After much debate these grievances were referred to a committee; but as the Lords would have nothing to do with it, the matter was obliged to be dropped. Bacon, who was assiduously climbing into royal favour, played a contemptible part on this occasion in the House. He affected the character of a patriot, and discoursed feelingly of abuses and the sufferings of the people, while in the Council, before the king, he declared that his majesty was the voice of God in man, the good spirit of God in the mouth of man.
The struggle continued between the Crown and the Commons through the whole session. As the Crown would not agree to reform the abuses complained of, the Commons declined to grant the king any money beyond the usual rate of tonnage and poundage. So apprehensive, in fact, was the king of another defeat in the present temper of the House, that he sent a message requesting them not to enter on the business of subsidy, notwithstanding his urgent need of money.
The struggle regarding religious liberty was carried on by the Puritans in the House with equal obstinacy. Convocation sitting at the same time with Parliament occupied itself in framing a new code of ecclesiastical canons. In spite of the resolution of the Conference at Hampton Court, which declared that no excommunication should issue except for very grave offences, these canons—one hundred and forty-one in number—equalled in ecclesiastical despotism anything which had been decreed under Henry VIII. Excommunication was pronounced against all who denied the supremacy of the king or the orthodoxy of the Church; who affirmed the Book of Common Prayer to be superstitious or unlawful, that any one of the Thirty-nine Articles was erroneous, or that the ordinal was opposed to the Word of God. All who should separate from the Established Church, or established conventicles, were equally denounced, and this bigoted code James ratified by letters patent under the Great Seal. But it did not pass without severe comment from the Puritan members of the House, in the midst of which the king prorogued Parliament; and so remained the question of the canon law of England, which in reality was and is a law binding only on the clergy, having received their own sanction and that of their head the king, but not that of the Legislature; for which reason the judges have always held that it binds the clergy who framed, but not the people whose representatives refused it.
No sooner was the canon law promulgated and Parliament prorogued, than Bancroft, the new archbishop, let loose the fury of the Church against nonconformists, whether Catholic or Protestant. All were called on to conform to the new regulations, and no less than three hundred clergymen were forced from their livings. The Catholics, on their part, were equally harassed, fined, and insulted. The legal penalty of twenty pounds a month for recusancy was again enforced, notwithstanding James had promised to overlook this; and it was executed with a new rigour of barbarity, the fines for the whole period during which James had been professing leniency being levied. Thus the sufferers were called on to make thirteen payments at one time, which at once reduced a vast number of families to absolute beggary.
The Puritans did not submit to the outrages perpetrated on them without sturdy resistance and remonstrance. The Catholics, or at least a section of them, proceeded to something more dangerous. Smarting under their renewed persecution, they felt it useless to remonstrate like the Puritans, for both the Church party and Nonconformists were against them. They, therefore, as a body, brooded in silence over their sufferings; but there were amongst the oppressed spirits those who could not thus endure in patience, but planned a desperate revenge. Amongst these was Robert Catesby, the descendant of an ancient Catholic family, seated for centuries at Ashby St. Legers, in Northamptonshire, and also possessing considerable property in Warwickshire. Catesby's father had been a great sufferer for recusancy, having several times been imprisoned, in addition to the plundering of his substance. In his youth, the younger Catesby, who was wild and extravagant, was not disposed to sacrifice his jollity for the maintenance of a persecuted faith. He embraced Protestantism, but in 1598 he returned to his original belief, and, feeling the bitter force of persecution, he became stimulated to an active hatred of the Government. He aided the insurrection of Essex on condition that he should enjoy full religious freedom; and escaping the fate of his leader by the forfeiture of three thousand pounds, he then secretly joined himself to the Spanish party amongst the Catholics, in order to prevent the succession of the Scottish prince. This hope being defeated, and the Catholics not only seeing James prepared to falsify his promises of Catholic indulgence, but all the heads of the Catholic world abroad—the kings of France and Spain, and the Pope himself—seeking the friendship of the king, Catesby conceived the gloomy idea that deliverance could only proceed from the English Catholics themselves. In following out this desperate idea, he gradually evolved a scheme of vengeance and annihilation of all the persecutors of his faith. This was no other than to blow up the king and Parliament with gunpowder.
Catesby first made a confidant in his terrible project of Thomas Winter, the younger brother of Robert Winter, of Huddington, in Worcestershire. Winter was the intimate friend of Catesby, and had been long associated with him in the plans for the relief of the Catholics. He had been a volunteer in the wars of the Netherlands, and then was sent to Madrid as the secret agent of the Spanish party in England, amongst whom his friend Catesby was an active partisan. But familiar as Winter was with the sufferings and projects of the Catholics, this bloody revelation struck him with horror, and he denounced it vehemently as most criminal and inhuman. But Catesby spared no labour to reconcile his mind to the idea; he painted in vivid colours the long, the pitiless, and the unmerited cruelties inflicted on the Catholics. He enumerated the numbers who had been exterminated by the axe and the rope of the executioner; who had perished in their prisons, or who had been reduced from affluence and honour to beggary by the relentless bigotry of the Government. He demanded whence relief was to come, what hope there was left of effectual intercession from abroad, or of resolute resistance from the dispirited Catholics at home. He appealed to him whether God had not given to every man the right to repel force by force, and whether the whole world besides afforded them any other chance.
GREAT SEAL OF JAMES I.
Winter was staggered but not convinced, and declared that he would not consent to any such frightful measure until fresh attempts had been made to procure a mitigation of their sufferings by milder means. He, therefore, hastened over to the Netherlands, where the Spanish ambassador, Velasco, had arrived, in order to conclude a peace between England and Spain. At Bergen, near Dunkirk, he had an interview with the ambassador, and urged upon him to demand a clause in the treaty for the protection of the Catholics. He was soon convinced that Velasco, though promising to use his influence for that end, would not risk the completion of the peace by the advocacy of such a stipulation.
Indignant at this apathy, he hastened to Ostend on his return, where he accidentally encountered an old comrade in the Netherland wars, of the name of Guido or Guy Fawkes, a native of Yorkshire, and a man of determined courage, as well as of great experience and address. He had been Winter's companion in his mission to Madrid, and he now solicited him to accompany him to England, and unite his endeavours with other friends for Catholic relief. Winter, it would seem, had now made up his mind to enter into Catesby's plot, but did not let Fawkes into the full secret for some time.