James I of England and VI of Scotland was known for his extravagance
Cecil simply had to find a way to get Parliament to behave itself next time it met
When Parliament met in March 1604 Robert Cecil desperately needed it to raise new taxes to pay for King James’s extravagances. But getting Parliament to agree to new taxes in 1604 would be especially tricky since Parliament was still also paying out poor relief to help victims of the plague of 1603, during which nearly a quarter of Londoners had died. (Puts the pandemic in perspective?) But, whatever the obstacles, the king was short of cash and it was up to Cecil to find a way to get more.
However the king hijacked the opening day and set out his own programme - union between Scotland and England and (to Cecil's particular horror) toleration for Catholics. There was universal - rather open and shocking - disdain for the new king and his idea of an English-Scottish Union. MPs shouted that James’s Scotsmen were weeds infecting English soil. They were starving sheep plundering English fields. They would not grant him any new money.
Within days it was obvious that Robert Cecil had completely failed in what should have been his main task for these weeks, to get cash for the king. It had been a fiasco. Never in the whole of Elizabeth’s long reign had Parliament met and refused to vote any tax at all. Cecil simply had to find a way to get Parliament to behave itself next time - by hook, crook, fair means or foul.
King James and the Parliament of 5 November 1605, engraving by Renold Elstrack
The Gunpowder Plot served the government’s purposes all too conveniently
When Parliament next met on 5 November 1605, for the first time since being adjourned on 7 July 1604, what do we find?
The assembled MPs and Peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their King and Cecil have oh so brilliantly foiled. If that didn’t make them sit up and vote new taxes then nothing would. And if it didn’t convince the king to drop his lily-livered tolerance of Catholics, then Cecil was a Dutchman.
Like the plots 'discovered' by Cecil’s father and his network of shadowy intelligencers between the 1570s and the 1590s, the Gunpowder Plot occurs at a moment and in a manner that served the government’s purposes all too conveniently.
Historians have shown how those earlier plots had all been a mix of reality, fabrication and entrapment. The Gunpowder Plot has the smell of something altogether too strikingly similar.
Had the King and Cecil - apparently - not been so brilliantly astute, so concerned for the welfare of those ungrateful Peers and MPs, they would have all been blown to smithereens. The message was pretty plain. MPs and Peers had better show more gratitude to the King and his minister this time.
[Elizabeth Fremantle blog here on James and his many male favourites]
There were many easier ways to kill the king without digging a tunnel or filling a cellar with gunpowder that goes off in the damp
The Duck and Drake pub on the Westminster side of Somerset House was a place Catholics used to go
Conjuring the story of the Duck and Drake meeting 20 May 1604
Almost every modern account of the Gunpowder Plot begins with the plotters meeting at the Duck and Drake off the Strand on 20 May 1604. There’s absolutely no credible evidence that the meeting ever took place and plenty to suggest that the Government of Robert Cecil at the very least invented many of the details, including who was there, if not the whole meeting from beginning to end. But the most intriguing part of the whole tale is the date. 20 May 1604.
Well, one explanation is easy to work out. In his instructions before the plotters’ trial, Robert Cecil tells the Attorney General that King James wants it made as clear as possible that the plot had not been hatched because of him or anything he had done.
Now this meant that it was important to push the beginning of the alleged Catholic plot as far back as possible, certainly before the middle of 1604, to the days when James, in hope of peace with Spain, was still being lenient to the Catholics and they had nothing to complain about. 20 May 1604 would fit the bill nicely. If the plot began then, King James could not be to blame.
And it happens that it was exactly on that day that a meeting took place, just a few yards along the Strand from the Duck and Drake, at Somerset House. It was the first formal session of the peace talks between the English and the Catholic Spanish. The Catholics should have been delighted, not plotting to kill the king and his ministers.
How very convenient, then, that it was on that day that the government subsequently alleged that the plot had originally been conceived.
[An immersive gunpowder plot experience at the so-called 'Duck and Drake']
Photos & read more - all episodes in SERIES on our website here
Thomas Percy
One of the so-called 'plotters' was one of the king's bodyguards
The oft-repeated story also states that one of the plotters, Thomas Percy, rents an upstairs room in Westminster adjoining the House of Lords. Actually, we do at last have some proper documentary evidence to go on. There is a lease that shows that Percy took the room from 24 May 1604. On 9 June Thomas Percy was appointed as a ‘Gentleman Pensioner’, one of King James’s personal bodyguards. So a room in Westminster would have been a perfectly sensible thing to have.
But what historians overlook is that as a bodyguard Percy would have had an excellent chance to kill the king much more easily than by hoping the king would attend a parliament one day and blowing him up.
Had this collection of down-at-heel Catholic gentlemen arrested for the plot genuinely wanted to blow up the Parliament that was noisily, angrily voting in harsh measures against Catholics on the other side of the door from Percy’s room, then they could have done it when James came and addressed the Lords and Commons assembled in the Lord’s chamber, just on the other side of the door, on 30 May or on 7 July 1604. It was, as we shall see, a pretty rare occurrence for the King to come to Parliament at all. But here he was, a sitting duck, twice in six weeks.
And what nobody ever mentions is that, once this Parliament rose - and especially thisargumentative, obdurate Parliament - it might not sit again for years. Back in 1604 or 1605 there would have been absolutely no point in renting the room and filling it with gunpowder. The plotters could not possibly have had any idea if they’d be sitting there for months, years or perhaps even decades.
#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
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