The Gunpowder Plot Read online

  Father Robert Persons’ ecstasy on the subject of Isabella in The Book of Succession – ‘a princess of rare parts’ – was all very well. The Spanish Council and King Philip dithered on. Sometimes they indulged in pipe-dreams, imagining that once Isabella was Queen of England she would cede the Isle of Wight to her brother so that he could harbour his fleet there, in order to ‘keep England (and even France) in subjection’. At other times, the Spanish Council, like the French, recognised the danger of Flanders being united with England – rather than Spain – in the future. In 1601 the Council suggested that Isabella should give Flanders back to Spain when she ascended the throne of England.16

  But it was Isabella herself, backed up by Albert, who showed the most marked disinclination to have her rich and interesting life as a ruler of Flanders interrupted. She saw the whole matter in terms of Flemish, not English, independence: was Philip III trying to secure the return of the Spanish Netherlands by this elaborate ritual of a royal claim elsewhere? English Catholics fantasised over the religious houses that this princess, ‘both strong and mighty and also abounding in wealth and riches’, would reestablish in their benighted country.17 Isabella, however, nourished the more realistic ambition of a Flanders, virtually free of Spain, where there was peace and prosperity.

  For all the royal lady’s unwillingness, her mere presence among the contenders – a Catholic presence backed by a large army – had a profound effect on the policies and initiatives of King James. It is indeed impossible to understand his delicate finessing of the Catholic question while he was still in Scotland, his diplomatic treatment of the Pope, without bearing in mind the threat that the Archduchess Isabella represented to him.

  In the final analysis, was this threat entirely in the mind? Speculations about what-might-have-been – what is now termed counterfactual history – are notoriously enjoyable. One might even conjecture that Queen Isabella of England would have made a remarkable, albeit Catholic sovereign, if she could have thrown off the Spanish influence. Like another great English Queen – Victoria – centuries later, she would have had an assiduous consort in the hard-working and supportive Albert.

  Returning to the late 1590s, the reaction of the English court had to be brought into the equation. During this period, Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex fought for position. Cecil’s father instructed him: ‘Seek not to be E and shun to be R’ (standing for that other charismatic figure at the Elizabethan court, Sir Walter Ralegh), but Cecil did not in fact have much choice.18 The respective weapons at his disposal and at that of Essex were very different: middle-class cunning on the one hand, aristocratic glamour on the other. Essex was the Queen’s favourite, Cecil the Queen’s servant; Essex charmed her, Cecil worked for her. During the reign of Elizabeth it was not clear which of them would prevail, still less was it clear who would prevail with the incoming monarch, whomsoever he or she might be.

  Early on, Essex started to make the running with King James. He corresponded with him from at least 1598 onwards, showering him with those sentiments most calculated to gratify the Scottish King. Under the circumstances, it seems probable that Cecil did allow himself to contemplate the rival claims of the Archduchess Isabella. Rapid revisionism on Cecil’s part after the fall of Essex in 1601 means that the subject is inevitably veiled in mystery. (No one knew better than Cecil how to cover his tracks when a change of direction was necessary.) Yet the affair of the royal portraits gives an interesting pointer to where Cecil’s interests lay in the autumn of 1599: which he did not manage to suppress afterwards.

  On 3 September 1599, Robert Cecil set about procuring portraits of Isabella and Albert, with the aid of Filippo Corsini, a foreign agent. Corsini promised not only to gratify Cecil’s wish as soon as possible but also to respect his request for ‘all secrecy and speed’. By 19 October the paintings were well in hand, and by mid-November Corsini was able to repeat his assurance to Cecil that the task had been carried out without anyone’s knowledge.*19

  Of course Essex, in his diplomatic war with Cecil, took care to see that rumours of Cecil favouring Isabella reached Scotland. Early in 1601 he instructed his Scottish ally the Earl of Mar to report to James that Cecil was persistently recommending Isabella’s admirable qualities to Elizabeth in order to sway the English Queen in her favour.

  In February, however, Essex attempted to mount an armed coup against the Queen’s evil advisers – as he saw them – with a view to imposing his own authority. He gathered together a band of swordsmen, including certain youthful Catholics who saw in such a rebellion an opening to secure religious toleration.20 The rising failed almost before it began, meeting with little or no popular support; while force was certainly not the way to deal with Queen Elizabeth I. It was not a mistake that the thoughtful Cecil would ever have made with his sovereign. While some of Essex’s Catholic accomplices – among them Lord Monteagle, Robert Catesby and Francis Tresham – were reprieved, Essex was tried and executed on 25 February 1601.

  Significantly, Essex had still thought it worth while trying to blacken Cecil’s name on the subject of the Archduchess Isabella at his trial. He accused him of telling a fellow councillor that her title to succeed was ‘as good as that of any other person’. This would certainly be mortifying news for the King of Scots, who believed that his own title was clearly the best. Essex did not realise that Cecil was actually eavesdropping on the trial proceedings from a concealed position. Hearing this potentially damaging charge Cecil stepped into the open court. Falling to his knees, he begged permission to correct the record, and then challenged Essex to provide the identity of this Councillor: ‘Name him, if you dare!’21

  Essex consulted with Lord Southampton, and ‘after a little hesitation’ gave the name of Sir William Knollys. The drama was not over. Knollys was fetched and for his part declared that he had never heard Cecil ‘speak any words to that effect’. But he did confirm that there had been a discussion of the book by Doleman – actually an alias for Father Persons – on the subject of the succession. Cecil, said Knollys, had described it as ‘strange impudence’ on the part of Doleman to give ‘an equal right in the succession to the Crown’ to Isabella as to any other. In short, Cecil’s reaction to Doleman had been the exact opposite. So, supposing that Knollys (and Cecil) were telling the truth, something that could never be disproved in view of Cecil’s new ascendancy, the matter was resolved.

  In short, the fall of Essex gave Robert Cecil his opportunity. There were to be no more thoughts of the Archduchess. James must be the man if it could be brought about. In Scotland the Earl of Mar, preparing for an embassy south with instructions from Essex, quickly backed off. Instead Robert Cecil initiated what was to prove two weary years of delicate correspondence between himself and the Scottish King. His conditions were that the ‘greatest secrecy’ (to spare Elizabeth’s feelings) was to be maintained, and no other more open bargaining for the royal title was to take place.22 Under these circumstances the two men cautiously grew to know and respect one another – by post.*

  ‘Build up a party in England to aid your chances there and above all seek the favour of the Pope.’ This strongly worded piece of advice was given to King James in 1600 by his relative Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany, who unlike James was a Catholic.23 The relationship was not particularly close – their respective mothers descended from the Dukes of Lorraine – but it suited both men to address each other as ‘cousin’. While Cecil hoped in time to establish the support of the English Council and build up a party for King James in England, as an outstanding Protestant, he could not solve the Catholic problem for him. Yet this the Scottish King must do, if he was to secure the great prize of England by peaceful means.

  A tranquil accession was his dearest wish. By both temperament and experience, James disliked violent action. Why rob an orchard from over the wall before the fruit was ripe? That could be dangerous. ‘By a little patience and abiding the season,’ the King told the Earl of Northumberland, ‘I may with far more ease and safety en
ter at the gate of the garden, and enjoy the fruits at my pleasure.’24

  The Scottish King’s first secret diplomatic overture to the Papacy had in fact occurred several years before the Duke Ferdinand’s good advice. Apart from diplomatic moves abroad, in Scotland itself James was already showing personal favours to Catholics. He saw it as a means of balancing the more extreme form of Calvinism represented by the Scottish Kirk (as the reformed Church was known). The Earl of Huntly and his wife Henrietta Stuart, both Catholics, were members of the inner royal circle. Lady Huntly had a special place in James’ heart, for her father Esmé Stuart had been his first love, when James was a neglected love-starved boy. As for her husband, James was inclined to address him as his ‘good son’. Such accolades, reported to Rome and if anything exaggerated, could not help creating a good impression there.

  Perhaps it was James’ youthful crush on the personable Esmé Stuart which had given him a preference for his own sex where intimate relationships were concerned; perhaps homosexuality was natural to him. In either eventuality, James also found it perfectly possible to act the loving husband and father as he was expected to do. Indeed, King James in Scotland enjoyed a positively happy marriage to his Queen, Anne of Denmark; by the royal standards of that time, when arranged marriages to unknown foreigners were often bitterly unhappy, the union was a miracle of accord. It has been mentioned that the Queen was pregnant with her sixth child at the time of Elizabeth’s death. All in all the King would beget a total of eight children over a period of eleven years – undeniable proof of marital assiduity.

  Contemporary observers also bore witness to the King’s affection outside the royal bedchamber for ‘our Annie’, as he called his wife. (More formally, in a poem to welcome her to Scotland, he addressed her as ‘our earthly Juno… the sweet doctor’ who could heal his heavy heart.) Anne of Denmark’s excellent royal comportment, her ‘courteous behaviour to the people’, made her a satisfactory consort in public, as well as a pleasing one in private.25 A slight giddiness in character was no great disadvantage since James had a low opinion of women at the best of times and hardly expected in his wife the stability of a man.

  In view of such public amiability, Anne’s conversion to Catholicism in her twenties could not help being interpreted as another sign favourable to the Papal cause, especially in Rome itself. Anne had been brought up as a Lutheran and never took to the official religion of her husband’s country. With time she became ‘most decidedly opposed to it’ and she found Catholicism altogether more sympathetic. According to her confessor, the Jesuit Father Robert Abercromby, she had gone to Mass in the household of a certain anonymous ‘great princess’ as a girl. It is possible that her desire to convert was conceived as a child, as well as being in part a reaction to dour Scottish Calvinism. At all events, some time after 1600 but well before March 1603, Queen Anne was received into the Catholic Church in a secret chamber in the royal palace. By the summer of 1601, she was writing to Pope Clement VIII assuring him of her fidelity to the Church.26

  King James showed himself tolerant of what he seems to have taken to be a feminine aberration. According to Father Abercromby’s account much later, the royal couple discussed the matter ‘one night, when they were in bed’. First of all, King James commented that his wife, inclined to be frivolous, had recently shown herself to be ‘much more grave, collected and pious’. When Queen Anne revealed the reason, James in effect gave her his blessing in these wise husbandly words: ‘Well, wife, if you cannot live without this sort of thing, do your best to keep things as quiet as possible, for if you don’t our crown is in danger.’27

  Genuine tolerance, where his own safety was not at stake, was one of the virtues of King James. Having been brought up to adhere to the strictest Calvinist doctrines as a child, he had come to see them as threatening the position of a sovereign. Elders of such a Church granted him no special ‘divine right’ or authority. A Church with a proper hierarchy of bishops and clergymen, on the other hand, had the monarch at its apex, duly supported by the whole structure.

  It is true that James remembered with bitterness that the Catholic Church had supported his mother’s claims to the Scottish throne over his own during her long English captivity. Yet James was personally pragmatic. Furthermore, in historical terms he was inclined to view Rome as the Mother Church, though much corrupted since. Not only were the Catholic Huntlys petted but Catholic priests such as Father Abercromby were permitted at his court if suitably disguised as a keeper of hawks or something incongruous which did not challenge the Kirk. King James even enjoyed disputing with them. He was certainly not prepared to take issue over a mere woman taking comfort in Papist practices.

  The Queen’s conversion, details of which inevitably leaked out in Catholic circles, gave the King another excellent opportunity for the kind of ambivalent diplomacy at which he excelled. The Queen’s letter to Rome of 1601 was ostensibly an answer to the Pope’s communication to her husband. The King could not reply himself, Anne explained, since he had to be circumspect. Not only could the Pope be assured of the Queen’s own devotion, and her care to educate her children in the Catholic Faith, but Anne went further and hinted that King James might soon grant liberty of conscience to Catholics. As for herself, if she publicly had to attend ‘the rites of heretics’, she asked for the Pope’s absolution and blessing in advance. Such attendance was hardly her own desire, but due simply ‘to the hostile times which we have to endure’.28

  This letter was almost certainly written with James’ knowledge, which made the reference to the royal children especially cynical. Anne had already clashed with her husband over the despatch of her eldest son Prince Henry away from her own care to the guardianship of the Earl of Mar, according to Scottish royal tradition which the Danish Queen greatly disliked. There was at the present time no question of these Scottish princes and princesses receiving Catholic instruction, much as the Queen would have liked it. But Queen Anne wrote out of wishful-thinking, an optimism based on a fantasy which came to be shared by Rome.

  By July 1602, Pope Clement, already happy at the news about Queen Anne, was urging the conversion of her husband. There had in fact been a rumour of this conversion – which must have seemed a miraculous development – on the continent as early as 1599. A Scottish visitor to the Spanish court brought the glad tidings. In Spain in July 1600, King James was said to be on the verge of submitting to the Pope’s religious authority in order to have his English claim confirmed. In the following November even Father Robert Persons thought it a serious possibility that the Scottish King would be converted. In the summer of 1601, Henri IV of France joined in the act. He was after all an expert on the subject of royal conversion, having become a Catholic specifically to ascend the throne of France. As he put it with his usual light touch: ‘Paris is worth a Mass.’ Henri IV assured his new pastor the Pope that he would do everything in his power to assist in his brother monarch’s conversion.29

  The Pope now privately offered to champion King James against anyone who tried to deny him the English throne. Clement VIII, elected Pope in 1592, was, unlike Pius V, by temperament a conciliator. He prided himself on having mediated between France and Spain to bring about peace. Perhaps he could now repeat this triumph by securing peace between Spain and England, if only to bring succour to the beleaguered English Catholics.

  King James’ diplomatic manoeuvring with regard to the Papacy was certainly successful. It was also carefully calculated. The King wrote no letters of his own; it was better like that. On the one hand Queen Anne – with her repeated use of the royal ‘we’ – would be believed by the Catholics to speak for him; on the other hand he could deny to their opponents that he had any share in her views.

  James’ agents in Rome were able to have a field day along similar lines. They encouraged the tall tales, one of which reached as far as the Spanish King Philip III. Not only, apparently, was James becoming a Catholic but his son and heir would be brought up in Rome. When one particu
lar letter did emerge later under James’ own signature, addressing the Pope in Latin as ‘Most Holy Father’, and signed ‘your most obedient son’, the King was more than capable of dealing with the challenge. He blandly announced that he must have signed the paper quickly, without looking at it closely, on his way out hunting.30

  From James’ point of view there was no need to emulate Henri IV and change his religion. It was far better to travel hopefully towards conversion – or to be seen to do so – than actually to arrive there. And, as we shall see, rumours of this famous conversion continued to circulate as late as 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot.

  In 1600, Thomas Wilson wrote concerning the succession in The State of England: ‘Thus you see this crown [of England] is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted.’ He went on to list twelve competitors.* Yet by 1602 the picture had entirely changed. In the Spanish Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella were working out ways of assisting James which would leave him under an obligation to them when he arrived in the south. As Don Baltasar de Zuñiga, the Spanish Ambassador in Brussels, wrote at the end of July: ‘His James’] game for the crown of England is almost won.’31 It was therefore essential to give support to the monarch who ‘would at the last, give liberty to the Catholics’.

  This remarkable turnaround would allow the Archduchess Isabella to exclaim ecstatically over the accession of King James, in a letter of April 1603 to her brother’s favourite, the Duke of Lerma. Surely the blood of the martyred Mary Queen of Scots must have ‘cried out towards Our Lord’ at the moment of her son’s proclamation! The memory of Queen Mary’s death would certainly spur on James’ conversion to Catholicism: towards which Isabella felt ‘strong signs’ were already pointing. A Scot, resident in London, put the whole matter more phlegmatically in a report back to James in the winter of 1602: ‘Wherever I passed and lodged they called your Majesty their young lord, which within a few years [back] no man durst speak.’32