The present case of the Catholics of England is one of charity and not of justice.
CARDINAL DE ROJAS Y SANDOVAL
Primate of Spain, 1603
IN MID-JULY 1603, GUY FAWKES set out from Flanders for Spain. It was around the time that Sir Thomas Tresham and other English Catholics presented their loyal petition to King James at Hampton Court. But Fawkes’ objective was neither loyal to King James nor was it peaceable. He intended to proceed further with the plan which had long obsessed certain Catholic activists, to prod Spain into a genuine commitment to the invasion of England. In spite of King James’ calm accession, Fawkes still managed to believe that the time was ripe.
Guy Fawkes was now a man of thirty-three. His life is sometimes described as an enigma: but while certain details have been obscured by the thunderclouds of mythology surrounding his name, the essential facts are known. There may be ambiguous or at least puzzling characters in the large cast of the drama later called the Gunpowder Plot, for example Lord Monteagle. But Guy Fawkes is not one of them. Far from being enigmatic, he was a straightforward soldier – or you could say mercenary, since he had been enlisted in the Spanish army in the Low Countries rather than in the army of his native land.
Fawkes’ appearance was impressive. He was a tall, powerfully built man, with thick reddish-brown hair, a flowing moustache in the tradition of the time, and a bushy reddish-brown beard. His physical courage was an important element in his make-up, and he was also steadfast. At the crisis of his life, he showed himself capable of extraordinary fortitude. He was neither weak, nor was he stupid. Although Fawkes was a man of action (hence Tesimond’s reference to his ‘considerable fame among soldiers’), he was capable of intelligent argument as well as physical endurance, somewhat to the surprise of his enemies.1
Guy Fawkes was born in 1570, in York in a house in Stonegate which belonged to his parents, Edward Fawkes and the former Edith Jackson.2 Although the exact date of his birth is not known, it is likely to have been 13 April since he was unquestionably baptised in the nearby church of St Michael-le-Belfry three days later, and that was the customary gap.* Guy Fawkes’ family was not outwardly Catholic. Edward Fawkes was a conventional Protestant, having followed his own father’s profession of notary public, and succeeded him eventually as Registrar of the Exchequer Court. This of course meant that Edward Fawkes had sworn the Oath of Supremacy to hold office. Guy’s paternal grandmother, with whom he spent some time in early boyhood, born Ellen Harrington, came of a line of Protestant public servants: lord mayors and sheriffs. Guy Fawkes’ descent on his mother’s side was, however, different. The Jacksons were listed among the recusants of West Yorkshire, while Edith’s sister’s son (Guy’s first cousin), Richard Cowling, became a Jesuit priest.
When Guy was eight, his father died. Two or three years later his mother remarried a recusant, Denis Bainbridge. Their life at Scotton near Knaresborough brought Guy formally into the Yorkshire Catholic orbit. Nevertheless Edith Jackson Fawkes’ second marriage suggests that she had never lost the recusant sympathies in which she had been brought up.
The earliest strong Catholic influence upon Guy Fawkes was however exerted by St Peter’s School, York.† His schoolfellows included those taciturn swordsmen Jack and Kit Wright (the latter was Guy’s exact contemporary), as well as at least three men who became priests, Oswald Tesimond, Edward Oldcorne and Robert Middleton, put to death at Lancaster in 1601. It is evident that this outwardly conformist school was in fact something very different underneath. The previous headmaster had spent twenty years in prison for being a recusant. The current headmaster John Pulleine called himself a Protestant because otherwise he would have lost his job, but the Pulleines as a whole were notable Yorkshire recusants.
Pulleine himself played along with the authorities, and on one occasion denounced a priest to them: further proof of his loyalty, necessary for one of recusant stock. But there were surely many other masters, less visible than the head, who contributed to the atmosphere of this ‘Little Rome’ (to adapt the term used of Magdalen Viscountess Montague’s Sussex home). At any rate, Guy Fawkes in the prime of life was known to be a devout Catholic, like Tom Wintour after his conversion, assiduous in attending the Sacraments and taking Communion. Father Tesimond made the further comment that Fawkes’ kind of ‘exemplary life’ was rare among soldiers.3
Guy Fawkes took himself abroad in the early 1590s to serve in an army where he could exercise his talents and practise his Faith freely. Before that, he had acted for some months as a footman to the 1st Viscount Montague, Magdalen’s husband, at Cowdray in Sussex. (This was a good position for a young man in the household of a great lord, not a servile one.) Fawkes seems to have been dismissed by the venerable old peer ‘upon some dislike he had of him’. But he was subsequently reemployed by Montague’s grandson, Anthony, who succeeded as the 2nd Viscount Montague when he was eighteen. According to the young lord, this was at the suggestion of his steward, Spencer, who was kinsman to Fawkes. Spencer pleaded for Fawkes to be allowed to wait at table and Montague gave in, although by his own subsequent account he ‘scarcely thought’ about the matter.4 It may well be, however, that Montague, by inheritance one of the leaders of the Catholic community, went further. He may have actually helped Fawkes on in his army career by providing an introduction along the Catholic network, as would have been common practice. But Montague, who found his mere employment of Guy Fawkes embarrassing enough in 1605, was hardly likely to admit anything which was not already of record.
There is another question mark over the early life of Guy Fawkes. According to one account, he married Maria Pulleine while he was still in Yorkshire and she bore him a son, Thomas Fawkes, in 1591.5 A Pulleine bride would have been plausible for Guy Fawkes, since he was already connected to the family because of his mother’s second marriage. However, not one contemporary account at the time of Guy Fawkes’ greatest fame - or infamy – refers to him as a married man, nor is there any reference to his wife or child either in England or in the Low Countries.‡ If the marriage did indeed take place, perhaps it was very brief, with both wife and son dying almost at once, while Guy was still in Yorkshire. Such tragedies were all too common and maybe the loss precipitated Guy’s journey, first south, then abroad. But this is to speculate. What is known is that Guy Fawkes, the successful and admired soldier, was also leading a clean life unusual for his profession. Whatever the background to his ‘exemplary’ conduct, the picture is created of a kind of soldier-monk, a man with a mission which did not include family and children.
Guy Fawkes’ army career in the Spanish Netherlands prospered. Flanders was at that point ‘the mother of military invention’, as Tesimond described it. Fawkes was given a position and became an alferez or ensign and by the summer of 1603 was being recommended for a captaincy.6 His commander there in the service of Spain was Sir William Stanley, a veteran soldier in his mid-fifties.
Stanley had probably always been a Catholic at heart, yet his interesting military career under Elizabeth illustrated just how difficult it was for the government to decide who was and who was not a Papist, providing the person concerned did not obtrude it. Stanley had been knighted for his services in the English cause in Ireland in 1569, and in the Low Countries served under Elizabeth’s favourite Leicester, who praised his courage at the siege of Zutphen in 1586, calling him ‘a rare captain’ and ‘worth his weight in pearl’.7 Unfortunately the very next year Leicester’s rare captain, now Governor of Deventer, surrendered his fortress to the Spanish and formally announced his change of sides (and religion). It was, in a sense, a good career move for one finding himself in the Netherlands, especially if Stanley had always held Catholic sympathies. But the English were understandably outraged. Stanley, the traitor, was high on the government’s hate list.
Hugh Owen, another veteran, but a veteran spy rather than a soldier, also featured on this list. The ‘Welsh Intelligencer’ as he was sometimes known (he had been born in Caernarvonshire) was sixty-five at the death of Queen Elizabeth. For the last thirty years, since he fled from England, Owen had managed to have a finger in most of the conspiratorial pies in the Netherlands, his natural capacity for intrigue being greatly enhanced by his ability to communicate in Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, as well as English and, perhaps less usefully, Welsh. Owen, like Stanley, had supported the claims of the Archduchess Isabella. Whether it was Welsh antipathy or not, he had a passionate dislike of King James, whom he designated ‘this stinking King of ours’ and ‘a miserable Scot’.8 The two men, Owen and Stanley, had visited Spain together, and for a long time shared a belief in the future of Spanish military intervention as a means of solving the Catholic problem. Stanley himself had in the past been responsible for various forays against the English and Irish coasts.
Yet vast tectonic plates were moving slowly beneath the surface of the diplomatic world. Sure enough, this invisible movement would one day produce its visible earthquake. The age-long hostilities between Protestant England and Catholic Spain would be brought to an end, and a treaty between the two countries negotiated. Already by the time of Guy Fawkes’ unofficial mission on behalf of English Catholics, sensible men, close to the councils of the great, were beginning to appreciate that the time for violent solution had passed.
Guy Fawkes, a soldier rather than a diplomat, and certainly not close to the councils of the great, was not aware of this potential upheaval when he set out for Spain. The tectonic plates were moving, but the earthquake was still far off. It is only recent researches into the secret Spanish correspondence of the time which have revealed how doomed the Fawkes scheme was from the start. At the time the Spanish Council and Philip III continued to give amazingly friendly answers to Fawkes and his colleague Anthony Dutton, who had come from England and travelled to Spain via Flanders.9 They experienced much civility, just as Tom Wintour had a year earlier. It was not in the Spanish interest to give a yea or a nay, when elaborate courtesies would serve their purpose better and mask the changes which were occurring. However, a man in international politics who has not spotted a subtle change in direction tends to suffer an ignominious fate, or worse, as the story of Guy Fawkes shows.
As for Dutton, from his arrival in Valladolid in May, he had already displayed himself as an incorrigible optimist (or another ardent advocate like Tom Wintour). Dutton asserted flatly that the English Catholics were ready and waiting to rebel, and that it would not even take very long to secure success. ‘With work, speed, secrecy and good weather,’ declared Dutton, ‘we will have the game in six days.’10 How far from reality all this was! This was the same period when the Catholic Moses, Sir Thomas Tresham, was in the throes of declaring his loyalty to the crown, Catholic priests were denouncing the fanatical Bye Plot and being rewarded for their loyalty, and Catholics in general were eagerly awaiting that toleration which they believed had been promised to them in Scotland by their new King.
Fawkes’ memorandum (in his handwriting, preserved in the Spanish archives) has an even more bizarre flavour, given that in July 1603 King James had been over two months happily resident in England and had recently remitted recusant fines. Fawkes wrote that the King’s claims to inherit were scorned all over England as illegitimate. Then James was repeatedly described as ‘a heretic’, one who intended ‘in a short time to have all of the Papist sect driven out of England’. His table-talk was said to be equally crude: ‘Many have heard him say at table that the Pope is Anti-Christ which he wished to prove to anyone who believed the opposite.’ Any overtures to Spain for peace, Fawkes declared, were to be treated as royal subterfuges of the basest sort. The King’s true intention was to enrich himself with the property of Catholics and, once grown powerful as a result, join with other Protestants ‘to wage war on the rest of the Christian princes’ who were not heretics.11
So far, so passionate and, given King James’ genuine desire for international peace, so wrong-headed. But there is another aspect to the memorandum and this is its fierce anti-Scottish bias. Fawkes concluded the memorandum with this prophecy: ‘There is a natural hostility between the English and the Scots. There has always been one, and at present it keeps increasing [due to grievances felt by the English against the King’s advancement of his Scottish favourites]. Even were there but one religion in England,’ went on Guy Fawkes, ‘nevertheless it will not be possible to reconcile these two nations, as they are, for very long.’
It has to be said, however, that Guy Fawkes’ raging against the all-pervasive Scots was the one aspect of his memorandum which would have commended itself to the majority of his fellow Englishmen. It certainly gave notice of a new, potentially rebellious feeling among the English: deep resentment at being passed over in favour of the greedy new men from the north.
Although the Spanish Council did solemnly debate the propositions of Dutton and Guy Fawkes, a percipient point was made in the course of the discussion by the Duke of Olivares, the King’s chief minister. ‘Any increase in men to a Catholic faction is composed of the malcontents,’ he remarked.12 And the debate was not ultimately favourable to the Englishmen’s cause.
In the meantime Father Cresswell, Superior of the English College, who a year previously had been encouraging action, along with Tom Wintour, had now changed his tack. He begged the Council to send Dutton and Guy Fawkes away, on the ground that they were endangering the negotiation of a diplomatic peace. In Rome, the Pope was equally resolute in asserting that ‘the way of arms’, in the phrase of Philip III, would simply result in the destruction of those English Catholics that remained.13
The only real memento that Guy Fawkes took away from this unpromising mission was a change of name: henceforth he would be known universally as Guido, the name he also used for his official signature. It was a name which might be said by his enemies to make his foreign allegiances clear. But that was not how Guido Fawkes saw the matter. In his eyes, he was both a sincere Catholic and a patriotic Englishman, an Englishman abroad but with the true interests of his country at heart.
From the point of view of English Catholic liberty of conscience, one crucial journey did take place in the summer of 1603: not the expedition of that amateur diplomat and adventurer Guy – now Guido – Fawkes, but the important mission of Don Juan de Tassis, from Spain to England. (The fact that Tassis could set out, travelling via Brussels, while the Spanish Council had still not officially ruled out providing armed support is characteristic of the ambiguity with which they operated.) Tassis’ brief was to pave the way for an Anglo-Spanish treaty and in so doing explore the whole matter of liberty of conscience for English Catholics.14
For example, should toleration be a precondition of any treaty? Should the Spanish King hold out for it at all costs? In any case, what was the nature of the English Catholic community? Strong, armed, rebellious? Or crushed, weak and disorganised? There had been many wild reports recently from visitors, including Wintour and Fawkes, and Tassis was going to test the truth of these claims
A peaceful tide was flowing across Europe and King James was by temperament the right man to go with it. Guido’s denunciation of him as a militant was extremely wide of the mark. It was the personal motto in which King James would take pride, Beati Pacifici (Blessed are the Peacemakers), which expressed the truth. Although Spain and England were still technically at war, the immediate Anglo-Spanish ceasefire which James had ordered on his accession provided the diplomatic excuse for Tassis’ journey. It was now a matter of protocol that Spanish royal congratulations should be conveyed to James on his accession. Meanwhile the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella were so enamoured of the possibilities of the new reign that they despatched their own welcoming envoy without consulting Spain, the mother country. The new King’s friendship was precious, Isabella had written in April, ‘as a chance of peace’.15
The presence of an embassy from a foreign Catholic power had an important side effect for the Catholics of England. Traditionally the government did not interfere with the private celebration of the Mass in an embassy chapel, nor seek to question too closely the status of the embassy officials, some of whom might be priests: embassies were in theory foreign soil. Englishmen could therefore slip into the great warrens of houses where such embassies were based and not only attend Mass but also enjoy Catholic contact. They could do so, if they were prepared to endure the ordeal of Cecil’s spies, eager to report who paid this kind of suspicious visit, as a method of discovering secret Papists. It was all part of the deadly game which Papists and their priests played, balancing the Mass against imprisonment.
The arrival of an envoy from the greatest Catholic power of all, Spain, produced incredible excitement. One of Don Juan de Tassis’ official escorts, Sir Lewis Lewkenor, thought it his duty to advise Cecil that ‘some gentlemen known to be recusants’ had rushed to greet him, and some of them in their eagerness even awaited his landing at Dover on 31 August.16
Tassis came from a family which (under the other version of the name, Taxis) had given nearly a century of service to the Habsburgs. He himself had acted as Court Chamberlain to Philip III since 1599. While Tassis clearly enjoyed the trust of his King, he was not a trained diplomat but a court official. Moreover his instructions betrayed a startling naivety concerning the English scene. He bore with him letters of greetings to many members of the English nobility, including ten dukes – but there were no dukes at all in England at the present time.§ Tassis was also supposed to greet ten marquesses which was slightly easier to achieve since there was actually one marquessate in England, that of Winchester.
Tassis’ stay in Brussels en route had been no more helpful in preparing him realistically for what he would find in England. Secret conferences were held ‘at a late hour to protect us from [English] spies’, with men like Sir William Stanley and Hugh Owen and a Jesuit, Father William Baldwin, who was part of their counsels. There was more talk of Catholic troops in waiting – the figure of twelve thousand men was mentioned. And Tassis’ card was marked concerning the English nobles he would encounter, and how friendly they were to the Spanish (Catholic) cause. Even here the familiar anti-Scottish note struck. The new Scottish favourites at the English court, such as Sir George Home, were said to be unenthusiastic about Spain – but it was thought that they would change their opinions if bribed.17
Tassis, if not a trained diplomat, was shrewd and practical. It is to his credit that once in England he realised very quickly how false the picture was that he had been given. His letters back to Spain reflect a complete change of approach from the lofty militarism of the high summer. Lewkenor complained that the recusants continued to accost Tassis in the course of his ‘slow journey’ to Oxford, which was destined to be his first official resting-place. Some Spaniards in his train took the opportunity to slip into the prisons and visit ‘the seminary priests … detained prisoners’.18 Lewkenor, however – and Cecil – would have been gratified rather than angered if they had had the opportunity to read the reports despatched by Tassis back to Spain. For Tassis was not impressed by what he found.19
The recusants ‘go about in such a timid fear of one another’, he wrote, ‘that I would seriously doubt that they would risk taking to arms’ unless there was a clear and definite opportunity. A month after his arrival, he was expressing serious disappointment. The numbers of active Catholics had been grossly inflated. In short, he had no expectation of any Catholic ‘stir’ (a commonly used word for a rising).
One of the activists that Tassis did meet was Tom Wintour. He was privately of the opinion that Wintour was a Jesuit, although Wintour introduced himself merely as one that had kissed the hands of the King of Spain ‘less than two years ago’ in the course of negotiations with members of the Spanish Council. Wintour’s fluent Spanish was useful once more on this occasion since Tassis spoke no English. Even so, he failed to convince Tassis that ‘3,000 Catholics’ were ready, only needing the promised money from Spain to spur them forward.
Tassis was finally received by King James on 8 October in a series of ceremonies which lasted for three days. (Not only had the King been away hunting since his arrival, but there remained the persistent fear of plague which led him to avoid official duties.) Tassis presented the King with some fine Spanish horses – under the circumstances, a suitable gift – and for Queen Anne there were magnificent jewels. There was however one hitch. The King was disconcerted to find that Tassis did not have plenipotentiary powers to negotiate the coming treaty. These had been granted to a member of the Spanish Council known as the Constable of Castile, who was still in Spain.
Tassis also had to make an adjustment. Writing back to Spain he poured cold water on those rumours of King James’ conversion to Catholicism. James was a Protestant and likely to remain so, despite the hints so casually dropped by his emissaries in the 1590s. Even more to the point, James’ current attitude to Catholic ceremonies was not at all what Tassis had been led to expect. Great care was being taken to ensure that the King had no official knowledge of any Mass being said: it was a case of a discreet ‘Mass in a corner’ here and there in private (Northumberland’s term to James in Scotland), nothing more public. There was general doubt whether King James would ever ‘permit’ the Catholic religion to be practised, but it was also viewed as fatal if the Spanish King was seen to be trying to set up his own religion ‘in this country’. On 12 October, the day after he parted from King James, Tassis wrote quite frankly to Philip III to say that the question of the free exercise of the Catholic religion ‘should be left aside until the peace has been negotiated’.20
Disappointed by the quality of local Catholic support, Tassis now believed that the English Catholics should continue to play that passive role for which they seemed best fitted. They were not after all Spanish subjects. If they had been, King Philip would be obliged to help them as a matter of justice, but as Cardinal de Rojas y Sandoval, the Primate of Spain, succinctly expressed it, the present case of the Catholics of England was ‘one of charity’ from the Spanish King ‘and not of justice’.21
This was a message appreciated by Philip III, who at long last gave up playing with the notion of a ‘stir’. In a letter the following February, he summed up the new official line: it was essential that ‘these Catholics’ (the English) should avoid arousing the suspicions of their sovereign at this crucial moment when there was a real prospect of a treaty.22 In short, the diplomatic solution was to prevail.
There was, however, some question of buying liberty of conscience for the Catholics. To some, including the Pope, this was an abhorrent idea: Clement VIII denounced it as ‘unworthy and scandalous’ since it would mean using unclean money to interfere with the divinely ordained timescale for these things. The Spanish Council was also worried by the proposition, not on moral grounds, but more pragmatically, because other religious minorities might request the same lavish treatment.23
In England, however, Tassis found himself entering the sweetly corrupt world of the Jacobean court, where bribery was not so much unworthy as a thoroughly worthy way of life. The promise of pensions – paid secretly by Spain – became a weapon in maintaining a pro-Spanish party at court. Of course the Spanish records of the money promised do not necessarily confirm that the money was actually received (Tom Wintour was after all still waiting for that promised Spanish subsidy). Whether all the promised money was paid over or not, it has to be said that very few names of prominent courtiers are missing from the Spanish pension records during the first decade of James’ reign. In general, the desire to amass money was like a fierce universal lust in the Jacobean period. (Both Cecil and Henry Howard Earl of Northampton had acquired large fortunes and great properties by their deaths, despite having begun, for different reasons, as poor men.) Most of James’ courtiers, as Tassis found, would have agreed with the aphorism of Francis Bacon, the lawyer and politician recently knighted for his loyalty to the crown: ‘Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.’
Outstanding for her avarice was the beautiful, wilful Catherine Countess of Suffolk. Her husband, formerly known as Lord Thomas Howard, a son of the executed Duke of Norfolk, had been given his Suffolk title in July as part of King James’ rehabilitation of the Howard family that he loved. The new Earl of Suffolk was thus a nephew of Northampton and, like Northampton, he had tasted the bitterness of family disgrace in youth. As Lord Thomas Howard, however, he had won the Queen’s favour by his distinguished service as a naval commander both at the time of the Armada and after. To Queen Elizabeth, in consequence, he had been her ‘good Thomas’.
Now in his early forties, the Queen’s good Thomas was resolved to be the King’s good Suffolk, but the glory days of naval warfare were over for him and it was as a leading courtier that he intended to shine – a courtier and hopefully a rich man. He was given the post of Lord Chamberlain of the Household while Catherine Suffolk was made Keeper of the Jewels to Queen Anne.
The kindest thing that can be said about the Suffolks, as a couple, is that they had a huge family to maintain: Catherine Suffolk bore at least ten children, seven of whom were sons. But, even as parents, they cannot be said to have shone. A Suffolk daughter, Lady Frances Howard, would one day, with her second husband, the Earl of Somerset, be accused of conspiracy to murder Sir Thomas Overbury; she spent some years in the Tower. It is a story that lies outside the timescale of this narrative, as does the final fall of the Suffolks from grace, thanks to their amazing peculations. Even Catherine Suffolk’s famous beauty did not escape scot-free. As in a morality play, ‘that good face of hers’ which had brought much misery to others ‘and to herself greatness’ was ruined by smallpox in 1619.24
At the beginning of James’ reign, however, the Countess of Suffolk was in her prime, and Tassis was mesmerised by her. She had already indicated Catholic sympathies and pro-Spanish feelings to an emissary from the Archdukes in Flanders before Tassis arrived in England; she had emphasised the prime importance of pensions and gifts in the delicate matter of establishing liberty of conscience. He allowed himself to be convinced that the key to ‘all the affairs of the bribes’ lay within her pretty grasp and that she was an essential ally in the preliminaries of the Anglo-Spanish negotiations.
Here, in Tassis’ opinion, was ‘a person of great judgement’. Catherine Suffolk was also a Catholic, although not publicly so, and planned to die ‘within the Catholic Faith’. Furthermore, she was an advocate of a Spanish marriage between King James’ son Henry and a daughter of Philip III, who would of course be a Catholic. It may be that Tassis’ lack of diplomatic training blinded him to the faults in this charming harpy. Charm she certainly had: gossip linked her name to that of Robert Cecil, who would leave her a jewel worth one thousand pounds at his death, although Cecil scarcely shared her Spanish sympathies. However, when the Constable of Castile finally arrived in England to negotiate the treaty with Spain, he had no difficulty in seeing through ‘her excessively grand pretensions’. Far too much weight, thought the Constable, had been placed on ‘the word of a fickle woman’. But by that time Catherine Suffolk had thoroughly infiltrated herself into the process by which Spanish money was to be paid over in return for English influence at court. She received at the least twenty thousand pounds, possibly more, as well as certain wonderful jewels.25 Catholics, the Protestant English were equally indignant at the evident increase in Catholic strength since March 1603. King James’ generous relaxation of penalties, his friendly reception of Sir Thomas Tresham and his associates, was having exactly the effect which James himself had dreaded while in Scotland: the Catholics were beginning to ‘multiply’. That is, they were visibly multiplying.
There must always remain some considerable doubt about the figures of increase which were bandied about in late 1603 and afterwards, given the ambiguous nature of Church Papistry. Father Persons, in Rome, believed that by 1605 the Catholics in England had almost doubled since the death of Elizabeth. Were there really all of a sudden far more Catholics in England – or were they just finding the courage (with due respect to Tassis) to declare themselves? What Tassis did not know was exactly how bad things had been before. There was a sensible point to be made that the Catholics appeared to be more numerous only because Mass could be said more openly.26
Later Parliament declared that the number of priests in England had swollen from one hundred to one thousand within three years of the accession of King James. But this was inaccurate on two levels. There were probably already about two hundred and fifty priests present in 1603, while there were certainly not as many as a thousand, even in the deepest hiding, by 1606. Similarly, when King James arrived in England, he was told by the bishops that there were only 8,500 recusants in the country, whereas the true figure was more like 35,000. Yet by the end of 1603 it was believed that a hundred thousand people were attending Mass. The important point to the Protestant interest was not so much statistical as psychological. In the words of Sir Henry Spiller, in a subsequent speech in Parliament, ‘the strength of the Catholic body, with the suspension of persecution, at once became evident’.27
Claudio Aquaviva, General of the Jesuits, had delivered a stern warning to Father Garnet in July 1603 on the continued need for circumspection. ‘By the unfathomable mercy of Christ, our Lord,’ wrote Aquaviva, ‘I implore you to be prudent.’ He reiterated the need for prudence at the end of his letter, passing on a similar message from the Pope.28 But for many of the English Catholics, buoyed up by the King’s favourable reception of Percy and others – surely in Scotland James had given ‘his promise of toleration’ – it was not so easy to be prudent. Then there was the spectacle of a court riddled with chic crypto-Catholics, high in the royal favour, which was hardly likely to encourage the rest to remain discreet. The difficulty of maintaining the ‘nil gain’ situation has been mentioned.‖ Most English Catholics were not even prepared to try.
‘It is hardly credible in what jollity they [the Catholics] now live,’ wrote Ralph Featherstonehalgh from Brancepeth in County Durham in mid-November. Among known Papists close to the King he instanced the eighteen-year-old Earl of Arundel, Suffolk’s nephew. From Lord Sheffield, the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, came a similarly outraged message: the Catholics were beginning ‘to grow very insolent and show their true intentions’ now that they were receiving ‘graces and favours’ from the King.29
Already the Catholics were ‘labouring tooth and nail for places in Parliament’, wrote Lord Sheffield with disgust. And it was true. The fear of the plague which haunted everyone at this time because it made all crowds potentially lethal carriers had at last diminished. The first Parliament of the new reign was to be held in the spring of 1604. Many Catholics hoped for great things from it. After all, in private talks, King James had frequently mentioned the need to refer the question of liberty of conscience to Parliament. They were expecting justice from their sovereign. But like their adventurous co-religionists Guido Fawkes and Tom Wintour in Spain, the Catholics in England were to be cruelly disappointed.
* His place of baptism is also the key to Guy Fawkes’ birthplace in his parents’ house. The site is now occupied by numbers 32–34 Stonegate next to the Star Inn (then as now a York landmark). York Civic Trust have placed a plaque on the eastern end of Blackwell’s bookshop frontage (number 32): ‘Hereabouts lived the parents of Guy Fawkes of Gunpowder Plot fame who was baptized in St Michael le Belfrey Church in 1570.’ A house in Petergate has also been suggested but it does not lie in the parish of St Michael; the entry of Fawkes’ baptism can still be seen in the York Minster Archives (S/2).
† Peter’s School, York, still survives. Although it has moved its site since the days of Guy Fawkes, the school retains a strong tradition of interest and even fondness for its best-known old boy. Guy Fawkes was however tactfully described by a recent head boy as ‘not exactly a role model’ (The Times, 5 November 1992).
‡ No entry concerning the marriage or baptism has been found in the register of Farnham Church, near Scotton, although the marriages of Fawkes’ sisters Elizabeth and Anne are recorded in 1594 and 1599 respectively.
§ The Dukedom of Norfolk was still under attainder [prohibited from use], following the execution of the 4th Duke in 1572, and was not restored until 1660; Prince Charles, the King’s younger son, was not created Duke of York till January 1605.
‖ There is a comparison to be made with racist outcries in the 1960s against Asian immigrants from the former British Empire into Great Britain by those who professed themselves in favour of immigration but ended by saying: ‘If only they wouldn’t have such big families.’