Tales from the Tower of London by Mark P Donnelly & Daniel Diehl

Author:Mark P Donnelly & Daniel Diehl [Donnelly, Mark P]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2011-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

Turmoil and Treason

9

GUNPOWDER, TREASON AND PLOT

Guy ‘Guido’ Fawkes 1604–5

Following the Catholic conspiracies centred on Mary Queen of Scots, religious bigotry and hatred bubbled to the surface all over England. All Catholics were viewed with suspicion and assumed to be agents of a foreign power (the Pope) bent on the destruction of England and its monarchy. Queen Elizabeth’s strength of character generally kept the hatred in check, but following her death in 1603 the violence crept into the open. Gangs of Protestant thugs destroyed Catholic homes searching for rosaries, holy relics and ‘priest holes’ where the dreaded Jesuits might be hiding. Any of these fanatical Protestants who were caught were prosecuted and imprisoned, but the law was half-hearted in its efforts to track them down, and this laxity only encouraged them. Sooner or later the situation was bound to come to a head, and when it did the results were nearly catastrophic.

Scotland’s King James VI was beset with problems from the moment he accepted the crown left vacant by the death of Queen Elizabeth. Scottish Presbyterians, Roman Catholics and the Church of England alike hounded him to designate an ‘official’ religion. Although he had little time for the straight-laced, puritanical Presbyterians, he was far more afraid of the Catholics, even though theirs was the church of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. Too many plots had been hatched by her and her followers against the English crown for James to trust any of them, particularly now that he was king.

Owing to his family’s violent history, James had a virtual paranoia of assassination and political upheaval. His mother had been beheaded, his grandfather had been shot dead and the Scottish lairds had attempted to blow up his father, Lord Darnley. Desperate to keep all of his subjects happy, James began negotiating a peace with staunchly Catholic Spain and commissioned an English translation of the Bible that would accommodate all the various Christian sects.

Judging by James’s private correspondence with his Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, it is obvious that he genuinely wanted to remain on good terms with all his subjects, no matter what their religious beliefs may have been. The only exception to this ecumenical view was the Jesuits. Both James and Cecil saw them as fanatics bent on stirring up anti-government and anti-Protestant sentiments on every possible occasion. In a memorandum, Cecil referred to them as ‘absolute seducers of the people from temporal obedience and consequent persuaders to rebellion’. In reaction to the Jesuit ‘problem’ King James initiated the Hampton Court Conference designed to impose harsher penalties on any Jesuit priest caught in England as well as anyone remotely associated with them. These apparently conflicting attitudes towards the Church of Rome led King James to be referred to as the ‘wisest fool in Christendom’. It was not the most positive judgement a new reign could hope for.

In March 1604, only weeks after the Hampton Court Conference got under way, three English gentlemen met at the home of John Wright in the London suburb of Lambeth.

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