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Authors: Alan Haynes
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with a rosary from the Pope to the queen. James was incensed at the opinion that he could be converted through the agency of a woman and on his return Standen was arrested and placed in the Tower for some ten months.
On 19 February 1604 James protested ‘his utter detestation of their superstitious religion’. So he and his bishops agreed. In asserting and defending the true faith there was the inevitable conclusion that all others were false, heretical and hence condemned. The rider to that was that they should be suppressed. So in his arguments against the Roman Church and its doctrines he followed the lead of Elizabethan divines in regarding those who were elected Pope as embodying Antichrist. This brittle antipathy was reflected in such books as George Downame’s A Treatise affirming the Pope to be Antechrist (1603) or Robert Abbot’s Anti-Christi Demonstratio of the same year. The tedium of such arguments was not felt then, moulding as they did the thoughts of salvation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the Anglo-Catholicism of Whitgift and Lancelot Andrewes that James was quick to defend because personally he hated the Puritans more than he did the Catholics. Even so it was the missal and its threat that immediately seized his attention. The powerful surge of the Counter-Reformation was unmistakable, and Catholics had a particular advantage over the Puritans – a centralized organization and a man at the top whose authority was pan-European (even partially global) and temporal; one whose claims, in fact, no ‘supreme governor’ could ever allow. 10
This led James on 22 February 1604 to take up the challenge with a proclamation that ordered all Jesuits and seminary priests to leave the country before the opening of Parliament on 19 March. On the same day the recusancy fine was again activated and by the following month the direction was obviously heading towards a reimposition of the Elizabethan code. The Bye plot, ineffective and blundering, had indicated the extraordinary speed with which optimism on both sides had decayed. On 16 July a priest, John Sugar, and his harbourer Robert Grissold were executed at Warwick in the locale that became crucial to the gunpowder plotters. Grissold’s brother John was one of Garnet’s servants, using the alias James Johnson. The following year he was in charge at White Webbs and was subsequently almost racked to death. It may have been a matter of zeal in local magistrates rather than the government in London, but then in August two laymen were executed at Lancaster at about the time James was staying with the Catholic Lord Mordaunt at Drayton (Northants). The hospitality must have been exceptional but it did not prevent Mordaunt from having frequent contacts with the plotters. It did, however, delay James’s return to London even though there had arrived Juan de Velasco, Constable of Castile and Duke of Frias, the representative of Philip III, to sign the formal peace agreement negotiated between England and Spain (Scotland had never been at war) in eighteen sessions between 20 May and 6 July. It was while gathering himself for the crossing to Dover that the Constable had been visited in April by Thomas Winter, whose account records that one of his objectives was to ram home the case of English Catholicism and so influence the negotiations that were held at Somerset House. The meeting had been arranged by Hugh Owen, but it proved to be a distinct failure. Even so, Winter did not totally waste his time for he renewed his acquaintance with Guy Fawkes and managed to persuade him of the utility of a visit to England in May. Sir William Stanley was also consulted when in camp at Ostend and he recommended Fawkes while still deprecating any project during the time of peace negotiations. Winter told Stanley that nothing had been decided and repeated this to Fawkes when he met him in Dunkirk. Even at this distance the assertion seems hollow.
The hopes of Philip
On 19 February 1604 James protested ‘his utter detestation of their superstitious religion’. So he and his bishops agreed. In asserting and defending the true faith there was the inevitable conclusion that all others were false, heretical and hence condemned. The rider to that was that they should be suppressed. So in his arguments against the Roman Church and its doctrines he followed the lead of Elizabethan divines in regarding those who were elected Pope as embodying Antichrist. This brittle antipathy was reflected in such books as George Downame’s A Treatise affirming the Pope to be Antechrist (1603) or Robert Abbot’s Anti-Christi Demonstratio of the same year. The tedium of such arguments was not felt then, moulding as they did the thoughts of salvation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the Anglo-Catholicism of Whitgift and Lancelot Andrewes that James was quick to defend because personally he hated the Puritans more than he did the Catholics. Even so it was the missal and its threat that immediately seized his attention. The powerful surge of the Counter-Reformation was unmistakable, and Catholics had a particular advantage over the Puritans – a centralized organization and a man at the top whose authority was pan-European (even partially global) and temporal; one whose claims, in fact, no ‘supreme governor’ could ever allow. 10
This led James on 22 February 1604 to take up the challenge with a proclamation that ordered all Jesuits and seminary priests to leave the country before the opening of Parliament on 19 March. On the same day the recusancy fine was again activated and by the following month the direction was obviously heading towards a reimposition of the Elizabethan code. The Bye plot, ineffective and blundering, had indicated the extraordinary speed with which optimism on both sides had decayed. On 16 July a priest, John Sugar, and his harbourer Robert Grissold were executed at Warwick in the locale that became crucial to the gunpowder plotters. Grissold’s brother John was one of Garnet’s servants, using the alias James Johnson. The following year he was in charge at White Webbs and was subsequently almost racked to death. It may have been a matter of zeal in local magistrates rather than the government in London, but then in August two laymen were executed at Lancaster at about the time James was staying with the Catholic Lord Mordaunt at Drayton (Northants). The hospitality must have been exceptional but it did not prevent Mordaunt from having frequent contacts with the plotters. It did, however, delay James’s return to London even though there had arrived Juan de Velasco, Constable of Castile and Duke of Frias, the representative of Philip III, to sign the formal peace agreement negotiated between England and Spain (Scotland had never been at war) in eighteen sessions between 20 May and 6 July. It was while gathering himself for the crossing to Dover that the Constable had been visited in April by Thomas Winter, whose account records that one of his objectives was to ram home the case of English Catholicism and so influence the negotiations that were held at Somerset House. The meeting had been arranged by Hugh Owen, but it proved to be a distinct failure. Even so, Winter did not totally waste his time for he renewed his acquaintance with Guy Fawkes and managed to persuade him of the utility of a visit to England in May. Sir William Stanley was also consulted when in camp at Ostend and he recommended Fawkes while still deprecating any project during the time of peace negotiations. Winter told Stanley that nothing had been decided and repeated this to Fawkes when he met him in Dunkirk. Even at this distance the assertion seems hollow.
The hopes of Philip
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