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

for one day, his ears nailed but not cut off.
    Rational men, men hitherto of discretion, began to fume at James for shifting policy, but then in both Scotland and England policy demanded that he should in the main stick to the religion of his tutors rather than that of his mother. One of those who felt particularly aggrieved was Thomas Percy, who seems to have had an over-measure in his personality of Percy eccentricity. The physical markers of companion mental instability were there – surges of wild energy subsiding into sloth; insomnia and a skin disorder so acute ‘he could not endure any shirt but of the finest holland or cambric’. Percy had shifted to Catholicism at about the same time as Robert Catesby, and fired with the emphatic enthusiasm of a proselyte had gone privately in 1603 to James at Holyrood as messenger for the Earl of Northumberland, hoping to draw from the king a promise of favour to the Catholics on his accession. It was reported that Thomas Percy had been assured of an accommodation that would allow them to worship discreetly and have their grievances amended. James afterwards would only deny this and given the recorded quaintness of his spoken English the possibilities for misunderstanding on both sides were very great. Probably he gave what he considered an airy (and suitably vague) assurance, and some colour may have been given to Percy’s confidence by his own appointment to a coveted vacancy in the gentlemen pensioners in ordinary, a privileged royal bodyguard. With the outbreak of persecution Percy felt horribly like a dupe and presented a remonstrance to James to which no reply was given. His broad contempt for Scots easily encompassed the Stuart, and it was an unsettlingly potent view collectively held in England by a majority. 13 As yet the simultaneous stirrings in the country had only parochial meanings, but given the atmosphere of ill-directed animosity in collision with repression, Robert Catesby who was to lead the gunpowder plotters identified an opportunity already hopelessly fluffed by the Bye plotters. What he settled upon was on a far more destructive and grandiose scale. How he tried to destroy the English government, the Anglo-Scottish royal family and the laws of the land, and why he failed, forms the next section of this book.

FOUR
The Gentlemen of the Sword
    S haped to counter the full tide of the influence of the Counter-Reformation, the religious policies of late Elizabethan England guaranteed conflict. The regime of Burghley and his fellow councillors was successful in putting down discontent, but it required violent counter-measures against dissidents of varying persuasions. Those who escaped abroad were sometimes jammed together, young men in the seminaries, restless and angry, capable of ill-judged mayhem when given the chance. To clamp down on any such efforts the great men of the privy council began to recognize the utility of intelligence operations, and as each plot against Elizabeth was uncovered, however fantastical, like the Squire’s plot, the rhetoric of denunciation by the discoverers grew more heightened and venomous. The treasons involved men from a variety of backgrounds whose combative inclinations were ill-sorted, unsteady and often lacking sense. Tense energy could also be distorted by cupshot camaraderie since London was crammed with taverns and ordinaries where men might meet in hired rooms. An estimate of the frequency of taverns has suggested an average of one to every eighteen houses. The taverns could be very large and the Bear in Westminster and the Angel near the Tower both had twenty-one rooms. Ordinaries were originally eating houses and there were various grades. In the twelvepenny ordinary the men of fashion took their meals and later played cards or dice. Even wealthy residents in London like Anthony Babington kept company in such places and met his fellow conspirators in them because ‘there were innkeepers who catered for the numerous