Raking through the embers
David Crane
It is difficult to put a finger on the reason, but there has always seemed something particularly dismal about the Gunpowder Plot. There is obviously a lot to be said for any conspiracy that can erase the Stuart line from English history at a blow, but from Robert Catesby and the rest of the old Essex mob to the wretched James everyone on both sides of the plot is so profoundly unsympathetic that it is hard to care at this distance what happened to any of them.
A romantic’s case — largely rooted in Aubrey — might be made for Sir Everard Digby, but, as James Travers’s beautifully illustrated presentation of the archival sources underlines, the single real exception is the broken and sadly compromised figure of the Jesuit, Henry Garnet. From the first days of the English Counterreformation there had always been men and women ready to die for their faith, but it seems a particularly bitter irony that the one priest who never saw himself as martyr material — and still goes unrecognised by the Catholic church — should be brought to the scaffold by a brand of self-regarding and callous fanaticism that was opposed to everything his English mission had stood for.
It is not simply a matter of the cast, though, because as David Cannadine points out in his introduction to Gunpowder Plots — and note that ‘Plots’, a sure sign that there is not much left to be said about the plot itself — the real problem with the whole business is that nothing actually happened. There is no doubt that there was enough powder down in John Whynniard’s cellar to destroy a great chunk of Westminster if it had gone up, but given the conspirators’ staggering carelessness and ineptitude, it is hard not to feel that 5 November 1605 was the one Bonfire Night in the last 400 years when nobody was ever going to get hurt.
Though it would certainly have been a different story, if Clive Ponting’s breezy history of Gunpowder is any guide, if the Jesuit missions out in the Far East could have co-opted Chinese advisers to their Counter-reformation. Ponting’s book opens with a brief account of the failure of the plot, but that is merely a prelude to a narrative that sets out to demonstrate how infinitely superior in technical, administrative, cultural, political, industrial and moral terms the Chinese have always been to a brute and ignorant Europe that is probably fairly represented by a bunch of malignant incompetents incapable of causing a bang in a cellar full of gunpowder.
There is an anti-European vein to Ponting’s book that can grow tedious at times, and it exhibits the usual strains of single-issue histories, but it is a good story and covers a huge sweep of ground. The accidental discovery of gunpowder owes its origins to the Chinese search for an elixir of immortality, and Ponting traces its military development and influence as it spread from the Far East into the Islamic world, Europe, the Americas and finally back to China on the receiving end of the naval guns of a brutal and greedy Britain during the 19th-century Opium Wars.
Four hundred years might not count as immortality, but it is not a bad start, and even if there is little new to say, there was never any chance that publishers were going to allow the anniversary to pass unexploited. After Antonia Fraser’s The Gunpowder Plot there is clearly no immediate room for another blockbuster, but between Ponting’s Gunpowder, James Travers’s Gunpowder: The Players Behind the Plot and James Sharpe’s history of Bonfire Night celebrations just about every aspect of the story that can be raked over has been. There still seems, though, something slightly half-hearted about the offerings, and save for an essay on anti-Catholicism by Justin Champion that breathes all the sweet reasonableness of a 17th-century pamphlet war, this is particularly true of Gunpowder Plots. David Cannadine does his best to work up the significance of the subject in his short introduction, but in spite of a ‘counter-factual’ squib by Antonia Fraser exploring a successful outcome — the future ‘Winter Queen’ reigns as Elizabeth II and Charles as King of Scotland — a good, brief narrative of the plot from Pauline Croft, and a reassuring blast at the folklorists from David Cressy, the collection as a whole has something of the trendy gloom of an academic conference about it.
It seems almost impossible to keep 9/11 out of 16thand 17th-century history at the moment (it gets in on page one of Gunpowder Plots), but at least the inevitable comparisons with contemporary terrorism are sensitively handled by James Sharpe. Even at 200 pages Remember, Remember is probably a good 30 pages longer than it needs to be, but as a history of the plot and its shifting place in the national consciousness — a symbol of Providential Deliverance, a pretext for anti-Catholicism, a ‘customary expression of rough plebeian festivities’, ‘an occasion for upper-class hooliganism’, or just an annual opportunity to torch the town of Lewes — it is both lively and scholarly.
It offers a perfect illustration, too, of David Cressy’s contention that the business of history is to ‘keep memory honest’, but the same rules clearly don’t apply to historical fiction. I could not give away the plot of The Firemaster’s Mistress even if I wanted to, but if an antidote to the academic conference is needed, then Christie Dickason’s cocktail of whores, pimps, codpieces, maidenheads, bear-baiters and spies — with the occasional injection of porn fed in like an automatic painkiller for the terminally bored — might be just the thing. Her story, the dust-jacket claims, is that ‘rare’ thing, an ‘historical novel utterly congruent with history and successful as a work of fiction’. Four hundred years after Equivocation took Henry Garnet to the scaffold it is nice to know that the doctrine is still alive and well.
Gunpowder: The Players Behind the Plot by James Travers (The National Archives, £19.99, pp. 192, ISBN 1903365864) Gunpowder by Clive Ponting (Chatto, £16.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0701177527) Gunpowder Plots introduced by David Cannadine (Allen Lane, £14.99, pp. 188, ISBN 0713998865) Remember, Remember the Fifth of November by James Sharpe (Profile Books, £15.99, pp. 230, ISBN 1861977271) The Firemaster’s Mistress by Christie Dickason (Harper Collins £12.99, pp. 513, ISBN 0007180691)
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