The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) Read Online Free PDF

royal carried the Crown and the day.
    It was to be expected that the response of the exiles would not be unanimous; no chorus of approval or disapprobation. Dr Gifford, who had helped to spread the hope of converting James and so offended the pro-Spanish cluster, conveyed to the rapturous king a friendly message from the papal nuncio in Brussels. Hugh Owen later took the view that if Gifford had not persuaded Clement VIII of this supposed impending conversion then the accession would have been a much more disorderly business. Father Henry Garnet, soon to become a prominent figure in the gunpowder conspiracy, wrote to Persons while James was travelling from Edinburgh to London, and was quite buoyant about the prospects for the new regime. His hope that no foreign power would intervene was duly fulfilled. In the seminaries where Persons had many admirers and supporters, Douai and Rome, there was a pause for reflection and for the time being rueful acceptance of the new situation. At Douai the college diary made no comment, although Dr John Worthington who was in charge there was a devoted follower of Persons. The latter had taken on the administration of the English College in Rome five years before the accession of James which was publicly celebrated by a mass on Trinity Sunday. Privately Persons was acutely sceptical about the king in his two realms. In July 1603 in a letter to Garnet he regretted that lack of unified purpose had prevented Catholics from imposing definite terms, but there was some pleasurable relief in the death at last of a hated queen. His comment several months before had been that ‘the doubt conceived of the king’s religion has cast much water into the wine’. 19 As for Clement VIII, he still hoped that James or Prince Henry would be reconciled, and this was perhaps allowable while he waited for a reply to his offer. The response from James was drafted in October 1602, but the messenger fell ill so that it reached Paris months later for forwarding to Rome. In it James rejected the proposed course, and although his tone was mild no concessions were trailed as they had been previously. Prince Henry was not going to be educated as a Catholic, even if his mother, Queen Anne, was retreating from her childhood Lutheranism.

TWO
Plotters in Exile
    I t was a striking coincidence not lost upon his contemporaries that James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth on what was then New Year’s Eve, 24 March 1603, thus restoring the Golden Age as they imagined with the new year. But the character, pronouncements and publications of his reign beyond the sometimes turbulent border did not disarm or even greatly encourage English Catholic exiles. Their judgments of him varied and the conspiratorially inclined could not be easily persuaded that he would make a principled and generous response to their hurts. The deformities of spirit remained, though after 1598, when the Edict of Nantes in France seemed to show that toleration was a benign option for countries with profound religious divisions, some discerned a faint light of hope. This did not touch James, whose real attitude towards Catholicism derived from the same roots as his views on Puritanism – a hostility that was much more political than religious. 1 He hated toleration and this matched the view of the man who emerged as his chief minister – Sir Robert Cecil. No doubt sensitive adjudication between Catholics and James was possible, but Cecil was not the man to do it, and the notion of armed resistance by the religious minority had an allure for some before 1605. A soldier in exile like Sir William Stanley, whose name was synonymous in England with treachery, certainly preferred bullets to compromise. For years he had sought ‘to promote his own standing and prestige in the Spanish military service by playing a prominent part in an invasion to some part of the British Isles’.
    With their royal blood, the Stanleys had inevitably a somewhat bumpy