Raking through the embers

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 Counter- reformation 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.