British History for Dummies by Sean Lang

Author:Sean Lang
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Boom, shake the room – the Gunpowder Plot

If James thought the Puritans were a problem (see the preceding section), he hadn’t yet met the Catholics. James was as good a friend as the Catholics were likely to get. He made peace with Spain and even tried to marry his son Charles to a Spanish princess. He certainly preferred Catholics to Puritans, but he couldn’t risk appearing soft on popery by removing all Elizabeth’s anti-Catholic fines and penalties (the English had executed his Catholic mother, don’t forget: James never did). So he allowed his chief minister, Lord Robert Cecil, to re-impose heavy fines on Catholics and banish Catholic priests. Most Catholics simply went and put new sheets on the camp bed in the priest-hole (see Chapter 12), but a hot-headed fool called Robert Catesby decided to get more pro-active. He planned one of the most famous terrorist attacks in history: The Gunpowder Plot.

Catesby, and a group of conspirators, planned to blow the king and the whole of Parliament sky-high. Had they succeeded, the explosion would have destroyed everybody with any claim to sovereignty throughout the islands, and what would have followed hardly bears thinking of: Almost certainly civil war, quite possibly foreign invasion, and very likely sectarian massacre.

The government got wind of the plot (the plotters were filling the cellars under the House of Lords with large barrels and lots of firewood – it would’ve been hard not to get wind of it) when someone, presumably one of the plotters, sent a note to a Lord Monteagle warning him not to go to Parliament on the 5 November. Lord Monteagle promptly showed the note to Lord Robert Cecil, who sent guards down to the cellar. They found Guy Fawkes, another conspirator, surrounded by barrels of gunpowder, with a fuse in one hand and a match in the other, trying to convince them he’d just come to check the plumbing. They took him away and tortured him, while the rest of the plotters gave themselves up after a gun battle with government troops. The nation breathed an almighty sigh of relief.

The English have got quite fond of the Gunpowder Plot and don’t take it too seriously nowadays. The Plot’s a good excuse for a big fireworks display each 5 November and a line of jokes about Guy Fawkes being the only honest man to go into Parliament. Of course, there was nothing funny about it at the time.

James I fought the law and . . . who won?

Ironically, James was probably a better King of Scotland while he was in London than he had ever been while he was at Holyrood in Edinburgh. He set up a system of nobles, bishops, lawyers, and Scottish MPs to keep Scotland on an even keel while he was away, and by and large his system worked. It was in England that he hit trouble.

The English soon came to despise James, especially when he started relying on favourites – never a good idea. First it was Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and then it was George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.