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A Review of Antonia Fraser's Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot

It has been more than a decade since Antonia Fraser's Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot appeared.  It is now available in softcover at very attractive prices.  It is a lively, fast paced history from one of the masters of "popular" history writing, as opposed to academic history writing, the difference being, of course, readability.  This book is a page turner, and relevant to Shakespeareans because of the influence of the events of the "Powder Treason" (as it was called at the time) on Macbeth, that was almost certainly composed in 1606 in the aftermath of the trial of the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet.

Shakespeare's treatment of Garnet's doctrine of equivocation in the  porter scene in Macbeth (II.iii), feeds upon the popular perception (indeed, inspired by relentless government propaganda) of the Powder Treason as a Jesuit inspired and led plot, hellish in its inception, damned in its deserts.  Shakespeare's "Here's a farmer that hanged himself on th' expectation of plenty...here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven" is akin to the insensitive letter written on May 2, 1606 by Dudley Carleton to John Chambers saying that Garnet "will be hanged without equivocation."  There was much ado about equivocation in the aftermath of the trial.  (Incidentally, "Farmer" was one of the aliases used by Garnet in pursuing his crypto-Catholic life of service in hiding).

We go far beyond the topical catch phrases in this book, however.  Fraser takes us elegantly through a brief history of the promises of Catholic toleration made by King James in Scotland before becoming James I of England, and links the breaking of these promises to the frustration of several brave, if rash, Catholic men who took the fatal step from submissive subjects to incipient terrorists.  At the heart of her story is Father Henry Garnet, the superior of Jesuits in England, who had pre-knowledge of the terrorist's plans through a confession by terrorist leader Robert Catesby to another priest, Father Tesimond, who gained Catesby's permission to confess this burden to Father Garnet.  The seal of the confessional was inviolable, so Garnet could not come forward--or rather cause information to be passed, because any coming forward would have resulted immediately in his arrest and an end to his mission--to the government.  He did all else in his power to prevent the plot from coming to fruition, and thought, wrongly, that he had succeeded until it became alarmingly apparent to him that he had not.  This was the man the government, in the person of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, son of Elizabeth's William Cecil, Lord Burghley, placed as the prime plotter in the trials that became a national sensation.

Fraser's sympathies are with the innocent Catholic casualties.  She makes clear the untenable conditions under which recusants struggled, made worse by becoming pawns in the games of statecraft practiced by Popes and Kings.  She has little sympathy for the would be terrorists--Catesby, Percy, Keyes, the Wright brothers, the Wintour brothers, the wavering Francis Tresham, and their recruited assistant, Guido Fawkes--though she does not smear them.  Nor does she have sympathy for Cecil, Waad, Monteagle, King James and the government propaganda machine.  Her sympathy is for the men of good will and clear conscience who were caught up in events beyond their control: Father Garnet and the faithful Anne Vaux who sacrificed to keep Garnet and many other priests safe from arrest, Nicholas Owen an unsung lay brother who perished from his tortures, the other Jesuits inadvertantly swept into the vortex of angry male aggression, Tesimond, Gerard and Oldcorne, and the many faithful women who supported them in their furtive life styles .  Fraser notes the raging scholarly debate over the events she relates, but steers an unambiguous course best justified by the documentary evidence.  Her contribution to the topic is strong support for the theory that Cecil (Salisbury) had pre-knowledge of the plot and manipulated it to bring about the downfall of his enemies, including an attack on Catholicism itself, is convincing:

"The story told here has been of Salisbury's foreknowledge--at a comparatively late stage--thanks to the revelations of Francis Tresham repeated to Monteagle and his subsequent manipulation of the King by the stratagem of the anonymous letter" (p. 286).

This is a history told in the grand fashion, though within moderate bounds (300 pages) since it is focused on a single incident.  The cultural context is amply portrayed, however.  The world of the Jacobean court is pictured as "sweetly corrupt."  No doubt the sympathy Fraser shows for the devoted sincerity of the innocently suffering Catholics in this story is motivated in part by their honest otherworldliness.  "In general," she says, "the desire to amass money was like a fierce universal lust in the Jacobean period."  Not so with Anne Vaux, the Jesuits Fraser portrays, and even the plotters, misguided as they might be.  It was a world, also, where violence was theatre.  Witness the ghastly Grand Guignol of state executions (which we actually do witness once the plot is exposed and the plotters arrested).  It was in this world that a plot to explode on the grandest scale the English state could be planned.

The plotter at the heart of the plot was the charming and charismatic Robert Catesby, not, ironically, Guy Fawkes who has become its icon.  Fawkes was essentially an interloper, one who did not share in "the tight-knit circle of interlocking relationships" of the core plotters.  He was known for his Catholic loyalties and military reliability, and accidentally, as it were, through common continental contacts, was recruited into the plot.  He was the unfortunate one first caught by the government--and suffered, perhaps, the cruelest torture as a result.  Catesby was the plot's originator and its "prince of darkness."  It was he who imagined packing the cellar of the House of Parliament with gunpowder, in order to explode it with King, Queen, Lords and all, and he conceived of the plot as early as 1604 when his "...mentality was that of the crusader who does not hesitate to employ the sword in the cause of values which he considers are spiritual" (93).  The core of the plotters, then, were Catesby, Fawkes, Thomas Percy, Jack Wright, and the stolid Tom Wintour.  In time, the number grew to thirteen, and, of course, as more people were impelled into the plot, the risk of discovery grew.  Fraser believes the ultimate betrayal (resulting in the famous anonymous 'dark and doubtful' letter) came from a verbal disclosure by Francis Tresham to his brother-in-law Monteagle, and that the Monteagle letter was a concoction between Monteagle and Cecil.  To illustrate, Fraser uses the crime novelist's style for which she is justly famous: "But there is, to be blunt, something very fishy about the whole episode [of the Monteagle letter] which makes it difficult, if not outright impossible, to accept this straightforward explanation [that some near relative of Monteagles wrote the warning letter]...It seems far more plausible to see the Monteagle Letter as certainly 'dark and doubtful' but also deliberately concocted" (154).  Fraser's conclusion: "The Monteagle letter, then, was a fake and not only Monteagle but Salisbury [Cecil] knew it was a fake" (156).

We know then, from the middle of the book--if indeed we were not thoroughly familiar with the story before we began the book--that the plotters are doomed.  But it is in the middle of the book that it takes wing, both as popular history and as art, because it is there that Father Garnet and his perplexities of conscience becomes its chief subject, interwoven with the taking of the criminals, their torture and trial, their grisly executions, and the governments schemes to lay the further blame for the plot upon the Jesuits.  And so it happened.  Father Garnet was eventually taken--after much suffering in concealment, and in spite of the best efforts of the faithful Anne Vaux.  His death was a forgone conclusion, but of great interest is the methods the government employed.  It is an open question whether Father Garnet was racked, but the government used other means to obtain enough information to construct a circumstantial case that linked Father Garnet closely enough with the plot to make it an easy step to calling him its originator.  He denied it, of course, but therein lies the fascinating tale of equivocation and its uses.

Fraser displays the least sympathy for the unprincipled men in charge of the English government's case, Salisbury, Coke, Waad, and the King himself.  They come off in the worst light of all the players in these dramatic events.  She unhesitatingly labels the plotters as terrorists, but at least their motives are not selfish and their engagements are not self-serving and venal.  It was inevitable that the government would succeed, however, and that the guilty terrorists, and their relatively innocent collateral associates, would die the most horrible imaginable death.  Ironically enough, we learn that when the gunpowder was removed from the cellar of Parliament and moved to the Royal Ordnance it was officially described as "decayed...This powder...would not have exploded anyway" (188).  Whether it would or would not have is beside the point.

Equivocation, that key word seized on by the public, and a certain playwright who knew it was always best to give the public what they wanted, had its origin in a treatise authored by Garnet (though the attorney general Sir Edward Coke seems not to know that Garnet was the author when he used it against him, see p. 240) on how a Catholic can answer in good conscience to a question if answered precisely would cause the capture, death or suffering of another Catholic.  Coke, like Dudley Carleton and Shakespeare made much of the damnable hypocrisy of equivocators, but in fact Garnet's treatise actually bore the title A Treatise against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulations.  Equivocation was a means for a conscientious Catholic to give an honest answer which would be misperceived, as Macbeth misperceives the his three prophecies, so that the one giving the answer could justify protecting someone else, while still not overtly lying.  The government, of course, took it to be nothing other than wrapping "a mantle of holiness round the lies" (241).

The most moving part of the book is the description of Father Garnet's behavior on the scaffold.  It is a masterpiece of human dignity in the face of monstrous malice.  Fraser gives descriptions (though without lingering on the horrible details of genital mutilation, disembowlment, beheading, and quartering) of the deaths of the actual conspirators, almost all of whom acted with bravery in their final hours.  When it came to Father Garnet, however, he acted with such dignity and sincerity that "...an odd thing happened...With a loud cry of 'hold, hold' they [the crowd] stopped the hangman cutting down the body while Garnet was still alive...As a result Father Garnet was 'perfectly dead' when he was finally cut down and taken to the block" (267).  He was the only one of the number executed who received this mercy.  When the hangman ripped the heart from his body and shouted the traditional "Behold the heart of a traitor" he received no applause.  "Nor did anyone cry out 'God save the King' as was customary.  Instead, there was an uneasy murmuring among the spectators" (267).

This is great writing, thoroughly engaging with a flair for detail which doe not betray the documentary evidence. 

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©2007  Terry A. Gray
Page version 4.0 — Last modified 09/21/09
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