The quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach and stain of human malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled … as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals.
FRANCIS HERRING
Popish Pietie, 1610
NEARLY FOUR HUNDRED YEARS HAVE passed since that dark night in November when searchers found a ‘desperate fellow’ with explosives in the vaulted room beneath the House of Lords. In the time that has elapsed, the Gunpowder Plot has meant many different things to many different people – including many different historians. The propaganda war has been long and vigorous and shows no signs of abating, given that the most recent scholarly works on the subject have taken diametrically opposite points of view.
Father Francis Edwards, S.J., in Guy Fawkes: the real story of the Gunpowder Plot? (1969), maintains that the entire conspiracy was devised by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, hereditary foe to the moderate English Catholics, who used double-agents including Robert Catesby himself (deliberately killed at Holbeach to stop his mouth), Guy Fawkes and Thomas Percy. Mark Nicholls in Investigating Gunpowder Plot (1992) believes that ‘it is surely more realistic to see the treason as one of the greatest challenges that early modern state-security ever faced …’*1
These two totally irreconcilable positions have in fact been present in the historiography of the Gunpowder Plot from the very beginning. Taking the government’s official stance first, its invective on the subject (including the vituperative language of Sir Edward Coke) was based on the premise of an appalling danger narrowly averted. Succeeding writers and pamphleteers built energetically upon these foundations in what came to be a prolific body of literature. An extract from a work of 1610 entitled Popish Pietie by a physician named Francis Herring is a characteristic reflection of it, rather than an exaggerated version of the genre. For Herring, the Powder Treason – ‘that monstrous birth of the Roman harlot’ – was ‘the quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach and stain of human malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled among the savage Turks, the barbarous Indians, nor, as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals’.2
In such estimates, there was an additional frisson in the status of the proposed victim. A King – God’s chosen representative on earth – had been menaced. That meant that the conspiracy was not only wicked but actually sacrilegious. Macbeth, first performed in 1606 (possibly at Hampton Court in August to mark the state visit of Queen Anne’s brother King Christian of Denmark),† is a work redolent with outrage at the monstrous upsetting of the natural order, which is brought about when subjects kill their lawful sovereign.
O horror! horror! horror!
Tongue nor heart cannot conceive, nor name thee!
Macduff’s appalled cry when he discovered the bloodstained body of the murdered King Duncan would have certainly reminded his hearers in that summer of 1606 of the recent conspiracy against their own King. Macduff’s words of shocked expostulation even echoed the government indictment against the conspirators, which found the Gunpowder Plot to be a treason such as ‘the tongue of man never delivered, the ear of man never heard, the heart of man never conceived …’.3
Rumours concerning the King’s safety – a monarch who was once threatened in such an appalling manner could always be threatened again – continued to rustle in the nervy months following the discovery of the Plot. At the end of March a story spread that James had been stabbed by a poisoned knife at Okingham, twenty miles from London, ‘Which treason, some said, was performed by English Jesuits, some by Scots in women’s apparel, and others by Spaniards or Frenchmen’ (showing an even-handed list of contemporary prejudices).4 The story was a complete fantasy, but it demonstrated the continued perturbation on the subject of the King’s personal safety; he was ‘the life o’th’ building’, as Macbeth described Duncan, whose presence guaranteed order.
The Papists’ Powder Treason, an allegorical engraving done for 5 November 1612 ‘in aeternal memory of the divine bounty in England’s preservation from the Hellish Powder Plot’, was careful to glorify the King, as the central feature of what had been preserved. A series of royal portraits, including Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth, loom over much smaller vignettes of Monteagle receiving the anonymous letter from a stranger and the conspirators taking their sacramental oath. It was unfortunate that the divine bounty failed the next day, when Prince Henry died of his fever on 6 November. The engraving had to be withdrawn (although it emerged in 1679, another period of virulent anti-Popery).‡5
Such perturbation, personalised and focused on King James, was grist to the government’s mill in its campaign against the treacherous Catholics. First, these traitors paid allegiance to the Pope rather than to their King; then, their perceived leaders, the Jesuits, were actual ‘King-killers’. A rhyming pamphlet of 1606 on the subject of the Powder Treason by the playwright Thomas Dekker contains ‘The Picture of a Jesuit’:
A Harpy face, a Fox’s head …
A Mandrake’s voice, whose tunes are cries,
So piercing that the hearer dies,
Mouth’d like an Ape, his innate spite
Being to mock those he cannot bite …6
Like Francis Herring’s disquisition on ‘Satan’s policy’, this violent caricature was not atypical of the way Jesuits were portrayed henceforth. Not only were they ‘King-killers’, but they were also equivocators.
The doctrine of equivocation continued to be seen, like the Jesuits themselves, as at once alien and diabolical. In Macbeth Shakespeare began by amusing himself on the subject, when the drunken Porter of Macbeth’s castle, awakened by knocking, imagined that he was at Hell’s Gate, welcoming the new arrivals. His language recalled the popular gibes made on the subject of Garnet’s death, including that jocular remark by Dudley Carleton to his correspondent John Chamberlain that Garnet would be hanged without ‘equivocation’ for all his shifting and faltering.§ ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator,’ exclaimed the Porter, ‘that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: 0! come in, equivocator.’7
Towards the end of the play, a more serious use of the word occurred. Macbeth began to suspect that ‘the equivocation of the fiend’ was responsible for two comforting prophecies which had been made to him. One Apparition, summoned by the witches, had told him: ‘Fear not, till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane’; the other Apparition had assured him that ‘none of woman born shall harm Macbeth’. But Birnam Wood did advance on Dunsinane – in the shape of Macbeth’s enemies disguised as branches - and Macduff did have the power to kill him, being ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’.8 Both prophecies were classic examples of equivocation, since Macbeth had understood them in one sense, while their hidden (sinister) meaning turned out to be very different.
This use of equivocation was seen as an essentially evil process: ‘a monster shapeless, two-headed, two-horned, and also with a double mouth, and especially a double heart’, as William Gager described equivocation in Pyramis, a Latin poem of 1608 dedicated to the King.9 It was a shapeless mythical monster that bore little relation to the actual Catholic doctrine of equivocation – heroic if arguably ill-advised – which was intended to avoid the sin of lying when in dangerous conditions.
Such propaganda accompanied the political measures taken by the government after the discovery of the Plot, and provided the correct climate for persecution. Much of this was directed at the blameless Catholic community, exactly as Father Garnet and others had feared. The Catholics, like the Protestants, trembled in the wake of the Plot, fearing a general massacre of their number inspired by a spirit of ‘vengeance and hatred’.10
In April 1606 Henri IV of France decided to give King James a little lecture on the virtues of toleration – and who better to do it than the man who had changed his religion to secure a kingdom? ‘His master had learned from experience’, said the French Ambassador in London, ‘the strong hold which religion has on the human breast’ (if not perhaps on Henry IV’s own); it was a flame which tended to burn with increasing fierceness in proportion to the violence employed to extinguish it. Let King James, therefore, punish the guilty, but let him equally spare the innocent.11 These same admirable sentiments had in fact been expressed by James himself in his speech to Parliament of 9 November 1605. Now he saw things differently.
The King told the French Ambassador that the English Catholics ‘were so infected with the doctrine of the Jesuits, respecting the subordination of the royal to the papal authority’, that he could do nothing. He would leave it to his Parliament. So another Oath of Allegiance was devised, with help from an Appellant Catholic priest, intended to increase the rift between those priests prepared to ‘compromise’ with the state, such as the Appellants, and those who could not, the Jesuits. It was an oath which resulted in a long propaganda war between King James and the defenders of the Pope’s spiritual supremacy.12 But from the point of view of the hapless recusants, such doctrinal wars were less important than the disabilities which came to burden their daily lives.
As these disabilities multiplied, Catholics could no longer practise law, nor serve in the Army or Navy as officers (on pain of a hundred pounds fine). No recusant could act as executor of a will or guardian to a minor, nor even possess a weapon except in cases of self-defence. Catholics could not receive a university degree, and could not vote in local elections (until 1797) nor in Parliamentary elections until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. All this was on top of the spiritual penalties by which Catholics were ordered to marry in the Anglican Church, take their children there for baptism, and finally rest in its burial ground.
In 1613 a bill was introduced into the House of Commons to compel Catholics to wear a red hat (as the Jews in Rome did) or parti-coloured stockings (like clowns did), not only so that they could be easily distinguished, but also so they could be ‘hooted at’ whenever they appeared. Wiser counsels prevailed and this unpleasant scapegoating was not carried through. Nevertheless a profound prejudice against Papists, with or without red hats and parti-coloured stockings, remained lurking in the popular consciousness after 1605, ready to emerge from its depths at any hint of leniency towards them. For many Protestants, a declaration of February 1606 on the subject of the Plot by Sir Thomas Smith summed the matter up: ‘this bloody stain and mark will never be washed out of Popish religion’.13
It was a stain which could be passed on to unborn generations. It was the allegedly ‘foreign’ nature of Catholicism – ruled by an alien Pope based in Rome – which made it perennially vulnerable to attack. A political organisation could be denounced where genuine religious convictions might evoke sympathy. In 1651 Milton called Catholicism not so much a religion as ‘a [foreign] priestly despotism under the cloak of religion arrayed in the spoils of temporal power’.14 He was on firm ground that would not be surrendered by every Protestant until the late twentieth century (if then). Meanwhile, as the contents of the anniversary sermons on 5 November reveal, the notion of a conspiracy which was so frightful as to be directed by Satan himself only deepened with the passing of the years.
Was the Plot really ‘Satan’s policy’ – that is, the work of Satan carried out by the Catholics? Or was some other agency responsible, rather closer to the King? The first rumours that the mastermind was in fact Salisbury, not Satan, occurred in November 1605. As early as 17 November, the Venetian Ambassador, Niccolò Molin, reported: ‘people say that this plot must have its roots high up’. Another cynical account described the fire which was to have ‘burnt our King and Council’ as being but ‘ignis fatuus [will o’ the wisp’] or a flash of some foolish fellow’s brain’.15
Such stories suited the Catholic powers abroad, because they shifted the embarrassing responsibility for the conspiracy away from their own co-religionists (Philip III, for example, on first hearing the news had hoped that Puritans would turn out to be involved). On 25 November Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels told Salisbury that he was ashamed to repeat the ‘daily new inventions at this court’ which were intended to exonerate the Catholics from scandal. An anonymous letter of December held it as certain that ‘there has been foul play’, that some members of the Council had spun the web which had embroiled the Catholics.16
Not only were rumours of foul play convenient for the Catholic powers, they also offered (and still offer) the most convenient defence for those reluctant to face the fact that convinced, pious Catholics could also be terrorists. Bishop Godfrey Goodman’s memoir The Court of King James the First, written about forty years after the event, provided material for this approach, albeit of a somewhat flimsy nature (the whole memoir has little scholarly quality). Goodman was the son of the Dean of Westminster and rose to become Bishop of Gloucester, despite being suspected of holding ‘papistical views’. His special interest was in fact the reconciliation of the Anglican Church and Rome, which he described in his will as the ‘mother church’.17
Goodman made Salisbury the clear villain of the piece. He began by drawing attention to the Catholics’ acute feelings of grievance after the death of the ‘old woman’ (Queen Elizabeth) when they did not receive ‘the mitigation’ that they had expected. Salisbury’s intelligence service had let him know all about this, whereupon he decided that in order to demonstrate his service to the state, ‘he would first contrive and then discover a treason’ – the more odious the treason, the greater the service. Thus Percy was an agent provocateur who was ‘often seen’ coming out of Salisbury’s house at 2.00am. Salisbury was meanwhile giving specific instructions for the convenient deaths of Catesby and Percy: ‘Let me never see them alive.’ But Goodman produces no proof for any of this, beyond second-hand gossip.
Nevertheless the sheer seductiveness of the story – from the Catholic point of view – prevented its dying away completely. In 1679, when the imaginary Popish Plot of Titus Oates created new waves of anti-Popery, Thomas Barlow, the fiercely anti-Catholic Bishop of Lincoln, saw fit to publish a fresh work on the Gunpowder Plot, which he called that ‘villainy so black and horrid … as has no parallel in any age or nation’. However, in the course of his narrative, Barlow also found it necessary to denounce the persistent ‘wicked’ rumours about Salisbury’s role. The Plot, he reiterated fiercely, had been ‘hatched in Hell’ by the Jesuits.18
Of course Salisbury himself never tried to conceal the fact that he had had knowledge of some impending ‘stir’. He not only mentioned it in his official communication to the English ambassadors but told King James, who repeated it in his own account of the Plot. The reputation of Salisbury’s intelligence service demanded no less and it would have ill become the King’s chief minister to plead total ignorance of such a flagrant conspiracy under his very nose.
Salisbury’s penetration of the Plot is one thing but the deliberate manufacture of the entire conspiracy with the aim of damning Catholicism for ever is quite another. There is far too much evidence of treasonable Catholic enterprises in late Elizabethan times for the Gunpowder Plot to be dismissed altogether as malevolent invention. It was, on the contrary, a terrorist conspiracy spurred on by resentment of the King’s broken promises. The wrongs of the persecuted Catholics were thus to be righted by the classic terrorist method of violence, which encompassed the destruction of the innocent as well as the guilty.
The story told here has been of Salisbury’s foreknowledge – at a comparatively late stage – thanks to the revelations of Francis Tresham repeated to Monteagle and his subsequent manipulation of the King by the stratagem of the anonymous letter. This limited foreknowledge makes sense of the extraordinary ten-day delay in searching the House of Lords for gunpowder – otherwise quite incomprehensible in a responsible and security-minded minister. In his Cold War against the forces of Catholicism, Salisbury scented the opportunity for a coup, particularly when it turned out that he could very likely entangle the hated Jesuits in the same net.
But foreknowledge is not fabrication, even if Salisbury, or perhaps Coke, did embellish the truth with certain vivid details afterwards, such as the celebrated – and infamous – mine which somehow vanished without trace. In the same way, the very different foreknowledge gained by Father Garnet, in the confessional, did not mean that he was, as Coke tried to suggest, the principal ‘author’ of the Plot. Neither Salisbury nor Father Garnet was the author of the Powder Treason, though both have been blamed for it. There is, however, a real difference between Salisbury and Garnet in that Salisbury gained by the Plot and Garnet suffered for it.
Could the Gunpowder Plot have succeeded? For it is certainly true that regimes have been triumphantly overthrown by violent means throughout history. If Salisbury’s foreknowledge, albeit limited, is accepted, one must also accept that these conspirators never really had a chance once the Plot was in its last stages. Tresham’s betrayal and Monteagle’s eye to the King’s preservation (and his own) saw to that, quite apart from Salisbury’s industrious intelligence system.
But Salisbury’s loyal activities, like the decisions of Tresham and Monteagle, were symptoms of a wider failure which was built into the scheme long before the last stages were reached. For the Gunpowder Plot to succeed, the conspirators needed to be sure of strong support at home and even stronger support abroad. King James understood the first point perfectly well, and expressed it eloquently when he said that the traitors had been ‘dreaming to themselves that they had the virtues of a snowball’ which would begin in a small way, but by ‘tumbling down from a great hill’ would grow to an enormous size, gathering snow all the way.19
In fact the snow-ball, far from increasing as it went, melted away in the light of the Plot’s discovery. The Catholic community, whatever resistance it might have provided in the time of Elizabeth, had been cozened to believe that James, the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, would act as its deliverer once he ascended the throne. By the time the truth was discovered – James did not intend to keep the promises they thought he had made – it was too late. Two sorts of Catholic leaders, the peers and the priests, never gave encouragement to the violence of the Powder Treason.
Any support abroad had vanished as a genuine possibility even before the death of Elizabeth. It vanished when the King of Spain, for all his diplomatic dallying, refused to back a specific Catholic candidate for the English throne (such as his sister Isabella – herself in any case a reluctant nominee). Thereafter the Anglo-Spanish Treaty confirmed the gloomy fact that there was to be no help from that quarter. Once again the Hapsburg - and Papal – belief in the impending Catholicism of King James was relevant. The King bamboozled two sets of Catholics into compliance by his slippery handling of his own religious convictions: English recusants and foreign potentates, including the Pope.
Quite apart from the continuing battle between Pro-Plotters and No-Plotters, the conspiracy has developed a rich historiographical life of its own. One feature of this has been the concentration on the figure of Guy Fawkes. It is Guy Fawkes who has had to accept the odium of being the arch-villain of the piece. William Hazlitt, in an essay of 1821 to commemorate 5 November, described him as ‘this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lanthom, moving cautiously about among his barrels of gunpowder, loaded with death …’20 It is Guy Fawkes who, in spite of having been generally known in his own time, including to the government, as Guido, has lent his forename to the stuffed, ragged figures on the pavement, whose placard solicits ‘a penny for the guy’, before being ritually burnt on 5 November. In all fairness, the reviled name should really be that of Robert Catesby, as leader of the conspiracy. But it may be some consolation to the shade of Guido, if it still wanders somewhere beneath the House of Lords, that Guy Fawkes is also the hero of some perennial subversive jokes as being ‘the only man to get into Parliament with the right intentions’.
In memory of the failed endeavour of Guy Fawkes, the vaults of the House of Lords are still searched on the eve of the Opening of Parliament. The practice has become one of the many rituals which accompany and enhance British political procedures, connecting them to a vivid past. But the search has its origins in genuine panic about the Catholic menace. Nearly thirty-six years after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the alleged massacres of Protestants by Irish Catholics aroused these fears. On 18 August 1641, Parliament, which was in a ferment over these supposed atrocities, believed that the threat might have moved closer to home. Orders were given to search ‘Rosebie’s House, the Tavern, and such other Houses and Vaults and Cellars as are near the Upper House of Parliament’ for powder, arms or ammunition.21
A similar panic marked the period surrounding Titus Oates’ revelations of a Popish Plot in 1678. In late October, the House of Lords was told by the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod that coals and timber had been lodged in the cellars adjoining and that, even worse, ‘a great knocking and digging’ in the earth had been heard there. Seventy years after the Powder Treason, with Catholics still very much the prime suspects, this was enough to raise the alarm. The House of Lords set up a committee, which was to have the cellars cleared of firewood, so that sentinels, under the command of trusted officers, could patrol these dangerous areas day and night. A certain Mrs Dehaure, living in the Old Palace Yard, was ordered out of her home so that it could be filled with guards.22
Again in 1690, following the accession of William III, there were fears of Jacobite insurrection on behalf of the exiled Stuarts. The Marquess of Carmarthen reported to the House of Lords that there was strong cause to believe that there was ‘a second Gunpowder Plot, or some such great Mischief’, since notorious ‘ill-wishers’ were resorting to the house of one Hutchinson in the Old Palace, Westminster.23 Nor were these fears totally imaginary. The assassination plot which led to the execution of Ambrose Rookwood the second occurred only six years later.
In the calmer weather of the eighteenth century, the search became progressively ritualised. In 1760 an agreeable new piece of ceremony was introduced, as is demonstrated by the accounts of a wine-merchant named Old Bellamy who was allowed to rent the vaults. The searchers ended their search by drinking the loyal toast in port which he supplied. By 1807 it had become the regular practice, supported by custom, for ‘The Lord Chamberlain of England’ to make a search for ‘combustibles’ under or near either House of Parliament before its Opening. After the fire which demolished much of the Palace of Westminster, Bellamy’s wine-shop moved to nearby Parliament Street – but happily the custom of port-drinking continued.24
From the beginning of the twentieth century, a detachment of ten men of the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard was accustomed to perform the search just before the Opening of Parliament by the sovereign and it still does. The Yeomen of the Guard, in their splendid scarlet uniforms and black Tudor hats, carrying lanterns, weave among the large modern pipes which heat the Palace of Westminster. Port is still drunk at the end of the search (after a lapse, the custom was revived, but without the loyal toast, in 1976).25 So far as is known, however, the one successful search ever made – in the sense that perilous substances and a perilous person actually turned up – occurred on the night of 5 November 1605.
A second feature of the historiography of the Gunpowder Plot has been the attention paid to the date itself, variously known as Guy Fawkes Day and Bonfire Night.‖ Unlike many English celebrations, 5 November was not invented by the Victorians with their talent for conjuring up instant, rich, immemorial traditions. Nor for that matter are its origins lost in antiquity, linked over centuries to the Celtic fire festival at the beginning of winter (which later merged into the Catholic Feast of All Saints also on 1 November). As David Cressy has written in his study of the subject, there has been ‘much speculative nonsense’ floated along these lines: the English Bonfire Night comes directly from the date of the Opening of Parliament in 1605, and the proximity to 1 November is purely coincidental.a26
Nevertheless this emphasis on the day itself has, like the opposing arguments, been present since the beginning. The first bonfires were lit on 5 November 1605 itself, the first sermon preached soon after. An analysis of the Gunpowder sermons (those preached on the anniversary) shows a concentration on the day which is almost mystical in its fervour. In 1606 Bishop Lancelot Andrewes preached from the text ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ He went on, ‘The day (we all know) was meant to be the day of all our deaths … It is our Passe-over,’ and made an even more solemn comparison to the Day of Resurrection. Altogether Andrewes, a fervent preacher of King James, would preach ten Gunpowder sermons. In 1618 he summed up the national feeling of patriotism mixed with religion: ‘Here we have the making of a new Holy-day (over and above those of God’s in the laws).’27
Predictably enough, celebrations waxed or waned according to the waves of anti-Catholicism which periodically shook England. Any apparent support given to that dangerous foreign-based religion, any renewed threat from its supporters, was enough to make the annual bonfires burn brighter. The marriage of Charles I to a French Catholic princess, the so-called Popish Plot of 1679, the Catholicism of James II – how convenient that his supplanter William III landed in England on 5 November! – all these events met with outbursts of conflagration.28
Yet there was one element present in the celebrations of the anniversary which would need diplomatic handling as the years passed. The original 5 November had been a date of royal deliverance: essentially it was a monarch who had been saved from destruction. Yet in 1647 – two years before the execution of Charles I – Parliament abolished all feasts except the 5 November celebration, on the ground that the day stood for the foiling of Papists, regardless of its other implications. Fifth of November continued to be celebrated under the Commonwealth, the only national feast to survive. This was despite a certain illogicality in commemorating the saving of a King from destruction by a people who had recently put their own King to death.29
Still stranger, in a sense, was the transmutation of Bonfire Night after it had crossed the Atlantic. Here were men and women who had come, very many of them, to throw off the chains of royalist absolutism: it might be questioned whether the annual memory of an English King’s deliverance was really such an appropriate occasion for rejoicing. If celebrating a royal anniversary was too negative, the answer was to emphasise the positive: that is, to burn a Pope of Rome, still in charge, rather than Guy Fawkes, long vanished. Thus Pope Day, a rumbustious occasion of mob revelry and mob rivalries, came to be celebrated, mainly in New England, on 5 November. It was a special feature of Boston life among the ‘lower elements’, but spread as far south as Charleston.30
Increasingly, there was something anarchic about the occasion, with strong anti-governmental undertones, particularly so long as that government was British. During the struggles for American Independence, advantage was taken of the flexibility inherent in Pope Day (or Bonfire Night) when the effigy of any displeasing person could be burnt so long as that of the Pope went along too. Not everyone joined in the revelry: the custom was condemned by George Washington as ‘ridiculous and childish’. Notwithstanding, Lord Bute, George III’s Prime Minister, began to feature. In 1774, in Charleston, the Jacobite Pretender to the throne (Bonnie Prince Charlie), the Pope and the Devil all shared a bonfire with English tea. In another contemporary bonfire Lord North was burnt, wearing his Star and Garter, as well as Governor Hutchinson, once again accompanied by the Pope and the Devil. When an effigy was burnt in 1780 of Benedict Arnold, the turncoat American general who joined the British side, it was a symbolic protest which bore very little relation to the original 5 November celebration.31
So the bonfires of Pope Day died down, the celebration lingering on in the nineteenth century in places like Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth and New Castle in New Hampshire mainly as an occasion for a boisterous outing for children, asking for money. Those in Newburyport who chanted, ‘Here is the Pope that we have got/The whole promoter of the Plot,’ had very little, if any, idea of the historical significance of what they were saying. In the United States, the coincidental proximity of 5 November to Hallowe’en on 31 October (to say nothing of the great national feast of Thanksgiving, roughly three weeks later) has meant that few folk memories of it survive, let alone celebrations, except among those of recent British descent, or with special British connections.b
In the Old World, as opposed to the New, Guy Fawkes Day was far from vanishing away. A study of popular prints on the subject of religion from 1600 up till 1832 shows anti-Catholicism and the political connotations of Popery as one theme that spans the whole period. The prayer of thanksgiving on 5 November remained in the Anglican Book of Prayer until 1859.c Protestant pastors annually remembered the hideous fate designed for King and Royal Family ‘by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter’. As they intoned, ‘From this unnatural conspiracy not our merit but Thy mercy, not our foresight but Thy providence delivered us,’ it was made clear that the unnatural conspiracy had been the work of the Catholics, not just a small group of them.32
This stubborn sense of Catholic menace did however mean that Guy Fawkes Day itself moved away, as in the United States, from the notion of royal deliverance. It moved in the direction of rowdy popular demonstrations on the one hand and anti-Popery on the other. Typical of the rowdy aspect was the running battle in Exeter, extending over forty years, between a popular force known as ‘Young Exeter’ and the authorities. In the course of it a High Churchman and right-wing Tory was burnt in effigy for his opposition to the Reform Bill in 1832.33
As for anti-Popery, the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 was marked by the burning of the effigies of the new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman, along with the Pope and certain Jesuits, on 5 November. For his part, Cardinal Wiseman protested against people being invited ‘to feast their eyes upon the mock execution of individuals’ (expressing the distaste that many have always felt for such practices).d At least Catholic priests in England could thank God ‘that their effigies and not their persons’ were in the hands of those who had made the effigies and lit the bonfires.34
This was not an exaggerated reaction, given the bursts of anti-Catholicism which continued to erupt publicly even in places where wiser counsels might have been expected. The publication of David Jardine’s A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot in 1857 merely stirred the controversy further. For Jardine placed a full measure of blame upon the Jesuits, with Garnet ‘a willing, consenting and approving confederate’. He also made a thinly veiled accusation that certain documents condemning the Jesuits had been suppressed.35
In this way William Turnbull, a Scottish Catholic archivist working in the Public Record Office, became embroiled in the controversy as the supposed author of this suppression. Extreme Protestants – led by the rabidly anti-Catholic Tory MP for Warwickshire North, Charles Newdigate Newdegate – howled for his resignation. In vain the Master of the Rolls, Lord Romilly, issued a public statement which totally exculpated Turnbull. Newdegate, who also issued wild accusations of treason against Cardinal Manning, had his way. Turnbull resigned in 1861 and died, broken by the experience, not long after. Certainly the Gunpowder Plot cast a long shadow.36 One of Newdegate’s additional motives in his campaign of enmity was to smear his Liberal political opponents in Warwickshire who happened to be Catholics: the Throckmortons of Coughton Court.
The immolation of current hate-figures – in effigy – was the way Guy Fawkes Day was to go from the eighteenth century onwards. It was, after all, a fertile field, and remains so. Joan Courthope was the daughter of a late-nineteenth-century Sussex squire. When she was thirteen, she recorded in her diary angry British feeling concerning the Boer leader ‘Oom Paul’ Kruger at the outset of the Boer War. On 5 November 1899, at Ticehurst, a suitable effigy having been constructed, the march ‘The Downfall of Kruger’ was played and a large bonfire was lit. At the end, Joan noted laconically, ‘Kruger chucked in.’37
A hundred years later, the most famous Bonfire Night celebrations in England, those of Lewes in East Sussex, also concentrate, merrily enough, on burning the infamous – or just the famous. In 1994 effigies included Mrs Thatcher, John Major on a dinosaur taken from the film Jurassic Park, and the Home Secretary Michael Howard in the week of the publication of the unpopular Criminal Justice Bill, as well as Guy Fawkes himself. The celebrations were attended by an estimated eighty thousand people, with two thousand of them marching.38
The town festival has a long history – anti-Catholicism was encouraged by the fact that seventeen Protestant martyrs were burnt there under Queen Mary Tudor – and in 1785 the Riot Act had to be read, owing to the conspicuous violence of the crowd. Nowadays there are five rural Bonfire Societies, whose members adopt various forms of historical fancy dress for their contests. Only one of them, however, the Cliffe, still burns an effigy of the Pope. (But the Cliffe is careful to make it clear that it is a seventeenth-century Pope which is being burnt, not the present incumbent.) An apt comparison can be made to the Palio in Siena with its similar loyalties and rivalries. In short, Lewes now provides ‘a night of wildness and fun’ rather than something more sinister, although there will always be those who will be made uneasy by the sight of the words ‘No Popery’ on a banner slung across an English street, let alone the burning of the Pope – any Pope – in effigy.e Perhaps those, including the present writer, who recoil from such sights, should take comfort from the sensible words in an American colonial almanac of 1746:
Powder-plot is not forgot
’Twill be observed by many a sot.39
All these ebullient and on the whole light-hearted festivities have little connection to the serious men who plotted the downfall of the government in 1605. The courage of the Powder Plotters is undeniable and even those hottest in condemning their enterprise have paid tribute to it. A notable example of this is provided by the historian S. R. Gardiner, locked for many years in the late nineteenth century in a Pro-Plot versus No-Plot controversy. He even expressed a certain satisfaction that so many of the original conspirators cheated the scaffold by their doomed last stand at Holbeach. ‘Atrocious as the whole undertaking was,’ he wrote, ‘great as must have been the moral obliquity of their minds before they could have conceived such a project, there was at least nothing mean or selfish about them. They had boldly risked their lives for what they honestly believed to be the cause of God and their country.’40
In their own times this was understood, even by those – Catholics – who disapproved in principle of any such adventure based on the destruction of the innocent. Father John Gerard, in his Narrative, compared the conspirators (his intimate friends) to the Maccabees, the Jewish warriors who delivered their people from the Syrians in the second century. ‘Seeing members of their brethren to suffer patiently the unjust oppression of their adversaries’, the Maccabees decided that if everyone was similarly passive ‘they will now quickly root us out of the earth’.f The comparison was an apt one as this was in essence the stance expressed by the conspirator Robert Keyes at his trial, when he spoke little but ‘showed plenty of spirit’. Keyes thought it the lesser of two evils ‘to die rather than live in the midst of so much tyranny’.41
It is not a position that the world can expect to see abandoned so long as the persecution of minorities – and for that matter of majorities – survives. Terrorism after all does not exist in a vacuum. ‘I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness or because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people …’ These are not the words of Robert Catesby, but mutatis mutandis they could in fact have been uttered by him had he lived to defend his actions to the world. This is in fact the speech, three hundred and fifty years later, of Nelson Mandela, in the dock for his leadership of the African National Congress, at the Rivoni Trial of 1964: he chose to quote it in his autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom as an explanation but not an excuse.42
Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment (and served twenty-five years) before he was elected President of South Africa in 1991. In the end, President Mandela was not, therefore, to be one of the myriad ‘defeated’ human beings to whom ‘History’, in the lines of W. H. Auden on the Spanish Civil War, ‘may say Alas but cannot help nor pardon …’ Yet this passage in his autobiography reminds us of one reason why terrorism, successful or otherwise, will probably always remain as the behaviour of last resort for some: ‘The hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought [my] people nothing but more repressive legislation, and fewer rights.’
The Gunpowder Plotters were terrorists and they were defeated. They were not good men – by no stretch of the imagination can they be described as that. The goodness in this tragic episode belongs to the priests and lay brothers such as Nicholas Owen (Little John) and the heroic women. But, under different circumstances, they might have been very differently regarded. One might go to the opposite extreme and represent the Plotters as brave, bad men: but perhaps brave, misguided men is a kinder verdict which may be allowed at this distance of time.43
The study of history can at least bring respect for those whose motives, if not their actions, were noble and idealistic. It was indeed a ‘heavy and doleful tragedy’ that men of such calibre were driven by continued religious persecution to Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
* The argument looks fair to continue, since Father Edwards has returned to the attack in ‘Still Investigating Gunpowder Plot’, Recusant History (1993), a review of Nicholls’ book countering his arguments.
† Although this may have been a shortened version. Scholarly disputes on the dating of Macbeth agree at least on one thing: that the inspiration of the Porter’s scene must have followed the trial and execution of Father Garnet. See Macbeth (Muir), pp. xv-xxv, for a discussion of the play’s dating.
‡ A painted version of this engraving hangs in New College, Oxford, today (see this page); it was commissioned and donated by a physician named Richard Haydocke, who probably had a hand in the design, and maybe in the painting as well (Weller, passim).
§ Another knocker at Hell’s Gate – ‘a farmer, that hang’d himself on th’ expectation of plenty’ – may also be a reference to Garnet, since Farmer was among his many aliases, those ‘appellations’ listed by Coke as evidence of deceit.
‖ It is the day, not the year, which has proved ‘utterly and even maddeningly MEMORABLE’ in the words of W. C. Sellar and R. C. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930, pp. 62–3). It would be fair to say that there are many able to mutter:
Please to remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder Treason and Plot
We know no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot
(in one of its many variations) who, if challenged, would not be able to name the actual year in which these memorable events took place.
a It will be recalled that this date was changed twice: the last postponement was from 3 October. According to Cressy’s argument, we might well have been chanting ‘Please to remember the Third of October’.
b Widespread enquiries by the author in 1993–4 failed to produce information concerning any indigenous celebration of 5 November in the United States – that is, festivals with continuity to the seventeenth century and Pope Day. All those who did mark Guy Fawkes Day in one form or another were careful to emphasise that their rituals were purely enjoyable and had absolutely no connotation of anti-Catholicism: as one correspondent wrote: ‘much more Dionysian than anti-papal’.
c It was discontinued along with the official commemoration of two other days of monarchical significance, 30 January (execution of Charles I, 1649) and 29 May (restoration of Charles II, 1660).
d One Catholic schoolmaster, Dom. Antony Sutch O.S.B. of Downside, used to celebrate 6 November as opposed to the 5th, as a protest against such practices: on this day he recalled to his pupils the sufferings of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholic martyrs (information supplied to the author).
e The Catholic parish priest at St Pancras, Lewes, since the mid-1980s, whose church is passed by the bonfire processions, emphasises that he has not found Lewes to be an anti-Catholic town in any way.
f The Maccabees decided (unlike their brethren) to fight on the Sabbath day: ‘let us not all die as our brethren died in their hiding-places’ (1 Maccabees 2:40–1).