But human hate and diabolical ingenuity, it was thought, could not last for ever. On the 24th of March, a.d. 1603, Elizabeth died, to the last the prey of vain desires and unsatisfied ambition. For weeks before her decease she was haunted by the phantoms of her innumerable crimes, and so terrified at the approach of death that she refused to lie in her bed or to receive any sustenance from her usual attendants. The courts of Europe, to which she had ever been an object of dislike and fear, could ill conceal their pleasure at the event, but millions of her subjects, the impoverished, the widowed, and the orphaned, made desolate by her despotic cruelty, in silence execrated her memory.
The Catholics generally found consolation in the thought of her successor, and, with that unqualified confidence in the house of Stuart, which now seems like fatality, they began to hope for better days under his sway. Was he not, they asked each other, the son of Elizabeth's royal victim, and could he be unmindful of the affection with which the Catholics of the three kingdoms ever regarded his mother? Had he not before he ever put foot in England authorized Father Watson to promise in his name justice and protection, [pg 183] and did not Percy, the agent and kinsman of the great Duke of Northumberland, assure his friends, on the strength of the royal word solemnly pledged, that the days of persecution were at an end? Poor deluded people, they little knew how much deceit lay in the heart of him whom the Protestant lord primate rather blasphemously averred “the like had not been since the time of Christ.” He had scarcely put on the crown when the Catholics discovered that they had neither mercy nor justice to expect from him. Once secure in the support of the Protestant party, he turned a deaf ear to their complaints, and even had the mendacity to deny his own word of honor, giving as a reason “that, since Protestants had so generally received and proclaimed him king, he had now no need of Papists.” Being by nature intolerant, he oppressed the Puritans, by whom he had been trained, to please the Episcopalians, and to gratify both he ground the Catholics into dust; arrests for recusancy multiplied, illegal visitations became more frequent, and if possible more annoying, the arrears of the monthly tax which he at first pretended to remit were demanded, and the amount, already enormous, was even increased so as to satisfy the ever-increasing rapacity of his pauper courtiers who had followed him into England. In place and out of it, he made the most violent attacks on the faith of his dead mother and of at least one-half of his English subjects, and his remarks were taken up and repeated from every Protestant pulpit and in every conventicle throughout the length and breadth of the land, till the hopes of the Catholics grew fainter and fainter, and finally expired. Unlike Elizabeth, he was not only expected to live a long life, but his progeny would succeed him, the heirs of his authority and cruelty; and being constitutionally a coward and an intriguer, he was bent on making peace with foreign powers, and thus cutting off all sympathy which the Catholic sovereigns might have felt it their interest to express for their suffering co-religionists in Great Britain.
Though the principles of reciprocal protection and allegiance were not as well defined at that period as, they have since been, the Catholics of England would have been more or less than human if they could have regarded James' government with any feeling other than detestation, and the wonder is not that a plot was laid to destroy it, but that so very few of the persecuted multitude could be found to embark in it, notwithstanding the manifold reasons afforded by the king and parliament for their destruction. It was an age of conspiracies and counterplots, when the highest and most trusted in every land endeavored by force or fraud to accomplish political and personal ends, success being the only criterion of merit. The history of Europe from the middle of the preceding century is full of dark schemes and secret contrivances, in which nobles and princes figure alternately as the bribers or the bribed, the patrons or the victims of the assassin, now devoted patriots and anon double-dyed traitors. The long civil wars, the vicious legacy of the Lutheran attempt to unsettle the faith of Christendom, had nearly ceased from sheer exhaustion, and unemployed soldiers of desperate fortunes but undoubted courage were to be easily had for any enterprise, no matter how dangerous.
Of this character was Guy or Guido Fawkes, whose name, though not himself the originator of the Gunpowder Plot, is most intimately [pg 184] associated with it in popular tradition. The real authors were Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, Thomas Winter, and John Wright; all of whom were country gentlemen of good family and education, but, except Catesby, very much reduced in circumstances owing to the unjust and repeated exactions of the penal laws, which had not only robbed them of their property and shut them out from all public employment, but had branded them with the stigma of traitors to their country and enemies to their sovereign; for, having in the early part of their lives conformed to Protestantism, they had subsequently returned to the church into which they had been baptized—an offence in the eyes of the rulers of that day of the deepest dye.
In the early part of 1604, the five conspirators met in London, and, having taken a solemn oath of secrecy, determined on their future schemes for the total destruction of the government. Wishing, however, it seems, to exhaust all milder remedies, they sent agents to Spain and other foreign powers friendly to the Catholic cause, to induce them to use their good offices in mitigating the sufferings of the English recusants. The answers were generally favorable, but non-committal, and the practical result nothing. They then determined to depend on themselves alone, and in the autumn rented a building adjoining the Palace of Westminster, the old House of Parliament, and commenced to undermine the dividing wall. This, some three yards thick of solid masonry, they found a work of difficulty, and from the paucity of their numbers and their inexperience in manual labor, advanced slowly. A circumstance soon occurred to modify their plans. A portion of the cellar immediately under the prince's chamber, which had been used by a coal dealer, was vacated by the tenant, and Percy rented it, ostensibly for storage purposes. The mine was abandoned, and thirty-two barrels of powder, which had been stored previously at Lambeth, were introduced in the night-time, and covered from observation by wood, furniture, etc. All that was now required to complete the conspiracy was a proper moment for the application of the match. This work had brought them into the spring of 1605, and, as parliament was not to assemble for some months, they resolved to separate, some going into the country to see their relatives, and others to the Continent to enlist the assistance of such adventurers as could be found willing to take service under the anticipated new régime. Meanwhile eight more persons were admitted into the plot, the principal of whom were Rokewood, Grant, Tresham, and Sir Everard Digby, all young men of family and fortune, whose proud spirits chafed continually under the social and political ostracism to which all recusants of the period were doomed.
The opening of parliament, expected in September, was, however, postponed till the 5th of November, but, to the secret satisfaction of Catesby and his fellows, the penal laws continued to be rigidly enforced, and additional measures of persecution were devised by the king's council for the adoption by the legislature when it should meet. As that time approached and everything augured success, the parts of the leading actors in the bloody drama were distributed. Fawkes was to fire the powder which was to blow the king, his oldest son Henry, and the lords and commons into eternity; Prince Charles, the next in succession, having been seized by Percy, was to be [pg 185] proclaimed king at Charing Cross by Catesby; while Tresham, Grant, and Digby were to gain possession of the person of the infant princess Elizabeth, at Lord Harrington's country-seat. After the explosion, Fawkes was to sail for Flanders to bring over reinforcements, and the others, a protector for the royal children having been appointed, were to rendezvous at Digby's residence and raise the country in favor of the new government. There was a method in the madness of these men, and the first part of their programme would undoubtedly have been carried out but for one important fact upon which it seems they did not reckon: Cecil was fully cognizant of all their movements, and for his own good reasons, as we shall hereafter see, allowed them to proceed unchecked to the very last moment.
That moment expired soon after midnight on the night of the 4th-5th of November, only a few hours before the expected catastrophe. As Fawkes was entering the cellar to assure himself that all was in readiness, he was seized by a body of soldiers under the command of Sir Thomas Knevett. His dress denoted that he was prepared for a journey, arms and matches were found upon his person, a dark-lantern was discovered in a corner, and the removal of the débris that was piled in the vault revealed the powder arranged ready for explosion.
The scene that ensued was highly dramatic, and did great credit to the histrionic genius of the secretary. The lords of the council were hastily summoned to the king's bed-chamber, the prisoner was brought up for examination by torch-light, and the royal pedant sat on the side of his couch in his night-clothes for several hours, questioning and cross-questioning the would-be murderer. But Guy was made of stern stuff, and, while he freely admitted that his intention had been “to blow the Scotch beggars back to their native mountains,” he obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates. The news spread with rapidity, and London at daylight was in the wildest commotion. The other conspirators in the city, with the exception of Tresham, fled to Digby's house near Dunchurch, where a hunting party had assembled, but upon the disclosure of the treason and its failure the guests rapidly dispersed, two or three only, from friendship or other causes, resolving to remain with the conspirators and share the fate which now seemed certain to overtake them. One of these was Stephen Littleton, who resided at Holbeach in Staffordshire, a strongly Catholic county, and thither the whole party, numbering between forty and fifty, including grooms and other servants, proceeded through Warwick and Worcester, vainly endeavoring on their road to excite the people to join them. At Holbeach they resolved to make a stand, but an accident destroyed whatever little chance might have remained of a successful resistance. Their ammunition, which had been wet during their hurried journey, exploded while being dried, and not only seriously injured Catesby and three others, but afforded an excuse for their handful of followers to forsake them. In this condition they were soon surrounded by the forces of Sir Richard Walsh, who, after summoning them to surrender and receiving a defiant negative, ordered his men to fire. The brothers Wright, Percy, and Catesby, fell mortally wounded; Rokewood, Winter, Morgan, and Grant were wounded and taken prisoners, and Digby and the two others were soon after captured. They were immediately [pg 186] taken to London, tried, and with Fawkes executed on the 30th of the following January.
Under ordinary circumstances, this insane conspiracy of a dozen desperate men would have ended here, and the plot itself have become lost in the thousand-and-one concerted crimes against authority which disfigure the annals of European monarchy in the middle ages; but the Puritan party in England, the more insatiable enemies of the Catholics, who saw in it an excellent opportunity for wholesale spoliation of what yet remained to the persecuted, endeavored to involve the millions in the treasonable guilt of the few, and Cecil, who had so long nursed the designs of the traitors, had his own deep schemes to subserve by endorsing this foul calumny. But James, bigot as he was, could not, in the face of such palpable facts to the contrary, go to this extreme length. “For though it cannot be denied,” he said in his speech to parliament recounting the discovery and origin of the plot, “that it was only the blind superstition of their errors in religion that led them to this desperate device, yet doth it not follow that all professing that Romish religion were guilty of the same.” Yet the Puritan party, who hungered for the spoils, by constant repetition succeeded in fastening the imputation of guilt on the entire Catholic body in England, and for a long time it was partially believed abroad, and re-echoed without hesitation by subsequent historians. The author of Her Majesty's Tower, to whom Catholicity owes little else, has, we are happy to say, had the manhood to set the matter in its true light in his recent publication. He says:
“The news of this plot was heard by the old English Catholics with more astonishment than rage, though the expression of their anger was both loud and deep. The priests were still more prompt to denounce it than their flocks. The venerable Archpriest, George Blackwell, took up his pen before a single man had yet been killed or captured in the shires, and in a brief address to the Catholic clergy stigmatized the plot as a detestable contrivance in which no true Catholic could have a share—as an abominable thing, contrary to Holy Writ, to the councils, and to the instructions of the spiritual guides. Blackwell told his clergy to exhort their flocks to peace and obedience, and to avoid falling into snares.”