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

toleration. However, despite a summons before the Lords of Sessions, by August of that year Constable and Boniton were indeed negotiating on behalf of the Pope with the king. The object, cited in a despatch from the London ambassador of France to Henri IV, was to win liberty of conscience for Catholics ‘et declarer la guerre à la Royne d’Angleterre, lui offrant pour cest affect grand denier et l’assistance de tous les Princes catholiques de la Chrestienté et d’ung grand nombre de Catholiques de ce royaume.’ 15
    The mission was not a success and there was some disbelief in political circles in London, rather more closely informed than the French ambassador after long years of monarch watching, that James had ever seriously considered cutting ‘the grass under Her Majesty’s feet’. When Henry Constable returned to Antwerp from Scotland, Thomas Phelippes, sometime spy coordinator and code-breaker to Walsingham, received a letter from his agent in Brussels who used the alias John Petit. He reported Constable now keeping company with a priest named Tempest and the Earl of Westmorland. One day when out walking they met a young English lad who worked for an exiled printer (probably the gifted and indefatigable Richard Verstegen), ‘and asked him what books are printing against the King of Scotland’s title; he said he knew of none.’ Constable’s view of James had evidently shifted and he thought now that the king relied on ‘no party in England but the Puritans, and will enter with that pretence, and before the tree falls, if he can find opportunity.’
    Evidently Constable was far from elated by his contacts with James, retreating from his former position of supporting him and making some rather disparaging comments. Petit again to Thomas Phelippes (alias Peter Halins): ‘he has been as backward for the King of Scots as he was forward before; he speaks of him as little better than an atheist, of no courage nor judgment, and says he and his intend to make havoc of England when the day comes.’ Even so, with no other significant candidate to succeed the childless Elizabeth remotely acceptable to his countrymen Constable thought to persevere with James, and he may have been the author of a book the king received that denounced the notorious Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, which appeared earlier in the decade with the alias R. Doleman for its author. This name was actually a cover for a collaboration between its essential author, Richard Verstegen, and its reviser Father Persons, a master of style in English and Latin. A text which Constable along with many others ascribed solely to him, it had repercussions in the succession debate that the stiff old queen tried to ward off. It was circulated on the continent late in the autumn of 1593, and a larger edition was printed in 1594 in Antwerp with a dedication to Essex. Optimism or an exile’s impertinence?
    The book’s first purpose was to discredit the principle of legitimism ‘in favour of a contractual theory of sovereignty’, and then secondly to rubbish the claims of all save one person. James might briefly have hoped that the emotion generated by the execution of his mother would rally her Catholic supporters to his side. However, Verstegen and others in exile wanted a genuinely Catholic candidate to oust all others. Their book ‘brought together arguments for a Spanish successor which had been circulating since 1571’. 16 Their choice was the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II, based on what we might regard as a rather strained ancestral argument, but she was a princess whose faith was unimpeachable. As far as James was concerned it was the most dangerous book of its time. More moderate Catholics looked to Lady Arabella Stuart, cousin of James, since she had been born in England and he had not. After the publication of Doleman her name was regularly noted high on the list of claimants, and there was also talk of her