Undergraduate Research at the Folger: Picturing the Plotters

“There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (1.4, lines 13-14). So says Duncan, King of Scotland, not long before his trusted subject Macbeth kills him in an act of regicide. Threats lie everywhere and no one can be safely held above suspicion, as Duncan is too late to learn. When Macbeth was first performed in 1606, such concerns were not simply the content of compelling drama but also matters of serious political affairs. In November of the previous year, a plot by a group of conspirators to kill the king, his court, and all of Parliament in a gunpowder explosion was uncovered. The conspirators, led by discontented Catholic landowner Robert Catesby, placed gunpowder in the vaults underneath the House of Lords with the intent of setting off an explosion while King James I gave the traditional speech to open Parliament. Following the discovery of a letter warning a member of Parliament to stay away on the day of the planned explosion, however, conspirator Guy Fawkes was discovered in the vaults and the plan unraveled.¹

News of the Gunpowder Plot reverberated across England and beyond. This print located at the Folger Shakespeare Library, depicting eight of the conspirators, includes the only contemporary engraving of the conspirators.² At the top of the print we see the main conspirators. Those visible in the engraving are Robert Catesby, primary leader of the plot; Guy Fawkes, the first conspirator to be discovered; other central plotters Thomas Percy, Thomas Wintour, and John Wright; Wintour and Wright’s brothers Robert and Christopher; and Catesby’s servant Thomas Bates. Most of the conspirators are crowded within the page margins, huddled together in discussion, while Robert Wintour, turned away from the group, passes Bates a letter. Here, the plotters do not appear to be either social outcasts or ashamed criminals, instead displaying a “social ease” in one another’s presence.³

The conspirators’ objective was to sow chaos while decimating state leadership, allowing them to stage an uprising which would result in the restoration of Catholic rule to England.⁴ The plot followed decades of suppression of Catholicism, and occurred a few short years after the accession of James I to the throne of England. James’ rule was met with hopes of greater toleration for Catholics, but, while the new king initially held a more conciliatory attitude, he also maintained oppressive laws.⁵ A 1604 manuscript petition from English Catholics to James I in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library displays the mixed optimism and frustration of Catholics in the first years of James’ reign (X.d.332). The Gunpowder Plot conspirators emerged from this atmosphere of disillusionment.

The apparent ease of the conspirators shown in the top half of the print stands in stark contrast to the brutal executions seen in the images below. The conspirators were hung, drawn, and quartered, a grisly method of execution in which the condemned were dragged behind horses before being hanged almost to the point of death, beheaded, and their body parts dismembered.⁶ To the left, we see three plotters dragged on the ground  pulled by horses, while in the middle panel one of the conspirators is beheaded, surrounded by a crowd of watching men. In the final panel to the right, eight heads on spikes loom above the ground. The result is an unsettling image of the brutal consequences of plotting against the state. Still, the print depicts these events with more detachment than cruelty, highlighting the commonplace nature of violence in Shakespeare’s day. Heads on spikes were not an unknown sight.

This engraving, with text in German, Latin, and French, was most likely produced in continental Europe. The artist de Passe, trained in Antwerp, is not known to have ever traveled to England.⁷ The print’s continental origins and multilingualism points to an international interest in the failed conspiracy. The near possibility of the entire English government being extinguished would have been shocking across Europe. With conflict between Catholics and Protestants extended across much of Western and Northern Europe, this likely felt too familiar a concern to ignore. 

While in Macbeth Duncan speaks of an inability to rely on outward appearances, an engraving of a contemporary event by its very nature will seek to communicate political allegiances through imagery. The conspirators’ appearance, combined with the accompanying description, evokes a sense of guilt and suspicion. Their faces appear almost indistinguishable from one another, suggesting that these pictures were not true portraits but rather a kind of stock image.⁸ These are not the shifting faces of individuals with unassured loyalties, but instead an image of treason and betrayal itself. Almost immediately after the plot was revealed, the state actively reinforced narratives of the plot which reaffirmed the legitimacy of James I’s rule and Protestant hegemony.⁹ This print advertising the event was one instrument of propaganda celebrating the state’s “deliverance” from its plotted destruction by gunpowder. Even though this internationally printed image was most likely not commissioned by the state itself, by spreading reports of the plotters’ dangerous plans and subsequent failure it contributed to the narrative of a Protestant state in Britain embattled by radical Catholic conspiracies.

Fear and paranoia ran deep in early seventeenth century Britain. Anti-Catholicism existed alongside anxieties surrounding witchcraft, with many Protestants developing an association between the former and what they viewed as Catholic superstition.¹⁰ Shakespeare clearly reflected this environment of fear and paranoia in Macbeth. Just as the Gunpowder Plot conspirators aimed to take control of the state through a violent and disruptive act, Macbeth claims rule over Scotland through an unsettling act of murder. A trio of witches, whose identities remain ambiguous throughout the play, instigate him to the act of regicide. Afterwards, Macbeth himself descends into ever-worsening paranoia, seeing threats to his rule all around him. All in all, inversions of the “natural order” and a lack of stable identities provoke chaos and destruction in Macbeth, reflecting the fears of Jacobean England. A similar dynamic plays out in de Passe’s print, where the would-be assassins hatch a plot to annihilate the most powerful figures of the English state but, like Macbeth, ultimately meet a tragic fate themselves.