuriated the secular clergy who regarded them contemptuously as a ‘Hispanicized faction’, and who credited them as being the real cause of the harsh laws against Catholics in general. As for Henry Constable, he was evidently a stalwart in the greater diplomatic tug-of-war and gave it his own particular thrust. He had spent some time in Rome before moving to live in Paris as a pensioner of the Duchess of Vendôme, sister of Henri IV.17 He continued to write to the Pope and Cardinal Baronio, making proposals for the conversion of England by means of France. In his estimation it was possible because Henri IV had himself made the leap from Huguenot to Catholic for reasons of state. Constable’s notion had led to discussions between the cardinal and Persons, but the scorn of the English Jesuit for its lack of a practical basis was enough to convince Baronio that it was flawed. The prelate told Constable that the Pope would not consider the matter.

The Englishman was phlegmatic about this and his views did find favour with certain other English exiles in Flanders. In Paris, too, men of influence chose to regard it with interest and d’Epernon and de Sancy convinced among others the papal nuncio in France. For his part Constable had contacted Dr Stapleton of Louvain; Dr Barrett, then rector of the Douai seminary and Dr William Gifford, Dean of St Peter’s in Lille, who had a somewhat spotted career and was to be paid by the government agent Charles Paget for supplying the English government with information after the gunpowder plot. This friendly contact was already known to Persons, as was Gifford’s continued correspondence with the French ambassador in Rome. The Jesuit took the understanding that a scheme was evolving for England to be brought into the French sphere of influence – Antonio Perez, exiled from Spain on charges of treason, had already represented Henri IV to Essex, who too had many Scottish contacts and was greatly esteemed by James. So, through the good offices of Henri there were to be negotiations leading to the granting of qualified religious liberty even during Elizabeth’s declining years. On her death the understanding would be that the same religious space and flexibility would continue under the benign rule of James. Persons understood that James had begun already to edge his nobles to a wary agreement and had appointed the Archbishop of Glasgow as his ambassador to France. Further, that promoters of the effort already had their agents in England about Essex and other accessible members of the privy council. Lord Dacre was in Paris with the archbishop and Persons expected him to travel to Scotland for talks with James. As for Constable – he was to be sent to Rome again.

The Spanish ambassador to the papal court, the Duke of Sessia, forwarded news of all this diplomatic activity to his government. On 1 February 1601 the Spanish Council of State reported to Philip III that Constable – named as a great confidant of James – had indeed arrived in Rome, with (it was believed) the consent of the king.18