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Home King James I and Domestic Affairs Plots against the King Plots against the King; Part 2 |
Plots against the King; Part 2The third plot was the famous Gunpowder Plot. The Roman Catholics had hoped much from a son of Mary Queen of Scots; and James, on his accession, was inclined to be tolerant, and excused the Roman Catholics from the fines which they paid for not going to their parish churches (They were extremely heavy—£20 a month, or else the confiscation of two-thirds of their property). The immediate result of this concession was an invasion of Roman Catholic priests from abroad—no less than a hundred and forty in six months—and such signs of activity that James felt obliged to reimpose the fines and to banish the priests. It was this which prompted the Gunpowder Plot (1605). Its leader, Robert Catesby, was something of a hero — of great strength, fascinating manners, and a real leader of men, with magnetic influence over others—but very wrongheaded, driven to desperation, almost to madness, by the persecution which the Roman Catholics had endured. Amongst the other conspirators was Guy Fawkes, who came of an old Yorkshire family, and had seen much warfare in the Netherlands. The plan of the plot was to blow up the House of Lords when the king and the members of both Houses of Parliament were assembled in it at the opening of the session; to capture James's son, Charles, and proclaim him king; and then to inform other Roman Catholics of the success of the plot at a hunting match which was to be arranged in the Midlands, and with their aid to organize a Roman Catholic Government.The plotters first tried to dig a mine from an adjacent house through the foundations of the House of Lords; then they hired a cellar, or rather a room on the ground floor, underneath the House of Lords, and put in it two tons of gunpowder in barrels. Finally, however, one of the conspirators, appalled at the enormity of the crime, sent a letter of warning to a cousin of his who was a member of the House of Lords, and who gave the letter to the Government. Consequently, the night before Parliament met, the barrels were discovered, and Guy Fawkes with them; and subsequently he and the other conspirators were either killed in fighting or executed. The result of the plot was that laws of extreme severity were passed against the Roman. Catholics—laws, for instance, which excluded them from all professions, which forbade them to appear at Court or within ten miles of London unless employed in business there, and which made the fines against them even more severe. Parliament was always clamoring for these laws to be put into execution, though James occasionally, and Charles very often, failed to enforce them (An attempt has recently been made to show that there was really no Gunpowder Plot, and that the whole affair was contrived by Lord Salisbury, James I's minister, in order to discredit the Roman Catholics; but this is very unlikely). |
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