A tolerant bigot
Busher went on to argue that persecution drives people into hypocrisy and harms trade, and he reminded James that Jews, Christians and Turks are treated alike in Constantinople without any quarrel between them. Yet even Busher held that people whose religion was tainted with treason should not be allowed to meet, or to live within about fifteen kilometers of London. He probably had in mind those who put the pope above the king.
James was, on the whole, a bigot who was nevertheless lenient toward other people's beliefs. He allowed Sunday sports on condition that people had first attended church, which offended the Puritans. He also wished to ease the laws against Catholics. Against the wishes of Robert Cecil and the council, he held back enforcement of the laws passed against dissenters from the established church, and he let Catholic priests enter England and say Mass in private houses. In his philosophical way he hoped to reconcile Catholics and Protestants. But when Catholic numbers grew thanks to his kindness, and the Puritans complained of his laxity, he revived and extended Elizabeth's anti-Catholic laws (1604). Anyone sending a child abroad to a Catholic school was fined 100 pounds, according to the book. Catholic missionaries were banished and preaching their faith was forbidden. Those who refused to attend Anglican services paid 20 pounds a month, and failure to pay meant seizure of their land and goods, including the livestock grazing on their property.
The plot
At this point some half-mad Catholics concluded that nothing remained but to kill their enemies. Robert Catesby, whose father had been jailed under Elizabeth for opposing the state church and who had himself joined a rising against the queen, conceived the Gunpowder Plot. The aim was to blow up the Palace of Westminster when the king, the royal family, the lords and the Commons gathered there for the opening of parliament. Catesby told his plan to Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright and Guy Fawkes. The five swore to keep the secret and sealed their oath by receiving the sacrament from a Jesuit, John Gerard. They then rented a house beside the palace, spent sixteen hours a day digging a passage from one cellar to another, and stored thirty boxes of powder (the book's wording) directly beneath the hall where the House of Lords would sit.
Repeated postponements of parliament left the scheme hanging in danger, and the conspirators held their nerve for a year and a half. At times they doubted the morality of the act, since many people other than the guilty, in Catholic eyes, would die. To calm them, Catesby asked Henry Garnett, the leader of the English Jesuits, whether it was lawful to take part in a war in which many non-combatants were killed. Garnett answered that the prophets of every religion would say yes, but he warned that any plot against the lives of officeholders would only make the sufferings of English Catholics worse. He told the pope and the Jesuit general of his doubts, and both ordered him to keep clear of political plots and to prevent any action against the government. Meanwhile Catesby confessed his part in the plot to another Jesuit, Oswald Tesimond (called Greenway), and added that the Catholics were about to rise across England. Greenway passed the matter on to Garnett. The two Jesuits hesitated between warning the government and keeping silent. They chose silence, but resolved to do everything they could to talk the conspirators out of it.
Discovery and punishment
To quiet his partners' scruples, Catesby arranged that on the morning of the session the Catholic members of parliament would be called away by urgent messages. A few days before the opening, one of the minor conspirators warned a friend, Lord Monteagle. Monteagle told Cecil, and Cecil told the king. Officers entered the cellars, found Fawkes beside the powder, and arrested him (4 November 1605). The next day Fawkes admitted his purpose of blowing up parliament but, under interrogation, refused to name his associates.
The others gave themselves away by taking up arms and trying to flee, and when pursued they fought. Catesby, Percy and Wright were wounded and died, and several of their followers were captured. At their trial the prisoners admitted taking part in the plot, but nothing would make them name any Jesuit priest. Fawkes and three others were brought from the Tower to the parliament yard and executed there (27 January 1606; the book's date). In England the fifth of November is still kept as Guy Fawkes Day, with bonfires, fireworks and effigies of Fawkes carried through the streets.
Garnett's trial
Gerard and Greenway escaped to the Continent, but Garnett and another Jesuit, Oldcorne, were taken. In the Tower they talked together, thinking themselves unheard, but spies reported their words. Questioned separately, Garnett denied what had been said, while Oldcorne admitted it. Garnett then confessed that he had lied. Worn out, he said he had known of the plot, but that since Greenway had learned of it in confession and he himself had learned it from Greenway in another confession, he had felt unable to reveal it, though he had done all he could to stop it. He was condemned not only for taking part in the plot but for concealing it. The king hesitated for seven weeks before signing the sentence. Garnett had been wrongly told that Greenway was a prisoner in the Tower and sent him a letter. When the letter was seized and he was asked whether he had written to Greenway, he denied it, and when shown the letter, he said that a man may use ambiguous words to save his life. He was executed on 3 May 1606.
The new laws
Parliament now felt entitled to tighten the anti-Catholic laws (1606). Catholics were barred from practicing medicine and law and from acting as guardians or executors, and they could not travel more than eight kilometers from home. They were also required to take an oath denying the pope's right to depose secular rulers and calling that claim heretical, damnable and against true religion. Pope Paul V forbade the oath. Most English Catholics obeyed him, though a considerable minority swore it. In 1606 six Catholic priests were put to death for refusing the oath and for saying Mass, and between 1607 and 1618 sixteen more met the same fate. Several hundred priests and a thousand lay Catholics were jailed. Despite the threats, Jesuits kept entering England as before: at least 68 were there in 1615 and 284 in 1623, according to the book. Some also reached Scotland, where one of them, John Ogilvie, was executed in 1615. The old church had once done such things to others, and now the same fate fell on it, as new ideas and new powers arose.