a ship which was to serve for no other purpose than to cross over to Flanders at the very moment of the explosion. This was to give news of the deed to the rulers of Christendom, to forestall adverse reports put out by enemies and to present the facts in the best light possible. 7
When their deed “spoke,” as it were, they wanted to ensure that it reflected their perspective, not their enemy’s.
But King James and the other intended victims of the plot would not or could not comprehend what they were hearing. To them, the plot was literally unspeakable, unthinkable, and indescribable. On November 9, 1605, four scant days after the plot was uncovered, James gave a speech before Parliament declaring that he had not the words to describe what the plotters intended. James had endured attempted assassination before, and he understood it. The Gunpowder Plot, however, was something else entirely: 8
But in this, which did so lately fall out, and which was a destruction prepared not for me alone, but for you all that are here present, and wherein no ranke, age, nor sexe should have bene spared; This was not a crying sinne of blood, as the former [plot to assassinate James], but it may well be called a roaring, nay a thundring sinne of fire and brimstone, from the which GOD hath so miraculously delivered us all. What can I speak of it? And therefore I must for horror say with the Poet, Vox faucibus haeret [My voice sticks in my throat] … the like was never either heard or read.
James was not alone in invoking the rhetoric of absolute originality leading to the failure of speech and language. The next day, November 10, the Bishop of Rochester, William Barlow, at the government’s behest, delivered a sermon at Paul’s Cross in which he also grasped for words beyond his reach. Barlow described the Plot as “a production without a match, … a Treason without Parallel; a slaughter beyonde comparison.” 9 Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, uses nearly the same phrase in a letter dated November 14, 1605 to Sir Thomas Edmondes: “By my last letters you have received the particulars of that horrible attempt which hath no example in no ages.” 10
Doubtless, James, Barlow, and Salisbury are right when they claim that the Gunpowder Plot represented a new form of political violence. Political assassinations were hardly unknown at the time. Both Elizabeth and James endured several attempts on their lives; Henry III and Henry IV of France were assassinated; and the religious wars in France demonstrated for all to see how doctrinal fanaticism could lead to mass murder, the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre in 1572 being only the best known of many such events. Yet there was truly something new in the attempt to “decapitate” England, and consequently, the “unspeakability” of the plot became its defining rhetorical trope.
In his indictment of the plotters, Sir Edward Phillips, “his Majesties Sergeant at Law,” begins his brief by admitting that the matter may be: 11
Treason; but of such horror, and monstrous nature, that before now,
The Tongue of man never delivered.
The Ear of man never heard.
The Heart of man never conceited.
Nor the malice of hellish or earthly devil ever practiced.
Attorney-General Coke began his prosecution by stressing how this treason is so novel and so terrible, that, to use Kristiaan Versluys’s phrase, the Plot constitutes “a limit event that shatters the symbolic resources of the culture”: 12
Now touching the offences themselves, they are so exorbitant and transcendent, and aggregated of so many bloody and fearefull crimes, as they cannot be aggravated by any inference, argument or circumstance whatsoever, and that in three respects: First, because this offense is Prima impressionis, and therefore sine Nomine, without any name which might bee adaquatum sufficient to expresse it, given by any Legist, that ever made or writ of any Lawes. For the highest Treason that all they could imagine, they called it only Crimen lasae Majestatis, the violating of the Majesty of the Prince. But this Treason doth want an apt name.
A year later, two neo-Latin epics would also describe the plot as something “unheard of” (“inaudito”), a deed so nefarious that not even the most creatively evil nations the world has known could conceive of it:
of which neither the Carthaginians infamous in the name of perfidy nor the cruel Scyth...