Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder

Transcription

1 340 BEN JONSON J O U R N A L Christ winking at adultery in the gospels is hardly useful. In fact, it is a great mistake to regard traditional Christian views of the body, of marriage, of celibacy, etc., as generally neurotic, dualistic or contradictory as several of these critics do, or to read Donne's poetry in such an unhistorical light. If poems such as "Nocturnall" and "Since she whome I lovd," etc., are to be read biographically, then what Donne is primarily struggling with here is not some sudden anxiety that human love is cursed in itself, but with the recognition of an excessive or otherwise inordinate love on his part. As Charles Williams said of another author's great literary love, "This also is Thou; Neither is this Thou" all created things lead to but are not God. Just as, in his impulsive marriage to Anne, Donne had been forced to reckon with the dilemma of fortune (a power which transfers earthly goods from one to another), so in the loss of his wife he must deal with the angel of death, which so shifts spiritual good about as to inhibit human beings from taking another creature as an absolute end in itself. Donne's difficulty with his wife's death indeed seems to have been excruciating. But so is the way of the cross which involves not just forgoing evil, but also giving up good. And in the death of his beloved Anne as later in confronting his own death, Donne saw himself drawn to exactly that. Robert Shenk University of New Orleans Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder New York: Doubleday, xxxv pages. Plot. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot is celebrated in England every fifth of November, on what is known as Guy Fawkes Day. It has been nearly 400 years since Guido Fawkes was found inspecting thirty six barrels of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords prior to the opening of Parliament. The annual celebration began in 1606 as a way for the people to give thanks to God for having saved the King and the rest of the royal family, but it very quickly lost its positive nature and became a vehicle for venting anti- Catholic venom (in some places the Pope is still burned in effigy).

2 Book Reviews 341 The anti-papist nature of the day, now remarked by fires and fireworks and the burning of "the Guy," has very much disappeared few people, adult or child among them, can tell you what it's all about. The Gunpowder Treason, as it was also called, has generated much debate throughout history. Initially, the government, headed by King James's chief minister, Salisbury, blamed the plot on the Jesuits and executed the innocent head of that order, Father Henry Garnet. There have been those who maintain there was no plot at all, that it was invented by Salisbury and others to make their work of eliminating popery in England easier. What Antonia Fraser has written is a thorough and intensely readable forensic study on the corpse of this treason. She has shown that there was indeed such a plot, but that it was planned neither by Salisbury nor the Jesuits. Nor was Guido Fawkes the leader of it. "In all fairness," she says, "the reviled name should really be that of Robert Catesby, as leader of the conspiracy." Contrary to what was put forth shortly after the discovery, a majority of the English Catholics were horrified by the idea of such a plot; those who had any intimations or suspicion of it tried to do what little they could to deter it. The two priests who learned of it through the sacrament of Confession thought they had made it clear enough that the Church could not support the sinful plan in any way. Because of this prohibition, they believed the matter was a dead issue. Fairness is what Fraser achieves after all these years. Her book reads like a primer in even-handedness. Former heroes are shown to have feet of clay or worse; and those most vilified the conspirators if not brought back to grace, are at least given a fair hearing. Key to the mystery of the plot is the anonymous letter, "the dark and doubtful letter" delivered into the hands of the Catholic Lord William Parker Monteagle, related by marriage to one of the plotters, Francis Tresham. The letter spelled out the existence of a plan to kill the king at the convening of Parliament. Monteagle gave the letter to Salisbury. At this point the plotters were essentially undone, but Salisbury did not immediately act upon the information. Instead, armed with this deadly foreknowledge, he set about to make a case which would implicate the Jesuits.

3 342 BEN JONSON J O U R N A L What Fraser points out is that although Father Garnet may have had foreknowledge of the same event, he used this knowledge to try and dissuade the organizers. Salisbury, on the other hand, wanted to entangle as many as he could in the web of treason, even if it meant the spreading of lies. Fraser's most important contribution to the Gunpowder polemic is the detection and the naming of the hidden author of this anonymous letter. She discards the formerly-accused, including wives and relatives of those involved in the treason. Applying the principle of cni bono, she asks, "Who had the most to gain from such a letter?" The answer: Monteagle himself. She arrives at this conclusion by examining primary sources with the question constantly in mind: what purpose did the letter serve and why did it exist? Fraser is not content with accepting the tory of the letter as related by Monteagle and Salisbury. "Something very fishy about the whole episode" prompts her deeper investigation. Someone had let Monteagle into the secret of the treason. It is Fraser's determination that "the most obvious suspect, Francis Tresham, is surely the right one." And as a further signal of her own even-handedness in this matter, she adds: "Tresham did not need to write to his brother-in-law [Monteagle]. The kind of confidence he had to make was far better delivered face to face, since it was not so much a warning as a betrayal of what was about to take place." It would be hard to find another historian of the Gunpowder Treason who would call this information a "betrayal." She concludes that "The Monteagle letter, then, was a fake and not only Monteagle but Salisbury knew it was a fake." It was not a genuine document but part of a plan of entrapment, allowing Salisbury to sit back and allow the plot "to ripen." Monteagle, who had escaped execution in the ill-fated Essex rebellion of 1601 against the queen's "evil advisers," could not afford to be so closely related to yet another uprising, especially since the leader of this new plot, Catesby, had been another of the accused in the earlier Essex stir. Monteagle would certainly have been hauled in along with the plotters and their relatives. The mysterious letter thus converts Monteagle from a doomed goat to a lauded hero, literally overnight. Fraser is quick to point out and to repeat that a terrorist conspiracy did exist, and that it belonged to a "long tradition of Catholic

4 Book Reviews 343 activism, plans for foreign invasion and the rest, with the aim of securing toleration. It was a violent conspiracy involving Catholic fanatics." Thirteen of them, to be specific. But it is not Fraser's primary purpose in this book to point a finger at Monteagle or Salisbury. It is rather "to explain, so far as is possible in view of imperfect records and testimony taken under torture, why there was a Gunpowder Plot in the first place." In this regard her book most resembles a detective story and avoids academic boredom as it examines the complicated details of the relationships, the mysteries and the motivation at the heart of the matter. This conspiracy did not represent a widespread agreement among Catholics in England. Most of them lived in fear of exactly such a thing and dreaded the repercussions. They had already been reduced to the state of suspect citizens as a result of the disastrous Papal Bull of 1570 in which Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and released her subjects from their allegiance to her. The worst of this, for English Catholics, was that "It incised the message that all English Catholics, however lowly, however obedient, were potential traitors to their country at the orders of their 'chief pastor.'" Why was there a Gunpowder Plot in the first place? Fraser does not condone violence or terrorist actions, and she refers to the band of thirteen conspirators as "fanatics." But she examines each one of them as individuals, measuring them against their own complex set of emotional, moral, religious, political and familial backgrounds. She draws attention to the cowardice and betrayal amongst them as well as to the bravery and nobility demonstrated by others of them. She makes careful distinctions between those who were driven to this treason strictly through religious conviction and those who entered into the pact through loyalty to or attraction of the charismatic leader Robert Catesby. What were the conditions that allowed these thirteen men to concoct a plan that would possibly convert their country into a living hell for all Catholics, and each of their lives to a tragic waste? The Catholic community had been led to believe at the time of James's ascension to the throne that he, the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, would act as its deliverer. But James did not intend to keep his early promises of relief, accommodation and tol-

5 344 BEN JONSON J O U R N A L eration promises which had won him widespread Catholic support. Neither was there to be any hope for foreign assistance this vanished when the king of Spain refused to back a Catholic candidate to succeed Elizabeth. And the Anglo-Spanish Treaty thereafter confirmed this gloomy condition. Priests and Catholic peers had been led to support the new king, but it was not long before recusancy taxes, penalties, jailings, tortures, confiscations and other hardships were increased. A handful of misguided, brave men decided to take matters into their own hands. Fraser does not call these good men "by no stretch of the imagination can they be described as that." The goodness that emerges from this tragic episode, she points out, belongs to the priests and the lay brothers and the heroic women all of whom are amply chronicled in this book. She says history will describe the motives, if not the actions, of the plotters as noble and idealistic. Terrorism does not, she says, exist in a vacuum. Her own summary is as good as any: "It was indeed a 'heavy and doleful tragedy' that these men of such calibre were driven by continued religious persecution to Gunpowder, Treason and Plot." Peter Parsons San Sebastian, Spain