James did succeed, and he did want to accept loyal Catholics, but he was limited by both the need to appease the anti-Catholic majority of his subjects and his own desire for the Catholics to remain a definite minority. Even so, his first government was still more liberal to the Catholics than his predecessor: his pardoning of recusant fines in 1604 saw them fall from a total of £7000 in 1603 to just £1500, but this wasn't the complete toleration many believed was coming and disillusionment began to spread among Catholics. James wasn’t living up to his own vague claims, let alone those of Percy and Watson. In addition, the hopes of the previous decade, when a childless monarch was dying and Catholics could pray for one of a number of Catholic candidates to succeed, had vanished. James had a large, growing and distinctly Protestant brood of children.
In 1603 some of the extreme Catholic rebels (including Father Watson), together with politicians who had now fallen out of favour, made two attempts to change things. These were the Bye and Main plots and, though they failed, their existence led James to question the 'relaxed' approach he was taking and many feared that, when he called his first Parliament, the fines for recusancy would be raised; the cycle of backlash, repression and backlash appeared to be beginning again. To make matters worse for the émigrés, Spain agreed a peace with James and ceased threatening an invasion in support of 'regime change'. This was enough for one group of plotters to make new plans involving gunpowder...
Although disillusionment with James was the trigger, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was born from this background, a long heritage of plots, executions, spies, repressive laws and struggles between Catholics and Protestant government. As Pauline Croft says, "Perhaps we should see the Gunpowder Plot as the last violent act of England’s turbulent Reformation." (P. Croft, 'The Gunpowder Plot' in History Review 52, p. 14)
