My review of The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605, by Antonia Fraser

The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605

by Antonia Fraser

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Whatever Lady Antonia Fraser wrote about - I'm sure I could read her shopping lists and be entertained - would be worth reading. The lady is perhaps my favourite mistress of this genre. Not simply erudite, eloquent and formidably well educated, she's genuinely talented. Such is the key to her success and longevity.

It came as no surprise, therefore, that what has to me been one of the most excruciatingly boring episodes in history to glean facts from, was here made gripping material that refused to be put down. Why couldn't we have had such reading at school? People can't help learning when drinking up such words.

It's unnecessary to outline here what the failed Gunpowder Plot was, with Guy Fawkes night such a culturally ingrained institution. What makes Fraser's history of its advent so coherent is, as always, her elaboration of the characters, their background, their motives, etc.

Just her broader insight into James I & VI's kingship was enough for this reader. His was never a time that resonated for me in other reading, yet here he is given life I had previously begged for in other works to gain just basic insight.

Callously indifferent to his mother's cruel fate, displaying not an ounce of filial loyalty, this maternally disdainful overly precious self-serving brat spent his Scottish days awaiting Elizabeth I's death. Baring a nauseatingly acquiescent grin from afar he anchored her favour as heir.

As if dancing, satin-shoed, on Gloriana's grave, he then minced brashly around her crumbling English palaces whose days of pomp and finery were gone before she lay cold. Ostentatiously bejewelled, in dusty ermine, swirling velvet, fluttering cloth of gold and ermine, he flirted audaciously with male favourites, in an unfathomable Scottish brogue. He stank. Behind him trailed a grubby, uncouth imported entourage that echoed his foreign tongue, stank just as badly and collectively got up everyone's nose. Yet James was impervious to the resulting courtly consternation. Not entirely facile, he was icily shrewd, calculating like his great great grandfather Henry VII. He also sponsored translation of the Bible named after him: the Authorised King James Version.

I still didn't warm to him though, but didn't need to.

It's astonishing that any son of so fascinating a legend as my favourite tragedienne, the martyred Mary, Queen of Scots, could have turned out so drab to eke out depth or meaning from! He would surely have been so reviled for his boringness alone; that in itself would justify the hatching of any plot. (In fact, this plot targeted the House of Lords rather than the king specifically. James's rule and its incidentals personified that target though.)

Contrasting with his predecessor Elizabeth I, her sister 'Bloody' Mary I and father Henry VIII, slithery James I lacked fire, conviction, had a spinelessness, a wateriness I find hard to get my teeth into. Yet Lady Fraser overrides this obstacle with all of her usual panache.

Guy Fawkes himself was little more interesting than King James, yet here we have all we need on him, fleshed out via 'that' satisfying Fraseresque treatment she is renowned and revered for.

The politics around the plot are, by any other account I've read, dry, monotonous and interminably convoluted, particularly for those not instinctively drawn to the Jacobean era. Not a patch on all things Tudor despite being immediately adjoined to its timeframe. Yet these politics, too, are here given context, explained patiently and meticulously. On this I knew I would be able to rely, having relished other such Fraser books. Like a child in a hearth I sat, glued, welcoming the magic of this storyteller's voice.

Like I said at the start, it wouldn't have mattered what it was about, it was always going to be special. It was, it is. I was finally able to learn things I didn't know about this fiasco, minus that dreaded textbook tedium that creeps into other accounts (oh woe, oh woe!).  

Recommended especially to those who, like this reader, need more than a dry old listing of dates and names to get through this done-to-death tale to broaden their knowledge.

(Would have given it 5 stars but knocked off a half for my undying dislike of all things James I & VI - give me his neurotic mother any day, or even his sleazy grandson Charles II - and another half for whoever chose that ludicrous e-cover art.)