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

abroad. Back in England to rest and take stock Leicester trumpeted his hostility to Mary, pushed for her execution and harried the friends of the dead plotters. Catholics now found the fiscal retribution meted out to them began to hurt more than hitherto. If they defaulted on the £20 fine for recusancy the government was now permitted to take two-thirds of their estates. Babington’s – from which he had drawn an income stated to have exceeded £1,000 per annum (a modern equivalent might be close to £500,000) – passed to Sir Walter Ralegh, and in a period when the estates of gentlemen usually grew larger, Catholics saw theirs contract, sometimes quite brutally. Taxes on the gentry before 1640 were generally negligible, but the penal levies caused deliberate hardship and a burden that passed down the generations. It was this squeeze on property that was most likely to convince a family (at least its public figures) that the mass was not worth the attendant ruin that could follow. Even so, there were sterner spirits than the Salusburys and Bulkeleys, who had settled to erasing the memory of the errant Thomas whose estate was yet preserved by an old entail. One in whom the spirit of resistance lived on was Sir William Catesby of Lapworth in Warwicksire, with a lineage described as ‘ancient, historic and distinguished’. Reconciled to Catholicism by the mission of Persons and Campion, married to a Throckmorton, he suffered imprisonment and the plundering of his wealth. His acceptance of this (whether troubled or indifferent) and the snubbing of his traditional patriotism tilted his son Robert towards armed resistance despite abundant evidence that it would fail. The gunpowder plot used the template of Ballard and Babington, drawing its participants from ‘the pupils and converts of the Jesuit mission’. 13 But it was necessarily flawed because it never achieved the critical mass that made its progress unstoppable. The unlucky thirteen main gunpowder plotters had a freight of personal conviction that was quite unmatched among contemporary lay Catholics. With a foundation of striking presumption they held fast to the view that death in the cause was nothing and ultimately they embraced their end as the prelude to eternal life. A wafer-thin fiction destroyed them. Perhaps it is possible still to find some explanation for this in developments after the execution of Mary and before that of the hapless Earl of Essex in 1601.
    A mere six priests had fallen foul of the laws of England and had been executed themselves before the beheading of Mary. But in the following year, 1587, with the country in a state of edgy passivity, waiting for an attack from Spain, the tempo of executions was stepped up and thirty-one died. Also in that year the work of rounding up recusants and valuing their lands was taken from the local authorities and given to operatives of the privy council. Lacking inhibitions based on personal familiarity they went about their business with an unyielding vigour; a procedure enhanced by a promise of an ‘allowance out of the forfeitures’ they should secure, and also by the first chance to purchase from the queen the lease of confiscated lands. The early missionary successes proved to be temporary and collapsed as the war against Spain continued after the Armada crisis into the next decade. There remained a pervasive fear of attack and a national preoccupation with war. The efforts to dissolve lay Catholic allegiance to Elizabeth, which were mounted at home and abroad, led to further executions in the 1590s – eighty-eight in all. The estrangement of the majority of the population from the old faith was now certain, and the government’s measures to counter the vituperation of Father Persons and the pro-Spanish party abroad were accepted. ‘Policy and ideology converged in England’s national energies, which were largely directed to defensive as opposed to aggressive or interventionist ends.’ Not