The Gunpowder Treason

"Witches & Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth" ^ | 1995 | Garry Wills

[MarkWar]

"How to suggest the scale of it? For a parallel we might imagine America in the 1950, and suppos that a communist cell -- made up of Americans acting under foreign direction -- has planted a nuclear device under the United States Capital. It is timed to go off when the President is addressing both houses of the Congress. All executive officers will be there, as well as all justices of the Supreme Court. The three branches of government will be wiped out. Every constitutional successor to the President will die with him.

"But the, at the last minute, the device is discovered and disarmed. The President himself deciphers a clue that had puzzled the FBI and the CIA. The Leader of the Free World thwarts godless communism, vindicating the providential role of the United States in an apocalyptic time of confrontation between Good and Evil.

"That is how much of the American public would have interpreted such events at the height of the Cold War. And that is the way godfearing English subjects interpreted the attempt on their sovereign's life and government in 1605, when a religious cold war existed between England and papal Rome. A cell of papists -- the "enemy within" of that time, directed from Rome by skulking Jesuits -- had trundled keg after keg of gunpowder into a vault under Parliament. A munitions expert named Guy Fawkes was discovered with the detonating materials, ready to ignite the fuse when the King was addressing his Parliament, in the presence of the Prince his heir and all leading members of his court. The Parliament -- all the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, the leading lustices, and members of Commons -- would be consumed in a particularly horrible way. Gunpowder -- considered the devil's invention, revealed to a friar-scientist -- had the eerie and numinous reputation in the Renaissance that atomic weaponry acquired in the 1950s. The relief of escaping this plot was tempered with fear that the hand of Rome had reached so far, had come so close to ending legitmate British rule. Though monks or friars had killed single rulers (a fact dwelt on in Protestant controversial literature), never had the destruction of a whole court or class been attempted at one blow. But for the signal act of Providence, the Plot would have worked. Relief at the discovery of the Plot was tempered by continuing fear of the Plotters' ability to get that close to success.

[...]

"...King James and his counselors promoted an official interpretation of the Powder Treason. Their aim was to achieve a quick consensus in the interpretation of unsettling events, so the nation would not be riven by random energies of dout, or recrimination, or retaliation. ... In fact, the Plot gave him his best opportunity to separate loyal and moderate Cathloics from the mad extremists of the Plot. For this reason he had his propagandists stress that the Plot was less the result of Cathloic theology than of a specific intervention by the devil, using only the most corrupt or malevolent elements in the Catholic community. For this effort, the isolation of Jesuits as the specific source of evil was very important. Other Catholics, lay and clerical, had some misgivings about the jesuits' secret mission to England. The permanent discrediting of these troublesome underground activists could be one benefit derived from the Plot."

[MarkWar]

Holy cow!

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

Talk about a Reichstag event...

I can't help but wondering a couple of things. 1) Given the British exploitation of the event, would "modern" minds simply take for granted that Guy Fawkes was either a dupe manipulated by the Crown itself, or flat out an agent of the King? (Would _anyone_ believe that the King could just happen to "interpret" a phrase like _blow_ to actually mean "blow up" and order the telling search right in the nick of time?! 2) Isn't it amazing that 300 years later, the SAME KIND of terror threats are STILL defining global politics? The SAME KIND of religious/political rhetoric is manipulating peoples' thinking?! (Only now it's not the nasty Jesuits taking the heat, but Muslims have become the new "enemy within.")

Mark W.

[Cicero]

The Gunpowder Plot was mostly the work of agents provocateurs, working for the Cecils. Insofar as there was Catholic participation in the plot, it was motivated by savage persecution of Catholics. It has been the basis, ever since, of British anti-Catholic bigotry. David Maltby's book, "The Black Legend," is a pretty good dissection of British anti-Catholic propaganda. C. Northcote Parkinson, inventor of Parkinson's Law, wrote a pretty unbiased book on the Gunpowder Plot.

[MarkWar]

>David Maltby's book, "The Black Legend," is a pretty good dissection of British anti-Catholic propaganda. C. Northcote Parkinson, inventor of Parkinson's Law, wrote a pretty unbiased book on the Gunpowder Plot.

Thanks for the refs. I'll be honest -- until I read this book on Macbeth, I'd never heard of the "Gunpowder Treason" (although I was born on November 5!).

It seems like a VERY interesting bit of history, and I intend to learn more about it. (I'm especially intrigued about the way King James sets up England as a defender of Christianity against oppressive Romish stuff, yet if I remember history right, the Dissenters were just a generation or two away from abandoning England in a huff because of what they saw as its anti-Christian ways...)

Mark W.

[Hal.009]

"Penny for the Guy?"

"Remember, remember the fifth of November.
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gun powder and treason,
should ever be forgot"