Political stability is a consummation devoutly to be desired.  How quickly may we lose it?

Professor J H (later, Sir Jack) Plumb delivered the Ford Lectures at Oxford in 1965.  They were published in 1967 as The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675-1725.  In them, Plumb said that lasting political stability was not common until recently and that ‘it is certainly far rarer than revolution.’  He defined political stability as –

…the acceptance by society of its political institutions, and of those classes of men who control them.

Instability comes from ‘conspiracy, plot, revolution and civil war’.  Plumb thought that political instability came in England because of three things –

….single party government; the legislature firmly under executive control; and a sense of common identity in those who wielded economic, social, and political power.

Since we now see political instability in England, America and Australia, especially in those parties that brand themselves ‘conservative’, we might learn from Plumb’s account of the arrival of stability.

There is one warning.  Anyone who thinks that the Whig v Tory divide might resemble the split between the two major parties in any of the three nations now is dead wrong.  The old concept is as simple as that of the Holy Trinity.  (Upon the arrival in England of the Germans (Hanoverians) in the person of George I, Sir Lewis Namier said that the ‘Tory gentlemen worshipped the Throne and loathed the Court, believed in authority and disliked Government…..expressing these contradictory feelings in harmless fancies about the ‘King over the water’, a royalty uncontaminated by administration.’  Try threading that needle with a knight of the shire after a few snifters in front of the fire after the hunt – while remembering the terminal penalty for treason.)

**

Migrant nations have become familiar with the resentment of migrants, especially among those who have missed out on the glittering prizes in their new home.  They see newcomers as trespassers on their property, as threats to what they have achieved.  (Our common law started with arguments over the forms of writs, and the earliest, and most fruitful form of writ was the writ of trespass, the word that figures in the King James Version of the Lord’s Prayer.)  Those protesting against migrants sense that the migrants are debasing or diluting the currency of their citizenship – which might be their most valuable asset in their nation – and threatening to deprive them of a livelihood that is already precarious.  What you get is the syndrome ‘kick away the ladder.’

This issue often figures in what is called ‘nationalism’ – like America First – and is often a front for something worse.  People who want to puff out their chests about their nation often puff out their chests about themselves.  In their grosser form, you get megalomaniacs like Mussolini and Trump.

For some people – again those who are not among life’s winners – the colour of their skin is an asset that that allows them to fulfil a need to put some people beneath them on the social ladder.  These crude and nasty instincts are fanned – for profit – by those parts of the press that we least admire.

The Tory party would eventually lead to the Conservative party.  The ancestors of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage did not like foreigners.  (For a while England had a Naturalization Act.)  The dislike of outsiders, Plumb instructs us, was rife among country Tories.  ‘Xenophobia was a very strong concomitant of Toryism.’  If you wanted to find a closet Tory, you just had to mention the Dutch.  Of course, the French later became the bête noire of the English – and General de Gaulle did all in his power to keep them there – to the extent that de Gaulle may be honoured as the spiritual founder of Brexit.  His rank ingratitude has come back to bite Europe on the bum.

**

The tags Whig and Tory did not so much stand for differences on policy, but different attitudes about how to get and handle the levers of power.  In the time we speak of, England ran on what they called patronage and what we call corruption.  ‘The vote was the basic coin for traffic in influence.’  But, then as now, if political parties stand for too little or too much, they splinter.  The death word is faction.  Without a strong, rooted balance of power, a party is exposed to the cancer of faction.  The result is, almost by definition, incoherence.  The party has to confront the proposition that if it cannot govern itself, it cannot govern the nation.  That is precisely the problem faced by the soi disant conservative parties in our three nations.  The plots and conspiracies in Australia have acquired an aura of vaudeville.

Walpole is seen now as England’s first prime minister.  He had a genius for managing the business of government.  Someone called him the greatest bomb-disposal expert in history.  ‘Walpole created a centre of gravity at the heart of the administration.’  Previous monarchs had not achieved that and ‘every Cabinet from 1689 to 1714 rapidly disintegrated into faction; their composition rarely remained stable for more than a year.’

We have seen that in the U K and here, and it looks very likely that the political pressure that is about to be applied to the Republicans will see them go the same way.  They have so far shown an appalling lack of moral fibre in allowing a political brute to trash almost every part of their political dispensation.

What is different in Australia is that two generations ago all the factions, cranks and crooks were on the other side of politics.  Now they are on the so called conservative side, and you can watch their inanity being aerated every night on Sky News or each morning with The Australian as Rupert Murdoch inflicts on the land of his birth the lesions he has so sadly inflicted on the land of his choice.

**

It follows a fortiori that a government that cannot control its parliament or congress is by definition unstable.  Trump now finds himself in a position similar to that of the prime minister of the U K and Australia.  Both got where they are faute de mieux after a squalid faction fight and each looks both transient and wobbly – the antithesis of the required centre of gravity.

Plumb tells us that after 1601, the Commons were ‘fundamentally out of hand – difficult to screw money from and a hotbed of criticism; no one could manage them for long, neither James I, Charles I, Cromwell, nor Charles II.’  They were in truth king-baiters from hell.  (In another work, Plumb memorably said of the arrival of George I: ‘He was not in any way enamoured of his new subjects.  They had an evil reputation amongst monarchs for shiftiness. He was aware that most of the noblemen who fawned on him at his arrival had dabbled in treason.’)

All three nations have taken the benefit of the English settling their constitution in dealing with the caprices of the Stuarts, but blood and pain had to be drawn to achieve that settlement.  Seventeenth century England is a terrible lesson of a parliament out of control.  And that’s without looking at the mayhem in the outliers.

**

Failures in the political system have a snowball effect.  People lose respect for institutions that have caused or at least allowed these fissures to open up.  People then tend to align themselves by interest in distinct groups rather than as a citizen of the nation or a member or supporter of a party.

Plumb spoke of ‘a sense of common identity’ by those who wield power and the acceptance of the institutions and those who control them.  All that has gone clean out the window in Australia – and it does not look healthy elsewhere.  There is scarcely a political, religious, business or sporting body that does not have a dark cloud hanging over it.

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that only the planet is worth conserving – but it is precisely on this issue that self-proclaimed ‘conservatives’ have betrayed us and themselves – morally, intellectually, and politically.  England’s dull, imported Hanoverian kings were better with logic and science than our native born dunces.  It’s OK for the shock jocks – they are just there for the lucre and their vanity.  But have our would-be statesmen no care for the rest of us?  Nor does it help that their most voluble stooge, the IPA, covertly gets its gelt from Madam Coalminer Extraordinaire.

**

Scare tactics have been known since Pisistratus, but Walpole brought them to a form of squalid perfection.  There is an appeal – overt or covert – to that bad actor called patriotism.  Plumb says:

Patriotism, almost xenophobic in its intensity, had long been regarded by the Tories as one of their own sacred principles; it was an emotion, they half believed, that no one could feel so intensely as themselves.  Hence, if Walpole could reveal, not once but time and again, that leading Tories were involved in treason, he knew the effect would baffle many a country squire proud of his Englishry, and draw him to support the Crown.

The bogeyman then was called Jacobitism – the prince across the water, the threatened return of the Stuarts and the Church of Rome, and a return to the hell of the previous century.

And of course, accusations of Jacobitism were extremely useful at elections….Like McCarthyism in our own time [they] generated public fear and sapped the will to oppose.

The bogeyman now is Islam and it is a sitting duck for brutal bullies because it is even less coherent than its pursuers – and given the unhinged hysteria of Trump about a migrant caravan, that is no small suggestion.  Ruling by fear itself leads to instability, because it demeans the institutions that permit or require it.

**

Now for the bad news for those who call themselves conservatives.

But, first, what is there left in the name ‘conservative’?  How may that word be usefully applied in a welfare state facing the slow death of churches and the fading of once grand institutions?  Plumb was after all speaking of a time more than two centuries before the evolution of the welfare state in England.  Some ‘conservatives’ say they want small government.  Well, the role of government was very much smaller in England before they set up their jails down here.  This was a time of which Lord Shelburne could say, offhandedly enough: ‘Providence has so organised the world that very little government is necessary.’  England then was just like a well-run cricket club, and you were OK as long as you played cricket.

To return to the bad news:

It is necessary to stress this moral collapse….. the Tory party was destroyed, destroyed by its incompetent leadership, by the cupidity of many of its supporters, by its own internal contradictions; weakened by its virtues and lashed by events, it proved no match for Walpole…..It failed to provide an effective barrier to Walpole’s steady progress towards a single-party state.

Walpole, Plumb says, made ‘the world so safe for the Whigs that they stayed in power for a hundred years.’

Only a very robust and blithe member of the Conservative, Republican or Liberal Party could now suppress a heart tremor on this recall of history.  Can they divorce themselves from one word of the above citation?  In stressing the ‘moral collapse’, Plumb was warning us of the weakness of character and failure of nerve that is destroying political parties in our time.  It’s a shame that more historians don’t bite that bullet – au fond, political issues involve moral issues.

**

Now for some worse news.  So far we have sought to find guidance from Sir Jack Plumb in looking at our current instability here and elsewhere.  But Plumb did not have to confront what some see as our biggest problem.  The English were and are beset by caste as well as class.  We do not have the first problem as a matter of law: and for the most part, we do not have much of the second problem as a matter of fact.

But we have a huge worry with inequality of wealth and income – that looks to keep getting worse.  A bank teller may be paid one hundredth of what her boss gets paid – and that pay is likely to go up by his firing more people like her.

Any social group must rest on an implied and shared assumption of fairness, decency, and tolerance.  The bank teller cannot retain any faith that that assumption still holds good.  If that is right, our ship of state is in very dangerous waters.  Since at least 1789, people espousing what some are pleased to call Western civilisation have been committed to some form of equality.  If our want of it is too great or painful, the result is not just instability, but revolution.

‘Identity politics’ is a vogue but shifty phrase.  (What else underpins trade unions, churches, cricket clubs, towns, party politics, or nations?)  But if you want to see how all hell breaks loose when a group of people come together out of interest at the unfairness of their lot in life, have a look at the sans-culottes – roughly, blue collar ‘tradies’ – in France after 1789.  Just look at how they doted on Robespierre, then they rejected him, then they slew him, and then they forgot him.  Bored with mere lynchings, they had turned to the guillotine, then the Committee of Public Safety, and then the Terror.  They were plainly not our first terrorists, but they did terrify people by killing others.  They killed to avoid being killed.  And they did so in the name of equality – or what some call justice.

Too many people in political parties that were once truly conservative are now flirting with the mob – or, if you prefer, the gutter.  My dad didn’t have much truck with politicians, but he said to me more than once: ‘Son, if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.’

And if there is one thing that is transcendentally clear about the nature of conservatism, it is that people who claim to be under that umbrella while indulging the mob – while looking warmly at Hanson, Abbott, Farage, Johnson or Trump – are not just deluding themselves, they are spitting in the face of the history of mankind – if not of God.

In truth, the crowds that cheer on Farage and Trump have a lot in common with the crowds that cheered on Jack Cade and Barabbas.

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

14

ENGLAND IN THE AGE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Sir Lewis Namier (1930)

Second Edition, Macmillan, 1961; rebound in quarter red Morocco with gold embossed label and stone cloth boards.

Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time; but restraint was a quality in which the eighteenth-century Englishman was as deficient as most other nations are even now.

When Ved Mehta wrote a book about English intellectuals, he went to see a star pupil of the late Sir Lewis Namier, and a keeper of the flame, John Brooke.  A woman showed Mehta to Brooke’s room and said: ‘Mr Brooke is a very eccentric man.  When it gets cold, he wears an electric waistcoat plugged into the light socket, and reads aloud to himself.’  Such conduct would come within my understanding of the word ‘eccentric.’

Brooke said that Namier looked on history as bundles of biographies; his interest was in the small men rather than the big; he believed that psychology was as important to history as mathematics was to astronomy; he looked at how men and women responded to the pressure of circumstances; his east European Jewish background enabled him to see his adopted and idolized nation in perspective; unlike liberals, he had no faith in progress – it was not that he did not wish to reform institutions that were decrepit – he just hated seeing them go; he would hammer out the first draft of a work with two-finger typing, and not be able to revise it until his secretary had finished the first draft – a process that might be repeated ten or more times.  He would go back and forth between his research boxes and indexes and his typewriter.  ‘It would be a constant process of writing and rewriting, shaping and reshaping, agony and more agony – and the biography was not more than a seven-thousand word job.’

There were other sources of pain.  He never relished acceptance by the English intellectual establishment; his deeply withdrawn nature led him to psychoanalysis; he suffered a cramp in the arm that got worse with the ill treatment of the Jews in the thirties – he was so terrified by the thought of a German occupation that he got a bottle of poison from a doctor friend and carried it in his waistcoat so that he could kill himself if the Germans came.

But his work, beginning with The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929, hit English literature like an earthquake in much the same way as F R Leavis did with literary criticism – and people who shake up the Establishment like that can expect a backlash.

Namier was, I am told, not an easy person to be with.  He was not respected as a teacher, and in good English universities that is a real minus.  John Kenyon referred to his ‘granitic seriousness, and the monomaniacal way in which he would impose his thoughts on others’  Sir Jack Plumb referred to the vulgar name-calling: ‘Constipation Namier – the big shit we can’t get rid of.’

Rejection was not new to Namier – his father cut him off for his espousal of Zionism – but exclusion breeds resentment and more exclusion – Namier became a frightful snob and name-dropper, and he fell for the English aristocracy.  He would never be offered a chair at Oxford, Cambridge or London – according to Kenyon, his commitment to Zionism ‘increased the coolness of an Arab-orientated upper class.’  A more rewarded historian – a man named Butterfield – had what might be called the Establishment view that ‘the point of teaching history to undergraduates is to turn them into public servants and statesmen…but I happen to think history is a school of wisdom and statesmanship.’  Butterfield thought that Namier’s factual inquiry was cutting the ground from under the feet of would-be philosopher-kings.

Why not just try to open their minds?  Things have changed.  The advocacy of the ideas or ideals of a dying empire now looks to us like a prospectus for a School for Bullshit.  But Butterfield and others went after Namier like gnats straining at a camel, and Namier became a kind of celebrity.

To those who have had to make findings of fact on inadequate and conflicting evidence, the Namier revolution seems to be the unsurprising suggestion that history should be based on evidence rather than romance.  From this book on the shelf, we have the following.

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le proces aux revolutions.  Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.

No wonder the idealists and the Glory Boys were crestfallen, but on Namier’s death, an undergraduate wrote to Lady Namier saying that ‘he was probably the only truly great man that I have known personally.’  It is not hard to see how Namier could have had precisely that effect.  He was like a great artist who has taken the trouble to learn how to draw.  After Namier had done the hard work of amassing and sifting the evidence, he could allow himself a go with the broad brush.

‘Characteristic of English social groups is the degree of freedom which they leave to the individual and the basic equality of their members, the voluntary submission to the rules of ‘the game’ and the curious mixture of elasticity and rigidity in these rules; most of all, the moral standards which these groups enforce or to which they aspire.  Characteristic of the German social group is the utter, conscious subordination of the individual, the iron discipline which they enforce, the high degree of organisation and efficiency which they attain, and their resultant inhumanity.  The State is an aim in itself….The English national pattern raises individuals above their average moral level, the German suppresses their human sides.’  (Conflicts, 1941)

‘And it was again on the masses that Hitler drew: what was worst in the Germans, their hatreds and resentments, their envy and cruelty, their brutality and adoration of force, he focused and radiated back on them.  A master in the realm of psyche but debarred from that of the spirit, he was the Prophet of the Possessed; and interchange there was between him and them, unknown between any other political leader and his followers.  This is the outstanding fact about Hitler and the Third Reich.’ (Personalities and Powers, 1955.)

‘But revolutions are not made; they occur…..The year 1848 proved in Germany that union could not be achieved through discussion and by agreement; that it could be achieved only by force; that there were not sufficient revolutionary forces in Germany to impose from below; and that, therefore, if it was to be, it had to be imposed by the Prussian army.’  (Vanished Supremacies, 1957)

‘The proper attitude for right-minded Members was one of considered support to the Government in the due performance of its task…But if it was proper for the well-affected Member to co-operate with the Government, so long as his conscience permitted, attendance on the business of the nation was work worthy of its hire, and the unavoidable expenditure in securing a seat deserved sympathetic consideration.’  (Structure, etc., 2^nd Ed, 1957.  ‘Bribery, to be really effective, has to be widespread and open…’)

‘Trade was not despised in eighteenth-century England – it was acknowledged to be the great concern of the nation; and money was honoured, the mystic common denominator of all values, the universal repository of as yet undetermined possibilities….A man’s status in English society has always depended primarily on his own consciousness; for the English are not a methodical or logical nation – they perceive and accept facts without anxiously inquiring into their reasons or meaning.’  (England in the Age, etc., 2^nd Ed, 1961; ‘….Fox would probably have found it easier to account for his fears than for the money…’).

On Charles Townshend: ‘He did not change or mellow; nor did he learn by experience; there was something ageless about him; never young, he remained immature to the end…Conscious superiority over other men freely flaunted, a capacity for seeing things from every angle displayed with vanity, and the absence of any deeper feelings of attachment left Townshend, as Chase Price put it, “entirely unhinged.”’  (Crossroads of Power, 1962).

The English aristocracy survived, almost alone in Europe.  They had been able to reach an accommodation with the Commons in shaping the English constitution, and they reached an accommodation with business and money in shaping British trade.  This triumph of the English aristocracy is unique in all Europe, and the failure of English historians to notice it, let alone celebrate it, is a sad reflection upon the provincialism and specialization of too much of English historical writing.  Namier saw it plainly, but he was from out of town.  Maitland frequently stressed the need for a comparative outlook, and was deeply interested in German history.  French historians such as Marc Bloch and Georges Lefebvre laced their analyses of the history of France and Europe with comparisons with what was happening across the Channel, and their work was so much more illuminating as a result.  But English historians do not often return that serve.  How often do you read in English history how the French law of derogation precluded the French lords from engaging in trade?  For example, under the heading La Noblesse et L’Argent, (The Nobility and Money), Georges Lefebvre remarked that the French lords envied the English lords who became rich on mixing with the bourgeoisie and who, thanks to their Parliament, formed the ministry and government of the nation.

The English lack of interest in Europe has borne fruit, and is currently celebrating a kind of mordant vindication, but the mind-set may also be at risk of being described as insular – definitively insular – with all the darkening and proud exclusion that that state of mind entails.

They are the kind of sparks you come across when reading Namier.  I can imagine he was difficult, a stranger to his new people, and possibly disloyal to his old people, and he was denied the acceptance that he craved and that he had so plainly earned.  My copy of The Structure, etc., has a letter signed by Namier on faded blue paper Shepherds Bush 2445, 60 The Grampians W 6, 14 December 1950.  The tone is antiseptic, but the signature is defiantly formal and straight.

When I read Namier, it is like being overtaken by a Bentley or listening to Joan Sutherland – you just know that there is plenty left in the tank.  Just as I think that Maitland’s intellect was far stronger than that of Pollock’, so I think that Namier was stronger than Berlin – it is just that the other two were better at the game.

Sir Geoffrey Elton was another import with a name-change who changed the way people saw his part of the history of England.  Elton said this about the reaction to Namier: ‘….the violence provoked by Namier owed much to the astonishment felt in conventional circles at the uncalled-for appearance of a historian with tory predilections who clearly outranked the liberals intellectually.’  We all recognize that syndrome immediately – the refuge of the tepid, the mediocre, the smug, and the fellow-travellers.  I have been a fan of Namier since 1963, and I will stay loyal to him.  I am not aware of anyone writing history now who comes even close.  He had a most formidable and penetrating intellect.  And how many historians now would have the courage to refer to ‘plain human kindness’?

On two of my six visits to Paris, I have been within earshot of the sounds of insurrection.  It is unsettling.  The French love a barricade and the first line of their national anthem has that bogus word ‘glory’ – after the exhortation to take up arms.  That’s fine before a footy match, or in Casablanca, but is that how you run a country?  It helps to understand this French love affair with violence if you look at events in England before their revolution and events in France after theirs.

During the 1700’s the people of the American colonies and of France revolted against their government.  In each case, the government had sought more revenue from taxation; the people wanted more representation in their government; when their governments denied their requests, the people revolted.

It is not just that the two revolutions have a lot in common – the French supported the American colonists against their old enemy England, and the cost of that support bankrupted the French nation.  Since that bankruptcy started the series of events that we know as the French revolution, that revolution may be said to have arisen from the determination of the French to keep up with the English.

The English had been developing a system of government since the Romans quit.  A system of government by the Crown in parliament had grown up with what the English called their common law.  Over the centuries, the English had experienced and absorbed four revolts each of which might fairly be called a revolution.  Between the first and second of these revolts, they had deposed two kings, and the deposition of one king – Richard II – was celebrated by the world’s greatest author in a play that put the fear of God into one of that nation’s strongest monarchs, Elizabeth I.

Armed barons induced King John to agree to a constitutional settlement.  The document, known as Magna Carta, is the root of title of the English constitution.  Since the king was assuming binding legal obligations, the settlement logically entailed, nearly six centuries before the French revolution against an absolute monarch, that the king was under and subject to the law.  This is how English judges and lawyers saw it, and have seen it ever since.  It is the foundation of what we call the rule of law.

This document laid the basis for civil liberties of the kind set out in the United States Bill of Rights.  It also rendered the doctrine of the divine right of kings into a kind of fiction, or regnal Dreamtime.  It was hard for a king to say that he was put there by God, and was only answerable to God, when in truth he held the Crown on terms laid down by his great and powerful subjects – who claimed to be acting on behalf of the whole nation – and where on a very bad day, the people would just depose a king if they thought that he was just not up to the job.

More than two centuries later, England obtained Home Rule from Rome.  It later defended that liberty under arms.  Unlike the son of the carpenter, the Holy Father had not renounced the kingdoms of this world.  One pope had annulled Magna Carta, and no self-respecting nation could leave itself open to that kind of foreign intervention.  The English proclaimed that ‘this realm is an empire’ – it had no peers.  (Before Agincourt, Shakespeare has the French herald Mountjoy giving the message of the French king, ‘now we speak upon our cue, and our voice is imperial.’)  In accordance with their custom, the English insisted that they were merely restating what had always been the case.  The pope issued fatwas and licences to kill the English monarch, and England felt the binding cement of the defeat of a great foreign armada.

This independence of the English church was fundamental to the capacity of the English people to mould their system of civil and religious governance as they saw fit.  What we call the Reformation was a great step up for the English parliament, since it was by its statutes that the constitutional settlement, including the succession of the Crown, was effected.  It was even harder for a king to claim authority from God when the royal succession was prescribed not by the Bible but by an act of parliament.  Putting to one side any spiritual differences, the constitutional effect of the revolution that we call the Reformation has been underestimated by historians.  If you doubt that effect, just look at the subsequent histories of European nations that did not achieve religious Home Rule – like Greece, Italy, Spain – or France.

In the seventeenth century, the English revolted against two Stuart kings.  The English nation owes a lot to that Stuart family from Scotland – they were a one-family Punch and Judy show, sent by God to provoke the English, and not bright enough to avoid quite terminal consequences.

The first revolt is sometimes called the Puritan Revolution.  It was fomented against a crafty and devious royal ideologue, Charles I, by a bunch of religious fanatics in parliament – both Lords and Commons – aided by common lawyers and judges outside of parliament, all king-busters straight from hell.  They procured the death of the king’s first minister by a parliamentary process that even Macaulay and Churchill conceded was revolutionary, but which might stand as a high point of ministerial responsibility.  (One of their great constitutional protests had said ministers should have the confidence of parliament.)  They forced through legislative protection of parliament against the king.

But Charles refused to go quietly and botched an attempted armed coup d’état.  This led to a civil war which the king lost to one of only two men the English have erected statues to outside their parliament.  When the king failed to negotiate responsibly, he paid the ultimate price for starting and losing a civil war.  The parliament proclaimed the end of the monarchy.  You do not get any more revolutionary than that – except that this was done by the law.

But the English were not ready for a republic.  It was too rude a shock, and they were frankly appalled by the excesses of some Puritans – who even liked closing pubs.  The monarch was restored with barely a ripple.  One vital statistic of English history is that after they passed a general act of indemnity, only about a dozen people were executed for their role in a revolution that saw the execution – now called the murder – of a king.

But when the second restored Stuart king refused to toe the parliamentary line, the English people revolted again.  This time they did it in style.  They called in a Dutch prince married to an English princess as a kind of receiver, and handed the Crown to him and his wife on conditions laid down in the English Bill of Rights.  James II fled, but this revolution, called the Glorious Revolution, effectively settled in 1689 the centuries old struggle between the crown and parliament.  The crown cannot get revenue except by act of parliament.  This is still the lynch-pin of parliamentary democracy in England and those states that follow its model.  This revolution was bloodless in England, but it was their last.

But at least as important as these revolutionary land-mark changes – that are celebrated in England and in the U S and elsewhere – were changes that evolved in England over six centuries.  English lawyers and litigants did not go the way of Europe in adopting Roman law.  They developed on a case by case basis their own native body of law based on custom and precedent.  This is the common law, which is still the ultimate source of authority for the English constitution, since it is the common law that says that parliament is sovereign.  The English gradually disbanded the feudal system under which people owed obligations to their seniors in return for protection (a kind of Mafia system that grew up in the chaos after Rome fell apart).  They developed their system of parliament from a small group advising the king and settling disputes to a broad representative body that was nowhere near being democratic, but which could and did claim to represent the nation in calling the king to account and making his advisers responsible to parliament.  They took the idea of a jury from the French as an ad hoc advisory panel to the crown to an essential ingredient in the judicial process, and a representative body in determining cases just as the parliament was in framing laws.  The jury was and is seen as a vital part of the constitutional settlement – in both the U K and the U S.  The Lords and Commons worked together to win their ascendancy over the Crown, and they did so with real help from lawyers, judges and juries.

By the time the English came to deal with James II, one hundred years before the fall of the Bastille, they looked back on, rejoiced in, and embroidered upon hundreds and hundreds of years of legal and constitutional development and political growth and maturity.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 contained the following:

When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people, and any portion thereof, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.

This was a bad mistake by people who put logic above experience.  Of course people can rebel or revolt.  But never assert that fact of life in a constitutional document that might be said to found something suspiciously like a right.  You might end up with a people who are beyond reform by legal means.

In the hundred years beginning in 1789, France experienced those events that we know as the French Revolution and then horrible revolutions in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  Putting to one side, for the moment, the huge death toll of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars – possibly seven million lives – and the subsequent coups, insurrections, and purges, France was subjected to the following forms of government in that period: the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons (Louis XIV); a limited monarchy ( the Rights of Man, and the detention of the king); a republic (the abolition of royalty and the execution of the king); a directory (after the fall of Robespierre); a tribunate (after a coup); the empire of Napoleon; the Restoration of Bourbons; the return of Bonaparte and his empire; the further restoration of the Bourbons (Louis XVI); the more limited monarchy after the 1830 revolution; the Second Republic (Louis-Philippe); the Second Empire (Napoleon III); and the third republic (after 1870).  Any nation so afflicted must be profoundly insecure.  France made banana republics look positively serene.

The horror of two world wars did not obliterate the French appetite for insurrection.  A revolution is a successful act of treason; an insurrection is a revolution that did not take off.  The French demand and get more benefits from their government than almost any people on earth.  Yet they periodically seek to blow up the whole lot.

The current insurrection takes us right back to the bad guys of Dostoevsky and Conrad – anarchists.  Like their comrades across the water who want the benefits of Europe without the cost, they aspire to what was rightly called the prerogative of the harlot through the ages – power without responsibility.

[A note comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the 2001 attacks on the US appears in four parts.]

13  Politics or morals?

Guy Fawkes there raised the issue of motive.  These insurrectionists had a political object – regime change – but their motive was religious – the vindication of their idea or brand of religion.  Like Brutus, they wanted to think that they were pure.  They may in some part have persuaded Trevelyan.  He said this of the treasonous conspirators.

But unlike their clerical chiefs, they were pure from self-interest and love of power.  It is difficult to detect any stain upon their conduct, except the one monstrous illusion that murder is right, which put all their virtues at the devil’s service.  Courage cold as steel, self-sacrifice untainted by jealousy or ambition, readiness when all was lost to endure all, raises the Gunpowder Plot into a story of which the ungarnished facts might well be read by those of every faith, not with shame or anger, but with enlarged admiration and pity for the things which men can do.

This is very slippery ground.  On what basis would we refuse this accolade or at least epitaph to the minions of Osama bin Laden who drove their aircraft into the twin towers with courage  cold as steel?  We may be reminded of the suggestion that the invasions and wars of Napoleon were somehow less evil than those of Hitler.  If you are being bayoneted or raped, your misery will not be lessened by the answer of your assailant to the question: ‘Why are you here?’

These conspirators were bent on killing people.  That is evil.  That the conspirators purported to do so in the name of God can only make it more evil.   As can the fact that they applied all their best qualities to achieve their purpose.  As indicated above, on at least two grounds, a person killing for God is worse than one killing for lucre.  First, his zeal makes him more venomous; it gives him strength, and some colour of right.  Secondly, and putting blasphemy to one side, it is obvious that by his crime against others, he exposes other members of his faith to retribution.

Even after he had ascended the scaffold, Father Garnet said, before making his final sign of the cross in this life: ‘I beseech all men that Catholics shall not fare the worse for my sake and I exhort all Catholics to take care not to mix themselves with seditious or traitorous designs against the king.’  No, Trevelyan should have stuck with his proposition that the conspirators put all their virtues at the service of the devil.

But this issue raises the question of how we judge insurrections, whether or not we apply the label ‘terrorists’ to those leading the insurrection.  (What is the difference between George Washington & Co and the IRA, except that the first lot clearly won and the jury is still out on the second?)  The rude truth may be that we assess an insurrection in the same way that we assess a business.  It is good if it succeeds.  If not, it is bad.  This was clearly seen by one of the leaders of what Americans call the American Revolution.  When the Declaration of Independence was finally signed, Benjamin Franklin said: ‘Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.’  (As ever, John Adams was different: ‘Power and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt.’)  If you succeed, you are a patriot, a hero and a liberator, a father of the nation.  If you fail, you get topped for treason.

As Antonia Fraser remarked in her book The Gunpowder Plot, ‘terrorism does not exist in a vacuum.’

I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage.  I did not plan it in any spirit of recklessness or because I have any love of violence.  I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people.

It was not Robert Catesby who said that, but Nelson Mandela when in the dock at the Rivoni trial in 1964.  This sometime terrorist is now widely revered as being as close to a secular saint as we can get.  Possibly our only hero who might match Mandela is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Yet, he was plainly involved in a plot to kill Hitler.  Do we see our two secular saints as terrorists?

So, as ever the kinks in our timber preclude us from formulating wide and fast maxims about any right to resort to violence.  Indeed, even the word ‘right’ is fraught there.  The brute historical fact looks to be that some forms of evil or oppression leave us no reasonable alternative but to resort to a form of action which would otherwise be plainly wrong.  But none of us wants to trust anyone else to make that decision for us.

14  Lessons?

There is one other great reminder in the story of the Gunpowder Plot (that as a kid I celebrated every 5 November with crackers and potatoes in the fire on the night that all dogs loathed – Bonfire Night.)  We say that we allow freedom of religion and that we claim to be tolerant.  Put that bluff or bluster aside.  It is obviously wrong and unfair to brand all those who profess a faith with the blame for wrongs done by fanatics who claim to be of that faith but whose actions show that they reject its teaching for their own motives.  It is like branding people because of the crimes, real or imagined, of their ancestors.  Typing people because of their faith or race is like holding them liable for the failures of others – they are two sides of our original sin.  We need to reach the insight that escaped Napoleon – you do not win people over by killing them or insulting them.  And that’s before you look at the moral question about how you should treat your neighbour.

We have a problem with religion that the ancients did not.  The religions of Greece and Rome look daffy to us.  It is hard for us to think of the Greeks or Romans taking them seriously.  But many of them did, especially if it suited them, like when the people of Athens decided that they had had enough of Socrates.  But one result of having so many all too human gods was that the people were very tolerant of other religions.  That stopped being the case with absolute religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Each of them said that there was only one God.  And it was theirs.  The problem then is one of simple arithmetic.  People are agreed that there can only be one answer.  But there are at least three different answers on offer.  The insight of Kant that I referred to was as follows.

If someone declares himself for this church [one that passes itself off as the only universal one] yet deviates from its faith in something essential (something made out to be so), especially if he propagates his errant belief, he is called a heretic and, like a rebel, is held more punishable than an external foe and is expelled from the church…..and given over to all the gods of hell. 

Kant also observed that the claim of each church to be the only universal church is ultimately ‘based on faith in a particular revelation which, since it is historical, can never be demanded of everyone.’  We might induce people to act on faith; we cannot compel them to do so.  Those remarks go to the heart of what we have been looking at.  So much of the suffering of this world has been caused by ruptures within religions that put themselves above all others.

We have been looking at manifestations of two of those ruptures.  The schism that we call the Reformation started a domino reaction that has been at least as lethal for mankind as the schism in Islam between Sunni and Shia.  As people on both sides could and did predict, the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath set back the course of religious peace in England in ways that can still be seen.  The reaction of the Protestant Crown left ample room for Catholic reaction and rejection, especially when disabilities were multiplied and decent people were asked to take responsibility for the actions of outright criminals who thought that they could fix their whole world with one big bang.  We might be reminded of the Treaty of Versailles.  The moral offence of Germany was great.  But the savagery of the reaction, as Keynes surely predicted, ensured that there would be another and worse war.

The division and hatred would be worse in Ireland.  The crimes of the English against the Irish were originally founded on a contempt for the Irish race.  A vicious sectarian shade was now added to that hostility.  At Drogheda, Cromwell, the great Puritan, engaged in what we would now call ethnic cleansing in the name of Christ.  As Christopher Hill remarked, ‘religious hostility reinforced cultural contempt.’  ‘Cultural’ there is the polite word for ‘racial.’  Professor Hill, no enemy of Cromwell, went on to compare the attitude of English people to the Irish with that of the Nazis  to the Slavs, and that of the Boers to black Africans, and said that ‘in each case the contempt rationalised a desire to exploit’.  The agony would go on for centuries.

So would blind prejudice.  In 1897, a Jesuit priest with the same name as one who fled when the Gunpowder Plot was exposed, Father John Gerard, published a book What Was Gunpowder Plot?  He said Salisbury made the whole lot up.  Off hand, it is hard to see how such a tract might achieve anything at all.

Those of us who look on glumly while mankind suffers from these two great schisms may just have to take refuge in the remark of a friend of Ben Johnson who gloried under the name of Lord Zouche:

Two religions cannot stand together.

Well, on one view, we may have been discussing four religions.

There may, then, be something to be said for teaching people about Western civilisation.  We saw that John Mortimer said that our Western civilisation is, after all, the product of a religion founded by Jesus of Nazareth.  That is, if I may say so, rather large.  Among other things, the splitting of Christianity has been about as much a blessing for us as the splitting of the atom – or the splitting of Islam.  Perhaps because I am a lawyer, I see the common law, including the rule of law, as fundamental to what I see as civilisation.  That may just be my prejudice.  The impact of religion on the common law has not been large – and part of the great teaching and legacy of the common law is that that’s the way it ought to be.  The alternative, frankly, is bloody dangerous.

Sources

[I apologise to those who like footnotes.  I don’t.  I like writing and reading and think that footnotes are bad for both.  They have clearly ruined our jurisprudence.  Any necessary references may be found below.]

Black, J B, The Reign of Elizabeth, Oxford History of England, 1959, 166-194, esp. 172

Bowen, C D, The Lion and the Throne, The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke, Little Brown & Co, 1957, 252, 261, 267 and 270

Fraser, Antonia, The Gunpowder Plot, Terror and Faith in 1605, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996, passim, but esp. 183, 235, 255, 258, and 295

Hill, C, God’s Englishman, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, Folio Society, 2013, 99

Johnson, P, A History of the American People, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, 125, 130

Kant, I, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 6:109; Religion and Rational Theology, A Wood and G Di Giovanni, C U P, 1996, 141

Lovell, J, Notable Historical Trials, Folio Society, 1999, Volume 1, 482-514, esp. 494, 505, 510

Neale, J E, Elizabeth I, Folio Society, 2005, 243

Ranke, History of England, Oxford, 1875, Volume 1, 403-417, esp. 408,411

State Trials, London, 1816 (Printed T C Hansard), Volume 2, 217-358 (trial of Garnet)

Trevelyan, G M, England Under the Stuarts, Folio Society, 1996, 80, 81, 84

[A note comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the 2001 attacks on the US appears in four parts.]

8 The priest and the confessions

Father Garnet was a distinguished scholar, and he comes down to us now as a decent man trapped in a vice put together by a haughty hierarchy and a rogue flock.  He showed astonishing composure and compassion during the trial  – and on the scaffold when the agents of the government were still pursuing him and trying to break him down morally before cutting him up physically.  Some would even later regard his conduct as saintly.

In the course of the trial, the leading government minister, Salisbury, had put it to the priest that he could not have absolved Catesby ‘because he professed no penitency, and therefore you could not absolve him.’  (We hear echoes of that discussion now on the issue of abuse by clerics.)  Father Garnet had maintained that he was obliged to respect the confessional and not report the confessor.

It looks likely that Father Garnet may have accepted that the law of England would go hard on him in carrying out what he saw was his duty as a priest.  When on trial for his life, Father Garnet was directly asked by Salisbury whether Catesby had told him of ‘the Powder Treason’, he calmly responded: ‘That my lord I may not answer.’  But he also said this:

But I allow that the laws made against such concealing are just and necessary, for it is not fit that the safety of the state should depend upon any man’s particular conscience.

It may be that such a concession related only to the knowledge that he had acquired outside of the confessional.  That would appear to have been the view of G M Trevelyan who said that Garnet had obtained ‘a general knowledge of Mr Catesby’s intention’ not in confession and that he saw himself as ‘highly guilty and to have offended God’ in not revealing it; Trevelyan also said that Garnet got the same knowledge from another source outside confession.

The depth of Garnet’s knowledge of the plot itself, and the source of such knowledge, are very controversial.  It is not easy to come to a conclusion even when you go back to State Trials – which is as close as we will get to a primary source.  (And the account there is as incomplete as it is evidently loaded against the accused.)

Garnet had said at first that Catesby had told him that ‘he had some great thing in hand for the good of Catholics.  I much disliked it and dissuaded him.’  On the scaffold, the Recorder challenged Garnet’s assertion that he only had general knowledge from Catesby.  He alleged that Garnet admitted getting ‘particulars of the Powder Plot’ from Tesimond at a meeting in Essex.  It was then said that Garnet acknowledged this to be true and said that ‘inasmuch as he had not declared the knowledge of the plot which had been generally imported to him, he owned himself to be justly condemned, and he asked pardon of the king.’  But Garnet had contended throughout that everything Tesimond said to him was said in confession.  That in itself was controversial – the discussion constituting the alleged confession took place in a walk in an Essex garden.

The great German historian Ranke said that Garnet had been asked to advise on a scheme to blow up parliament and the queen in the previous reign, and that he had said that such a scheme was ‘lawful’ – he cannot have been referring to the laws of England.  He said that the conspirators would have had a duty to spare as many of the ‘innocent’ as possible.  (By what criteria were the victims to be denied their ‘innocence’?)

The scheme which had been started under Elizabeth was resumed under King James, when men saw that his accession to the throne did not produce the hoped-for change.  On this occasion also scruples were felt on the ground that many a Catholic would perish at the same time.  To a question on the subject submitted to him without closer description of the case, Garnet answered in the spirit of a mufti delivering his fettah [fatwa?] that if an end were indubitably a good one, and could be accomplished in no other way, it was lawful to destroy even some of the innocent with the guilty.  Catesby had no compassion even for the innocent: he regarded the lords generally as only poltroons and atheists, whose place would be better filled by vigorous men.

If this assessment is well founded, it is frightening.  This discussion shows how alarmingly inhuman we can get if we allow religious schism to guide our moral judgment.  Here is a man of God contemplating indiscriminate slaughter on the footing that members of one sect are somehow ‘innocent’ in a way that members of another sect are not.  Kant was plainly right.  Heresy is a killer.  Offending God is far worse than offending man.  As Kant said, a heretic is like a rebel.  Heresy was religion’s version of rebellion – at least in those propagating the affront to authority.  Both involve a challenge to the existing order.

At least, as Ranke implies, this learned priest should have followed the maxim of seasoned lawyers – never give advice in the round, or on broad hypotheticals.  That way, two people can fall right off a cliff.  Father Garnet on any view was playing with fire – during his trial, it was alleged that Catesby had also sought to fish from Garnet some abstract ground of ‘lawfulness’ in respect of the deaths of innocent people.

When Father Garnet was pursued on the scaffold to confess to treason, he maintained his innocence in a manner that is for me persuasive.

I consider the late treason and conspiracy against the state to be cruel and detestable; and for my part all designs and endeavours against our king were ever disliked by me.  If this attempt had been perfected as it was designed, I think it would have been altogether damnable, and I pray for all prosperity to the king, the queen, and the royal family.

That was, after all, the teaching of his church and the inevitable consequence of the mission of its founder.  When, still on the scaffold, Father Garnet was asked if he sought pardon from the king, he responded:

I do so as far as I have sinned against him; namely, in that I did not reveal that whereof I had a general knowledge from Mr Catesby – but not otherwise.

There, then, was a decent man in dreadful plight.  The evidence is not complete, but doing the best I can, the finding of treason against Father Garnet looks to me to be about as sound as the same finding against Jesus of Nazareth nearly sixteen centuries beforehand.  Garnet would I think have been fairly convicted and executed on the misprision charge on its own, but in my view, he did not deserve the verdict or mode of death that he got.

9 Abuse of process

One source says that on the discovery of the plot, ‘the government seems to have fallen into a wild state of terror.’  That is just what the terrorists had sought, and we know what happened in the U S in 2001.  The USA Patriot Act of 2001 does not lack colour or warmth.

Possibly as a result of this ‘wild state of terror’, the trials did not reflect well on the English legal system.  Most of what Coke said or tendered in evidence would not be permitted in court today.  In his introduction to Volume I of the Folio Society Notable Historical Trials, the late John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole, said of the conduct of Coke toward Ralegh that that was ‘the sort of cross-examination which demotes an attorney-general from an advocate to an accomplice in murder.’  Mr Mortimer concluded his Introduction:

So, reading these trials is as good a way as any of understanding history.  Sometimes the best people are in the dock, the most corrupt on the prosecutors and judges’ benches. Our Western civilisation is, after all, the product of a religion founded by someone who was tried, sentenced and executed as a criminal, in a trial of which a focus group of the citizens of Jerusalem thoroughly approved.

We can see aspects of a show trial.  For example, during the hearing, Salisbury (Cecil) had rather given the game away.

Alas, Mr Garnet.  Why should we be troubled all this day with you, were it not to make the cause appear as it deserveth?

Most lawyers know that feeling.  Sometimes when the train leaves the station, you are in no doubt about where your journey is going to end – why then are we here?

10 Punishment

Death, then, was the inevitable penalty.  The only question was how degrading and painful that death would be.  That meant that the English then were less exposed to the problems that come when you lock up religious fanatics together.  The Catholics who refused to toe the line were called recusants.  Elizabethan prisons were full of recusants.  Among other things, they could more easily attend mass in a place loaded with priests.

One of these slammers was named ‘the Clink’ – what else? – in Southwark.  It was always loaded with recusants and was seen as a ‘propaganda cell for the whole capital.’  This mirrors the experience in France and other jurisdictions where they now know that putting Muslim fanatics together unsurprisingly makes them worse.  No one appears to have the faintest idea of an answer.

11 The evil that zealots do – to priests

So, even in its hell-raising and mind-numbing scope, there was nothing new in the attack on the twin towers in 2001.  These attempts to raise hell on earth are meant to destabilise us by terrifying us.  They are especially evil when driven by what is said to be faith, because the fanaticism goes up a notch, and the stakes go up by far more than a notch – they go up to eternity.  One of the conspirators with a nice sense of understatement confessed that their object had been to ‘breed a confusion fit to beget new alterations.’

These zealots are also evil because they involve a prostitution, perversion and betrayal of the faith that they claim to represent while doing evil.  And by doing that, they are laying up trouble on earth for those that we may call the true believers.

To the extent that we disintegrate and drop our guard, we are handing the prize to the terrorists.  In my view, we do that by rashly abandoning long held rights, such as the ban on torture.  In that I think that we should follow the teaching of the military and police people who, as I understand it, follow the advice of the King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor – don’t poke your enemy in the eye if he may come back and poke both of yours.

12 Protecting criminals

On the other hand, the time must be long past when adherents to one faith can allow their dogma to stand in the way of their saving the lives of others.  You may have thought that the claim of the clergy to be above the law had been put to bed more than 800 years ago after that unfortunate misunderstanding in the cathedral with Thomas Becket.  The effort to resuscitate it now shows not merely what Americans refer to as a tin ear, but a worryingly heartless preference for dogma over human life.  Whatever Father Garnet had in mind, he was plainly right when he said that ‘it is not fit that the safety of the state should depend upon any man’s particular conscience’.  It is revolting to think that the life or welfare of one man, woman or child might depend wholly on how the conscience of another man requires him to perform some part of a religious rite.

We read at times of priests claiming the protection of the seal of confession, and of some even offering to go to jail rather than adhere to the law, if law it be.  If such priests think that such a course might be a form of martyrdom, we might hope that they are deluded.  It is hard to think of anyone in our community, and certainly not anyone who has brought up children, who would accept such a view.  And before any cleric seeks to go down that path, he should carefully consider the hell that Father Garnet brought down upon himself and others.  The truest words that Father Garnet ever spoke may have been this response to Salisbury: ‘My lord, I would to God I had never known of the Powder Treason.’  Any priest who wants to allow any chance of being put in the life or death quandary of Father Garnet will look at best a brick shy of a full load.

It is sufficient here to refer to two subsidiary arguments of Coke that would have held attraction then and which could embarrass a cleric now.  Coke urged that Garnet could have revealed the identities of those who were not ‘confitents.’  His alternative submission may have had more attraction – Garnet ‘might and ought to have discovered the mischief for the preservation of the state though he had concealed the persons.’  These points are arguable but we do not provide our courts to settle disputes about religious dogma or rites.  Whose back would rise higher – that of the judge, or that of the jury?

And while we are talking about clerics giving succour to members of their flock who are contemplating doing evil to others, they may want to get some mature legal advice about the crimes of aiding and abetting.  In the humour of our time now, they need not expect warm sympathy from a jury.  And certainly any cleric offering a comforting view to a would be criminal about the ‘lawfulness’ of a proposed crime might look to receive full retribution at the hands of the law.  Preserving the peace is after all the law’s prime reason for existence.

As it happens, Guy Fawkes had correctly identified the nature and extent of the evil of the Gunpowder Plot in two answers that he gave directly to the king when he was arrested (with a watch, slow matches and touchwood on his person).

Why would you have killed me?

Because you are excommunicated by the pope.

How could you conspire against my children and so many innocent souls?

Dangerous diseases require a desperate remedy.

[A note comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the 2001 attacks on the US appears in four parts.]

4  Two plots compared

The first thing to notice is that there was something like a state of war between two Christian sects in 1605.  We know that some Muslim clerics have issued fatwas, but none of those clerics had the standing or authority of a pope, and none of those fatwas was a direct attack on the sovereign government of a nation.  No fatwa that I am aware of gave spiritual licence to the murder of a head of state – on spiritual grounds.

Although the terrorists were seeking to topple a regime, their motivation was to serve their faith throughout.  From the time that the pope excommunicated and in effect deposed Queen Elizabeth, there was at least the risk that Catholics might think that any attack on the English Crown had the implicit blessing of their Church.  In the meanwhile, Spain had made war on England in the name of God.  France was harbouring the training of Jesuit opponents of the English Crown at Douai.  The Jesuits would provide what we know as the Fifth Column.

The forces behind those in the Gunpowder Plot therefore look to have been stronger and more highly backed than those in the attacks of 2001.  And their aim was correspondingly much higher.  They were after all intent on more than the death of the king.  They planned the annihilation of the entire parliament, and the top of the judiciary, and the incitement of a religious civil war that would have given new and awful meaning to Milton’s phrase ‘all hell broke loose.’

The object of the Catholic conspirators was to spread fear and alarm, and had they succeeded in at least their first objective, it is hard to imagine that fear and alarm not exceeding that which grabbed the United States after the attack on the twin towers.  The effects of the foreign wars commenced by the U S after that attack are still being felt.

5  The reaction – and torture

The attacks in the U S in 2001 led to calls for torture.  There is in my view little doubt that the U S engaged in torture, and that its allies looked the other way.  Torture was not permitted under the common law of England, but the king claimed the prerogative to use it at least in the case of Guy Fawkes.  Fawkes was the first to be taken, and his captors felt that they needed to torture him to identify the others.

It is hard to imagine a different course being taken in England in 1605.  But it is as like as not that those calling for torture in 1605 or 2001 were not recalling the role that torture played in the miscarriage of justice that led to the cruel death of the founder of their faith.  (The man called Jesus was found guilty of a religious offence (blasphemy) by the local authority and then executed by the imperial authority for an alleged breach of the secular criminal law (treason) for which there was no evidence at all.  The imperial authority committed the ultimate crime of handing the indigenous accused over to the mob.)

There was, however, other conduct in England that savours of hysteria.  Many in the parliament wanted to give the conspirators a ‘more sharp death.’  A bill was put forward in parliament for that purpose.  The bill was defeated, but as a fine American biographer of Sir Edward Coke (pronounced ‘Cook’) says:

Yet its very proposal gave indication of the ferocity with which the plotters were looked on – indication also of the time-honored propensity of legislators to proclaim their loyalty and save their skins by flaying alive the nearest vulnerable neighbour.

Yes, we do see that – and we did see some of it in the U S after 2001 – but these legislators were doubtless impressed by the fact that the conspirators had been trying to blow them to kingdom come – every last one of them.

6  The confessional

During the investigation and the trials following the Gunpowder Plot another issue arose that we now meet in a different context.  One of the conspirators, Catesby, confessed to a priest (Tesimond) during confession.  Catesby did not spell the plot out, but he made it clear that he and others would ignore the plea of the pope to leave matters to Providence.  The priest Tesimond in turn confessed this incident, again in confession, he said, to another priest, Father Henry Garnet, S J.  Both priests were horrified, but they felt precluded by the teaching of their church from notifying the government.  All they could do was to seek to prevent the crime by counselling against it.

Father Garnet was the leader of the Jesuits in England.  He was known as the English Provincial.  Putting to one side that he was said to be ‘a genial, easy-tempered man who loved his wine second only to his religion’, Garnet was always likely be a prime target of the Crown.  They were after the Jesuits as a body.

7 The trial

The prosecution was led by the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke.  He would go on to the bench and be a doughty defender of the common law, by standing right up in the face of James I for example, and he would be as a light unto the nations.  But as a prosecutor he could be like a dog with rabies.  (His conduct with Garnet was for our time appalling; with Ralegh, he was revolting.)

For Coke the phrase ‘English Catholic’ was close to being a contradiction in terms.  One of the conspirators had previously written that for Coke merely being a Catholic was sufficient to qualify a man as a traitor – a man is not English who gives his first allegiance elsewhere.  (Before you dismiss that notion as just ugly prejudice, you might recall that it would be very much that kind of that issue that led – fairly or otherwise – to the end of the Stuarts.  James II never got the point.)

Coke did not charge Garnet with not reporting evidence of treason – called then misprision of felony.  Coke charged the Jesuit with being a party to the plot – indeed, its mastermind.  And Coke performed with venom and frightful colour.  He said that the whole conspiracy had been dominated by the priests.  ‘I will name it the Jesuits’ treason, as belonging to them.’  Their doctrines of ‘King-killing’ and ‘Queen-killing’ were vital.  Garnet had had his finger in every treason since 1586.  It was the Jesuits who plotted to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.  (All the worst fears of the King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor were now fulfilled.)  Coke said that this Jesuit doctor was a doctor of – ‘Dissimulation, Deposing of princes, Disposing of kingdoms, Daunting and Deterring of subjects, and Destruction.’  For good measure, the man from Cambridge added: ‘And I never knew any priest of Cambridge to be arraigned in court.’

When Coke read transcriptions of eavesdropped entrapment conversations, he adopted the practice of the time and edited out those parts that were favourable to the accused.  As G M Trevelyan coolly observed, this was ‘an age when the rules of evidence were the rules of probability interpreted by prejudice.’

Coke was not being forensic.  His denunciations were not even Protestant.  This exercise was wholly political, and the whole trial bears an unhealthy likeness to the proceedings before Senator McCarthy.  It is said that the Earl of Salisbury (formerly the all-powerful Sir Robert Cecil) later conceded that the object of Garnet’s trial had not been so much to convict the Jesuit as ‘to make a public and visible anatomy of Popish doctrine and practice.’  There is the risk of such contamination in all treason trials; it is inevitable in a show trial.  Show trials are just graphic political statements on behalf of the government.  They are propaganda.

Coke did refer the jury to canon law which he argued allowed Garnet to report on ‘a future thing to be done, not then already executed.’  He also attacked the Jesuits on their practice or technique of ‘equivocation’ in responding evasively to questions touching them in the profession of their faith.  (Shakespeare would pick up on this in Macbeth, which came out shortly after and which was heavily influenced by these events.)  Coke also alleged that at common law a person was bound to ‘discover’ (reveal) a treason against the king as soon as it came to his knowledge – even if it came to a priest during confession.  In that, Coke was on stronger ground.

The jury only took fifteen minutes.  (You might think that that was quick, but the practice in treason trials then was to do them in a day.  You may not smile if you consider the contemporary alternative.)  The sentence was the appalling one for treason, but a sympathetic crowd moved by this man’s spiritual demeanour ensured that he was as good as dead when he came off the scaffold to be disembowelled.  (Another source says that by express command of the king, Garnet remained hanging from the gallows until he was ‘quite dead.’  This would be one of the grounds of dispute later between Protestants and Catholics, some of whom believed his death was attended later by a miracle.  And the official version does smack of propaganda.)