The Gunpowder Plot - Essay Example

?The Gunpowder Plot Remember the 5th of November is the mantra that has been celebrated for centuries. While the celebrations are symbolic, they by no means empathize with the plight of the many years of persecution that were perpetuated against English Catholics. The failed plot to assassinate James I and the ruling Protestant elite tainted English Catholics with claims of treason for centuries thereafter. In this paper I describe the infamous Gunpowder plot before discussing its resolution and the implications for English Catholics before their emancipation. The year 1603 marked the end of an era where Catholics were in a transitional phase between rulers and had the opportunity to fundamentally alter their subjugate role within society. After nearly 45 long years as Queen of England, Elizabeth I was nearing death. It was assumed that her successor would be James VI of Scotland. Had this have been the scenario, Catholics would have been able to celebrate increased freedom as James VI was more lenient towards catholicism (Smith 1998). This was pleasing to the English Catholics as this could have marked an end to their suffering. They had suffered severe persecution since 1570, when the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth, releasing her subjects from their allegiance to her. Additionally, The Spanish Armada of 1588 continued to make matters worse. To the Tudor State, it was held that each and every follower of Catholicism were potential traitors (Adams, 2005). They were forbidden to hear Mass, forced instead to attend Anglican services, with steep fines for those recusants who persistently refused (Smith 1998). Since James was more warmly disposed to Catholicism than the dying Queen Elizabeth. His wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, was a Catholic, and James himself was making vocal about his empathy with the plight of the Catholics. Moreover, historians contend that the early signs were encouraging to catholics as he ended their political dissatisfaction. In fact, he immediately ended recusancy fines and awarded important posts to the Earl of Northumberland and Henry Howard, another Catholic sympathizer (Questier, 2006). Catholics began to openly practice their beliefs as they became increasingly optimistic about their future in England (Smith 1998). While some individuals indicate that Catholics should have never felt any sense of security, others indicate that the Catholics were well on their way to emancipation. In his attempts to accommodate different religious demands, James was dissatisfied at their growing allegiance. This is because of his religious devotion to his own beliefs. Moreover, the uncovering of the 2 plots in 1603 created obstacles to James’ capacity to further empathize with the Catholic followers. The situation deteriorated further at the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604 where James I was explicit in his show of hostility against the Catholics in order to satisfy the Puritans, whose demands he could not wholly satisfy. Furthermore, in the following month he publicly denounced Catholicism. This was followed by every priests and Jesuits had being expelled as well as the resurgence of recusancy fines. The taste of freedom coupled with the abrupt 180 created an aura of desperation that hit home with some of the most devout followers. Specifically, Robert Catesby was a devout Catholic whose father had been imprisoned for harboring a priest. Moreover, he had had to leave university without a degree, to avoid taking the Protestant Oath of Supremacy. Yet he possessed immense personal magnetism, crucial in recruiting and leading his small band of conspirators. James’ discontent is arguably because of the fact that the Catholic followers were so devout to the pope. He assumably didn’t want to have his constituents loyal to another leader. This perhaps caused him to be more cruel to the followers. Moreover, many sources indicate that there were fears of the pope attempting to take over. This is why kings did not want to allow this religion to proliferate within their borders. As kings were becoming increasingly hostile yet again towards the catholics, it became evident that there was no end in site for the persecution. While the Gunpowder plot did not do much to change this, it simply exacerbated the initial plans for persecution. Postmodern historians believe that the massiveness of the plot could have contributed to their further alienation. Beyond that issue it is important to note that historians believe that the attempt to use explosives led the nobles to realize how vulnerable they were and hence, the requirement for them to be harsh in terms of their response. Ensuring that the population at large saw a response directly proportionate the the attempt made on their lives. Postmodernist explain their methods as the “spectacle of the scaffold” where by their sentencing was a theatrical act to create docile bodies. And that is indeed what happened, the catholics were caught, publicly humiliated and punished and the rest of the community denounced their activity. In terms of the implications of the plan, it seemed to be counterintuitive because it was the ordinary Catholics who were forced to suffer the longest as a result of the Gunpowder Plot (Okines, 2004). The Popish Recusants Act 1605 was an Act of the Parliament of England which followed the Gunpowder Plot (Cressy, 1992). These new legislation were passed preventing them from practicing law, serving as officers in the Army or Navy, or voting in local or Parliamentary elections. Furthermore, as a community they would be hurt for the rest of the century, blamed for the Great Fire of London and unfairly fingered in the Popish Plot of 1678. Thirteen plotters certainly proved an unlucky number for British Catholics who were consequentially stigmatized for centuries, it was not until 1829 that they were again allowed to vote (Okines 2004). While anti-Catholicism is constituted as a debate about Scripture and Christian faith, in England it is much more than that. The conviction held by some Protestants that anti-Catholicism is a fundamental tenet of their faith fits seamlessly with, and even helps to reinforce and maintain the lines of social cleavage in the North, which themselves are a cornerstone of the conflict. Anti-Catholicism thus needs to be approached sociologically, for anti-Catholicism was given a Scriptural underpinning in the history of Protestant-Catholic relations in England in order to reinforce divisions between the religious communities and to offer a deterministic belief system to justify them. It has been mobilised in this way at particular historical junctures in Protestant-Catholic relations in England and as a result of specific socio-economic and political processes. Anti-Catholicism in some settings is therefore mobilised as a resource for critical socio-economic and political reasons, using processes that are recognisably sociological rather than theological. But it operates for this purpose in a restricted social setting. In England’s case, this setting is distinguished by two kinds of social relationships – an endogenous one between Protestant and Catholic, and an exogenous one between England and Britain generally. The colonial relationship between Britain and England ensured that the social structure of Irish society was dominated by the endogenous relationship between Catholics (natives) and Protestants (settlers), which persisted in England after partition. This explains its continued resonance. Anti-Catholicism survives in England when it has declined elsewhere, notably in Britain and the Irish Republic, nearest neighbours to England in the British Isles, because it helps to define group boundaries and plays a major sociological role in producing and rationalising political and economic inequality. Yet this is only part of the sociological explanation for its saliency. There is a sociological dynamic which explains why it is ‘received’ so readily amongst its primary constituency. Greater freedom for Roman Catholics to worship as they chose seemed unlikely in 1604, but the discovery of such a wide-ranging conspiracy, the capture of those involved, and the subsequent trials, led Parliament to consider introducing new anti-Catholic legislation. In the summer of 1606, legislation against recusancy were strengthened; the Popish Recusants Act returned England to the Elizabethan system of fines and restrictions, introduced a sacramental test, and an Oath of allegiance, requiring Catholics to abjure as a "heresy" the doctrine that "princes excommunicated by the Pope could be deposed or assassinated"(Walsham, 1993). Catholic Emancipation took another 200 years, but many important and loyal Catholics retained high office during King James I's reign (Okines 2004). Although there was no "golden era" of "toleration" of Catholics, which Father Garnet had hoped for, James's reign was nevertheless a period of relative leniency for Catholics, and few were subject to prosecution. The Act also made it high treason to obey the authority of Rome rather than the King (Smith, 1998). Historically, theological differences in England obtained their saliency because they corresponded to all the major patterns of structural differentiation in plantation society, such as ethnic and cultural status, social class, ownership of property and land, economic wealth, employment, education, and political power. Anti-Catholicism has remained important down the centuries because the patterns of differentiation in Northern Irish society have stayed essentially the same. Alternative lines of division are relatively weak in England, with ethnicity, marked by religious difference, remaining as the only salient social cleavage, at least until very recently. Modern industrial society in the North has not produced secularisation on a grand scale, and religious difference remains critical to many Protestants. As Bruce argued in relation to Free Presbyterians, ‘being possessed of a strongly religious worldview, many Ulster Protestants explain a great deal of what happens to them in religious terms. They see the conflict in England as a religious conflict. Their culture and their circumstances are mutually reinforcing’. However, the continued saliency of religion is only partly to be explained by the slow progress of secularisation, with the commensurate high levels of religiosity in England. It also continues because religion stands in place for ethnic identity and thus represents the patterns of differentiation in an ethnically structured society. In the former respect anti-Catholicism continues as a throwback to Reformation debates about theology in a society still wedded to doctrinal conflicts because of its high religiosity. In the latter, anti-Catholicism helps to define the boundaries of the groups involved in competition over power, wealth and status, it is mobilised to regulate and control that competition, and is used in social closure to defend the monopoly of the Protestant ethnic group. Anti-Catholicism has been employed as a resource for ethnic mobilisation amongst Protestants in specific historical circumstances and events. While some of these have been theological (such as when Catholicism seemed to progress as a faith through church expansion), anti-Catholicism has also been mobilised in political events – especially when there is a need for political unity - throughout Irish history, such as when the political interests of Protestants had to be defended during Catholic emancipation, Home Rule, the 1974 Loyalist Workers’ Strike, and Drumcree and the issue of contentious parades by Protestant loyal orders. Durkheim’s theory of religion, formulated at the beginning of the twentieth century from an analysis of pre-Christian religions, stresses the socially integrative functions of religious belief and this fits Ulster Protestant politics well. In times of political threat and instability, conservative evangelicalism acted as the sacred canopy, lending itself readily to anti-Catholicism because of the deep antipathy within conservative evangelicalism to the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Historians recognise this sociological truth. Economic circumstances have also provoked the mobilisation of Protestants by means of anti-Catholicism, especially when social closure was necessary to protect access to scarce resources, as occurred, for example, during Catholic threats to Protestant domination of the linen industry in the eighteenth century (which witnessed the formation of the Orange Order) and shipbuilding in the nineteenth. This also occurred when high levels of Protestant unemployment, notably during the 1930s, threatened their position as a labour aristocracy, and when non-sectarian forms of class mobilisation seemed to be successful in advancing the position of the Catholic working class, such as during the Catholic Civil Rights marches in the late 1960s. Religious confrontation between Charles and other "High" Anglicans and the more extreme Protestants - at this stage mostly still within the Church of England (the Puritans) formed a strand of the anti-monarchical leanings of the troubled politics of the period. The religious tensions between a court with 'Papist' elements and a Parliament where the Puritans were strong was one of the major factors behind the English Civil War, in which almost every Catholics supported the King. The victory of the Parliamentarians meant a strongly Protestant, anti-Catholic (and, incidentally, anti-Anglican) regime under Oliver Cromwell (Hurstfield, 1973). Mobilisation on the basis of anti-Catholicism during these events made reference to various features about Catholicism and Catholics, which illustrate the different dimensions of anti-Catholicism as a sociological process. As we shall demonstrate shortly, there is a theological dimension, going back to the Reformation, with references to Catholic doctrine, but there is also a cultural dimension, involving everyday discourse, imagery and values within Protestant popular culture. This anti-Catholic language can be called a ‘discursive formation’ and it permeates deep within Northern Irish popular culture. Other dimensions to anti-Catholicism exist as well. There is a political dimension that involves defence of the Union, which Catholicism supposedly threatens, and an attack on Republicanism, which Catholicism is supposed to advance, even, in some cases, to the point of supporting the use of violence against Catholics. There is an economic dimension also, with the need for Protestant ascendancy and privilege to be protected, which involves references to Catholicism as allegedly endangering Ulster’s wealth and prosperity because of its encouragement of sloth and laziness, and to Catholics as threatening jobs, housing and ‘social capital’. It is not surprising that in a society where religious labels are used to define group boundaries, anti-Catholicism becomes readily available and easily recognisable culturally as a resource for the purpose of social stratification and social closure because it fits seamlessly with society and its patterns of cleavage and conflicts. Anti-Catholicism fits neatly with Northern Irish society for the following reasons. It has long historical roots in ethno-national traditions in England, going back to the original conflict between planters and Gaels and forming part of their ethnic myths; it has a legacy of efficacy and effectiveness in the past, providing many lessons of its effectiveness as a resource across time; it is very consistent with the rendering of the Northern Irish society into the simple zero-sum game between two competing groups, which is the way the groups like to see the conflict; it fits the self-identities of the groups involved in this zero-sum conflict as religious groups, since religious labels are appropriated common-sensically to define the competition for power and privilege and group boundaries; moreover, the deployment of anti-Catholicism as a resource in structuring group relations fits with the high levels of religiosity in England and the value people place on religious belief in their sense of personal and national identity; and, finally, anti-Catholicism comes with its own immutable and in-built legitimation (the perceived Scriptural injunction to oppose doctrinal error), which has a special cultural sanction in England because of the society’s high religiosity. This congruity becomes a constraint for those people and groups that seek to move beyond sectarian politics. In short, anti-Catholicism is part of the ideological apparatus that constructs two mutually exclusive groups with opposed sets of interests and identities, and it forms part of the symbolic myths, rituals and language which reproduce and represent polarised and sectarian experiences and behaviour. An empirical example of the individualized punishment is in 1606 where Ben Jonson and his wife, were summoned before the authorities for failure to take communion in the Church of England, yet the King tolerated some Catholics at court; for example George Calvert, to whom he gave the title Baron Baltimore, and the Duke of Norfolk, head of the Howard family (Loomie, 1996). King James was followed by Charles I who ruled from 1625 to 1649 with his Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria saw a small resurgence of Catholicism in England, especially among the upper classes. As part of the royal marriage settlement the Queen was permitted a Catholic royal chapel and chaplain (Okines 2004). Henrietta Maria was in fact very devout in her religious observances, and helped construct a court with continental influences, where Catholicism was tolerated, even somewhat fashionable. Some anti-Catholic legislation seized to be enforced. The Counter-Reformation on the Continent of Europe had created a more vibrant form of Catholicism. The explicitly Catholic artistic movement (i.e., Baroque) ended up "providing the blueprint, after the fire of London, for the first new Protestant churches to be built in England (Newton, 2005)." Both Charles and James can arguably be said to utilize the plots to consolidate their rule against the pope. A religious figure with so much political power was extremely dangerous. Furthermore, the fact that the pope was capable of raising an army raised even more issues. While the Gun powder plot actually occurred, it simply made it easier for the Catholics to be implemented in yet another plot and consequentially, prosecuted (Smith, 1998). The resurgence of the monarchy under Charles II (1660–85) also saw the resurgence of a Catholic-influenced court like his father's. However, although Charles himself had Catholic leanings, he was first and foremost a pragmatist and realised the vast majority of public opinion in England was strongly anti-Catholic, so he agreed to legislation such as the Test Act requiring any appointee to any public office or member of Parliament to deny Catholic beliefs such as transubstantiation. As far as possible, however, he maintained tacit tolerance. Like his father, he married a Catholic, Catherine of Braganza. James II is to date the last Catholic to reign as monarch of England. Charles' brother and heir James, Duke of York (later James II) converted to Catholicism in 1668–1669. When Titus Oates in 1678 alleged a (totally imaginary) 'Popish Plot' to assassinate Charles and put James in his place, he unleashed a wave of Parliamentary and public hysteria which led to anti-Catholic purges, and another wave of sectarian persecution, which Charles was either unable or unwilling to prevent (Snith, 1997). Throughout the early 1680s the Whig element in Parliament attempted to remove James as successor to the throne. Their failure saw James become, as James II in 1685, Britain's first openly Catholic monarch since Mary I (and last to date). He promised religious toleration for Catholic and Protestants on an equal footing, but it is in doubt whether he did this to gain support from Dissenters or whether he was truly committed to tolerance (Champion, 2005). James' clear intent to work towards the resurgence of the Church of England to the Catholic fold encouraged converts like the poet John Dryden, who wrote "The Hind and Panther", celebrating his conversion (Hogge, 2005). Protestant fears mounted as James placed Catholics in the major commands of the existing standing army, dismissed the Protestant Bishop of London and dismissed the Protestant Fellows of Magdalen College and replaced them with a wholly Catholic board. The last straw was the birth of a Catholic heir in 1688, portending a return to a Pre-Reformation Catholic dynasty (Smith, 1998). The Glorious Revolution deposed James and established his Protestant daughter and son-in-law and nephew, Mary II and William III, on the throne (1689–1702). For some, however, the revolution was "fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy." Nevertheless, the King fled into exile, and with him many Catholic nobility and gentry (Smith 1997). The Act of Settlement 1701, which remains in operation today, excludes any Catholic or anyone who marries a Catholic from the throne. Henry Benedict Stuart (Cardinal-Duke of York), the last Jacobite heir to publicly assert a claim to the thrones of England, Scotland, and England, died in Rome in 1807 (Smith 1997). A monument to the Royal Stuarts exists today at Vatican City. The current Duke of Bavaria, Franz Bonavertura Adalbert Maria von Bayern, head of the Wittelsbach family, is the most senior descendant of King Charles I and is considered by Jacobites to be the heir of the Stuarts. The fictitious Popish Plot unfolded in a very peculiar fashion. Oates and Israel Tonge had written a large manuscript that accused the Catholic Church authorities of approving the assassination of Charles II. The Jesuits in England were to carry out the task. The manuscript also named nearly 100 Jesuits and supporters, supposedly involved in this assassination plot; nothing in the document was ever proven to be true (Smith 1998). The Gunpowder plot not only caused the Catholics years of persecution, but it immediately reversed any gains made under the initial inception of James I of England's Throne. Not only were the implications felt on the individual level, but the following decades resulted in the persecution of the catholic followers as a collective. Being implicated in plats as well as other issues caused them to be the target of much animosity. There were several attempts to reconnect the Catholics with the Vatican, but laws were passed that prevented them from ever holding a position of importance. This is due to the fact that the Pope would then have leverage over a throne and the international community seemed to have a problem with such a scenario. 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