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Why Was There So Little Government Reaction to Gunpowder Plot?
Abstract
This article rejects the approach that treats the Gunpowder Plot as a discrete historical episode. The plot is better understood when examined in parallel with the period after November 1605; the surprising leniency shown by the Jacobean government towards English Catholics destroys the motives upon which conspiracy theories are based. This article demonstrates that Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, supported King James's toleration since both wished to preserve domestic stability and peace with Spain. The assassination of King Henri IV of France in 1610 did more to jeopardise toleration than did the Gunpowder Plot, despite the latter's profound impact on the English popular consciousness.
Kilian Schindler examines how playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe represented religious dissimulation on stage and argues that debates about the legitimacy of dissembling one's faith were closely bound up with early modern conceptions of theatricality. Considering both Catholic and Protestant perspectives on religious dissimulation in the absence of full toleration, Schindler demonstrates its ubiquity and urgency in early modern culture. By reconstructing the ideological undercurrents that inform both religious dissimulation and theatricality as a form of dissimulation, this book makes a case for the centrality of dissimulation in the religious politics of early modern drama. Lucid and original, this study is an important contribution to the understanding of early modern religious and literary culture.
The assumed source of the annual early modern English commemoration of Gunpowder treason day on 5 November – and its modern legacy, ‘Guy Fawkes day’ or ‘Bonfire night’ – has been an act of parliament in 1606. This article reveals the existence of earlier orders, explains how these orders alter understandings of the origin and initial purposes of the anniversary, and provides edited transcriptions of their texts. The first order revises the accepted date for the earliest publication of the special church services used for the occasion. The second order establishes that the anniversary thanksgiving was initiated not by parliament, but by King James I; it also shows that, in a striking innovation, he issued instructions for regular mid-week commemorations throughout England and Wales, expecting the bishops to change the Church of England's preaching practices. The annual thanksgivings were not just English, but ordered also in Scotland and observed in Protestant churches in Ireland. The motives for these religious thanksgivings are placed in a Stuart dynastic context, with Scottish antecedents and a British scope, rather than in the English ‘national’ setting assigned to the anniversary by English preachers and writers and by recent historians. The parliamentary act is best explained as an outcome of tensions between the king and the House of Commons.
For contemporaries, the Gunpowder Plot was ‘a mother… of all crimes’, and their sense of shock, and awe, in the face of so dreadful a treason was in no way diminished by the drama surrounding its discovery. 2 The arrest of Guy Fawkes outside the cellars of Westminster, late on the night of 4 November 1605, caught King James I and his ministers completely off guard. A mass of documentary evidence for the fraught days following Fawkes's apprehension confirms that ignorance, embarrassment, even panic ran through the highest counsels in the land. While a deadly strike had clearly been frustrated, with just hours to spare, no one knew whether trouble might be expected from other conspirators in the capital, or indeed, from rebels and mischief-makers elsewhere in England. Military men rushed to court, and within a week a sizeable force had assembled there under the command of the Earl of Devonshire, prepared to face and to repel a phantom enemy. 3 Open panic did of course subside, as administration and country alike began to measure and appreciate the danger, but anxiety was a long time dying. The extraordinary hysteria that swept London in the spring of 1606, on a rumour that the king had been assassinated, touched the court itself and serves as a reminder that, months after 5 November, many Englishmen in high positions still stood on their guard. 4
The article explores two prospective fields within the burgeoning history of crime: the various responses of early modern legal systems in Europe to violent political crimes such as assassination and regicide and their representation in popular print media, notably in illustrated broadsheets and pamphlets. The early modern era can be characterised as an incubation period of 'modern' political crime with regard to its phenomenology and its manifestations as well as concerning the conceptualisation in penal law and the actual practice of criminal justice. The case study of assassination attempts and their representation in illustrated broadsheets demonstrates that the developments of political crime, legal responses and popular print are strongly interconnected and created the modern narrative and image of political crime, which evolved from a national issue to a transnational European discourse. Hence, public punishment and popular print media constituted an integral part of the legal responses to political violence and dissidence by communicating the states interpretation of political crime, the damnatio memoriae and obliteration of the perpetrator and his motivation as well the appropriate just legal responses of the legal authorities.
This paper argues that proverbs provide valuable insights into popular opinion, in this case, in to the challenges and changes of reformed English religion. It builds a particular study of a celebrated proverb relating to the anticipated reign of 'King Henry IX', or Henry Prince of Wales (d.1612). Proverbial insights on this theme stand forth distinctively from many other proverbs circulating through Early Modern England, in having an easily identifiable provenance and context. This argument will pursue the meaning of a proverb relating to Prince Henry and the English Church, showing how proverbial wisdom functioned as a vehicle for anti-episcopal sentiments.
This article seeks to develop our understanding of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by asking a number of elementary questions. Were the plotters terrorists in any meaningful sense? Were they religious fanatics, as the Jacobean state understandably chose to portray them after the event? Was their plan built on a misguided fantasy of widespread support for a Catholic insurrection, or does the Plot perhaps have a practical coherence that lies obscured by the drama of the projected strike against Westminster? How does evidence for coherent planning square with the strong desire for revenge, running through so much of the surviving testimony? Through answers to these questions, we begin to see the Gunpowder plotters as men engaged in a calculated and demonstrably pragmatic attempt to engineer a change in regime. Their planning was robust, and to the point, while the emotional power of revenge was channelled creatively by the ringleaders. The article concludes that the odds against success were long, but not impossible.
The youngest son of Emperor Maximilian II, and nephew of Philip II of Spain, Archduke Albert (1559-1621) was originally destined for the church. However, dynastic imperatives decided otherwise and in 1598, upon his marriage to Philip's daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, he found himself ruler of the Habsburg Netherlands, one of the most dynamic yet politically unstable territories in early-modern Europe.
Through an investigation of Albert's reign, this book offers a new and fuller understanding of international events of the time, and the Habsburg role in them. Drawing on a wide range of archival and visual material, the resulting study of Habsburg political culture demonstrates the large degree of autonomy enjoyed by the archducal regime, which allowed Albert and his entourage to exert a decisive influence on several crucial events: preparing the ground for the Anglo-Spanish peace of 1604 by the immediate recognition of King James, clearing the way for the Twelve Years' Truce by conditionally accepting the independence of the United Provinces, reasserting Habsburg influence in the Rhineland by the armed intervention of 1614 and devising the terms of the Oñate Treaty of 1617. In doing so the book shows how they sought to initiate a realistic policy of consolidation benefiting the Spanish Monarchy and the House of Habsburg.
Whilst previous work on the subject has tended to concentrate on either the relationship between Spain and the Netherlands or between Spain and the Empire, this book offers a far deeper and much more nuanced insight in how the House of Habsburg functioned as a dynasty during these critical years of increasing religious tensions. Based on extensive research in the archives left by the archducal regime and its diplomatic partners or rivals, it bridges the gap between the reigns of Philip II and Philip IV and puts research into the period onto a fascinating new basis.
The ‘new British history’ still has a great deal to offer when it comes to understanding the formation and conceptualization of British identity before the advent of the British state. This article focuses on the aftermath of the 1603 ‘union of crowns’ under James VI and I. Up to now it has been the consensus among historians that British identity was mostly limited to James himself and that he, rather clumsily, attempted to impose the idea of Britain on his unwilling subjects in England and Scotland. However, by paying more attention to the thoughts and aspirations about Britain, a different kind of British identity can be discerned. There were many individuals in both Scotland and England who believed that the union of crowns created one of the most powerful Protestant kingdoms in Europe. For these individuals British identity was a militant Protestant identity. They embraced the idea that Britain should be an active protector of Protestantism and that it should use this combined military might to extirpate the papal Antichrist. While the militant Protestant version of British identity was always a minority opinion, its existence reveals that there were alternative ways to thinking about Britain that did not necessarily originate with James VI and I, nor was it limited to or inhibited by traditional antagonisms between England and Scotland.
The reformed English Church retained its bishops and its episcopal hierarchy. Yet contemporary evidence reveals perceptions of English bishops as being withholders of Protestant reform and punishers and persecutors of those churchmen who actively advocated further reform of the Church of England. In a challenge to these impressions, this article surveys the writings of Sir John Harington and Josias Nichols, the first a layman and the second a deprived minister and both interpreters of the reformed English episcopate. An interrogation of their texts shows that both writers identified dissent which emanated from within the reformed episcopate of the Church of England; Nichols in particular asserted his loyalty to the Church of England at the same time that lie had dissented from it, using the names and precedents of reformed bishops to argue away accusations of dissent. In examining the responses of Harington and Nichols to the episcopate, this article accounts for the exercise of episcopal authority which was explicitly reformed and Protestant, a point revealed by Harington's emphasis on the episcopal responsibility for enacting religious reform and Nichols's account of bishops who sheltered dissenters and encouraged reform of the church.
On November 9, 1605, the warden and fellows of All Souls College wrote to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, in some distress, and, as they thought, on a matter of considerable importance. Then, as now, they elected fellows at the beginning of November. On this occasion, they believed it essential to explain that they had turned down a nominee of Salisbury and the king; the man had failed to turn up for examination, and the college nervously pointed out that it did have its academic standards. But it could assure Salisbury that another candidate of the king's was safely in. This letter is the first of many ironies of the Gunpowder Plot. It was not unusual for colleges to worry about the pressure applied by the crown and its leading ministers to their selection procedures. That this anxiety should have preoccupied this institution at this particular time is nevertheless a delightful example of the differing priorities of philosophers and kings.
For the letter was written four days after men had learned the stupendous news that the king, the queen, at least one of their children, the lords temporal and spiritual, the judges, the leading members of the House of Commons, any foreign ambassadors present, and no doubt many others as well—King James put the figure at thirty thousand—were to be blown up by the Catholics.
This article explores the Jacobean oath of allegiance as an act
of government. It
suggests that historians have misread the intentions of the regime
in its formulation and enforcement
of the oath. Consequently they have underestimated the capacity of
the regime to enforce its will on
catholic nonconformists. An analysis of contemporary reaction to the
oath demonstrates that early
modern government could exert its power in ways which revisionist
historians have either missed or
denied. The oath should be understood as an exceptionally subtle and
well-constructed rhetorical essay
in the exercise of state power, and this we see in the devastating
effect it had on the structure of
Jacobean Romanist dissent. The evidence presented here suggests that
this statutory oath was not a
simple profession of civil allegiance to which English Romanist
dissenters responded with a
characteristic mixture of paranoia and politically illiterate
confusion. Rather it was an exceedingly
complex association of religious and political ideas, a diabolically
effective polemical cocktail, which
did not have to rely merely on the mechanics of a bureaucracy to work
its intended course against the
Romanist fraction within the English state.
The issue of conformity in religion is crucial for historians who want to describe how religion worked politically in the English Church during the period of the Reformation. This article takes one aspect of conformity—the struggle by self-consciously Protestant authorities to force Catholics in the North of England to conform before and after the accession of James'VI in their country. It appeared to some Protestants (as well as to some Catholics) that James’s accession might lead to changes in the established order of religion in England. Some papists in the North were very enamoured of James. Protestants tried to cool their ardour in part by using statutory conformity to emasculate their political activism. Yet some Catholics who expressed their hatred of the Elizabethan regime by and in separation from its Church became less determined to stand out against conformity when James’s accession seemed assured. The very mechanism by which papists were to be controlled no longer worked as Protestant activists intended. In short, the politics of conformity explains many of the puzzling features of Catholicism (particularly of ‘church papistry’) at this time and in this region—why some people moved between nonconformity and compliance, and why strict recusancy might not always be an article of faith even for the most belligerent of Roman dissidents.
Vita. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 1949. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 474-479). Microfiche of typescript.
84 Stuart royal proclamations, 246. 85 A royalist's notebook : the commonplace book of Sir John Oglander knight of Nunwell
- G O V E R N M E N T R E A C T I O N T O G U N P O W D E R P L O T Stuart Royal Proclamations
- Ed J F Larkin
- P L Hughes
G O V E R N M E N T R E A C T I O N T O G U N P O W D E R P L O T
83 Stuart royal proclamations, ed. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes, Oxford 1973, i. 245–53 ; CSP
Venetian, 1607–10, 501.
84 Stuart royal proclamations, 246.
85 A royalist's notebook : the commonplace book of Sir John Oglander knight of Nunwell, 1622–5, ed.
F. Bamford, London 1936, 193.
86 CSP Venetian, 1607–10, 494, 509.
87 Harrison, Second Jacobean journal, 194.
88 7 & 8 Jac.I. Cap.VI.
James I and his Catholic subjects, 1606–12 : some financial implications ', Recusant History xviii (1987), 258; Questier, ' Politics of religious conformity ', 27. 30 M. Questier, 'Sir Henry Spiller, recusancy and the efficiency of the Jacobean exchequer
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La Rocca, 'James I and his Catholic subjects, 1606–12 : some financial implications ',
Recusant History xviii (1987), 258; Questier, ' Politics of religious conformity ', 27.
30 M. Questier, 'Sir Henry Spiller, recusancy and the efficiency of the Jacobean
exchequer ', Historical Research lxvi (1993), 256–66.
Government by polemic : James I, the king's preachers, and the rhetoric of conformity
- L A Questier
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Questier, 'The politics of religious conformity and the accession of James I ', Historical
Research lxxi (1998), 25–6; L. A. Ferrell, Government by polemic : James I, the king's preachers, and the
rhetoric of conformity, 1603–25, Stanford 1998, 20.
26 CSP Venetian, 1603–7, 479–80.
King James VI and I, 82. 62 Patterson, King James VI and I, 80n. 63 CSP domestic, 1603-10, 397. 64 CSP Venetian
- Gunpowder Fraser
- Plot
Fraser, Gunpowder Plot, 183; Patterson, King James VI and I, 82.
62 Patterson, King James VI and I, 80n.
63 CSP domestic, 1603-10, 397.
64 CSP Venetian, 1603-7, 363.
65 Ferrell, Government by polemic, 72-3.
Oxford 1973, i. 245-53 ; CSP Venetian, 1607-10, 501. 84 Stuart royal proclamations, 246. 85 A royalist's notebook : the commonplace book of Sir John Oglander knight of Nunwell
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- P L Larkin
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83 Stuart royal proclamations, ed. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes, Oxford 1973, i. 245-53 ; CSP
Venetian, 1607-10, 501.
84 Stuart royal proclamations, 246.
85 A royalist's notebook : the commonplace book of Sir John Oglander knight of Nunwell, 1622-5, ed.