Dangerous Talk by Cressy David

Author:Cressy, David [Cressy, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2010-09-16T23:00:00+00:00

Catholic Crimes

A final strand of seditious speech came from the Catholic subjects of Charles I. Most Catholics, of course, held their tongues, but a few spoke boldly against their Protestant monarch. We have already heard from James Farrell who wished the king dead, Henry Sawyer who predicted a deluge of blood, and Mary Cole who talked of hanging his majesty. Catholics were always subjects of suspicion, and their words carried extra danger.

John Trevelyan, a Cornish recusant gentleman, predicted in 1628 ‘the utter and speedy ruin of this whole state and church’, and warned his Protestant neighbours that they ‘must change or choose their religion within this month or their throats would be cut’. According to testimony before magistrates at Bodmin, Trevelyan had declared that the psalm sung in church was but ‘a Geneva gig’, that there was ‘knavery in our Bible’, and that ‘were it not for images we should all be atheists’. The evidence rested on a chain of hearsay, too slender to hang a suspected popish plotter. Trevelyan was a braggart and a nuisance, but the government had no real cause for alarm.236

The Catholic soldier John Langton, who was born in Lancashire and served in Denmark, caused consternation at an Oxford alehouse in September 1630 when he championed the Gunpowder Plot. ‘It was not treason,’ Langton declared, and ‘Catesby, Percy and the Winters that were in the Gunpowder Treason were no traitors’. A tailor named Francis Thornton, who had been drinking with Langton, told magistrates about this remarkable discourse. Methuselah Flower, a maker of bowstrings, reported Langton to say ‘that the king was a young king, and that he would serve under another king if the king would not pay him his pay’. There was no shortage of witnesses and little disagreement about the words in question. Under examination, Langton explained that had just arrived in Oxford when ‘he fell into company… and had conference with them concerning the Gunpowder Treason’. But he was so drunk at the time that he could not remember anything he said. The mayor of Oxford, however, found Langton to be ‘of comely personage, well spoken’, and ‘very penitient’, while his accusers were ‘such as are usually found in alehouses in suburbs’, and these factors bore in his favour.237

Within a week the details reached the Privy Council and came to the attention of the king. Secretary Conway wrote back to the magistrates at Oxford, thanking them for their ‘care in making stay of this Langton, whose unwary tongue durst meddle with the censure of things so much above him’. The king’s decision, ‘of his gracious clemency’, was that the soldier ‘hath endured a sufficient punishment for this time of his unadvisedness’, and that he should be released with a caution.238 What is striking about this story is not just Langton’s sympathy with the Gunpowder plotters, and the ease with which he got off the hook, but the evidence of tailors and bowstring-makers, tavern-keepers and travellers, casually engaged in political conversation. It illuminates once

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