Just Finished Reading: The Gunpowder Plot – Terror and Faith in 1605 by Antonia Fraser

I’ve been meaning to read this for a while now and it seemed an appropriate time to do so. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was the culmination of many months of planning and many years – indeed decades – of religious persecution. During the long reign of Elizabeth and the short reign of James I up to the historic events of late 1605 the minority Catholic population lived under an increasingly harsh Protestant regime. Non conformity to Protestantism resulted in fines and imprisonment as did the wearing of religious icons. Performing a Mass or importing religious artefacts could result in a particularly gruesome form of public execution. It was not a good time to be a devout Catholic.

But all of this seemed to be changing on the event of Elizabeth’s death. James had apparently offered the hand of reconciliation and tolerance to the Catholics in his new Kingdom. Unfortunately any hopes were quickly dashed and the full force of a theocratic police state was brought to bear on those outside the Protestant faith. Of course things had not been helped by the Pope excommunicating Elizabeth I and extolling her Catholic subjects – who where afterwards not subject to her but to the Pope – to rise up against their Sovereign. For real fear of armed insurrection the penalties levied on the Catholics were harsh indeed.

Thrown back on their own resources and with a growing feeling of desperation a small band of men decided that enough was enough. They decided that the only solution was the elimination of the King and his ministers in one awful spectacular. They would kill him and everyone around him on the state opening of Parliament on 5th November 1605. Of course, as every English schoolboy knows, events did not go as planned. Before the plot could come to its bloody fruition Guy Fawkes was caught red-handed and the attempt to change English history unravelled.

Antonia Fraser in her very readable, if occasionally rather dry, book went into far more detail than I could have ever wished to know about the events surrounding this significant event in our nations history. I knew the basics but this book made me acutely aware of what it must have been like to have been a Catholic in the early 17th Century. I suppose this was all the more poignant from my perspective as, technically at least, I am a Catholic myself. It certainly made me feel more sympathetic than maybe I would have been if I were not ‘of that faith’. I couldn’t help wondering what I would have done if I had been in their rather troubled and undoubtedly painful shoes. Fraser most certainly brought home the plight of these clearly oppressed men and women who were in all honestly merely following their faith. Unfortunately for all concerned, the times and circumstances were against them. In some ways the Gunpowder Plot itself was inevitable given the level of oppression and the lack of viable alternatives. In other ways – as the author pointed out – it was a literally horrifying affront to the views of the time which contributed to the deaths of all involved and the backlash against the larger Catholic community.

In the final section Antonia Fraser mentioned, as if in passing, several facts that almost shocked me speechless. Apparently Catholics could not vote in local elections until 1797 nor could they vote in Parliamentary elections until 1829. That’s only 180 years ago! I couldn’t believe that ‘we’ – at this point I was identifying with the downtrodden minority religion - could not even exercise our democratic rights and duties until the early part of the 19th Century. So what must it have been like and what must it have felt like 220 years previously? I am still struggling to get my head around it. The things we do to each other in the name of religion never cease to amaze me. The sooner we turn our backs on it so much the better I think. History can teach us lessons for today. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 teaches us that oppression and discrimination breed violence and that desperate people in desperate times resort to desperate methods. It would appear that it is a lesson that many have forgotten.