Windows into Men's Souls by Campbell Kenneth L.;

Author:Campbell, Kenneth L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

James and the English Catholics—the Impact of the Gunpowder Plot

On November 5, 1605, a disgruntled Catholic terrorist named Guy Fawkes and a large supply of gunpowder were fortuitously discovered in the basement of Westminster Palace immediately prior to a meeting of Parliament at which James was scheduled to appear. This represented the culmination of a Catholic conspiracy that was intended to result in the seizure of the government and the restoration of the Roman faith in England, following the overthrow of the government and the assassination of most of its leading members. The plot failed, the leading conspirators were arrested and executed, and English Catholics remained a quiet and obedient minority for the rest of James’s reign. Most Catholics willingly consented to an Oath of Allegiance that the king imposed upon them in 1606. The oath particularly required Catholics to deny the power of popes to depose princes.

The Gunpowder Plot was likely the result of despair among some English Catholics who believed that, with so many of their co-religionists already conforming outwardly as Church-papists, their window of opportunity to reclaim the country for their own faith was rapidly closing. It also resulted from the disappointment that this select group of Catholic conspirators felt when it became clear that the new king, the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, would not restore the old faith in England, as they had hoped he would. In addition, James’s proclamation banishing Jesuits from the kingdom could have had an especially significant impact in the circles likely to hatch such a conspiracy in the first place. James stated that such a decree was necessary in order “to keep our subjects from being affected with superstitious opinions, which are not only pernicious to their own souls, but the ready way to corrupt their Duty and Allegiance. . . .”[4] This statement provides a key to understanding James’s general attitude toward religion, which was always intertwined with his political commitment to his rights as sovereign.

The Gunpowder Plot had inevitably altered James’s attitude toward popery, at least toward the Jesuits and those Catholics dedicated to the principle of absolute papal supremacy. Yet James never sought to blame or punish all Catholics for the Gunpowder Plot. In a speech that followed the attempt on his life, James conceded that “many honest men, seduced with some errors of Popery, may yet remain good and faithful subjects.”[5] This did not mean that James was unconcerned with his Catholic subjects after the Gunpowder Plot, for he sought additional assurance of their “duty and allegiance.” Thus James imposed in 1606 the Oath of Allegiance, which became a contentious issue among Catholic writers but not among the majority of Catholics who did take the oath. Even among those Catholic intellectuals who debated the issues surrounding the oath, the controversy revolved more around certain theological intricacies than around the actual issue of whether the English Catholics owed obedience to James or not. That “duty and allegiance” James regarded as more important than the

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