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Who laid the fuse for the Gunpowder Plot?
00:45:54
Historian John Cooper introduces us to the conspirators behind the infamous plot to blow up king and parliament
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From barrels of gunpowder hidden beneath the Houses of Parliament to the mysterious Monteagle letter, the gunpowder plot of 1605 is one of the most infamous conspiracies in Britain's history. But how did a small group of Catholic gentlemen led by Robert Catesby and involving the now famous Guy Fawkes come so close to blowing up England's royal and political elite? I'm Danny Bird and for this four part History Extra series on the Gunpowder Plot, I'm joined by historian Professor John Cooper from the University of York. In this first episode, we'll be setting the scene exploring the political, religious and personal tensions that led to this audacious act of treason. JOHN during the late 1500s and early 1600s, Catholics in England faced heavy fines, imprisonment and sometimes execution if they practiced their faith. What was life really like for Catholics at this time under Elizabeth I and then James vi. And first.
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Well, it's a very good question, and it depends on what your social position was in life, I think. But the essential truth of this is that to be a Catholic is an outlawed, prohibited kind of existence. This is as a result of the Reformation. And since the arrival of Elizabeth I on the throne, there have been an increasing number of statutes passed through Parliament regulating or effectively prohibiting Catholicism. So controlling the movement of priests, banning the celebration of the Mass in Latin. Now, this doesn't mean that Catholicism dies out. It survives in lots of places. It survives particularly in the north of England. It survives in some Oxford colleges and schools. It even survives at the Royal Court and out in the countryside. But to be a Catholic, to be a practicing Catholic, means that you live your life in fear. You could be picked up by the authorities, you could be fined, you could be imprisoned, you could, of course, be tortured and ultimately executed if you were to be discovered to be a Catholic priest or a Jesuit. And so there is a prevailing culture of fear and mistrust. But I think, by and large, it's easier to practice your Catholicism if you're a gentleman, if you are able to sort of keep a Catholic priest in your household, than it is to be a member of the ordinary population, where, you know, to be a Catholic is really a very difficult idea.
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And we should just reference, of course, that this is a period of transition between the Tudor dynasty and the Stuart dynasty, as it were. The King of Scotland, James VI becoming King James I of England. Why is that accession so significant to the story of the Gumhider Plot?
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Well, Catholics have been living under this sort of groaning pain for decades. By the time that James VI becomes James I, and the penal statutes against Catholics and the fines have been enforced pretty rigorously. And Elizabeth has maintained that fairly mercilessly. The arrival of James VI as James I is a time of hope, I think, because James, he's a very different kind of character than Elizabeth. And even though he's clearly a Protestant, he's raised as a Protestant and a genuine Protestant. I think he also thinks of himself as a peacemaker and he uses some of the language of toleration. And there's another remarkable fact about James, and that is that his wife, Anne of Denmark, is either by the time that he comes to the throne, a Catholic or in the process of becoming one. So English Catholics see this arrival of James on the throne in 1603 as a time of hope, as something to celebrate. And we know from evidence of the Catholics, Catholic priests imprisoned in the Tower of London, that they pick up, of course, that something has happened, that the old Queen has died and that James has come to the throne. And there's a real thrill of excitement that possibly now they will be able to practice their faith, at least with some degree of toleration. Maybe the prisons will be opened. And this turns out to be a false dawn because James ultimately is as hard on Catholics as Elizabeth has been. But this is in part because of the Gunpowder Plot, actually. So James, I think he does have a genuine commitment to an element of toleration. So this is the sort of context of sort of hope, but also internal debate and internal division within the Catholic community in England out of which the Gunpowder Plot springs.
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And I'd like to turn now to Elizabeth I, Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, and then later Robert Cecil, who's obviously very significant under James vi. And first, he's a key advisor. During that reign, they both built vast spy networks and hunted down Catholic priests and conspirators. Who were they exactly? And how did that intelligence network work? Why did it create such an atmosphere of fear and surveillance?
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Well, both of these men have got sort of the reputation of being the M figure of, you know, out of MI5, really, the head of a vast, highly organized secret service. I don't think it's quite like that. I don't think that the intelligence networks either of Francis Walsingham or Robert Cecil are ever as vast as people believe them to be. But that's part of the illusion that they create, right? I mean, they deliberately create that sense that if you're a Catholic, you need to be fearful everywhere because everywhere is infiltrated. I just don't think this is the case. But certainly Francis Walsingham, there has been a step change in the intelligence networks that he recruits. He puts a lot of money, secretly accounted for money, into paying informers and also paying people to be something like modern style sort of professional intelligences, professional agents. And the most dangerous thing about these people is when they sort of go into deep cover, I think. And one of the most extraordinary things about Francis Walsingham's intelligence network is the extent to which he has secretly penetrated the English Catholic community. So as a Catholic celebrating the Mass, attending the Mass in late Elizabethan England, you were never quite sure who the other people in the room were, whether one of them might actually be a secret plant, counterfeit Catholic as it were, in the pay of Francis Walsingham. And this may seem fanciful, but we have a lot of the reports back from these figures, not only within England, but also in the Catholic seminaries on the continent. Incredibly, Walsingham has managed to place young men in the Catholic training colleges, the English Catholic training colleges in Dowie and Reims and Rome, who are training to be Catholic priests, apparently with their fellow students. But they're actually reporting back this stream of intelligence to Walsingham on who's going to be coming, which of the priests are going to be coming on this secret Catholic mission. This is obviously incredibly disruptive within the English Catholic community. So Catholics know that they're being watched, they know that they have to be suspicious, but they also have to practice their faith. Robert Cecil, after Walsingham's death, picks up a lot of these, as does the Earl of Essex, a lot of these individual agents and these contacts, and continues to maintain these intelligence networks. In fact, there are rival intelligence networks operating at the court of Elizabeth I and James vi. And first, it isn't all one sort of of organized secret intelligence service, because knowledge is power, information is power, and everybody is competing to try and be the person who, if there is conspiracy out there, that you want to be the person reporting that to the government because it increases your power at the Royal Court.
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And could you tell me a little bit about the status of Parliament at this time in history? Was it a standing organisation or was it a sort of ephemeral institution?
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Yeah, Parliament's at a very interesting stage of its developments by the end of the 16th century. So, no, technically, it's not a standing institution, it's an ephemeral institution. There is no absolute constitutional reason that the Queen or the King needs to summon Parliament, but they can't govern the country without Parliament because they can't afford to. So it's Parliament. Even by the early 16th century, Parliament has control over taxation effectively. And so no monarch in the 16th century can rule without Parliament. And government is a very expensive business, increasingly expensive business, especially when England goes to war from the 1580s. So something rather interesting has happened in the reign of Elizabeth, that Parliaments, even though, as you say, they're still sort of constitutionally ephemeral, they've become so regular that Parliament has almost become a permanent feature of the English establishment. That's the English Parliament. Of course, Scottish Scottish Parliaments of the sort that James VI has been used to be dealing with in Scotland, are a very different kind of beast. And so when James VI becomes James I of England, his dealings with Parliament are actually quite rocky. And James does ultimately try to rule without Parliament, as Charles I will, famously thus being one of the causes ultimately of the English Civil War. So it's a bit of a mixed answer really, but another very interesting thing about Parliament is that it has acquired premises within the palace of Westminster, particularly the House of Commons. Before the mid 16th century. The house of Commons has met in borrowed space, essentially on the site of Westminster Abbey. They lose that space as a result of the Reformation and the House of Commons moves, possibly initially on a temporary basis, into a former Royal chapel in the palace of Westminster in the mid 16th century and they stay there until 1834. And that, I think increases the sense of identity of Parliament and particularly the identity of the House of Commons.
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I'd like to zone in a little bit on James as a monarch. How popular was he when he first came to the throne of England?
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James popularity, it depends on who you believe. So James was very obviously Scottish and there weren't that many scots, interestingly, in 16th century England, in 16th century London. And there is quite a lot of anti Scottish feeling in London and around the courts and in Parliament. And that anti Scottish feeling is also very clearly prominent amongst the Gunpowder Plotters themselves. So one of the claims that Guy Fawkes makes after he's arrested, you know, what were you trying to do? And he says something like, I was going to blow you stinking Scots back to Scotland. So there is a strong sort of anti Scottish element within even English Catholic circles, in fact. But James also has enormous assets, not least that he comes with a ready made royal family. So bear in mind that under Elizabeth, the succession has never been settled. It's never been clear who will actually succeed Elizabeth. Will it be James? Will it be Arbela Stuart? Will it be a foreign Spanish Catholic prince or princess? It simply isn't clear. So when James comes to the throne, he's married, he has an heir in Prince Henry, he has a spare with Prince Charles and he also has a daughter, the Princess Elizabeth. And Anne is also pregnant. So there's an entire ready made sort of royal family establishment, which means that for the first time in 30 or 40 years, the succession is secure. And that's actually a very stabilizing factor in English politics and as James wants it to be within British politics, because James thinks in British terms, not just in Anglo Scottish terms. He wants there to be a union between England and Scotland. But Parliament have other ideas.
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Turning now to the conspirators involved in the Gunpowder Plot itself, could you tell me a little bit about who some of these men were and what was motivating them.
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Well, there are a lot of conspirators. There are ultimately 13 conspirators, but the leader of them is a man named Robert or Robin Catesby. So we think about the Guy Fawkes plot. In fact, Guy Fawkes is sort of 4th or 5th in line within the conspiracy. Catesby is the leader, and his cousin, Thomas Winter is a sort of a second in command. There are a number of other plotters, Thomas Percy, who's sort of very distantly related to the Percy earls of Northumberland. There are a couple of Yorkshire recusants, the Wright brothers, but essentially the core conspirators. They're quite closely related to each other. They're strongly Catholic in faith. They're pretty much all of an age. They're all roughly in their 30s. They have a strong devotion to not only the Catholic faith, but very unusually within the Catholic community, to radical political action. And at least the gentleman amongst them. All have country houses and estates sort of spread across the English Midlands, spread across Northamptonshire, Worcestershire and into Staffordshire. And this is a really important fact in terms of how the Gunpowder Plot is meant to function once Parliament has been blown to smithereens and the King has been killed. Beyond that group of male conspirators, there's also a group of women. Now, these are much more shadowy within the presence of the plot, but they're definitely there. And so we're thinking not only of the wives of the Gunpowder Plotters themselves, but we're thinking about figures like Ann Vaux and her sister Eleanor Brooksby. And these are powerful and in some cases, widowed independent women who've been running a series of sort of Catholic safe houses across the Midlands and the north of England to protect Catholic priests and particularly to protect Jesuit priests. Jesuit clergy. So there's both a kind of a male and a female side, but all the principal plotters are male. But Guy Fawkes himself only comes into the plot at a comparatively late stage. Catesby is the real instigator of what becomes known as the Guy Fawkes Plot.
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B
Perhaps we can focus on that a little bit more, because why do you think Catesby has kind of faded into the background of popular memory of the Gunheader Plot, whereas Guy Fawkes is obviously front and center. And perhaps you could tell me a little bit about who Robert Catesby was, how he came to be involved in this grand conspiracy?
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Catesby is a very interesting figure. At one level, he doesn't look much different from other English country gentlemen of the time. We know, he's very tall, actually, he's six feet tall and he's very charismatic. He thinks of himself as a bit of a poet. I think he's interested in theology. He's very good on a horse. He likes hunting. He's been to Oxford University, but he hasn't taken a degree because people of his social status don't bother to take a degree. And also taking a degree would require him to swear the oath of Supremacy to Queen Elizabeth as head of the Church, which he's not prepared to do. In his earlier years, Catesby seems to have led a fairly conventional and possibly very slightly dissolute life of an Elizabethan, you know, mid to late Elizabethan gentleman, of acquiring estates, marrying and hunting and socializing with his friends. Something happens to Catesby. He seems to have undergone some sort of a. A personal conversion experience. And from then on, Catesby, he's much more religiously devoted. But he also begins to flirt with sedition and treason. He begins to kind of speak and think a much more radical political language. And this really marks him out from the majority of English Catholics at the time who largely want to be left alone to be able to practice their faith and to be able to attend mass in private. The government propaganda notwithstanding, the English Catholic community is not ready to rise up and assassinate Queen Elizabeth. But Catesby, he's dabbling in very, very dangerous waters, I think. And Catesby also, he gets himself embroiled in the so called Essex Rebellion. This is Essex the man, not Essex the place. It's the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's favored courtier, who leads this. It's not really a rebellion at all. It's a sort of preposterous protest in 1601 because Essex feels he's being edged out of court politics. And he and his retainers march through the City of London to protest to Elizabeth. Shouting the Earl of Essex is undone. Well, a day. And Essex ultimately is executed for this. He can't get away with that. But Catesby is involved in this. He's on the outskirts of this rebellion. So we can see that even before Queen Elizabeth dies, even before James comes to the throne, Catesby is getting involved in a kind of a more radicalized, more devoted form of the Catholic religion. But also that's interfacing with the kind of politics of discontent, I would say, and the kind of the Venn diagram between those two things, between the religion and the disaffected politics in Catesby's case becomes very toxic.
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B
And as we've already mentioned, Guy Fawkes is essentially the public face of the Gunpowder Plot to this day. What do we know about him prior to the events of 1605?
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A
The interesting thing about Guy Fawkes is that he comes more or less from nowhere. We know something about his background. He comes from the city of York, where there is still a pub named after him. We know that he was baptised in the Church of St. Michael the Belfry in York, which means he was baptized within the Church of England, which I think is a very interesting fact. And his father actually acts as an official, essentially in the service of the Exchequer, in the service of the English state. So there is some indication that Guy Fawkes initially must have been brought up as a Protestant, or at least conforming within the Church of England. But then his father dies and he starts to incline much more to his mother's side of the family, where recusant Catholicism is much stronger. And he also attends St. Peter's School in York, where two of the other conspirators also attend that school. And St. Peter's is absolutely full of crypto or secret Catholics, including some of the masters there. And so that's where Guy Fawkes begins. But after that he does what a lot of sort of young men of strength and ability and bravery and not much money do. He essentially joins the army, but he goes to fight in the Spanish Netherlands, interestingly on the Spanish side, against the sort of Protestant rebels against the Spanish authorities in the Netherlands. So Guy Fawkes is a soldier, he's a fighter, he's shown his military devotion to the Catholic cause. That again, that doesn't completely mark him out. It's not such an extraordinary thing to do for a hot blooded Elizabethan to go and fight in the Spanish Netherlands on either side. Actually. It's a way to you get some military experience. But for Guy Fawkes it does seem to be more serious. And as well as being a soldier, he picks up from somewhere knowledge of mining, mining as a military technique, which of course becomes very significant when it comes to the palace of Westminster and the Gunpowder Plot. He's a very convincing figure, I think. And he also, as he starts to speak this much more sort of radical religious language, he starts to become something like a political negotiator and he becomes obsessed with the idea of Spanish Catholic support for English Catholics and moves around between Flanders and the Spanish Court, essentially petitioning people, essentially asking the Spanish monarchy to make good on its promises and actually come up with money and arms. And soldiers and possibly an armada to come and liberate English Catholics from the groaning tyranny under which the, you know, they are suffering. It's actually Thomas Winter, it's Catesby's cousin, who recruits Guy Fawkes into the plot. So Guy Fawkes isn't the instigator, but he's a man of steel is Guy Fawkes. And that's why ultimately, he's the man who's deputed to sit below the House of Lords on a big pile of firewood concealing an almighty quantity of gunpowder with a fuse and a lantern. And as I say, he does have nerves of steel. So he's a remarkable figure. And interestingly, he undergoes a change of name as well. So we remember him as Guy Fawkes. Once he's within sort of Spanish service, once he's negotiating with the Spanish, he goes by the Spanish version of his name. He's known as Guido rather than Guy.
- [24:24]
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- [26:00]
B
In terms of the conspirators themselves, do we know much about the internal dynamics? Were there any tensions that existed within group? And I believe a man called Francis Tresham was viewed with particular suspicion. Do we know why?
- [26:13]
A
Yes, essentially there are a lot of tensions within the Gunpowder Plotters, but also within the English Catholic community more broadly. And this point is really worth emphasizing. The Gunpowder Plotters are right on the radical edge of the English Catholic community, which is itself very torn with divisions, partly because of Walsingham's and Cecil's secret service. And Catholics essentially need to make up their minds as to whether they're going to kind of maintain a rigorous devotion to Catholicism, withdraw from the Church of England completely and face the consequences, or whether they're going to compromise to an extent with the Church of England and maintain their Catholicism in secret. So that creates some pretty poisonous divisions, actually, between the Catholics of England and also even within the clergy. So there's quite a strong divide between some of the seminary priests and the Jesuits who are leading a mission in England, and that is very significant for the Gunpowder Plot. But actually within the plotters themselves, among the plotters themselves, there are some divisions. And this starts quite early on. So I think that Robert Catesby, his cousin Thomas Winter, Guy Fawkes, are pretty much Vermuchist. They're all very close to each other, they're all devoted to the cause. But there are other figures who come in later in the day, like Francis Tresham, who are much less clear. They want to protest, I think. I think Tresham wants to protest at the infamous tyrannical treatment of Catholics. But the idea of actually engaging in action, that's so radical. That's killing the King, that's killing the royal family, that's blowing up Parliament. Tresham is very queasy about that. The reason that Catesby has looked to Francis Tresham is for money. Actually, the core of the Gunpowder Plotters, they've been fined very heavily. They have estates, but the estates are mortgaged. They need money. They need money, particularly to buy heavy war horses, for instance, that they could use as a cavalry force to lead the uprising in the Midlands. That's supposed to kind of coincide with or follow on from the Gunpowder Plot. So that need for money means that they have to reach out at a particular point to a wider grouping of conspirators, and that's ultimately the downfall of the Gunpowder Plot. That's where the leak comes. But another point of weakness, I think, between the conspirators is A figure called Thomas Percy. And Thomas Percy, he's older than Catesby, he thinks of himself as a natural leader. There's a degree of friction between Catesby and Percy. Percy is the man who's got the connections at court. He's a really important figure in terms of getting the Gunpowder Plotter's physical access to the palace of Westminster. But he also in a sense, thinks of himself very highly and wants to be the leader. So there's a bit of a sort of a challenged leadership even amongst the core of the Gunpowder Plotters between Percy and Catesby.
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B
I think you've mentioned some of the Catholic women who were involved, such as Anne Vaux, and I wanted to know if there's any evidence of just how involved or aware they were of this conspiracy.
- [29:46]
A
The involvement of the women in the Gunpowder Plot is a really interesting question. We have to rely to a degree on spec speculation here. This is because of the way that the early 17th century legal system operates and that is that women in the early 17th century are not perceived by the legal system to have a separate legal identity. Essentially they are chattels of their husbands, they're under the control of their husbands, unless they're widows, which gives them a degree of additional authority. But actually the sort of the interrogations that follow and the endless interrogations that Attorney General Coke is leading, he's not particularly interested in the women. He doesn't look for a network of Catholic women supporting the plotters. What he's looking for is a senior nobleman who must be leading this plot. Coke simply can't believe that all of these gentlemen, you know, mid ranking people in early Jacobean society have organized this plot for themselves. He thinks there must be a key courtier, a key nobleman who's leading them. So he's not really looking for the women. What we do know is that the women sort of behind the plot. You've mentioned Anne Vaux, also Eleanor Brooksby. They're absolutely essential in maintaining these Catholic networks of safe houses and protecting the priests, protecting the seminary priests and protecting the Jesuit priests. John Gerrard in particular, and Henry Garnet. And Garnet is one of the figures who is swept up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. A Jesuit who suffers the full brutal execution as a traitor under English law. These are men who've been protected and maintained by this network of recusant aristocratic women with country houses and with resources and with some political connections and with it quite extraordinary bravery actually, to maintain these priests in their houses. And I teach at the University of York. And in York, we still remember Margaret Clitheroe, a figure from the 1580s who's been canonized as a saint within the Roman Catholic Church, who. Who is one of these Catholic women in the city of York in the later 16th century, maintaining safe houses for Catholic priests, working on the underground. Incredibly dangerous thing to do. Margaret Clithereau ultimately pays with her life for that. So it's frustrating in a sense. We would like to know more about the women within the plot, behind the plot. We know that they're there, but just because of the way that the interrogations proceed, because of the way that the English legal system functions, the courts just don't take much interest in them. So we don't get the kind of the transcript of their involvement that we would like.
- [32:48]
B
Turning now to the details of the plot itself, when did the conspirators decide on targeting the palace of Westminster and what exactly was the plan for that day?
- [32:58]
A
The conspirators seem to have decided on targeting the palace of Westminster at a comparatively early stage. But what was going to happen next and quite how they were going to do that remained unclear to an extraordinary degree. So they're clear that they want to strike at the heart of government. They're clear that they want to bring gunpowder in, and somehow, whether they're going to be tunneling it into the palace of Westminster or by some other means, they want to target the state opening of Parliament. The reason that they want to do that is because they can, within one, you know, almighty inferno, as they hope they can take out the King, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Privy Council, the judges and most of the royal family, and a fair bit of the palace and indeed the City of Westminster with it. So it will be an extraordinary coup d' etat that would have not only removed the monarch, but removed all of the monarch's principal infrastructure and courtiers and councillors up one fell sweep. The difficulty for the plotters is when to do that. And clearly they're planning for this through 1604 and into early 1605, and they actually start moving gunpowder into the palace of Westminster precinct. But the original plan was that Parliament would be opened by the king in February 1605, and parliament is postponed because of the plague. So they then have to change their plans. They have to wait. They've already begun the plan. They've already begun moving gunpowder. So there does seem to be an extraordinary sense in which at least some of the plan, some of the powder, are waiting there in the palace of Westminster from the early part of 1605 all the way until November, when Parliament actually opens and James comes in person to sit in the House of Lords and open the session of Parliament. So all of that looks reasonably well planned in terms of what was going to happen next. There does seem to be an extraordinary degree of uncertainty about that, and that they would play it by ear, really, because nobody really knew how that explosion would have worked out and how many members of the House of Lords, or whatever members of the government or royal family might have survived, or indeed whether any Catholic nobleman, because there were some, would have got wind of the plot through leaks or through being informed and would have stayed away from that opening of Parliament. And whether those are the people who could have been turned to by the gunpowder plotters as a kind of makeshift emergency government once the King had been assassinated. So they're playing it by ear in terms of the government that they were going to create. What is clear is that this was a sort of a two part conspiracy. There was a London or Westminster focused part of the conspiracy and a Midlands focused part of the conspiracy. And whilst the plotters in London, particularly Guy Fawkes, blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill the King at the same time, a revolt is going to ignite in the Midlands under cover of a hunting party. And the plan seems to have been to kidnap one member of the royal family who would have survived that because she was too young to come to the state opening of Parliament. And that's the Princess Elizabeth, who is being looked after by Lord Harrington at Combe Abbey outside Coventry. So that seems to be their plan, that they would kill the King, kill all the Privy Councillors, kill all the parliamentarians, set up some kind of an immediate emergency government around the Princess Elizabeth, who would have been proclaimed, believe it or not, as Queen Elizabeth II at that point. And then they were going to play it by ear. No document amongst all of the interrogations, and there were lots of interrogations of the gunpowder plotters, no document has ever really revealed what would happen next. Nothing very clear about that government and what support it might have had from Spain has ever really been reported or revealed. And I think that that plan was never fully made.
- [37:44]
B
And for the benefit of people who are watching, they may have an idea of what the palace of Westminster looks like. That is the modern palace of Westminster with the clock tower known as Big Ben and, you know, that sort of neo Gothic architecture. But we're talking about an extremely different complex of buildings, aren't we, at this time? Could you go into a little bit more detail about what the palace looked like during 1605.
- [38:07]
A
Yes, the modern palace of Westminster, that's such a sort of, you know, icon of Britishness around the world, with that sort of, you know, Victorian river frontage and Big Ben and so on. That's a product of the 1840s-1860s, essentially. So the palace of Westminster that the Gunpowder Plotters would have known was a kind of sprawling, ramshackle, well, really a rabbit warmer warren, a labyrinth of medieval and Tudor structures. There was still technically a royal palace and a quite significant royal palace. In fact, technically, the palace of Westminster is the only palatium, it's the only actual palace of the English crown. But Henry VIII has already moved out of the palace of Westminster into Whitehall next door. So no monarch of England has lived within the palace of Westminster since the early 16th century. But the palace remains as a very important site of government and finance and administration, and it's where Parliament meets. But all sorts of other things go on within the palace of Westminster, the law courts in particular. So the law courts, King's Bench and Common Pleas and Chancery, they actually meet within Westminster Hall. And the palace is also, it fulfills all sorts of other functions. It's a meeting point. There are taverns that operate within the palace of Westminster. There are all sorts of shops and trading establishments within the Palace. Quite a lot of storage facilities are based in the palace of Westminster, because the palace has very extensive and largely disused medieval storage chambers and cellars. And that becomes very important to the Gunpowder Plotters. The palace of Westminster, I mean, it seems extraordinary to us now, doesn't it? But it is a place where you could actually rent space and even have a house, and the conspirators are able to let, or in fact to sublet a house from a minor court official. We need to think of the early 17th century palace of Westminster as being a place with a large degree of public access and a huge amount of public activity. So it was a real hubbub of activity. And it's only that can really help us to explain how it is that the Gunpowder Plotters were able to move in and out and around that building without being detected.
- [40:34]
B
Looking now at making sense of the Gunpowder Plot within its historical context, what must we understand about the political and religious divisions of early Stuart England? And why did James I's rule feel so fragile to so many Catholics?
- [40:49]
A
I think that when James comes to the throne, he has an agenda which is to unite England and Scotland, and that's really what he's working towards. He's also intent on bringing peace to England. He thinks of himself as a peacemaker monarch, as a monarch of toleration. And for him, that has two aspects. He is interested to some extent in extending an olive branch to the English Catholic community. And this is something that Catholics pick up on. But I don't think that he's ever really seriously. He's too Protestant to actually contemplate open toleration of Catholics. And I think this is something that Catholics are hopeful for. But it gradually becomes apparent that their hopes are gonna fade away, that official toleration of Catholicism as a kind of minority faith is not going to be permitted by James. And this creates a further sort of set of subdivisions, political subdivisions within the English Catholic community. But the other aspect that James. Other aspect of peace that James wants to bring is peace with Spain. And England has been facing a war with Spain for 20 years. So that kind of Cold War rhetoric, shall we say, around England and Spain of the 1590s and the possibility of a hot war actually developing between England and Spain, that's always been there right the way through the 1590s and into the very early 1600s. And the English government is alarmed by this, and it's particularly terrified that there might be a Spanish landing in Ireland where there is a hot war developing. And that's a really complex set of British problems for James to inherit. Right. So there's a complex political context between England and Ireland. And James is bringing Scotland into the mix by also being King of Scots. And he wants to create a united Britain. And one of the ways of doing that is, as he thinks, create some kind of religious peace. But he also wants to make peace with Spain. But if James makes peace with Spain, that's going to be a disaster for Guy Fawkes or Guido Fawkes and for Thomas Winter and for Robert Catesby, all of whom have been looking to Spain, to the court of Philip iii, for financial support, for military support, maybe for another invasion armada, for the English Catholic corps. So that kind of radical fringe of English Catholics, they don't want there to be a peace treaty between England and Spain because they want Spain to support England's Catholics. And so when the Spanish delegation comes over and there's the Hampton Court Conference marked in a very famous painting, and finally England or Britain, to an extent, and Spain make peace. This happens in 1604. All of those English Catholics at that radical end who'd been looking to Spain for support, those hopes just turn to ashes. It's clear that although Philip III continues to kind of talk in positive terms about English Catholics. He now has a peace treaty with England. He's not going to compromise that by stirring up a pro Catholic rebellion, let alone some kind of revolution in England. He wants England to be at the best neutral and maybe from now on a kind of stable trading partner. But that means devastation for the plans of the gunpowder plotters and other Catholics who've been always they've been looking to Spain as their big protector. Clearly they're going to get no help from abroad now, and that's why they turn inward, they turn into themselves and they launch the plot that becomes the powder treason of 1605.
- [44:55]
B
Next time, we'll be looking at how the would be regicide of King James VI and first, in what might have been history's boldest act of terrorism was betrayed by a mysterious letter. If you enjoyed today's episode and want to know more about the Gunpowder Plot, head over to the History Extra app to go beyond to the podcast, I've selected several articles from the BBC History Magazine and the History Extra archives that will help you to broaden your knowledge of what you've learned today with features from historians including Lucy Worsley, Justin Pollard, Claire Jackson and more. You can find a link to download the app and access that content. In the description of this episode, you.
- [45:41]
A
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