The Succession, Bye and Main Plots of 1601-1603 (review)

This is, in effect, the second volume in Francis Edwards' overview, principally from printed sources, of the conspiracies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period leading up to the Gunpowder plot. This book's purpose is, in effect, to tell the story of James's accession through the series of alleged conspiracies that occurred in opposition to James's candidacy. In itself this is a valid and valuable approach. This is, however, a volume written with a specific agenda, derived from some of the polemics of specific Jesuits of the period, principally Robert Persons. Its intention is to prove yet further Edwards' thesis that the Gunpowder conspiracy was a fiction, a device invented and pursued by Sir Robert Cecil, in the sense that Cecil already had "form." This is a much-debated topic, and there are several quite entrenched positions associated with it. Edwards, it has to be said, is now in something of a minority here. There are real problems with an account of Cecil merely as a kind of universal spider, though this is not to say that he did not prove extremely effective in the furious maneuvering which preceded James VI's accession to the English throne.

The whole subject (sometimes referred to as plotterology) has, in fact, a tendency to look a little unreal. All too quickly, historical descriptions of this or that conspiracy seems to become bogged down in mind-numbing complexity and ever more unlikely narratives and apparently ridiculous detail. (It is almost inevitable that the none-too-stable Arbella Stuart, who figures prominently in some of the chapters here, would have employed an embroiderer called "old Freake.")

Nevertheless, it is clear that there is much to be said for an investigation of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century politics from the perspective of how contemporaries identified and described conspiracies. Edwards is in fact quite right that the official accounts of the plots exposed to the world by the late Elizabethan and early Stuart regimes cannot be taken merely at face value; or, at least, raise as many questions as they answer. And, indeed, John Bossy's extraordinarily brilliant recovery of the Throckmorton conspiracy (Under the Molehill [Yale University Press, 2001]) shows how intractable and unlikely sources can be mined in order to narrate the series of events leading up to the exposure of that particular attempt to advance Mary Stuart to the throne, and also to get as close as possible to what "really" happened, as opposed to what the regime claimed had happened. At the same time, it is useful to interrogate the rhetoric employed in both revelations and denials of plots. Any narrative of the period taken directly and without adequate context from official exposures of plots and plotting tends merely to reproduce the, on-the-surface, hysterical rendering of events pumped out by one faction or interest group against another. If one can get away from the idea that the discovery of plots (real and imagined) was merely and only an aspect of the machinations of an evil and persecutory regime, directed against the innocent, and instead read off from them aspects of the political culture of the period (taking just as seriously the allegations that there were puritan conspiracies against monarchical authority as well as Catholic ones), then we have a means of talking sensibly about the range of political meanings with which contemporaries invested Catholicism as well as a series of positions within the Church of England.