Gunpowder Plot - Aftermath

Aftermath

See also: Gunpowder Plot in popular culture

Greater freedom for Roman Catholics to worship as they chose seemed unlikely in 1604, but the discovery of such a wide-ranging conspiracy, the capture of those involved, and the subsequent trials, led Parliament to consider introducing new anti-Catholic legislation. In the summer of 1606, laws against recusancy were strengthened; the Popish Recusants Act returned England to the Elizabethan system of fines and restrictions, introduced a sacramental test, and an Oath of Allegiance, requiring Catholics to abjure as a "heresy" the doctrine that "princes excommunicated by the Pope could be deposed or assassinated". Catholic Emancipation took another 200 years, but many important and loyal Catholics retained high office during King James I's reign. Although there was no "golden time" of "toleration" of Catholics, which Father Garnet had hoped for, James's reign was nevertheless a period of relative leniency for Catholics, and few were subject to prosecution.

The playwright William Shakespeare had already used the family history of Northumberland's family in his Henry IV series of plays, and the events of the Gunpowder Plot seem to have featured alongside the earlier Gowrie conspiracy in Macbeth, written some time between 1603 and 1607. Interest in the demonic was heightened by the Gunpowder Plot. The King had become engaged in the great debate about other-worldly powers in writing his Daemonology in 1597, before he became King of England as well as Scotland. Inversions seen in such lines as "fair is foul and foul is fair" are used frequently, and another possible reference to the plot relates to the use of equivocation; Garnett's A Treatise of Equivocation was found on one of the plotters. Another writer influenced by the plot was John Milton, who in 1626 wrote what one commentator has called a "critically vexing poem", In Quintum Novembris. Reflecting "partisan public sentiment on an English-Protestant national holiday", in the published editions of 1645 and 1673 the poem is preceded by five epigrams on the subject of the Gunpowder Plot, apparently written by Milton in preparation for the larger work. The plot may also have influenced his later work, Paradise Lost.

Faith, here's an equivocator,
that could swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven

Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 3

The Gunpowder Plot was commemorated for years by special sermons and other public acts, such as the ringing of church bells. It added to an increasingly full calendar of Protestant celebrations that contributed to the national and religious life of 17th-century England, and has evolved into the Bonfire Night of today. In What If the Gunpowder Plot Had Succeeded? historian Ronald Hutton considered the events which might have followed a successful implementation of the plot, and the destruction of the House of Lords and all those within it. He concluded that a severe backlash against suspected Catholics would have followed, and that without foreign assistance a successful rebellion would have been unlikely; despite differing religious convictions, most Englishmen were loyal to the institution of the monarchy. England might have become a more "Puritan absolute monarchy", as "existed in Sweden, Denmark, Saxony, and Prussia in the seventeenth century", rather than following the path of parliamentary and civil reform that it did.