God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (46 page)

Sir William Catesby had seriously considered exile. In 1582, the year after Campion, the trial and the exorbitant increase (from 12d to £20) of the monthly recusancy fine, he had backed a proposal to establish an English Catholic colony in North America. The scheme was promoted by Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerard (the Jesuit’s father) and attracted several of Campion’s erstwhile hosts.
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It offered a possible way out, a haven where recusants could worship freely and thrive. Sir Francis Walsingham had endorsed it – with such enthusiasm that the Spanish ambassador thought it his design – and a list of articles was agreed in June 1582. In return for putting up a hundred pounds and ten men for the first voyage (forty for the next), ‘associates’ like Catesby would benefit from the lordship of ten thousand acres of virgin turf and election to ‘the chief offices in government’. They would set up a legal system ‘as near as they can’ to that in England and extend ‘special privileges to encourage women to go on the voyage’.
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The venture was undeniably risky – ‘wild people, wild beasts, unexperienced air, unprovided land’
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did not inspire investor confidence – but it had some momentum in the summer of 1582. The Spanish killed it. Ambassador Mendoza argued that the emigration would
drain ‘the small remnant of good blood’ from the ‘sick body’ of England. He was, however, far more concerned about Spain’s interests in the New World. The English could not be allowed a foothold in the Americas. It mattered not a jot that they were Catholic, ‘they would immediately have their throats cut as happened to the French’. Mendoza conveyed this threat to the would-be settlers via their priests, with the further warning that ‘they were imperilling their consciences by engaging in an enterprise prejudicial to His Holiness’ the Pope.
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So Sir William Catesby did not sail the seas or have a role in the plantation of what might have been the first English colony in America. According to Robert Persons, their attempt was soon mocked by the Protestants and scorned by the Catholics.
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It does, however, posit some interesting counter-factual questions, for both sides of the Atlantic. From the Old World perspective, one thing is clear: had the venture succeeded and the Catesbys settled in America, there would have been no plot to blow up the Parliament house in 1605, no bonfire-night celebrations, and Guido – or Guy – Fawkes, a Yorkshireman soldiering in Flanders, would never have gained fame as the cloaked figure in the cellar that we burn in effigy every year.

Elizabeth I died in the early hours of 24 March 1603 ‘easily like a ripe apple from the tree’ according to a law student of the Middle Temple. More hostile commentators dwelt on her decayed face and ‘distempered’ mind. John Chamberlain accused ‘the papists’ of spreading ‘strange stories as utterly void of truth as of all civil honesty or humanity’.
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Sir Robert Cecil, who had once had his ears boxed by the Queen, made the observation that she had been ‘more than a man and, in troth, sometime less than a woman’. She would have discerned the compliment. She had come a long way since 1572 when, dithering over the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, she had admitted to Cecil’s father, Lord Burghley, that the ‘hinder part’ of her brain could not trust ‘the forwards side of the same’. Hanging on the walls of her quarters at Hampton Court was a gold-embroidered tapestry depicting the murder of Julius Caesar – a salient reminder of the stalking threat of assassination in an age that had seen brother monarchs taken by bullet and blade. Country and duty had come first, masculine reason had prevailed over feminine passion, and ‘justice’, as Burghley termed
it, had trumped natural clemency. Elizabeth’s priorities were always more political than dogmatic. She would have preferred to have gained obedience ‘without constraint’, but ‘when obedience was lacking’, her godson John Harington observed, she ‘left no doubtings whose daughter she was’.
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Like her father, she made good use of the scapegoat and, like him also, she needed money.

To her credit, the statute book remained clean of the wilder anti-Catholic proposals that emerged during her forty-five-year reign. Nonetheless, it was manifestly the case that some priests were executed for being priests and a religious minority was punished for not attending the state church. Only at Elizabeth’s death did recusants talk of a golden age and they were looking to the future. Henry Garnet reflected the mood in Anne and Eleanor’s house: ‘A golden time we have of unexpected freedom … Great hope is of toleration: and so general a consent of Catholics in the [King’s] proclaiming, it seemeth God will work much.’
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The King was James VI of Scotland, now James I of England, the Protestant son of Mary Stuart, Elizabeth’s nearest blood relative. There had been some anxiety before his accession because Elizabeth had refused to name her heir. Almost a decade earlier, Robert Persons, S.J., had produced a controversial tract in implicit favour of Isabella, the Infanta of Spain, whose hereditary claim through the house of Lancaster was weaker than James’s, but apparently advantaged by her moral and religious position. In 1602 Garnet had received letters, or ‘breves’, from Rome insisting that Catholic support could only go to a successor who would promote the faith ‘with all his might’ and ‘submit himself to the Sea Apostolical’.
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During the Queen’s final illness, her English-born cousin, Arbella Stuart, who was preferred by some Catholics, was moved closer to London. ‘Some principal papists were made sure,’ wrote John Chamberlain, and those with rebellious form, like Catesby and the Wright brothers, were ‘clapped up’.
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The nervous energy of the capital was captured by John Donne, who later teased the citizens for ‘running up and down like ants, with their eggs bigger than themselves, every man with his bags, to seek where to hide them safely’.
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But there had been no need to panic. James’s proclamation on the morning of the Queen’s death was a work of neat choreography that had been years in the making. James and Rome, James and Madrid,
James and Brussels, and the English court, and the Privy Council, and latterly, above all, Sir Robert Cecil – the Scottish King had been playing a long and careful game, which ensured the smoothest of border crossings. To the Earl of Northumberland, acting on behalf of the English Catholics, he had promised: ‘I will neither persecute any that will be quiet and give but an outward obedience to the law, neither will I spare to advance any of them that will by good service worthily deserve it.’
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Either by accident or design, the Earl’s messenger, his kinsman Thomas Percy, had returned from Holyrood with the impression that some form of Catholic toleration was in the offing.

On Friday, 25 March 1603, the day after the proclamation of the King at Whitehall and the morning after a night of hard riding in the rain, Thomas Tresham proclaimed King James at Northampton. The Puritans of the town were less than delighted. Tresham was surrounded by a hostile mob and one ‘spleenish and peevish’ fellow heckled him on the soundness of the King’s religion. With glorious hypocrisy, Tresham lectured the man on the importance of ‘civil loyalty and obedience’. The incident sheds light on Puritan hostility to Catholic confidence at the King’s accession, in Northampton at least, though Tresham’s abrasive personality probably accounted for some of the rancour and at least one Puritan, Lewis Pickering, was happy enough with James I to gallop to Edinburgh to seek his patronage.
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Sir John Roper was apparently ‘the first man of note’ to proclaim James in Kent, while back in Northamptonshire, at Harrowden Hall, his daughter, Eliza Vaux, and her priest, John Gerard, were soon celebrating the knighting of Gerard’s brother, which was performed by James on his journey south with reference to his particular ‘love’ of Gerard blood on account of past support for Mary Queen of Scots.
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If recusant optimism was inflated, it was nonetheless sincere. Here was a King not a Queen, a Stuart not a Tudor, a peace-loving poet and family man with heirs and a recently converted Catholic wife. James had no record of religious persecution and no desire to create one, believing it to be ‘one of the infallible notes of a false church’.
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Above all, Gerard wrote later, ‘the son of such a mother’, who had died ‘because she was a Catholic’, would surely prove their friend. Exiles began to return home – Tresham’s brother William with a French accent – and Garnet advised Robert Persons in Rome to muffle any noise about ‘foreign competitors’. He even hoped that James the
theologian-king might welcome a papal nuncio to London.
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And because the papal breves on the English succession had become dead letters, he burnt them. Or so he later claimed, but not before Robert Catesby, his cousin Thomas Wintour and their friend Thomas Percy had all seen them. And so ‘they made use of them’, Garnet later admitted.
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In many ways, King James remained true to his word, at least the written word, verbal assurances being notoriously hard to prove. He gave places at court to prominent crypto-Catholics and he honoured his pledge, made to Tresham and others in July 1603, to remit the recusancy fines in return for dutiful conduct. He was apparently content to put up with the English Catholics as long as they were ‘quiet and decently hidden’.
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But for those who had hoped for some kind of formal toleration – perhaps even an English version of the French Edict of Nantes – James was profoundly disappointing.

Perhaps, for some, reality dawned at Easter, 1603, when the refusal of some court Catholics to attend divine service elicited the royal response: he ‘who can’t pray with me can’t love me’.
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For others it may have been during the summer when an official reply to a petition for toleration was not forthcoming. At least some of those involved in the ‘Bye Plot’ that summer claimed to have turned on James because he had reneged on his pre-accession promises. The conspirators included Eleanor’s kinsman Bartholomew Brooksby, Anthony Copley, who would later expiate his sins on pilgrimage with Ambrose Vaux, and Sir Griffin Markham, who, in addition to a ‘very great’ nose, had use of the royal lodge in Beskwood Park, where Francis Tresham, Fathers Gerard and Percy and the young Lord Vaux had recently been hunting. The plot was headed by William Watson, an appellant priest whose idea to kidnap James and force him to grant full toleration was, even Copley conceded, ‘without head or foot’.
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An attempt to draw Gerard into the conspiracy led to its disclosure: the Jesuit, his superior, Garnet, and Archpriest Blackwell tried ‘to stay it what they could’, but when Watson showed no sign of quitting, they leaked the details. Watson’s rampant anti-Jesuitism – recall his tirade against the ‘hot holy ladies’ who supported the Society – had not aided his desperate cause. He was executed in November 1603, but most of his confederates were ultimately reprieved. A second
‘Main’ plot, involving Lord Cobham, Sir Walter Ralegh and the forcible enthronement of Arbella Stuart (‘the King and his cubs’ to be eliminated), also failed to ignite.

Sir Thomas Tresham, whom the Bye plotters had earmarked for the Lieutenancy of the Tower, was disgusted by the ‘menstruous or rather monstrous filthiness’ of the conspiracy. He half suspected it to be a put-up job (an erroneous view he had also held about the Babington Plot) and on the eve of his July meeting at Hampton Court, he blasted the Judas ‘caitiffs’ and pronounced them ‘anathema among us’. Others were less perturbed. ‘I hear much by private means of strange plots,’ Sir John Harington noted in his remembrancer, but ‘I have no concerns of this sort, save that my man Ralph hath stolen two cheeses from my dairy-house. I wish he were choked herewith.’
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On 26 November 1603, Garnet reported ‘some contentment of toleration’ in the south. He tried to remain positive despite reports of ‘intolerable and continual searches’ in the north, and the presence in the early autumn of ‘restless men who even in our own name entice our most intimate friends to rebellion’. General Aquaviva urged prudence: ‘Shun every species of activity that might make priests of our Order hated by the world and branded the instigators of tragedy or subverters of peace.’ The message, which came ‘in most grave and serious terms’ from the very top, was to pray hard and trust in divine providence, which ‘knows how to maintain its order in its own place and time’.
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That the time was not going to be 1604 was soon dismayingly apparent. Keen to get on with the union of England and Scotland and fed up with the Catholic clamour for toleration, James was seemingly happy in the New Year to clarify his position. Never, he assured his Privy Council on 19 February 1604, had he considered toleration for the Catholics, whose ‘superstitious religion’ he abhorred. By royal proclamation three days later, he reinstated the recusancy fines and ordered all priests out of the realm. His opening speech to his first Parliament on 19 March expressed his general hope for Christian union, but warned the Catholics against increasing in number. A bill confirming all the Elizabethan penal legislation on Catholic nonconformity received royal assent on 7 July. A few days later, a priest called John Sugar
alias
Sweet was executed in Warwick. His servant, who
was hanged with him, was Robert Grissold, the brother of Anne and Eleanor’s ‘faithful man’ John.
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