Faith and Treason: The story of the Gunpowder Plot.

A "penny for the Old Guy" wrote T. S. Eliot at the beginning of "The Hollow Men," and in my youth this cry and the stuffed effigies of Guy Fawkes made out of old clothes were still evident on English streets during the run-up to November 5. Now the homemade Guys have disappeared, and the Guy Fawkes commemoration is merging into Halloween, a fairly recent American importation; children find trick-or-treating an easier way of extracting money than going to the trouble of making Guys. But Guy Fawkes's Day itself still provides an almost orgiastic outburst of fireworks and bonfires, like a parody of a national saint's day in a Catholic country. Everyone has heard of Guy Fawkes, but fewer and fewer people know what was the Gunpowder Plot his name recalls. In fact, Guy, or Guido, Fawkes was only a lesser conspirator, whose job was to light the gunpowder that would blow up king and parliament. The prime mover of the plot was Robert Catesby, a charismatic and fanatical young Catholic aristocrat.

It is all splendidly described in Antonia Fraser's book. She is an accomplished writer of popular history from a Catholic family (her distinguished and venerable father, Lord Longford, was a minister in Labour governments) though there is no evident bias in her writing. Her book is enthralling and sad, describing in fascinating detail an act of colossal folly that turned to disaster. Under Elizabeth I, most English Catholics were loyal to the queen, though it was a criminal offense to be a priest, to harbor one, and to say or hear Mass. At the same time, Catholics were subject to heavy fines if they absented themselves from Anglican services. Despite these terrible pressures the Catholic faith persisted, helped by aristocratic families who were prepared to pay the fines. They were also ready to shelter priests, such as the courageous English Jesuits who came out of exile in Flanders and who often ended as martyrs, hanged, drawn and quartered on the scaffold. Persecution, though, was patchy, and could be eased by local circumstances, by bribery, or by covert sympathy from those in authority. As Fraser shows, the wives of Catholic gentlemen paid an active part in keeping the faith alive; since women could own no property, they could not be fined, and for some reason husbands were not made to pay their wives' fines.

When the Virgin Queen died at last in 1603, the new and popular monarch was the king of Scotland, James VI in his own country, James I in England. Catholics were cautiously hopeful of a change for the better; after all, James's mother had been the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. James made political half-promises of better times for the Catholics, but he did not keep them and perhaps did not mean to. Unusually for a monarch, he was keenly interested in theology and was determined to maintain a Protestant path between Puritans and papists; despite his mother, and his wife, who was privately a Catholic, he had no time for papists.

It was the failure of these promises and expectations that provoked Catesby into his conspiracy. He was an archetypal terrorist of a currently familiar kind, who believed that extreme situations demand desperate measures. To blow up the king and Parliament was an extraordinary act of "propaganda by deed," but the devout Catesby based his plan on the traditional Catholic teaching, much hedged round and uncertain though it was, that in some situations tyrannicide might be justified. He had no doubt that such a situation had now arrived, though few Catholics would have agreed. The pope and the priests in England wanted to avoid provocation, quietly to persevere in the faith as best they could, and to wait for God to improve matters in his own good time. The Gunpowder Plot, had it succeeded, would have destroyed many innocent lives, including the king's children, and several Catholic peers assembled in Parliament. Catesby was prepared to justify these deaths by the principle of "double effect."

He and the other conspirators that he attracted into following him were brave, headstrong, and incompetent. The plot was leaked while it was being prepared; as Fraser shows, the government knew something about it beforehand, though just how much is uncertain. Father Henry Garnet, leader of the English Jesuits, picked up hints of it and made desperate but unsuccessful efforts to halt the plot. At all events, Guy Fawkes was arrested at Parliament; Catesby and several leading conspirators were pursued in the Midlands, where Catesby was killed in a shoot-out. Fawkes, under torture, named other conspirators, who were duly caught and imprisoned. There followed show trials and a string of cruel executions. The government, and Lord Salisbury in particular, used the plot as a means to incriminate the Jesuits, though they had not been involved and had opposed it insofar as they knew about it. Garnet was among several guiltless Catholics who were executed.

The result of the debacle was to increase suspicion and sometimes hatred of Catholics, and to leave them worse off than they had been before. It strengthened the visceral anti-Catholicism that has never been far below the surface in what is still an officially Protestant state, where the monarch cannot be a Catholic. In mainland Britain, which has become a highly secular society, such prejudice is not often overt now, though I suspect it unconsciously feeds the widespread resistance to further integration into the largely Catholic European Union. But in Northern Ireland, where religion is taken very seriously and where the seventeenth century seems as close as yesterday, hatred of Catholicism is a powerful force among Protestant Unionists and a major barrier to agreement with the Catholic and nationalist community. The Reverend Ian Paisley, M.P., a religious and political leader with many followers in Ulster, believes that the Catholic church is not a Christian body at all, an opinion which would have been eagerly echoed in England when the Gunpowder plotters were on trial. That disastrous event left a far worse legacy than the pleasant spectacle of fireworks and bonfires in the darkness of November.

Bernard Bergonzi writes from England.