The Cradle King (38 page)

One Warwickshire conspirator, Catesby’s first cousin Francis Tresham, was worried that the blast in Parliament would kill his brother-in-law William Parker, Lord Monteagle, and decided to warn him, while giving the conspirators a chance to escape. Monteagle was at supper at his house in Hoxton, near London, on 26 October when he was passed a note that had been given to one of his servants by a stranger. Monteagle told his servant, Thomas Ward, to read the letter aloud:

My Lord, out of the love that I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise your excuse to shift off your attendance at this Parliament. For God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. And think not slightly of this advertisement [warning], but retire yourself into your country, where you may expect the event in safety. For though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say, they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them. This counsel is not to be contemned, because it may do you good, and can do you no harm, for the danger is past so soon as you have burnt the letter. And I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it: to whose holy protection I commend you.
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The letter was then taken by Monteagle himself to Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who was dining with four other Privy Councillors, Northampton, Nottingham, Suffolk and Worcester. They suspected that ‘a terrible blow’ might refer to an explosion, but determined to postpone any search, and instead allow the plot to develop.

James was on a hunting trip at Royston until the beginning of November, and it was only on his return to the capital that Salisbury showed him the letter. The King read the message and congratulated himself on breaking its cunning code – plotters had attempted to blow up his own father so the notion did not strike him as far-fetched. Since the opening of Parliament was scheduled for 5 November, he determined that a search should not be carried out until the night before, to give the plot time to mature. Late on 4 November, Suffolk led a search that discovered Guy Fawkes, calling himself John Johnson, standing guard over a pile of faggots. James was informed, and he commanded a more detailed search. At 11 p.m. the gunpowder was discovered, and ‘Johnson’ was arrested and taken to the Tower. James was awakened and told of developments; he gave thanks to God for his deliverance, and gave instructions that ‘Johnson’ must not be allowed to kill himself: he was their source for further information. James provided his councillors with a series of questions with which to interrogate ‘Johnson’, and asked whether they thought a recent ‘cruelly villainous pasquil [lampoon]’ that had inveighed against James’s adoption of the title ‘King of Great Britain’ might not also be his work?
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(Fawkes had in fact written a memorandum in July 1603 dealing with the unpopularity of the Scots in James’s court.)
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Within hours of Fawkes’ arrest, the conspirators had fled to Dunchurch, but soon discovered that they had to keep moving. On 6 November, Harington at Combe Abbey received a message from one of his neighbours, claiming that horses had been stolen during the night by armed men whom they believed to be papists. Harington wrote to London for instructions, but as rumours intensified he decided to wait no longer but to take action himself, and whisked Elizabeth to Coventry, placing her in the custody of a merchant there. It was a wise decision: Sir Thomas Edmondes reported that ‘popish flight-heads’ came ‘but two hours too late to have seized upon the person of the Lady Elizabeth’s grace’.
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In truth, however, the Warwickshire conspiracy had fairly much evaporated, and its dregs, led by Catesby, fled west, to what they hoped was a safe house, Holbeach House, near Stourbridge. There they were captured, Catesby being shot on the spot, the others dying of their wounds, or being taken to London for trial and, ultimately, execution.

James made the most of the opportunity. On 9 November he appeared in Parliament to offer thanks to God ‘for the great and miraculous delivery he hath granted to me, and to you all, and consequently to the whole body of this estate’. He begged the members’ indulgence to explore a conceit of his: ‘That since kings are in the word of God itself called Gods, as being his lieutenants and vice-regents on earth, and so adorned and furnished with some sparkles of the divinity; to compare some of the works of God the great King, towards the whole and general world, to some of his works towards me, and this little world of my dominions.’ Just as God punished sin by the ‘general purgation’ which only Noah and his family survived, James ‘may justly compare these two great and fearful Domesdays, wherewith God threatened to destroy me and all you of this little world in me’, the Gowrie Plot and this new Gunpowder Plot. He ‘amongst all other Kings have been subject’ to ‘daily tempests of innumerable dangers’, ‘not only ever since my birth, but even as I may justly say, before my birth: and while I was in my mother’s belly’, a rare reference to the trauma of the Riccio murder.
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James went on to congratulate himself on bringing the matter to light – an uncharacteristic act because he had always believed suspiciousness to be ‘the sickness of a tyrant’ and tended personally to the other extreme. On this occasion, however, things were different. When Salisbury showed him the letter, he was ‘so far contrary to myself’ that he ‘did upon the instant interpret and apprehend some dark phrases’ it contained, namely the ‘general obscure advertisment’ of ‘some dangerous blow’. This interpretation, he continued pedantically, required reading ‘contrary to the ordinary grammar construction of them’ – the kind of construction that you might expect a mere university divine or lawyer to offer. If he’d interpreted it in any other way, ‘no worldly provision or prevention could have made us escape our utter destruction’. In fact, the whole affair showed ‘a wonderful providence of God’. It so happened that Fawkes was taken with ‘his firework for kindling ready in his pocket’: if he’d been apprehended only a few minutes earlier this evidence would not have been there. Even if the plan had gone ahead, it would have been to James’s immortal fame, since future ages could not say that ‘I had died ingloriously in an ale-house, a stews [brothel], or such vile place’; instead, ‘but mine end should have been with the most honourable and best company, and in that most honourable and fittest place for a king to be in’.
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A few months later, upon the publication of the King’s Parliament speech of thanksgiving, these self-glorifying notions were developed in an accompanying tract entitled
A Discourse of the Maner of the Discovery of this Late Intended Treason.
Ostensibly written anonymously by a courtier, it describes how, with God’s aid, the King discovered the plot, saving his own person and the whole realm. Salisbury and Suffolk are portrayed as possessing no intellectual nous of their own, instead referring the letter to James since they apparently knew of ‘his fortunate judgement in clearing and solving of obscure riddles and doubtful mysteries’. In fact, the
Discourse
continues, Salisbury didn’t believe the letter to be of importance, but James ‘apprehended it deeplier’, and ordered the search of the Parliament house, astounding his Secretary. At the same time, the
Discourse
insisted that the King was indifferent to his own harm, ‘whereby he had drawn himself into many desperate dangers’; no, his concern derived only from his care for the state. A marvellously sycophantic piece of work, it pleased James enough – if indeed he did not pen it himself – to include it, without comment, in his collected
Workes,
published in early 1617.
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The Catesby plot had a severe effect on the royal family. Nine-year-old Elizabeth in particular suffered from the aftereffects of the ordeal. In January 1606, her guardian Harington reported that the Princess was still suffering ‘from the fever occasioned by these disturbances’: ‘this poor lady hath not yet recovered the surprise and is very ill and troubled.’
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For all his bravado in Parliament, James, too, was deeply disturbed. ‘The King is in terror,’ reported the Venetian ambassador. ‘He does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms with only Scotsmen about him. The Lords of the Council also are alarmed and confused by the plot itself and by the King’s suspicions.’
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For James, the Gunpowder Plot, calling to mind only too clearly the attack on Riccio and the Gowrie Plot, was just the last in a line of threats to his life. This was no time for complacency.

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Most directly, the Gunpowder Plot gave James pause for thought about his policy towards English Catholics. This, after all, was not the first Catholic conspiracy he had encountered in his new country. In his final years in Scotland, James had been informed, primarily by Lord Henry Howard, that Sir Walter Ralegh, one of Elizabeth’s favourites, opposed his claim to the throne; James did not forget the advice and as a result Ralegh was one of the few Englishmen to lose out on James’s accession, as the new King deprived him of his post of Captain of the Guard, other lucrative posts and licences, and ordered him to leave his house, Durham House in the Strand. On 14 July 1603 he was summoned before the Privy Council and grilled concerning his possible involvement in any plot ‘to surprise the King’s person’, and in particular a plot contrived between the Spanish agent Count Aremberg and Ralegh’s friend Lord Cobham. Unable to prove his innocence, Ralegh was imprisoned in the Tower of London three days later. In November, he was brought to trial before a specially appointed, and notably hostile, commission at Winchester. He was found guilty on charges of receiving bribes from Spain; ‘compassing and imagining’ the death of James and his family, ‘the old fox and his cubs’; and of trying to put Arbella Stuart on the throne, to deliver England into the hands of Spain.

Ralegh’s alleged co-conspirators, William Watson, George Brooke, Lords Cobham and Grey, were tried and condemned to death. Ralegh himself was due to be executed on 11 December, but the day before Ralegh, Cobham and Grey were reprieved, and sent back to the Tower, where Ralegh was to spend the next fourteen years of his life. According to a published letter, ‘written from Master T.M. near Salisbury, to Master H.A. at London, concerning the proceeding at Winchester’ but bearing the traces of James’s personal involvement, the reprieve was a brilliant
coup de théâtre,
designed to show his kingly clemency. During the trial, James allegedly called fourteen or fifteen Privy Councillors to the nearby estate of Wilton, where he was staying. Warrants for execution were signed, but James secretly wrote a warrant of reprieve in his cabinet, and appointed a Groom of his Bedchamber to deliver it ‘even at the instant when the axe should be laid to the tree’s roots’ – a forgivable dramatisation of the actual event. The letter likened this trick to ‘some ancient history, expressed in a well-acted comedy’ and applauded ‘so many lively figures of justice and mercy in a king, of terror and penitence in offenders, and of so great admiration and applause in all others, as appeared in this action, carried only and wholly by his Majesty’s own direction’.
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This time, however, James was in no mood to show mercy, even for the sake of his public image. Fawkes had confessed ‘that there was no cause moving him or them, but merely and only religion’, namely his Roman Catholic faith. What did it mean, asked James, that ‘Christian men, at least so called, English, born within the country … should practise the destruction of their King, his posterity, their country and all?’ On the one hand, it did not follow ‘that all professing that Romish religion were guilty of the same’. On the other, ‘it is true, that no other sect of heretics, not excepting Turk, Jew, nor Pagan, no not even those of Calicut, who adore the Devil, did ever maintain by their grounds of their religion, that it was lawful, or rather meritorious (as the Roman Catholics call it) to murder princes of people for quarrel of Religion’.
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Parliament reacted at the end of May 1606 by passing ‘An Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants passing tougher laws against Catholic recusants’ which included what it termed the Oath of Allegiance. An English Catholic could now be commanded to swear this Oath, which acknowledged James as lawful king, denied the power of the Pope to depose him, and went on to condemn as ‘impious and heretical’ the ‘damnable doctrine’ that a sovereign excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church could lawfully be deposed and murdered.
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In practice, many lay Catholics chose to take the Oath, justifying it to themselves on the ground that it did not insist that they abjure their faith; Jesuits and priests who refused to take it, however, were banished from the realm.

James’s move attracted international opposition. While he saw the Oath as a civil matter, concerning the allegiance of subjects to their sovereign, Rome inevitably viewed it as a matter of spiritual concern that denied papal supremacy, and was thus
de facto
heretical; this disagreement was made more intense by the death, in 1605, of Clement VIII and his succession by the more hard-line Paul V. The subsequent breakdown of relations with Rome depressed the King. In early 1606, the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘His Majesty on Sunday last while at chapel and afterwards at dinner, appeared very subdued and melancholy; he did not speak at all, though those in attendance gave him occasion. This is unlike his usual manner. After dinner, however, he broke out with great violence, “I have dispatches from Rome informing me that the Pope intends to excommunicate me; the Catholics threaten to dethrone me and to take my life unless I grant them liberty of conscience. I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood, though sorely against my will. But they shall not think they can frighten me, for they shall taste of the agony first. I do not know upon what they found this cursed doctrine that they are permitted to plot against the lives of princes. Sometimes I am amazed that when I see that the princes of Christendom are so blinded that they do not perceive the great injury inflicted on them by so false a doctrine.” He continued for a whole hour to talk in a similar strain, and those in attendance praised and approved.’
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