CHAPTER IV.
The responsibility of the intrigues in respect to the claims to the English throne, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, rests to some extent upon Queen Elizabeth herself. As Mr Gardiner puts it:—[57] “She was determined that in her lifetime no one should be able to call himself her heir.”It was generally understood that James would succeed to the throne; but, so long as there was the slightest uncertainty on the question, it was but natural that the Catholics should be anxious that a monarch should be crowned who would favour, or at least tolerate them, and that they should make inquiries, and converse eagerly, about every possible claimant to the throne. Fears of foreign invasion and domestic plotting were seriously entertained in England during the latter days of Elizabeth, as well as immediately after her death. “Wealthy men had brought in their plate and treasure from the country, and had put them in places of safety. Ships of war had been stationed in the Straits of Dover to guard against a foreign invasion, and some of the principal recusants had, as a matter of precaution, been committed to safe custody.”[58]
When James VI. of Scotland, the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the throne, rendered vacant by the death of Elizabeth, as James I. of England, no voice was raised in favour of any other claimant, and[59] “the Catholics, flattered by the reports of their agents, hailed with joy the succession of a prince who was said to have promised the toleration of their worship, in return for the attachment which they had so often displayed for the house of Stuart.”King James owed toleration, says Lingard, “to their sufferings in the cause of his unfortunate mother;”and “he had bound himself to it, by promises to their envoys, and to the princes of their communion.”
The opinion that the new king would upset and even reverse the anti-Catholic legislation of Elizabeth was not confined to the Catholic body: many Protestants had taken alarm on this very score, as may be inferred from a contemporary tract, entitled[60] Advertisements of a loyal subject to his gracious Sovereign, drawn from the Observation of the People’s Speeches, in which the following passage occurs:—“The plebes, I wotte not what they call them, but some there bee who most unnaturally and unreverentlie, by most egregious lies, wound the honour of our deceased soveraigne, not onlie touching her government and good fame, but her person with sundry untruthes,” and after going on in this strain for some lines it adds:—“Suerlie these slanders be the doings of the papists, ayming thereby at the deformation of the gospell.”[61]
On the other hand, there were both Catholics and Puritans who were distrustful of James. Sir Everard cannot have been long a Catholic, when a dangerous conspiracy was on foot. Sir Griffin Markham, a Catholic, and George Brooke, a Protestant, and a brother of Lord Cobham’s, hatched the well-known plot which was denominated “the Bye,”and, among many others who joined it, were two priests, Watson and Clarke, both of whom were eventually executed on that account. Its object appears to have been to seize the king’s person, and wring from him guarantees of toleration for both Puritans and Catholics. Father Gerard acquired some knowledge of this conspiracy, as also did Father Garnet, the Provincial of the Jesuits, and Blackwell, the Archpriest; and they insisted upon the information being laid instantly before the Government. Before they had time to carry out their intention, however, it had already been communicated, and the complete failure of the attempt is notorious. The result was to injure the causes of both the Catholics and the Puritans, and James never afterwards trusted the professions of either.
So far as the Catholics were concerned, the “Bye” conspiracy unfortunately revealed another; for Father Watson, in a written confession which he made in prison, brought accusations of disloyalty against the Jesuits. It was quite true that, two years earlier, Catesby, Tresham, and Winter—all friends of Sir Everard Digby’s—had endeavoured to induce Philip of Spain to invade England, and had asked Father Garnet to give them his sanction in so doing; but Garnet had “misliked it,”and had told them that it would be as much “disliked at Rome.”[62]
Winter had arranged that if Queen Elizabeth should die before the invasion, the news should be at once sent to the Spanish court. For this purpose, a Yorkshire gentleman, named Christopher Wright, and one Guy, or Guido, Faukes, or Fawkes, “a soldier of fortune,”of whom we shall have more to say by-and-bye, were sent to the Court of Spain in 1603. Although Father Garnet disapproved of the plan, he had given Wright a letter of introduction to a Jesuit at the Spanish Court. Neither Wright nor Fawkes were able to rouse King Philip, who said that he had no quarrel with his English brother, and that he had just appointed an ambassador to the Court of St James’s to arrange the terms of a lasting peace with the English nation. Knowing something of this, Father Watson used it as an instrument of revenge against the Jesuits, who, he knew, had intended to warn King James against his own attempt to entrap him.[63] “It is well known to all the world,”he wrote, “how the Jesuits and Spanish faction had continually, by word, writing, and action, sought his majesty’s destruction, with the setting up of another prince and sovereign over us; yea, and although it should be revealed what practises they had, even in this interim betwixt the proclaiming and crowning of his majesty.”And then he enumerated some of these “practises,”among others, “levying 40,000 men to be in a readiness for the Spaniard or Archduke; by buying up all the great horses, as Gerard doth; by sending down powder and shot into Staffordshire and other places, with warning unto Catholics to be in a readiness; by collection of money under divers pretences, to the value of a million;”“by affirming that none might yield to live under an heretic (as they continually termed his majesty);”“and by open speech that the king and all his royal issue must be cut off and put to death.”In making these bitter and, for the most part, untrue accusations against the Jesuits, he complained that he was “accounted for no better than an infidel, apostate, or atheist, by the jesuitical faction,”and that he was never likely “to receive any favour”from his majesty “so long as any Jesuit or Spaniard”remained “alive within this land.”
Undoubtedly, during the cruel persecutions of Elizabeth, Jesuits, as well as secular priests, and Catholic laymen too, for that matter, had hoped that her successor on the English throne might be of their own religion; they had good cause for doing so; the Pope himself had urged the enthronement of a Catholic monarch for their country, and in fairness, it must be admitted that not a few Englishmen, who considered themselves royalist above all others, had at one time refused to regard Elizabeth herself as the legitimate possessor of the British crown; but, when James had been established upon the throne, with the exception of a few discontents, such as the conspirators in the “Bye”plot and the diminutive Spanish party, the English Catholics, both lay and clerical, acknowledged him as their rightful king. Pope Clement VIII.[64] “commanded the missionaries”in England “to confine themselves to their spiritual duties, and to discourage, by all means in their power, every attempt to disturb the tranquillity of the realm;”he also ordered “the nuncio at Paris to assure James of the abhorrence with which he viewed all acts of disloyalty,”and he despatched “a secret messenger to the English Court with an offer to withdraw from the kingdom any missionary who might be an object of suspicion to the Council.”