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ELEVEN

Union and Disunion

‘BLOW YOU SCOTCH BEGGARS BACK TO YOUR NATIVE MOUNTAINS’

By the beginning of November 1605, the whole royal family, bar Elizabeth, came together in London for the state opening of the next session of Parliament. Taken as a family the Stuarts had proved to be an act more than able to step into Elizabeth I’s shoes – which partly accounted for Catesby, Throckmorton, Fawkes and their discontented Catholic friends’ decision to kill them all, except the girl. The rest dead, they could forcibly convert Princess Elizabeth to Catholicism, set her up as a puppet, and offer her to a Catholic prince. With most MPs and Lords also dead, they could establish a Catholic-dominated Parliament.

The opening of Parliament was scheduled for 6 November 1605. The day before, acting on a tip-off, a search party revealed Guy Fawkes in a cellar under the great hall at Westminster nursing thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.

Prince Henry and his parents were ‘a dangerous disease’, Fawkes said. It required ‘a desperate remedy’ to ‘blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains’. King James had betrayed them. In Scotland he let them believe he would ease the penal laws against Catholicism when he succeeded to the throne of England. He had not done it. Racist anti-Unionism overlapped with religious loathing.