Free The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) by Alan Haynes

III, his Council of State and his negotiators who sat on one side of the turkey-carpeted table opposite the leading figures of Jacobean politics led by Cecil, the hopes of a peace, were strikingly fulfilled. One curiosity did fall – the notion of the strongly anti-Spanish Prince Henry marrying an Infanta, although the gift of a Spanish horse and embroidered velvet tackle did please the young man. 11 In his disinclination to marry outside his religion Henry was only following his father’s advice, though it sits oddly with the comically desperate efforts to secure later the Spanish match for his other son. As for the English Catholics, nervously expectant, their case was nudged into limbo and proved to be the great topic on which the diplomats chose to remain mute. Any covert expressions of mild sympathy for their situation by Northampton (who like Cecil spoke Spanish) was more than offset by the stern attitude of the House of Commons, where any relaxation of statute and its enforcement was regarded with abhorrence. They did not want Catholicism treated as ‘tolerated vice’. Indeed, after only four sessions of the Somerset House conference, a bill requiring the imposition of statutes (of which there were plenty) against Jesuits, priests, recusants etc., not only re-enacted the Elizabethan code but extended it to penalize those who sent children or adults overseas to study at the seminaries, and those who remained in such institutions. In September, while the Constable was slowly returning to Spain via Flanders, a commission was created to execute the laws for the banishment of Jesuits and seminary priests. The government ignored their protests and also began to enforce the recusancy fines upon the laity, more strictly than they might have done because James needed money to placate courtiers and servants. Royal extravagance and failures in collection of taxes would eventually lead to a crisis, and in the meantime the archduke hoped to exploit matters by seeking to buy the cautionary towns in the territory of the Estates General.
    The prophetic analysis of Hugh Owen with regard to James was being fulfilled. 12 He noted the onerous conditions of his co-religionists in England, and he assumed (or was told by his couriers) that the plot first talked of earlier in the year was advancing. Cecil’s spy Thomas Allyson, who was in the Low Countries about the time the peace was concluded, reported hints from Owen about the Infanta’s claim; angry references to Cecil, Bancroft and Sir John Popham, and venom directed at James. Allyson followed this a little later by offering to procure for Cecil a copy of the plot against James drawn up by Owen and his Jesuit friends, with reasons advanced for the archdukes, the Pope and Philip III to reject the peace treaty. The exiled spy master evidently had hopes for a breakdown in Anglo-Scottish relations leading to civil war over the question of union, with the consequent intervention of Spain. In England there were signs of real disappointment in James and a growing sense of despondent unease among Catholics. A minor revolt broke out in Herefordshire during the summer, and there were rumours of guns, armour and horses being collected for some violent activity. Like all such rumours the numbers tended to multiply in the telling. In September, twenty-one priests and three laymen were banished, and the notorious case against old Thomas Pound(e) reached star chamber in December. Since the arrival of Campion in England whom he had befriended, Pound had spent much of the last twenty-five years in gaols and was arraigned at this time for protesting against the cruelty of the law and recent executions. The new sentence he received was bizarre; one ear was to be severed in London and the other in Lancaster, while his term in prison was extended to coincide with the length of his life. In addition, a fine of £1,000 was imposed. The mutilation was later commuted to standing in the pillory in each place