Gunpowder Plot

• 1. Introduction

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  The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 nearly erased the English government in a single morning. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were hidden beneath the House of Lords, enough by one estimate to reduce the building to rubble. The man guarding them, a soldier named Guy Fawkes, was discovered late on the night of the 4th of November with a lantern, a pocket watch, and slow matches ready to light the fuse. Had the plan succeeded, the explosion would have killed the King, his family, most of the Protestant aristocracy, the senior judges of the English legal system, and the bishops of the Church of England, all gathered for the State Opening of Parliament. A nine-year-old girl, Princess Elizabeth, was to be installed in her father's place as a puppet queen. What drove a group of English Catholics to attempt one of history's most audacious acts of political violence? And why, in the end, did it fall apart before a single fuse was lit?

• 2. A Faith Under Siege

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  Between 1532 and 1540, King Henry VIII severed the English Church from Rome, setting off decades of religious tension that shaped everything that followed. Queen Elizabeth I's Elizabethan Religious Settlement required anyone in public or church office to swear allegiance to the monarch as head of both Church and state. Refusal carried severe consequences: fines for recusancy, imprisonment for repeat offenders, and execution for priests who continued to practise in secret. Catholicism was pushed to the margins, its practice concentrated in remote areas far from London. By 1605, there were 5,560 people convicted of recusancy, of whom 112 were landowners. The wealthiest who refused to attend their parish church were fined £20 per month. Those of more moderate means paid two-thirds of their annual rental income. When James came to power, nearly £5,000 a year was being raised through these fines, a sum equivalent to almost £12 million by 2020 calculations. Priests faced death simply for being present on English soil, yet many continued ministering to their congregations in secret, sheltered by recusant families who built hidden passages and priest holes into their homes.

• 3. Catesby and His Circle

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  Robert Catesby, described by contemporaries as a good-looking man of about six feet who was athletic and a skilled swordsman, was the driving force behind the plot. He came from what was called "ancient, historic and distinguished lineage", and had already paid a steep price for political rebellion: after the failed Essex Revolt of 1601, Queen Elizabeth fined him 4,000 marks (equivalent to more than £6 million in 2008 terms), forcing him to sell his estate in Chastleton. In February 1604, Catesby gathered Thomas Wintour at his house in Lambeth and laid out his plan to blow up the House of Lords. Wintour was a competent scholar who spoke several languages and had fought in the Netherlands; his uncle had been executed for being a Catholic priest in 1586. Also present was John Wright, reputedly one of the best swordsmen of his day. Wintour agreed to join, perhaps persuaded by Catesby's rhetoric: "Let us give the attempt and where it faileth, pass no further." Wintour then travelled to Flanders, where he found Guy Fawkes, a committed Catholic with ten years of military experience fighting in the Spanish Netherlands. Fawkes had even been part of a 1603 delegation to the Spanish court that pleaded for an invasion of England. The final original member was Thomas Percy, Catesby's friend and John Wright's brother-in-law, a man who had converted to Catholicism and was described as a "serious" character who relied on "his sword and personal courage".

• 4. Barrels in the Dark

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  The five conspirators took their oath of secrecy in a private room at the Duck and Drake Inn, just off the Strand, on the 20th of May 1604, swearing on a prayer book before receiving the Eucharist from a priest who was, by coincidence, celebrating Mass in another room entirely. Percy's appointment to the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners gave him a plausible reason to maintain a property near Parliament. A building owned by Henry Ferrers, a tenant of John Whynniard, was chosen as their base. Fawkes took charge of it under the pseudonym "John Johnson", posing as Percy's servant. On the 25th of March 1605 the conspirators purchased the lease to an undercroft directly beneath the first-floor House of Lords. The space was unused and filthy, possibly once part of the palace's medieval kitchen, and its location was ideal. According to Fawkes, 20 barrels of gunpowder were brought in first, followed by 16 more on the 20th of July. The supply of gunpowder was theoretically controlled by the government but was easily obtained from illicit sources. By late August, Fawkes and Wintour discovered that the stockpiled gunpowder had decayed. They replaced it, concealing the barrels under piles of firewood and coal. A contested story held that the conspirators also spent weeks digging a tunnel toward the House of Lords, though no evidence of any such tunnel was ever found, and Fawkes did not confirm its existence until his fifth interrogation.

• 5. The Letter That Undid Everything

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  On the 26th of October 1605, a servant delivered a letter to the house of William Parker, 4th Baron Monteagle, in Hoxton, brought by a stranger on the road. The letter warned Monteagle to find an excuse to avoid Parliament, because "they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament; and yet they shall not see who hurts them." Monteagle immediately rode to Whitehall and handed the letter to Robert Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury. Catesby was told about the betrayal through Monteagle's servant Thomas Ward, who had family connections with the Wright brothers. Catesby suspected Francis Tresham, the last man admitted to the conspiracy, had written it. Tresham was a cousin to Catesby and the heir to a large fortune depleted by recusancy fines. He managed to convince Catesby he was innocent but urged them all to abandon the plot. Salisbury already had some sense that something was afoot before receiving the letter, but he elected to wait and let events unfold, wanting the King himself to appear to uncover the conspiracy. The King read the letter on the 1st of November and immediately seized on the word "blow", connecting it to an explosion like the one that had killed his own father, Lord Darnley, at Kirk o' Field in 1567. A first search of Parliament on the 4th of November, led by the Lord Chamberlain Thomas Howard, turned up Fawkes in the undercroft, who claimed the firewood there belonged to his master, Thomas Percy. That mention of Percy's name, already known to the authorities as a Catholic agitator, triggered a second and more thorough search that night.

• 6. Flight to Holbeche

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  Word of "John Johnson's" arrest spread rapidly. Most of the remaining conspirators fled northwest along Watling Street. Ambrose Rookwood, who had been recruited partly because of his stable of horses at Coldham Hall in Stanningfield, Suffolk, managed to cover 30 miles in two hours on a single horse, overtaking several of his colleagues before catching up with Catesby, John Wright, and Bates on the road. The fugitives reunited at Dunchurch before moving west toward Warwick. Meanwhile Catesby told Everard Digby, who had assembled a supposed hunting party there to prepare for Princess Elizabeth's capture, that the King and Salisbury were dead. The conspirators received almost no support from those they met along the way, including family members who were terrified of being associated with treason. At Holbeche House on the border of Staffordshire, desperate and exhausted, several of the men spread wet gunpowder in front of a fire to dry it. A spark landed in the powder and the resulting flames engulfed Catesby, Rookwood, Grant, and a man named Morgan. John Grant was blinded by the fire. On the morning of the 8th of November, Richard Walsh, Sheriff of Worcestershire, arrived at Holbeche House with a company of 200 men. Thomas Wintour was shot in the shoulder crossing the courtyard. John Wright was shot, then his brother Christopher, then Rookwood. Catesby and Percy were reportedly killed by a single lucky shot. Those who survived the stand were arrested on the spot.

• 7. Trial and Execution

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  Fawkes was taken to the Tower of London, where King James authorised torture. In a letter of the 6th of November, the King wrote that "the gentler tortours are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur", meaning extended by steps to the bottom depths. Fawkes may have been hung from the wall in manacles and was almost certainly subjected to the rack. His resolve broke on the 7th of November, and he confessed over the following two days. At trial on the 27th of January 1606 in Westminster Hall, the Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke argued at length that the Jesuits had invented the entire plot, and that it would always be known as the "Jesuit Treason". Everard Digby was the only conspirator who pleaded guilty. He argued that the King had reneged on promises of toleration for Catholics, and asked for death by the axe rather than hanging. Before the verdict he called out: "If I may but hear any of your lordships say, you forgive me, I shall go more cheerfully to the gallows." The response was: "God forgive you, and we do." On the 30th of January, Digby, Robert Wintour, John Grant, and Thomas Bates were dragged through the streets to St Paul's Churchyard and hanged, drawn and quartered. The following day, Thomas Wintour, Rookwood, Keyes, and Fawkes met the same fate in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, opposite the building they had planned to destroy. Fawkes, weakened by torture, managed to jump from the gallows and break his neck, avoiding the worst of the execution. Henry Garnet, the principal Jesuit of England, was tried at the Guildhall on the 28th of March 1606 and executed on the 3rd of May.

• 8. Bonfire Night and After

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  In January 1606, during the first sitting of Parliament after the plot, the Observance of the 5th of November Act 1605 was passed, making commemorative services an annual feature of English life. That act remained in force until 1859. The tradition of church bells and bonfires began shortly after the plot's discovery, with fireworks appearing in some of the earliest celebrations. Children in the weeks before the 5th would make "guys", effigies stuffed with old clothes and newspaper and fitted with grotesque masks, to be burnt on bonfires. These were paraded to collect money for fireworks. The word "guy", which originally meant an oddly dressed figure, expanded in the 20th and 21st centuries to mean any male person. In pre-revolutionary American colonies, according to biographer Esther Forbes, Guy Fawkes Day was a popular holiday; in Boston the "Pope Night" celebrations took on anti-authoritarian overtones and could grow so dangerous that many people stayed indoors. The plot also left a mark on English literature. William Shakespeare is thought to have drawn on both the Gunpowder Plot and the earlier Gowrie conspiracy in Macbeth, written between 1603 and 1607; Garnet's A Treatise of Equivocation was found on one of the plotters, and equivocation is a recurring theme in the play. John Milton wrote a poem about the plot in 1626, In Quintum Novembris, and the events may have shaped his later Paradise Lost. The cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament were leased to private individuals until 1678, when news of the Popish Plot prompted officials to begin searching them the day before each State Opening, a ritual that continues today.