....What no one is pleased to remember about the Fifth of November is the depth of desperation to which England’s Catholics had been driven by decades of government persecution. It wasn’t just a case of one side’s being in power and the other having to suck it up as the loyal opposition. Imagine if, on Wednesday, whichever party loses tomorrow’s election were instantly banned. Everyone required to re-register as a member of the party in power and campaign actively for the winning party’s platform. All elected officials representing the losing party driven from office, and no members of the losing party allowed to run again. All losing-party consultants and lobbyists deprived of citizenship and exiled. Members of losing party (and their minor children) no longer permitted to enroll in public universities or receive advanced degrees. Possession of losing-party pamphlets, buttons, signs, bumper stickers—even clothing in the losing party’s colors—made punishable by imprisonment, torture, forfeiture of all personal property. Dissemination of ‘seditious’ losing-party materials punishable by death. Neighbors deputized as a network of spies, sharing in the spoils of confiscated goods when they rat out ‘traitors.’
Those are precisely the conditions under which England’s Catholics lived in the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign—only the persecution was spiritual as well as temporal. Catholics were barred from the sacraments, because priests were barred from the country. No priests, no Eucharist, for real. Centuries of Catholic culture, embedded in the calendar of saints’ days and festivals, were erased. Catholic religious articles—prayerbooks, rosaries, missals, images of the Blessed Virgin—were as dangerous to possess as gunpowder....
....the Plot was infiltrated from the start by Cecil’s spies, and the search of the vaults beneath the Houses of Parliament that netted Fawkes and his barrels of powder was orchestrated. The King was never in any danger, and the Jesuits (some of whom knew of the plotters’ intentions, but believed themselves to be bound by the seal of confession from revealing the information) had done everything within their power to deter violence. That did not prevent James, who had begun his reign by vowing to end torture (again, like someone else we know), from applying it with gusto to those of the plotters who survived capture, and to several Jesuits netted in the same sweep. Convicted of treason, the plotters and the Jesuits who survived imprisonment and torture were executed in the most agonizing manner, by being hanged, drawn, and quartered....
....this year, as a voting Catholic, the echoes of 1605 are troubling. True, we live under the protection of the First Amendment’s guarantees that the faith of our governors need not be our faith, and that we are entitled to free exercise of religion. But we also know what it is like to have those freedoms questioned and curtailed, under the guise of the good of the state (framed as the right to equal marriage, the health of women, the exercise of the free market). We know what it is like for our bishops to be assured that conscience will be respected, only to have that promise—like the promise to end torture and execution without due process—evaporate in the face of other agendas. We know what it is like to be told be our leaders and a loud majority of our fellow citizens that the practice of our faith in the public square is intolerable, evil, unAmerican; that everything would be fine if we just kept our beliefs to ourselves and practiced them in suitable quiet behind closed doors for an hour on Sunday morning....
Charles I, son of James I, executed by Protestants.
Charles II, grandson of James I, elder son of Charles I. Became a Catholic on his deathbed.
James II. Catholic. Younger son of Charles I. Deposed by Parliament in the so-called "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, after he had the temerity to produce a Catholic heir, in favor of the Dutch Protestants William & Mary.
James III, called by his enemies "the Old Pretender". Catholic. Invaded England in 1715, with the support of Scotch nobility, both Protestant and Catholic, in an attempt to regain his throne. The uprising failed, and James retreated to exile in France.
James III's elder son, Charles III in pretense, "Bonnie Prince Charlie" to his friends, the "Young Pretender" to his enemies. Catholic. Invaded England in 1745 in an attempt to reclaim the throne, again supported by Scotch nobility. The attempt again failed, and Charles returned to France.
His Eminence, Henry Benedict Cardinal Stuart. Younger son of James III, and thus the great-great-grandson of James I. Died without issue.
The last three Stuarts are all buried within St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.