Two contrasting views on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 - by the same person

‘… History has to be rewritten in each generation: each new act in the human drama necessarily shifts our attitude towards the earlier acts. So there is a dialectic of continuity and change not only in the seventeenth century itself, but also in our awareness of the seventeenth century. We ourselves are shaped by the past; but from our vantage point in the present we are continually reshaping the past which shapes us’ [Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in 17th Century England (1974), p. 284]

 A few weeks ago I was given the honour of delivering the annual A.L. Morton memorial lecture. Arthur Leslie Morton (1903–1987) was a Cambridge-educated Marxist historian and poet who joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Unlike several prominent intellectuals, he remained a Party member despite the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). Indeed, during the Cold War Morton delivered invited lectures at Moscow (1954) and East Berlin (1956) as well as at the Soviet-backed World Peace Council (1957). He also visited Bulgaria (1957) and Czechoslovakia.

Arthur Leslie Morton photographed in 1983

 His first book, A People’s History of England (1938) has been translated into more than a dozen languages. To date it has sold more than an estimated 100,000 copies. Morton, moreover, published on subjects such as The English Utopia (1952); the English visionary poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1958); and the Welsh philanthropist and social reformer Robert Owen (1962). He also edited selected works by the English textile designer, poet and artist William Morris (1973, 1977) as well as by the Levellers (1975). In addition, Morton wrote extensively on topics ranging from Arthurian Legends, the Peasants Revolt of 1381, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and The World of the Ranters (1970) to the Monmouth Rebellion and Glorious Revolution; not to mention The British Labour Movement (1956) and Chartism. What is more, Morton wrote essays on, among others, Jonathan Swift, the Brontë sisters, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot. Indeed, even a critic of Marxist historical writing conceded that ‘time and again during his career’, Morton ‘was to anticipate the cultural readings of historians and literary critics on the Left’.

 Here, in anticipation of Bonfire Night Celebrations on 5 November (I will be going to watch with my family at Lewes), I want to revisit two short pieces by Morton on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The first, entitled ‘Treason, old and modern’ and just over 1000 words in length, was published in the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker on 4 November 1949. The second, called ‘Famous gunpowder plot – or infamous ploy’ appeared on 5 November 1969 in the Morning Star (renamed successor of the Daily Worker). Written twenty years apart, the two articles could not be more different in their interpretation of events. The important question is why, and to what extent, did Morton change his mind? More broadly, under what circumstances do historians alter their views about the past and what implications does this have for our understanding of certain aspects of the past knowing that it is, to varying degrees, connected with ever changing present-day concerns? In Morton’s case, the answer was provided in correspondence between two leading Communist Party members, the academics Margot Heinemann (1913–1992) and Willie Thompson (1939–2023), who jointly edited a posthumously published selection of Morton’s writings History and the Imagination (1990). Simply put, writing in December 1988 – that is less than a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall – Thompson maintained that these ‘two contrasting pieces on Guy Fawkes’ reflected the ‘political stance of the [British Communist] Party at the time they were written and express a position which we wouldn’t now endorse’. Indeed:

The first, written in the late forties when the Catholic Church was being mobilised as an auxiliary in the Cold War, is vehemently hostile to the plotters; the second, written many years later in a very different climate with a Marxist/Christian dialogue in process, is sympathetic to their fate and receptive to the possibility that they were framed.

Ultimately, and perhaps for this very reason, neither article was selected for inclusion in History and the Imagination.

Preparations for Guy Fawkes Night at Battle Abbey, Sussex, November 1945

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Treason, old and modern

A.L. Morton in the Daily Worker (4 November 1949)

‘For I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot’.

 So runs the old rhyme. The extraordinary thing is that it has remained so true even down to our own day.

 Guy Fawkes Day, which we celebrate tomorrow, has, I think, become part of our national life because it celebrated the climax and the defeat of a great reactionary campaign, the international campaign of the Roman Church against English independence and the liberties of Englishmen.

 Its memory remained because the danger remained because it remains today: the power of that Church may be less, but its alliance with the most reactionary elements of world capitalism makes it still very great.

 The battle now being fought in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia is in some respects the same battle that our forefathers fought and won in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

 The Church in the Middle Ages not only exercised complete religious authority throughout Europe. It was also a vast international organisation, a super-State whose activities touched every aspect of human life.

 In every country it was the greatest landowner; its clergy everywhere occupied the key posts in the State machinery; it controlled education; it had its own courts of law and it extracted each year vast sums by various forms of graft and taxation which were sent abroad to Rome.

 As trade and industry grew, so these interferences and exactions grew and became more burdensome.

 The Reformation, therefore, in England, as in other lands, was not just a change of church doctrine – it was a movement to throw off this burden which made national development impossible.

 What we need to remember is that in many European countries this Reformation either never happened or it was stifled or defeated.

 In those countries the Roman Church still keeps much of the power which in England it lost 400 years ago.

 This is true especially of Spain and Portugal and of countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which were once part of the great Hapsburg Empire.

 In England it was soon found that certain measures were needed to end the Pope’s power.

 These included the confiscation of much of the land and property of the Church, the stopping of Papal taxation and appointments of clergy, and, finally, the transformation of the Church into a national body completely controlled by the State; that is, first by the Crown and later by Parliament.

 Similar steps were taken in other countries where the Reformation triumphed.

 Naturally, the Church did not accept this limitation of its power to exploit, any more than it does today. At the Council of Trent it reorganised itself into an aggressive fighting force.

 The Inquisition was set to work, civil wars were systematically fomented, the Jesuits were formed as a spearhead, encouraging treason and justifying assassination if these worked for the glory of God.

 Under Elizabeth the struggle took a new form. The Pope declared Elizabeth deposed as a heretic and called on all her subjects to revolt.

 Foreign-trained priests, Jesuits and others, swarmed in, working underground, preaching treason and organising a Fifth Column to work with reaction from outside.

 For, just as today the Vatican works for and with American and British imperialism in the crusade against Communism, so then the Pope called upon Spain and the Empire to impose Catholicism and feudal reaction by armed intervention.

 In these circumstances, every Catholic became a possible danger and every priest an actual one. Catholic worship was prohibited. Catholic laymen declared incapable of holding any offices of State and priests, especially Jesuits, were hunted down without mercy and hanged when caught.

 Rough measures! But the war with Spain and the sending of the Armada proved them necessary.

 They saved England from the horrors of the Inquisition such as were experienced in the Netherlands, or of prolonged and savage civil wars like those which devastated Germany and France.

 When Elizabeth smashed the Jesuit Fifth Column and when the Gunpowder Plotters were exterminated, the Roman Church naturally screamed about persecution and the suppression of religion.

 Yet, in fact, religion had no more to do with the matter than it has in Hungary today: it was then, as it is now, a story of a nation defending itself and its liberties against a political attack launched under a mask of religion.

 What is really striking, I suggest, is the mildness and humanity with which democracy in Poland or Hungary defends itself, as compared with what it was found necessary to do here in England.

 In England, priests were hunted down – in the new democracies they receive State salaries.

 In England it became a criminal offence to say or hear Mass or even to stay away from the official church services – in the new democracies the Constitution specifically guarantees freedom of worship to all and makes it an offence for anyone to interfere with the enjoyment of this freedom.

 This comparison might be extended almost indefinitely.

 I do not make it to condemn the methods we then employed. Those methods were necessary under the conditions of the time, and this is recognised today.

 What is important is to expose the humbug and hypocrisy of the Roman Church, which throughout the ages has been a persecuting Church whenever it has had the power, in posing as the defender of religious freedom.

 “The Day” of the Catholic Church in Britain came very near on November 5, 1605, as Guy Fawkes stood waiting by his powder barrels, and it was the nation’s sense of the greatness of the deliverance which made this day so long remembered.

 Certainly it would be absurd to suggest that all Catholics are reactionary today – thousands in England, millions in Poland and Hungary, are ready to join in the advance of Socialism.

 But it is true that the Roman Church as an organisation is just as reactionary today as it was three centuries ago.

 And just as it was then ready to exploit the religious loyalties of millions of plain people for political reaction, so it is today.’

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Children standing around a bonfire in November 1971

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Famous gunpowder plot – or infamous ploy

A.L. Morton in the Morning Star (5 November 1969)

 There are not really so very many characters in English history of whom one can be quite certain that everyone knows something – Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Victoria, the list soon begins to exhaust itself.

 But one name is a must for any such list, that of Guy Fawkes, and it is kept alive by one of the oldest folk festivals on record.

 And of them all, he is probably the one we SEE the most clearly. With his cloak, his tall hat, his little pointed beard and his lanthorn, he is as familiar as Father Christmas, and seems to come from the same country.

 But how much do we really know about this hero, in whose honour we send up our rockets and light our bonfires tonight?

Tradition

 There is, of course, a traditional tale to which most of us were introduced at school.

 How a group of Catholic gentlemen, smarting under laws which imposed severe hardships upon them, planned to blow King, Lords and Commons sky-high on the day Parliament was to open.

 How a cellar was hired under the House of Lords, barrels of gunpowder secreted, with Fawkes as the man with the match.

 Then, at the eleventh hour, a cryptic letter was sent to Lord Monteagle, warning him to stay away because “they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them.”

 This letter deciphered by the kingly wisdom of James I, put the authorities on guard, the conspirators were killed or captured and executed, the Plot failed, and we celebrate this providential deliverance every November 5 ever since.

 This, indeed, is the substance of the official version, circulated at the time by James’ painstaking Minister, Robert Cecil. But was it the truth?

Hard to take

 Or was it, like so many official versions from that day to this, what a Government with some pretty murky doings to hide wanted the people to believe? Such questions have exercised historians for a long time.

 On the face of it the story is a bit hard to take. The cellar was not much of a cellar, more of a wide-open semi-basement in a densely packed neighbourhood.

 Could all those powder barrels have been kept a secret for so long? And that Mystery Letter, so dramatic, so nicely redounding to the credit of the King. These and similar difficulties have often been raised.

 And now comes Father Francis Edwards, S.J., in Guy Fawkes: The Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot? (Rupert Hart-Davis, 50s.), with the theory (not really altogether new) that the Plot never existed at all.

Smear

 According to his interpretation, the Government wanted an excuse to blacken the Catholics and tighten the laws against them. For this, a scare and a smear were needed.

 Consequently, Robert Cecil, the King’s “little beagle” – and no doubt at all he was as crafty as they come – got hold of a number of the more disreputable young Catholic gentry (and ex-Catholic and pseudo-Catholic, the distinctions not always being very clear in those confused times), either by blackmail or straight bribery.

 Among these, the Plot was contrived with full Government support, and efforts made to compromise some leading Jesuits and genuine Catholic gentry. The so-called conspirators, of course, were promised rewards and a safe getaway.

Double-crossed

 Then, at the right time, the Plot was “discovered”, and Cecil double-crossed his dupes, all of whom were disposed of in ways that prevented them from giving away the game. A number of innocent Catholics whom the Government wanted out of the way were conveniently executed on faked-up evidence.

 Father Edwards makes a substantial case. Certainly Cecil and the Government had long been adept in the use of spies and agents – provocateurs. Certainly some of the conspirators, notably Catesby and the sinister Thomas Percy, had pretty dubious histories.

 Certainly the Government profited politically. And certainly many of the alleged details of the Plot seem quite crazy.

 We have here two rival theories about the Gunpowder Plot: the truth is so deeply buried that we are not likely to discover it.

Mad plots

 At the moment I do not feel I can go all the way with Father Edwards. As a Jesuit he is naturally, and indeed properly, jealous for the reputation of his Order, but I am not convinced that all the Jesuits of this time were quite so innocent as he supposes.

 Similarly, mad as the Plot appears, this was an age of mad plots, an age in which anyone entering upon a conspiracy seemed as often as not to take leave of all sense and judgment.

 My guess, for what little it is worth, would be that there was a real Plot; that it was penetrated from the start by Government agents, and may, indeed, have been initiated by them; that its progress was carefully watched and its “discovery” sprung at the most politically profitable moment.

 And this, after all, would be exactly in line with what we know to have been the common practice of a great many British Governments in a great many subsequent crises of our history.

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 On this coming 5 November there will be a new guest post ‘Gunpowder Plot in perspective’ by Professor Michael Questier.