Conspiracy or Plot?
In 1605, Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and eleven other renegade Catholics plotted to blow up Parliament as the new King James I presided over the State Opening. Their plot was supposedly foiled in the nick of time, with Fawkes caught red-handed with barrels of gunpowder. Ever since, “Guy Fawkes Day” has been celebrated throughout England with fireworks, feasts and, well, booze.
The plot was a singular disaster for England’s long-suffering Catholics, and the truth about the circumstances surrounding it has been the subject of heated debate. Many historians, some quite persuasively, have made the case that one of the King’s ministers, Robert Cecil, fabricated the entire event as a pretext for a full-scale crackdown.
One of the best books on the subject is Antonia Fraser’s Faith and Treason. Fraser doesn’t buy the fabrication argument, but she documents in excruciating detail the provocative abuses Catholics suffered under James I and his predecessor the famous Elizabeth I.
Under “Good Queen Bess,” returning to “the Church of Rome” or encouraging others to do so became high treason. Any Catholic priest ordained abroad was subject to being hanged, drawn and quartered, a practice which involved hanging a man until just before the point of death, cutting him down and disemboweling him, and then separating him (roughly) into fourths. Catholic laymen who assisted these priests got off easy — they simply were hanged. Those who refused to attend Protestant services, “recusants,” were subject to enormous fines affordable only by the wealthy.
With the Gunpowder Plot finally “proving” the disloyalty of the realm’s Catholics, more measures were introduced by James I. Catholics were forbidden to practice law, to obtain university degrees, to vote, or to serve as officers in the army or navy. Parliament gave serious consideration to forcing Catholics to wear red hats when in public.
Traces of Faith
During my trip to London in October of 2005, I picked a copy of the unimaginatively titled but wonderfully written Catholic Trivia: Our Forgotten Heritage by Fr. Mark Elvins. He describes how many words, pub signs, diseases and customs “betray the deep influence of the Catholic Church” on the British national consciousness, “despite every attempt to root it out.”
How extensive were these attempts? Protestant reformers, particularly the Puritans, in the name of stamping out “popish superstition” even went so far as to attack a number. The number “13,” perhaps the world’s unluckiest, was once a sign of good fortune as it represented Christ and His twelve Apostles. It was “reformed.” Similarly, walking under a ladder reminded English Catholics of Christ and His cross; it was changed into a now familiar harbinger of bad luck.
As often as not, though, a harmless, potentially beneficial censured practice was replaced by a truly superstitious one. When the English were told by their ministers to cease carrying a rosary in their pockets, they carried a rabbit’s foot instead.
But the Faith which had built English society for centuries had deep roots. Historian Hilaire Belloc estimated that after forty years of Elizabethan persecution half of England’s population still considered themselves Catholic.
Those roots are still there, in everything from language to place names. The omnipresent British adjective “bloody” is a truncation of the oath “by Our Lady.” The well-known London district of Blackfriars takes its name from a Dominican priory. Likewise, Whitefriars is named for a Carmelite Convent. If that weren’t enough, Greyfriars, the site of a hospital founded by Edward VI, is the original location of a Franciscan friary.
St. Pancras Station, a gorgeous redbrick Gothic “tube,” or subway, station made famous for being bombed by Moslem terrorists in July of 2005, is named for a fourth-century martyr of the Diocletian persecutions. The first church to be consecrated by St. Augustine of Canterbury in the sixth century was dedicated to St. Pancras.
When the famous St. Bride’s Church (the layered steeple of which has served as a model for countless wedding cakes) was bombed during the Blitz, unknown areas of its crypt were accidentally revealed. They discovered that Christians — Catholics — had been worshipping on the site since at least the ninth century, perhaps earlier; a section of Roman-era pavement was found.
Confronting a Legacy
For all of English society’s genteel anti-Catholicism — an English monarch still may not be Catholic — the Church of England operated throughout much of its history as something of a resentful doppelgänger to the dreaded “Church of Rome.” For instance, when the Rosminian order of Catholic priests brought the Roman collar to England in 1835, a full three centuries after Henry VIII’s famous split, Anglican ministers followed suit. They wear them to this day, as anyone touring Westminster Abbey will observe.
As Guy Fawkes Day loomed during my October trip, I was struck by how little the English were doing to promote it. In fact, I saw far more signs and advertisements for Christmas parties. The Houses of Parliament did have a small exhibit near the exit and across from the bookstore commemorating the infamous plot.
One got the sense that the government was at pains not to offend anyone, and even went so far as to include the diary of Cardinal William Allen, the renowned dean of the English College of Douai which trained generations of outlawed priests. Still, the placards throughout the exhibit did present the slanted “Whig” interpretation of history.
Under the section “A Divided Europe,” visitors are told “Protestants across Europe…rejected the authority of the Pope in Rome over their own churches and religious beliefs.” That may have been true of Luther’s Germany, but, as historian Eamon Duffy has made clear in his book Stripping of the Altars, in England that “rejection” was imposed violently by the crown.
To their credit, the exhibitors do feature Fraser’s balanced treatment of the Gunpowder Plot in the bookstore nearby. However, the exhibit itself is barely promoted. A couple of orange and black signs could be seen on the gates in front of Parliament, but that’s about it: no fuss, no fanfare, and no fireworks.
Could England finally be confronting its legacy of anti-Catholicism? After all, the British press in recent years has featured many stories concerning Prime Minister Tony Blair’s dalliance with Catholicism (he attends Mass on Sundays with his Catholic wife and children) and Education Secretary Ruth Kelly’s status with Opus Dei.
More likely, though, the toned-down quadricentennial Guy Fawkes Day is another example of Europe’s slide into secularization. Talk of religion is divisive, and a holiday with such a controversial, “un-P.C.” pedigree probably makes official London nervous.
England’s Catholic roots are never far from the surface, however. All it takes is a little curiosity to reveal them.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Rich Leonardi, publisher of the blog Ten Reasons, writes from Cincinnati, Ohio.
