The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (25 page)

The most influential of all the early poems was surely that by the Cambridge graduate and physician Francis Herring (
c.
1565–1628).
Pietas Pontificia
was translated into English and expanded by one A.P. in 1610, and was also translated in 1615 by John Vicars. Between the first Latin version of twenty pages of hexameters, and the English verse translation of one hundred, the text was stiffened with prefaces, notes and miscellaneous poems on Prince Henry, Princess Elizabeth and the Jesuits. The gap between the two versions allowed for an amplification, some of which was drawn from Herring’s own second version, but the difference between the author’s first version and that of the translator marks the direction of the story in the interim period. Vicars maintains some of the more fanciful details derived from rumours and yet knowing more than Herring about the actual events he obscures the snappy outlines of the latter. He knew, for example, that the key instigator of the plot was Catesby, yet he allowed a false prominence to Guy Fawkes. In Herring, in a little over a page (Sigs. A3v-A4), Fawkes and his cadre travel to Rome and Austria for instructions. Vicars (pp. 8-22) nudges in the favouring of Providence accorded to Elizabeth I over Spain, and the transmission of the same to James I. The Spanish reject Catesby’s call for aid because of the 1604 peace negotiated in London at the Whitehall Conference, and Catesby is thereby forced to propose his diabolically inspired scheme, with Roman fame the reward of his cohort. In Herring, the begetter of the plan was Fawkes, but in Vicars his voice is secondary, and he adds an attack on Sir Everard Digby, omitted by the former. In the last half of the poem a long prayer of thanks is added.

For a Scottish voice considering the plot, we turn to the obscure figure of Michael Wallace, an MA of Glasgow University in 1601, who took the chair in philosophy in the same year. His brief epic of the Plot entitled
In serenissimi regis Jacobi liberationem
begins with an infernal setting; Satan addresses the forces of Hell on the necessity of conquering England (was Wallace enjoying a sly joke here?). Abaddon makes a somewhat lengthy reply, finally urging that one of the pope’s agents be induced to lead the project to a triumphant conclusion. When the hellish council breaks up, Abaddon disguises himself as a Jesuit, declaring the task ahead in an encounter with the earthbound Fawkes. From this point the plot follows the actual course of events fairly accurately, with Thomas Percy as the only other named conspirator. The last two pages are given over to the prayer of thanks and praise of James. Where Hawes had merely ambitious plotters, Wallace represents Fawkes as a fanatical supporter of Rome who thinks the Pope will build altars to him.
²⁰
And while there is a reference to previous plots against James in Scotland, there is no awareness of the purpose of 5 November growing out of previous Elizabethan efforts to kill the queen, especially the Babington plot, and that of Dr William Parry. In a Latin poem of the 1580s, Paraeus deals with Parry by having him suborned by a cardinal sent from the Pope, whose idea for killing Elizabeth ultimately derives from Pluto or Satan.

In his thoughtful and detailed article on the Plot and the poetic seekers after myth, Richard Hardin makes a point well worth repeating, and it is that Wallace, Heering, Vicars and Goad (leaving aside Milton and Hawes (b. 1950)) were not mere hacks and tale-tellers, but men of learning who hoped to give a boost to their careers by levering themselves above their contemporaries (and rivals). Dr Herring was a member of the London College of Medicine and one of those who praised the work of John Gerard, the barber-surgeon and naturalist. John Vicars, although an orphan, had the good fortune to be raised at Christ’s Hospital where he returned to teach (as an usher) after an Oxford course of study.
²¹
Also part of the intellectual community that seized upon the event was John Ross, lawyer at the Inner Temple, and possibly an aide to Sir Edward Coke, the attorney-general who presented the case for the prosecution at the trial of the plotters. The
Britannica, sive de Regibus Veteris Britanniae
was published in Frankfurt in 1607, but evidently written by Ross before December 1606 was the poem he added to it of 439 lines,
Apostophe and Praesens Tempus,
thus ending a book of Latin verses on the Kings in Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the poem the swelling notion of Guy Fawkes as a mythical figure is pitched into the historical event. The last King of the Britons Cadwallader emerges from the nether world to tell Alethia the nymph of the wondrous sight to which he has been given access. Somehow a living person has penetrated hell to seek aid for the Plot, and it is Catesby; very unusually we are treated to a description that is likely quite accurate since it avoids grotesque exaggeration: ‘a man of pale countenance’ (all that tunnelling), ‘hair down to his shoulders, uneven teeth, unusually thin-bearded, body tall yet slender, promising its strength not in itself but in the use of arms . . . one not readily inclined to speak, yet bold’.

This rare display of specificity suggests that Ross had a proximity to the plotters and their plan beyond any poet other than Ben Jonson, who had dined with them a month before the planned treason. As for Fawkes, Ross declines to personalize him, opting instead for something rawly impersonal so that after his capture ‘he came to court to be gazed at like a monster... he never changed his expression but was the same toward everyone wherever he went . . . He was so brazen-faced, iron-willed, and adamant-hearted that he would not soften in any way, nor could anyone goad him out of his alarming boldness’. Catesby and Garnet are surpassed as fiends by this unearthly monster, whose right to human compassion is utterly negated.

In his youthful imagining Edward Hawes had made Perry and Catesby into Bosch-like skulls, but they retained human characteristics, motives and personal histories, even souls. Such aspects of men are lost to Fawkes as the history of 5 November itself begins to lose its churning fluidity. The Latin poet William Gager wrote in 1608 of Fawkes as ‘hardened with iron and rock, now threatening horrors and almost breathing fire from his eyes and jaws.’ The ‘almost’ is intriguing since it surely suggests an unwillingness of Gager to believe every aspect of his own characterization of man become monster. The shift towards the demonizing of Fawkes actually began, it seems, around the end of January 1606. At the beginning of the month, even before the trial of the plotters, the text called
The devil of the vault
(possibly by John Heath) names as the brutal principals Percy and Catesby, but makes no mention of Fawkes. Yet, by the end of the month a report of the Westminster executions puts the spotlight on him as ‘the great Devill of all’. A.P’s translation of Herring in 1610 makes Fawkes a ‘night walking goblin’. The poets jab at the plotters, and the incensed public allows the slippage of Percy and Catesby from their primary roles to fix on the one man who remains silent as to his motive even under torture. They die quickly and away from the centrality of the proposed action; Fawkes, the gritty Yorkshireman and hater of Scots, the Catholic who had fought in Spain’s armies at Nieuport and the siege of Calais, slumps into the central position, pushing aside Digby, whose treatment at the hands of the poets is inconsistent. There is no mention of him by Ross, and the reason may be his friendship with the Digby family. Vicars and Thomas Campion do rehearse the alleged plan of Digby to kidnap Princess Elizabeth from her surrogate family in the Midlands, but Gager and Hawes make no mention of Digby and he is also excluded from Jonson’s play Catiline, again because the Catholic playwright was a friend of the Catholic plotter who came so late into the matter. In some part Digby’s rank protected him from the mass scrutiny of the poets, if not the public humiliation of his execution.

Another writer on the plot, and a little later in his work, was Phineas Fletcher, cousin of the playwright John Fletcher.
Locustae, vel Pietas Jesuitica
was written about 1611, but not published until 1627 – a year after Milton’s writing of
In Quintum Novembris.
Both seem to have looked at Paraeus, and Fletcher expanded the subject beyond the general outline of Wallace. One of his inventions brings together in Rome a satanic emissary and the Pope. However, the notion that Locustae was a source for Milton is clearly wrong as the chronology of their writing and publication reveals.

As for
Paradise Lost
– resemblances between Milton’s epic and the plot poems do exist, though nothing very full-bodied, so that, for example, the comment on Satan disguising himself to deceive Uriel (PL 3.681) is not unlike Fawkes’s adoption of clerical attire for disguise, as found in Herring (translated Vicars).

This picture curiosity which derides the plotters showing Justitia passing through a triumphal arch, and lauds the royal family, remains comparatively little known despite the article by G. Wickham Legg. An error in this was corrected in 1986 by Professor Höltgen when he pointed out that a somewhat fleshy blond figure is a personification of Divine Bounty:
Bonitas Divina,
not a clumsy and ambiguous rendering of God.
¹
Most recently work has been done on the picture by Ralph Weller, in his research for a study of the picture’s donor, Dr Richard Haydocke (1569–1642/3).
²
Although Haydocke was himself a painter and engraver, as well as a physician and translator, the work in question was executed by John Percivall. He came from a family of minor artists working in Salisbury in the first half of the seventeenth century. The town commissioned several copies of original portraits of Charles I and his queen, as well as of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, for many years Salisbury’s High Steward, and Percivall very likely worked from portraits in Wilton House where the Percivall family had worked as gilders.

The gunpowder painting is also a copy of an allegorical engraving done for the seventh anniversary of the plot in 1612. Because Prince Henry died on 6 November that year, the print was swiftly withdrawn from sale, when only a very few copies had been bought by courtiers such as Pembroke. Nearly seventy years later, at the time of the commotion caused by Titus Oates, the anti-Catholic engraving was reissued by Richard Northcott of Cornhill. From a unique copy, formerly in the collection of the Marquess of Bute, and now in the Huntington Library, California, it is possible to see that the print varies from the painting in only three ways:

The other variation was in size – the painting being almost exactly twice the size of the engraving (3ft 4½ in × 2ft 8½ in against 19½ in × 14 in). As Ralph Weller noted in a private letter, an experienced engraver like Haydocke would have found it a simple task to ‘square up’ the canvas and define the general outline of the picture for Percivall by doubling dimensions taken from the print’s first issues.

Some work still remains to be done on the musical notation in the painting, and a start on this has been made by a graduate student of New College, Timothy Morris. For the origins of the music I suggested a crypto-Catholic composer, but as he pointed out in a private letter, the open book in the top right of the painting shows a Magnificat, and this suggests an Anglican, not a Catholic, origin ‘since evensong had become the principal focus of Protestant musicians’ attention’. He suggested too that the music came either from Oxford or Cambridge, or possibly the Chapel Royal, which had always had the privilege (like the universities) of using Latin for its services.

One composer candidate can be proposed, though not yet securely proven; it is Thomas Weelkes (born
c.
1576). No recusant, he lived in Chichester with his wife and young son, and at the cathedral he had a senior position in the music-making, being a singer, organist and master of the choristers. After the plot he had composed a verse anthem with the text taken from Psalm 21 ‘Oh Lord, how joyful is the King’ used thereafter in the annual services of thanksgiving.

On Wednesday 6 November 1605 a London cutler, John Cradock, made a statement to the embattled Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham. In it Cradock outlined how he had been initially employed by the plotter Ambrose Rookwood to do work embellishing a special sword. During the summer of that year the wealthy young man had commissioned him to put a Spanish blade into a sword hilt that was itself unusual because it showed the story of the Passion of Christ in ornamental plaques. Cradock described these as ‘richly engraved’ – the meaning then being that they were low relief items. Since swords (rapiers) were worn by all gentlemen in public such insistent imagery was likely to cause comment when it was noted and was ‘a potentially dangerous statement of faith’.1 Rookwood evidently had an appetite for conspicuous display, and just a few days before the ‘dire combustion’ he changed his mind about the handle or grip. Cradock was told to remove it and replace it with a gold one before joining it to the hilt. The finished sword was then discreetly delivered to Rookwood at his London lodgings on the Sunday night at 11 o’clock. A further delivery of a less grandly decorated sword was then made to Thomas Winter, staying at an inn in the Strand just beyond the well-known premises of Mr Patrick. Winter had paid £12 10s. four months before on commissioning the work. Thomas Percy had also ordered one at slightly less cost, paying 10s. down towards the final price of £7, but he never got to collect it and Cradock held the sword at his premises. As expert consultant on these purchases Christopher Wright, one of the leading swordsmen of the day, went to the shop to give an appraisal of the blade length and so on. Rookwood was clearly wealthy, and could afford to indulge an expensive whim, spending £19 10s. – the price noted by Popham in a letter to Salisbury written before the interrogation of the cutler. The additional work may have boosted the price beyond the £20 mark; a princely sum at that time for a sword, as the other examples cited by Claude Blair indicate.2