Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution Read Free Page B

the Commons on 20 June, in which were defended such rights as freedom of speech and freedom from arrest. It was declared that ‘our privileges and liberties are our true right and due inheritance, no less than our lands and goods’. It was a parliamentary way, perhaps, of introducing a Scottish king to the peculiar constitution of England. Another section stated that ‘your majesty should be misinformed if any man should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either to alter religion … or to make any laws covering the same’. The ‘form of apology’ was never presented to the king; it may have been rejected by a majority as too extreme.
    Without doubt, however, James came to hear of it; he resented its implication and was angered at its impudence. He came down to prorogue parliament on 7 July, where in the course of his speech he berated some of its members for being ‘idle heads, some rash, some busy informers’. He said that in Scotland he was heard with respect whereas here there was ‘nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find fault with my propositions’. In Scotland ‘all things warranted that came from me. Here all things suspected.’ He added that ‘you have done many things rashly, I say not you meant disloyally’. Then, at the conclusion, he advised that ‘only I wish you had kept a better form. I like form as much as matter.’
    He was perhaps waiting for the assistance of Richard Bancroft, newly installed as archbishop of Canterbury, who was a firm upholder of the royal prerogative and no lover of puritans. Even then Bancroft was steering the convocation of senior clergy towards a statement of general religious conformity; the canons of 1604 gave nothing to the puritans but demanded that they submit to the Book of Common Prayer and to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The sectarian ministers must conform or be deprived. The more draconian penalties were in truth rarely applied, but the measures marked the first schism in the history of the reformed English Church.
    So the king had prorogued parliament with a very bad grace, little or nothing having been achieved by it. He stated at a later date that it was a body without a head. ‘At their meetings,’ he is reported to have said, ‘nothing is heard but cries, shouts and confusion. I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have allowed such an institution to come into existence.’ His opinion may have been shared by others. In the winter of 1604 Thomas Percy sub-leased a house beside the Palace of Westminster and, with the assistance of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators, began to excavate a tunnel.

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    The plot
     
    In these early years the king was proclaimed as a Caesar, a David, a Noah, a Joash and even a Homer. He was a second Augustus, a true Josiah, a wise and religious sovereign. It is difficult to know what this bewildering wealth of parallels might signify, but one virtue soon became predominant. He was ‘ rex pacificus’ or ‘ Jacobus pacificus’ . Blessed was the peacemaker. His was the reign of the fig tree and the vine.
    Others were not so satisfied by the pleasures of peace. ‘Na, na,’ James is supposed to have said after his coronation, ‘we’ll not need papists now.’ He had wooed them in case of trouble, but could now afford to discard them. In February 1604, the Jesuit priests who owed all their obedience to Rome were banished from the realm. It was a sensible precaution, perhaps, but for fervent Catholics it was an ominous sign.
    Among these was Thomas Winter, or Wintour, who had unsuccessfully appealed to Philip III of Spain for aid on behalf of the faithful. In the same month of February 1604, he visited his cousin, Robert Catesby, at Lambeth. Catesby was possibly a convert from Protestantism and therefore one in whom the Roman fire burned ever more brightly. It was he, rather than Guy Fawkes, who led what became known as the ‘powder plot’. Catesby informed his cousin