Laura Sangha

This is the second of three posts surveying the London Catholic community around the time of the Gunpowder Plot. View the first here. View the last here.

Recusant roll entries can give details about social status.

Having established that there were lots of missionary priests about in Jacobethan London, my question today is: how much of an appetite was there for what Catholics were selling? We are fortunate in that recusant rolls survive for Middlesex from 1603-1625, so these provide part of an answer. Recusancy was the term applied to those who refused to attend Church of England services: from 1593 these people were punished with fines, property confiscations and imprisonment. Whilst not all people who were fined for refusing to take communion in Church were Catholics (they might be Protestant nonconformists), Jacobethan Puritans were less likely to avoid attending altogether, and more likely to attend begrudgingly, omitting parts of the service or disrupting the performance as part of a vocal protest. Records were kept of those people that were indicted, and these recusant rolls often give details about the identity and status of absentees, in the process historians have assumed that they furnish us with information about the Catholic community. Continue reading →

Laura Sangha

This is the first of three posts on Catholics in England at the time of the Gunpowder Plot. The second, on recusancy is here. The third, on the places in London where Catholics were often found, is here.

Allegedly Guy Fawkes’ lantern, now in the Ashmolean Museum

On 4 November 1605, during a search at around midnight on the eve of the state opening of England’s Parliament, a soldier by the name of Guy Fawkes was accosted by officials in an undercroft directly beneath the House of Lords. He was wearing a cloak and hat and carried a lantern, and a search of his person revealed several slow matches and touchwood. Nearby, under a pile of faggots and wood, thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were discovered. Fawkes was promptly arrested and taken to the king.

This was of course the moment at which the infamous ‘gunpowder treason’ plot was foiled, bringing to a halt the breathtakingly ambitious plan of a group of Catholic conspirators determined to reduce Parliament to rubble, to assassinate king James VI and I and his family, and to tear the heart out of the Protestant political establishment by killing in one fell swoop privy councillors, senior judges, the leading lights of the aristocracy and members of the House of Commons.

The undercroft beneath the House of Lords, 1799 engraving.

At the trial of the surviving conspirators, the Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke insisted that the plot had been invented by Jesuit priests, depraved fanatics determined to subvert the loyalty of the English people. Historians have interpreted this as part of a consistent policy on the part of James I to separate religious radicals (both ‘papists’ and ‘puritans’) from their more moderate allies, whereby he emphasised the subversive and dangerous nature of the radical fringe in an attempt to persuade their more moderate brethren of the utility and desirability of religious uniformity within the English nation. Continue reading →