News from Friends of the City Churches

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 shocked Jacobean London as much in its potential as much as the last decades’ bombs have alarmed us in their realisation. The scenario at least is familiar to us; 400 years ago, it was a terrible revelation that a handful of conspirators could plant 36 barrels of gunpowder in the cellars of Westminster, and come literally within striking distance of the throng assembled for the opening of Parliament. In the event, Guy Fawkes was caught red-handed on the eve of the fatal day, and the conspiracy unravelled, not without drama as four men were shot in a raid on a safe house, and eight were publicly hung, drawn and quartered – four at Westminster, and four in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a prospect unthinkable to us, who remember these events with bonfires and fireworks.

Yet conspiracies fuelled the Jacobean imagination as much as our own, driving the action of history plays and nurturing an intelligence service quite as sinister as any today, for all the limitations of contemporary surveillance technology. But the plots were real enough, with the Essex rebellion of 1601 chief among those in recent memory, and still fascinating enough to inspire a recent television dramatisation. Indeed, the overthrow of plots and enemies of the state was then a matter of public celebration, in which the church bells played a key role. The parish records of St. Botolph Bishopsgate, for example, include a payment for bread and drink for the bell ringers "when Anthony Babington and the rest of the Traitors were taken" in 1585. Their conspiracy fatally implicated Mary, Queen of Scots, whose execution in 1587 occasioned bell-ringing across the land: the records of St. Botolph Aldgate are among the many to record that event. (Even for this conspicuous display of patriotism, monuments in that church handsomely commemorate Thomas, Lord Darcy, and Sir Nicholas Carew, both of whom were executed for conspiracies against Henry VIII.)

The Gunpowder Plot also inspired much preaching; indeed, the only one of John Donne’s 160 sermons to survive in his own hand is a Gunpowder Sermon delivered in 1622, shortly before he came to St. Dunstan-in-the-West, a church with its own sad story to add. The mother and sister of John Felton were at service there in 1628 when news came that he had assassinated the Duke of Buckingham; they fainted, as well they might, for he was hanged at Tyburn. For all their present calm, City churches remind us that London has often seen, and weathered, dangerous times.

Friends of the City Churches, St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6DN tel 020 7626 1555

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