Gunpowder treason and plot – or not?
The folk rhyme says: “I see no reason / Why Gunpowder treason / Should ever be forgot.” But a combination of laws limiting fireworks at home and the rival attractions of Hallowe’en and Diwali mean that Guy Fawkes’s treason is less widely known in the first place, let alone forgot.
The Book of Common Prayer included, until 1859, an annual service of thanksgiving for “the happy Deliverance of King James and the Three Estates of England from the most traiterous and bloodyintended Massacre by Gunpowder”. If it had succeeded it would have been more improbable than the atrocities of September 11 2001. But was there ever such a plot?
Two historians, Penelope Middelboe and Jon Rosebank, hosts of the History Cafe podcast, conclude that “if we strip out all the evidence from torture (or the very present threat of it) and the government’s own contradictory account, there is effectively nothing left”. The Catholic weekly The Tablet, not a tub-thumping papist publication, has now published their argument.
They quote Mark Nicholls, a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, whose Investigating Gunpowder Plot was published in 1991, saying that 500 statements made in the months after November 5 1605 barely mention gunpowder and none adds any significant detail to the government’s hastily published account. But Dr Nicholls himself concludes that “the magnitude of Fawkes’s intended treason should never be underestimated”.
Yet history shouldn’t depend on a consensus of historians. As for evidence under torture, it may not be false, though it should be inadmissible legally. Torture was against English law, but was administered under the royal prerogative, explicitly exercised by James I.
The Gunpowder Plot must be judged primarily by the characters of the people involved. So, no one would take the word of the Earl of Salisbury (successor to his father William Cecil as first officer of the ship of state). The discovery of the plot was very strange. It hinged largely on an anonymous letter to Lord Monteagle “to devise some excuse to shift youer attendance at this parliament, for God and man hath concurred to punishe the wickedness of this tyme ... They shall receive a terrible blow this parliament and yet they shall not seie who hurts them.” It is in the National Archives online and reads like something from a Jacobean melodrama.
Dr Nicholls thinks it was “almost certainly” written by Francis Tresham, said to have been told of the plot on October 14, who wanted nothing to do with it.
A large plank of the government picture of the plot was the involvement of Jesuit priests. Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney General, made up speeches against the Gunpowder conspirators as it pleased him, calling the Jesuit Henry Garnett, “a Doctor of Dissimulation, Deposing of Princes, Disposing of Kingdoms, Daunting and deterring of subjects”. In reality, Garnett, consulted by another Jesuit, Oswald Tesimond (who, it is true had been at school in York with Guy Fawkes), under the seal of Confession, on a case of conscience, had kept firm to his established line of condemning violence. He had already shown Robert Catesby, the layman later taken as leader of the plot, a letter from the pope which forbade rebellion. Garnett was caught and hanged drawn and quartered in May 1606, winning a reference in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Middelboe and Rosebank argue that the heart of the matter was an attempted rising by Catholic gentry in Warwickshire, turned by Salisbury into a gunpowder “fable” to blacken the reputation of Catholics.