No. 14, October 2007

The Powder Treason

  Click the image to enlarge it As November the 5th approaches, it seems appropriate to choose as our monthly offering The Powder Treason, a very large sheet (635mm x 385mm) engraved by Michael Droeshout at some unknown date during the reign of James I. Hind noted that the central representation of James in Parliament derives from a print engraved by Elstrack and issued in 1610, which thus provides the terminus post quem. 1 A side-verse seems to refer to other assassination attempts that James has survived thanks to divine protection, including Gowries Treason—which occurred in Scotland in 1600, before he was made King of England—and French bluddy knife, which if a particular attempt on the part of some Frenchman to stab him, might well provide a narrower dating bracket. It is perhaps more probable, however, that it alludes to the assassination of James’s brother king, Henri IV of France, by the monk Ravaillac in 1610—though, if so, sadly this gets us no further! Antony Griffiths suggests the most likely date for The Powder Treason is the early 1620s, ‘when it would have formed part of the anti-Catholic propaganda of the time of the Spanish marriage’, 2 that is the proposed marriage of the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I, to the Spanish King's sister, the Infanta Maria. Somewhat humiliatingly, the party returned to England in early October 1623 to wild rejoicing from the fearful Protestant populace, exulting undisguisedly at the Prince's failure to charm the Spanish princess, who reportedly said she would rather enter a nunnery than marry Charles (but in fact, went on to marry her cousin, King Ferdinand of Hungary, later Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor).

Two small cutaway scenes show Guy Fawkes and the cellars of Parliament filled with kegs of gunpowder. Beneath these and flanked by two further scenes—the plotters being sworn in a Sacrament of secrecie by a priest, and their execution (The reward of Trechery)—are portraits of the twelve conspirators arranged, like a parodic Last Supper, either side of an oval portrait of Henry Garnet Archprest princeps proditoru[m]. The plotters are labelled The Popes salt peeter Saints or the true pictures, of false Trators, having faces seemly, personages Comly, but there lives heathnish, practiss develish, ther deeds damnable, there ends miserable. These words were, in fact, taken from the closing lines of a set of broadsides entitled Princeps Proditorum: The popes Darling: or, a guide to his twelve Apostles, only the first of which is extant (surviving in the Department of Prints & Drawings of the British Museum). 3 The series was, however, copied out in full by Thomas Trevilian in both his 1608 and 1616 manuscripts, though, extraordinarily, appears not to be known to historians of the Gunpowder Plot. 4 Princeps Proditorum is undated but must have appeared before 3 May 1607, as it refers to the execution of Garnet as having occurred last third day of May, and maybe as soon as a few days after the event—a ballad entitled The shamefull Downefall of the popes Kingdome conteyninge the lyfe and deathe of Stephen [sic] Garnett the popes Cheife preiste in England uses the same phrasing, yet was entered in the Stationers Registers just two days after his execution on 3 May 1606. 5 Princeps Proditorum is the very earliest English publication to illustrate the Plot, for, mysteriously—as if the nation and its artists were still in shock—no surviving English print concerning the plot can be dated before The Papists Powder Treason of 1612. 6 Not only did the half-length portrait of Garnet, holding a document labelled The Popes Pardon, appear on the initial Princeps Proditorum broadside, but—to judge from Trevilian’s copies—the remaining twelve conspirators also appeared in pairs on the further broadsides which formed part of the set.

At the bottom of the present Powder Treason print, beneath the plotters, who are disposed in an arc with Garnet at its apex, is a hell-mouth—portrayed in the medieval fashion as the mouth of a gaping beast—in which a devil brandishes what is probably intended for that same alleged advance papal pardon, rather in the manner of a letter of introduction, before the resident fiends, the plotters behind him being labelled Ignations conclave, that is, a conclave of Jesuits, or Ignatians, followers of Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Order of Jesus (it is doubtless mere co-incidence that Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave, a scurrilous anti-Jesuit polemic, appeared in 1611). Suggestively, in a letter to Tobie Matthew of 1607/8, Francis Bacon referred, in passing, to this last Powder Treason; fit to be tabled and pictured in the chambers of meditation, as another hell above the ground. 7

British Museum 1852, 1009. 248. Dimensions of original: 635 mm x 385 mm

Footnotes

1.
A.M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (3 vols., Cambridge, 1952-64), vol. 2, p. 342. Back to context...
2.
Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603-89 (London, 1998), p. 154. Back to context...
3.
British Museum 1886, 1410.1. This is a single leaf broadside, and the implication is that the six comparably composed pages which follow in Trevilian’s book (see below) were comparable items issued as a set, though the original format of the text which appears on facsimile page 272 is unclear. Back to context...
4.
Nicolas Barker (ed.), The Great Book of Sir Thomas Trevilian (2 vols., London, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 9, 142 (see also pp. 44, 112); vol. 2, facsimile pages 265-72. Back to context...
5.
Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers 1554-1640 (5 vols., London, 1875-84; reprinted Gloucester, Mass., 1967), vol. 3 , p. 138b. Back to context...
6.
F.G.Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Satirical and Personal Subjects, vol. 1 (London, 1870), p. 24. For the current print, see ibid., pp. 36-7. Back to context...
7.
James Spedding (ed.), Letters & Life of Francis Bacon (7 vols., London, 1861-74), vol. 4, p. 10. Back to context...