Stuart

Kit Harington as plotter Robert Catesby in the BBC drama 'Gunpowder'. (BBC/Kudos)

What if the gunpowder plot had succeeded?

Guy Fawkes and the men behind the gunpowder plot. Guy Fawkes, best known of the conspirators, is third from the right. (Print Collector/Getty Images)

Why the gunpowder plot went up in smoke

Guy Fawkes was a conspirator in the gunpowder plot to destroy the Houses of Parliament, c1606. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Life of the week: Guy Fawkes

Fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day c1800. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty)

A very short history of bonfire night

Circus performer Otto Witte, who in 1912 successfully pretended to be the new king of Albania. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

14 weird things that have happened in November through history

Trick photograph. (Photo by LM Melander and Brothers) entitled 'The Haunted Lane,' depicts a pair of men terrified by a female ghost, mid-to-late 19th century. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

5 historic hauntings for Halloween

A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, c1588. (Photo by ACTIVE MUSEUM / Alamy Stock Photo)

“The rankest traitor in all England?” Walter Ralegh on trial

Illustration from Dante's ‘Inferno’, the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem ‘Divine Comedy’, depicting thieves tormented in hell by serpents. Engraving by Gustave Dore, 1885. (Photo by Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images)

General ancient history

A brief history of the afterlife

Brutus begs his companion to kill him in a 1756 painting by Giacomo Zampa. Having been decisively defeated in battle by Mark Antony and Octavian – later to rule Rome as emperor Augustus – Brutus felt he had little choice but to commit suicide. (Photo by Alfredo Dagli Orti-Art Resource, NY)

7 things that happened in October through history

A portrait of Henry VIII with Prince Edward, his son by his third wife, Jane Seymour. If the future Henry IX had survived, there may have been no cause for Henry to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn in 1533, says Amy Licence. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

6 royal births that changed the world (or could have)

Diana, Princess Of Wales, Prince William And Prince Harry visit Thorpe Park amusement park. (Photo by Julian Parker/UK Press via Getty Images)

How to raise a royal… with Tracy Borman

Between 1613 and 1754, a legal loophole meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’. (Photo by Getty Images)

10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London

Blenheim Palace in a c1880 print from ‘A Series of Picturesque Views of Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland’, edited by Reverend FO Morris, Volume I, William Mackenzie, London. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

10 things you might not know about Blenheim Palace – ‘the real Downton Abbey’

An illustration of a group of supposed witches being beaten in front of King James VI and I, the most notorious royal witch-hunter of all time, c1610. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A brief history of witches by Suzannah Lipscomb