Catholic killers
LYONS, DONALD
Catholic Killers By Donald Lyons England, 1603. The old queen was finally dead, and the new king was a sly, secretive Scot. Harassed and persecuted English Catholics had been forbidden to worship,...
...Soon the wounded conspirators joined him in the Tower...
...Triumphant James had his Jesuit blood...
...In London, Attorney General Coke, at the King's explicit urging, began applying "the gentler tortures"—i.e., the rack, which stretched the suspect, and the manacles, which suspended him—to Fawkes...
...She manages to sketch in a comprehensive and fascinating background of Catholic life in the Midlands at the turn of the seventeenth century...
...And, of course, the annual commemorative Guy Fawkes bonfires, complete with burnt effigies of the pope, have kept bigotry warm...
...The House of Commons rejected this, but it was some 200 years before most civil disabilities were removed from English Catholics...
...They were confident that good King James, with his Catholic wife and penchant for hunting on the estates of Catholic nobles, would relax the punitive regime of stern Elizabeth...
...In remote Staffordshire— and quite unsupported by the local populace—four fiery conspirators died and others were wounded in a shootout with a government posse...
...In the wee hours of November 5, one Guido, ne Guy, Fawkes, a bellicose and fanatical ruffian and a latecomer to the conspiracy, was found skulking around a cellar underneath Parliament...
...This of course did not stop the torturing of Garnet, his fellow Jesuits, and lay brother Nicholas Owen, the crippled and ingenious architect of unnumbered priest holes...
...some were defiant...
...They aimed to wipe out the entire Protestant establishment by choosing the opening day of Parliament, November 5, 1605, when the royal family—king, queen, two little princes—and the entire nobility would be in attendance...
...They—especially high-spirited aristocrats like charismatic Robert Catesby and charming Everard Digby—looked to James as a potential bringer of "toleration" for Catholics and an enabler of glamorous careers, on the order of Essex or Raleigh, for frustrated bloods like themselves...
...And not just Parliament: Donald Lyons is theater critic of the Wall Street Journal...
...The idiotic and wicked plan resulted not in the emancipation but in the prolonged and intensified persecution of English Catholics...
...Those who murder, or will the murder of, innocents may or may not be brave, may or may not be devout, but they are always bad...
...These words, she says, could have been uttered by Robert Catesby...
...But James disappointed...
...It was proposed in 1613 that Catholics be compelled to wear red hats (like the Jews of Rome) or particolored stockings (like clowns) to render them easier targets...
...Antonia Fraser is best known for her sympathetic lives of Mary Queen of Scots, of various Stuart monarchs, and of Henry VIII's wives, and indeed her gift is less for narrative than for biography...
...Fawkes's arrest sent the ringleaders flying to their country estates, where they fondly expected to organize a desperate rising in their behalf...
...Who would have dreamt that James's eldest son would die of typhoid fever at the age of eighteen in 1612 and that his second son, then Charles I, would be publicly decapitated by a Puritan tyranny in 1649...
...Fraser herself comes from a distinguished Catholic family, and her tribute to this twilight culture is heartfelt and touching...
...James and Salisbury were determined to use the foiled plot as an occasion to rid England of the brains of its Catholic remnant, the Jesuits...
...By November 7, he was confessing and implicating others...
...The little Princess Elizabeth was to marry a German and become the ancestress of the present ruling house...
...But such is the glamour of this doomed Catholic aristocracy— mingling, as it were, elements of Brideshead Revisited and the French Resistance—and so repellent are sadistic cold fish like James and Coke that Fraser is tempted at moments to jettison her moral rudder...
...On May 3, Garnet was hanged...
...Some had duly confessed to the priests' foreknowledge, but Digby the charmer, who was best placed to know, maintained to the last that no Jesuit was privy to the plot...
...The idea was then to institute a Catholic government, with James's nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth (absent from London) as puppet queen and a Catholic grandee, yet to be named, as lord protector...
...A letter of mysterious origin warning a relative of one of the plotters not to attend the opening reached, on or about October 26, the all-powerful minister Salisbury, "the crafty statesman par excellence . . . who had masterminded among other things King James's accession to the British throne...
...She shows us husbands making public profession of Protestantism to maintain land and career, resourceful wives doing the daily work of keeping religion and family afloat, hotheaded scions...
...Coke led the prosecution at the show trial...
...The verdict was guilty...
...Winifred in Wales...
...She does a competent-enough job telling the story here (though it would perhaps take the Conrad of Under Western Eyes to do it justice) but her real interest is elsewhere...
...On the last two days of the month, eight conspirators met the late of traitors...
...It was a world of intense, pervasive piety, with huddled masses, priests disguised as lords, scrupulously kept feast days, and pilgrimages to the healing waters of St...
...dud gunpowder lay about...
...Weak from torture, they were publicly hanged for a few minutes, then cut down alive to have their hearts ripped out and their bodies torn asunder...
...The generous historian Clarendon called Cromwell "a brave bad man...
...On the pretext that the plotters had confessed their intentions to Jesuits and been absolved in advance, a ferocious priest hunt was instituted...
...Antonia Fraser's new book, Faith and Treason, deals with the upshot of Catholic frustration, the most infamous terrorist plot in English history...
...Salisbury showed the letter to the king on November 1. The government had plenty of time to foil the grotesquely inept plot...
...they died with panache and piety, kissing crucifixes and images of the Virgin...
...But the official taste for blood was far from slaked...
...She seems not to see that, rather than reflecting Mandela's light upon Catesby and mitigating terror, they imbrue Mandela with some of Catesby's dark folly...
...Some were penitent...
...He proved more intent on making peace abroad with Spain, the recent hope of English Catholics, and on consolidating his Protestant base at home...
...a suddenly still and merciful crowd demanded he be killed whilst hanging and spared consciousness during the rest...
...On the book's last page she cites Nelson Mandela explaining his indulgence in "sabotage" on the grounds that "fifty years of nonviolence had brought [my] people nothing but more repressive legislation, and fewer rights...
...Head Jesuit Father Henry Garnet and others were flushed from priest holes in late January...
...Harassed and persecuted English Catholics had been forbidden to worship, obliged to shelter their proscribed priests in airless nooks called priest holes, compelled to subscribe publicly to Protestantism, menaced with confiscation of property and prosecution for treason...
...she has a nice gossipy knack for clarifying the dense web of intermarriages that linked the Catholic gentry...
...Dashed hopes turned, as they have a habit of doing, to rash schemes...
...Under the torture, Garnet admitted enough to give Coke grounds for an indictment of "misprision of treason...
...Some thirteen Catholics, mainly young noblemen from the Midlands, decided to blow up Parliament by laying gunpowder in the basement...
...It was all sad, mad, bad nonsense, and, as such wild stuff will, it went spectacularly awry...
...Matriarchs like Anne Vaux and Eliza Roper, dowager of Harrowden, held it all together with a very English pluck and chipper efficiency, and some of these women were scarred by proximity to the conspirators...
...Fras-er hesitates so to label her plotters and suggests we think of them as "brave, misguided men...
...all died resolutely Catholic...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 14
