Frighted with false fire

Peter Vansittart

THE GUNPOWDER PLOT: TERROR AND FAITH IN 1605 by Antonia Fraser Weidenfeld, 120, pp. 347

Some interpret the Jacobean era as containing intellectual greatness within autumnal morbidity, after fresh Eliza- bethan summer, with Macbeth more typical than Twelfth Night. The fateful year 1605 indeed opened at court with Jonson's The Masque of Blackness. Yet both reigns need- ed a murky understructure of secret agents, double-dealing, torture, the furtive. The Gunpowder Plot was only the most sensa- tional of successive Catholic plots, several against Elizabeth, then two against James, both betrayed by Catholics.

The Plotters, remembering 500 besiegers blown up at Antwerp in 1585, planned to explode King, Lords, Commons, Catholics and Protestants alike. This has been seen as a frame-up instigated by Robert Cecil, akin to the Reichstag Fire, or as a Jesuit enterprise. Antonia Fraser dismisses both these theories, accepting the more normal version of 13 young laymen disillusioned by the new King's religious policy in which they had had high hopes. The Queen, Anne, who deserves a book to herself, was Catholic; the King, adroit, indeed slippery, had allegedly promised Catholic toleration. Disillusion induced fanaticism. The Thirteen ignored Papal and Spanish disap- proval — though a Spanish force had land- ed in Ireland as recently as 1601 — while most English Catholics were either more

royalist than Romanist, or content to await the justice of Providence.

The government was led by Cecil, the complete minister for whom the show must be kept on the road at whatever moral cost; Edward Coke, unscrupulous master-lawyer; and James himself, a type perhaps more sympathetic to moderns, save for support- ers of animal rights. Intellectual, pacific, unmethodically internationalist, keeping free of the horrors of the Thirty Years War, emotionally complex, coiner of the unpopular 'Great Britain', he was afflicted with what William Harvey called 'an incredible sadness'. From infancy, and very justifiably, he had feared assassination. Dis- inclined to underestimate his own omni- science, he had shrewd insights.

I did ever hold Suspicion to be the sickness of a Tyrant.

The chief conspirator was not the stub- born, aggressive tyke, Fawkes, but Robert Catesby, who, with several others, had joined Essex's futile rising against Eliza- beth. Young and charismatic, he is fleeting- ly compared to Adam von Trott. Fraser also cites Nelson Mandela planning sabo- tage only as a last resort against oppres- sion. A comparison of Catholic sufferings under James I, and Protestant sufferings in Spain and France, is avoided. Undeniably, though, the Plotters scarcely sought vulgar rewards; they had much to lose, and lost it. Conscientiously, they sought justification for tyrannicide in the Bible, in Aquinas.

Conspiracies are liable to betrayal, through conscience, cowardice, over- optimism. A colleague of Fawkes assured the Spanish authorities that

with work, speed, secrecy and good weather we will have the game in six days.

Similar assurances lured Monmouth to his doom in 1685. The Plot foundered on an anonymous warning to Lord Monteagle. He passed it to Cecil. Fraser believes the letter a fake, perhaps concocted by the ambitious Monteagle himself to safeguard his own position, already weakened by complicity in the Essex plot. The usual suspect, his brother-in-law Francis Tresham, probably did warn him, but ver- 'Video recorders are killing the art of television watching.'

bally. Anyway, Cecil now had time to trap the conspirators and many associates, including the respected Jesuit, Henry Garnet, who raised another question still pertinent today. He deplored the Plot, but, having learnt of it under the Seal of Con- fession, could not reveal it, could not risk his soul by betrayal, though this would save several hundred lives. Was he thus guilty of treason, or of callous turpitude? His trial publicised the matter of 'equivocation', the disguising of blunt truth by subtle replies and internal reservations in dangerous cir- cumstances. It exposed Catholicism not only to accusations of un-English devious- ness, but to ridicule, as in Macbeth. The Plot itself prolonged anti-Catholic hatred, already fanned by Mary Tudor, the St Bartholomew Massacre, the Armada, the Inquisition, Spanish cruelty in the Nether- lands and the New World. Cromwell's loathsome Irish policy was partly derived from his disgust with Catholic priests. Lon- don would be terrorised by the bogus Popish Plot and the 'No Popery' Gordon Riots, and Catholics were denied full tights until 1829. Like fascism, anti-Catholicism gave mindless opportunity to equate crimi- nal violence with patriotism.

None of this is very new, but Fraser traces a well-documented course through ambiguous terrain with some original com- ments and details: Dekker described the King as accompanied by silver clouds of blissful angels. He might have been more accurate to describe the King's retinue as a grasping crowd of greedy Scots.

The details are interesting. Fawkes's gun- powder had deteriorated, was perhaps use- less. The Plotters ordered themselves Spanish swords engraved with the words `The Passion of Christ'. A 1613 bill to compel all Catholics to wear red caps or, like clowns, parti-coloured stockings, was disallowed. Some Catholic women sus- pects, understandably, preferred prison to enforced, bi-weekly Calvinist sermons. Such women, notably Anne Vaux, at last given their due, are among the few who emerge honorably, together with the rough Protestant mob ready to mock HenrY Garnet on the gallows, then unexpectedly surrendering to common decency. Christianity, in general was scarcely at its best. Mass-murder is uningratiating, and Coke, prosecuting, unctuous and vindictive, quoted a Psalm, 'Let his wife be a widow, and his children vagabonds, let his postentY be destroyed.' It is a relief to recall a remark of Elizabeth I, not, one suspects, a prime favourite of Antonia Fraser:

There is but One Faith and one Jesus Christ. The rest is a dispute about trifles.

She added that theology was ropes of sand or sea-slime leading to the moon.

To order a copy of this book at the special discount price of £16, call The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 964 9640.