Antonia Fraser on the Gunpowder Plot [30min]
Not only was this month’s programme (Sunday 6 November, Thursday 10 November, 4pm, Radio 4) rather topical, at least in the sense that it coincided (almost) with Bonfire Night, though its subject matter is 400 years old, but we found ourselves talking to Antonia Fraser on the very day when her household had been turned upside down by the news that Harold Pinter had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
She and her husband work in different parts of their house -- indeed he labours away in an office at the bottom of the garden -- and they were going about their business, he no doubt pondering how to manage a long silence in the next play, she on the telephone, when the lightning struck. Lady Antonia got a message saying that he wanted to speak to her; she said she was rather irritated at having to interrupt a phone conversation with a friend, and wondered what it could be."I’ve won the Nobel Prize" came the rather unusual answer.
They hadn’t had a hint and got the news twenty minutes before it was to be announced to the world. We rather wondered whether she’d be able to fight through the paparazzi who’d gathered outside their home: we know that Bookclub is a celebrated programme, but our guests aren’t usually pursued down the street by bevvies of snappers. She made it, in rather fine fettle, as you might expect.
We were talking about The Gunpowder Plot, her wonderfully rich history of the Catesby-Fawkes affair in 1605. It has all the qualities which she has exhibited in her history writing, both the narrative accounts of events and biography -- a feeling for character and for context. The detail is meticulous, but there’s also a novelist’s eye and ear at work. She feels the flow of events with great sensitivity.
In her case, of course, there was also a certain passion. She is a Catholic convert, like her parents (the late Lord Longford and his wife Elizabeth) and has a deep attraction to the bloody history of post-Reformation Catholicism, which was such a violent assault on those who believed that they were defending not only the"true" faith but the loyalty of England itself. As a schoolgirl she was fascinated by the story of the plotters who wanted to blow up James VI and I (I’m afraid we Scots were always taught to put it that way round) and Parliament (such as it was) along with him. The background was bloody indeed, the suppression of Catholics since the excommunication of Elizabeth I having turned into routine oppression which meant that any householder whose property was used for a prohibited Mass could be strung up on the spot. The priests’ holes -- often tiny little places -- were closely guarded in the great houses, and an underground network of dissenters tried to keep the practice of the faith alive, in the knowledge that they did so at the risk of their lives.
The story of the plot -- the network of supporters abroad, the deceptions to keep it secret, the rivalries inside the group, the blunders and bungles that always attach themselves to such enterprises -- is told with tremendous relish, and wonderful detail. In particular, Antonia Fraser reveals the importance of the women in the story. It was they who kept the old religion going, and managed the priests’ holes -- which Antonia first heard about, and saw, when she was evacuated from London during the Second World War. She thinks she has now visited every one in England.
James himself was a politician of a sort that we can recognise, mixing a degree of altruism with a ruthless self-interest and a certain cynical cast of mind."The wisest fool in Christendom" he used to be described to us at school, and he’s a fine centrepiece in this story. Antonia is fascinated by him particularly because he is one of the prime examples for her theory that many of the best politicians have the unhappiest childhoods. (I think we’ll leave that theme there, safely tucked away in the seventeenth century...).
It was a rattling good discussion, greatly enlivened by some hair-raising stories from Sussex, where they take Bonfire Night very seriously indeed. You may know that in Lewes, all kinds of effigies go up -- various Popes being favourites over the years. It’s all rather dramatic, but a matter of tradition rather than sectarian over-indulgence. Perhaps not surprisingly, Antonia is not, she says, a great one for effigy-burning.
In her book, the period comes startlingly to life.