There was even talk that he was just waiting to become King so he could do a Blair and convert to Catholicism. But their hopes for better days were based on the facts that James was both the son of Mary, who had died a Catholic, and also that he was married to a Catholic. Life for Catholics in England was pretty well intolerable. And let’s face it, there was plenty of scope for improvement. When the old virgin finally died and was replaced by James I there was a general view (among the Catholics, at least) that life for England’s Catholics was likely to improve. They found it just as hard to understand why he spent so much time chasing male Courtesans around his various palaces. James is perhaps my favourite Royal of all time – a king with more numbers than your average king being both James I and James VI, he also spoke with so broad Scottish accent that the English struggled to understand what he was saying.

On a near endless list of jobs with appalling OH&S standards in Elizabethan England, Catholic Priest surely was in the top ten list of most dangerous. Given her near absolute power, all this was hardly likely to be good news for the Catholics living in England. You know, the Catholic Church had not exactly done all that much to endear itself to her. She was considered a devil, not only for being a woman ruler (clearly considered a job that could only be done with the right set of genitalia intact – a view that was so wide spread that even Elizabeth thought of herself as an honorary man), but also a bastard and therefore out of contention for what was basically a holy office from birth – she had even been excommunicated from the Church.

A Pope had even named her in what we would probably call today a fatwa – making it virtually the religious responsibility of Catholics to try to kill her. You can understand why the Queen might have been a bit annoyed with the Catholics – she might well have won the Spanish Armada, but even the joy of winning would have to have been tempered by the fact that these guys literally wanted her dead and were prepared to go to quite an extreme to assure that. For much of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the repression meted out against Catholics increased almost annually.

The Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser