The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) Read Online Free

everyone favoured the brisk efforts of Essex in his leadership of the Cadiz expedition (1596) and the Islands voyage (1597). As Thomas Wilson noted in The State of England, Ann. Dom. 1600, the ‘common soldiers that are sent out of the realm be of the basest and most inexperienced, the best being reserved to defend from invasion.’ But laws to prohibit could also entice, and in court circles Catholicism had a fluttering fitful glamour as the late cult of Eliza took on a rather desperate air. The sort of scepticism about Rome that finds voice in Marlowe’s spiritual drama Dr Faustus, could yet open the way to a nostalgic conversion.
    There were tensions, too, within the upper levels of government, involving the tugging of policy by factions. Lord Burghley, ageing and sometimes infirm, came increasingly to rely on the administrative skills of his younger son Sir Robert Cecil. They shared not only the primary tasks of office as ministers, but also an identical dislike of minorities, the improvident and dissident. In what seems like a deliberate contrast there was Essex who benignly gave such provocative elements neglected space, jobs and support whenever he identified an opportunity – and if it ruffled the Cecilians that was a pleasurable bonus. As the heir of his stepfather Leicester ( d . 1588), the young earl had puritan support as well, and he married Walsingham’s daughter, the widow of the great Protestant hero Sir Philip Sidney just before Walsingham’s death. But among Essex’s closest friends were the dashing Earl of Southampton, an unsteady Catholic, and Sir Oliver Manners, who had turned back to the old faith. The convert cast of mind found expression in the works of Henry Constable, who had been at St John’s College, Cambridge, and yet had Catholic kinsfolk, including priests and nuns from the large Babthorpe family; the conversion of Constable himself seems to have taken place in 1591. 14 A letter that he wrote to Essex in October 1595 is revealing, for in it he declared that ‘he was more affectionate to him than to any’ and although there was a gap between them on religious matters, the fact that this had forced him to depend on others had been against his will. He then claimed – as many of his co-religionists would have done – that although passionately devoted to Catholicism, he did not wish its restoration in England, nor the servitude of his country to a foreign tyranny, and that he had on several occasions dissuaded some of his Catholic countrymen from violence ‘and such as be in authority in the church from approving of them’.
    Writing on the same day to Anthony Bacon who had returned to England from a lengthy (and not untroubled) sojourn in France to take control of Essex’s intelligence operations, Constable wrote: ‘An honest man may be a Catholic and no fool.’ Some time later the poet wrote again to Essex in terms that suggest the growth of a friendly understanding between them. He renewed his protests of lawful affection for his country and said that he had written to Rome to dissuade the Pope from believing that English Catholics actually favoured Spanish designs against Elizabeth who had just passed her ‘climacteric’ of sixty-three years (a number loaded with significance for Elizabethans). Sir Robert Cecil and Essex were both advised of Constable’s movements and apparent intentions, and on 12 September 1598 Sir Thomas Edmondes wrote to the former from Paris that there was a project afoot to send Constable to Scotland to encourage James VI to allow Catholics there ‘a toleration of Religion’, and to assure him of the devoted support of English Catholics. In March of the following year George Nicholson reported to Cecil from Edinburgh that Constable had arrived from France, and the Laird of Boniton, another Catholic, had travelled with him. Yet several days after, Roger Aston informed Cecil that James had refused Constable an audience; the king rejected the notion of