HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-01-23T11:09:00.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: How to build a radical: what the Gunpowder Plot can teach us about extremism today
items: The gunpowder plot: everything you wanted to know
items: The letter that betrayed the gunpowder plotters
items: Remember remember the 5th of November: why Bonfire Night is a 400-year-old political hot potato
items: A very short history of bonfire night
items: Why did the 1605 gunpowder plot fail? 9 big questions about the conspiracy to blow up parliament
items: Anne of Denmark: a killer queen?
items: Alternate history: what if… the gunpowder plot had succeeded?
items: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot: everything you need to know
items: The Gunpowder Plot

How to build a radical: what the Gunpowder Plot can teach us about extremism today
type: item
date: 2025-01-23T11:09:00.000Z
creator: Lucy Worsley
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Catholic
subject: Stuart kings and queens
description: The experiences that shaped Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot co-conspirators into violent extremists seem all too familiar today. Lucy Worsley tells a story of religious clashes, state-sanctioned torture and comrades-in-arms willing to die for the cause
encoded: Towards the end of 1605, a man was being interrogated in a smallish building deep within the fortress of the Tower of London. It was here, in the most secure place in Britain, that the state dealt with its enemies. This particular enemy of the state was named Guy Fawkes. The records of that interrogation are today among the treasures of the National Archives, and going there to film them for the new series of Lucy Worsley Investigates was an unbelievable thrill. It’s evident that a secretary recorded Fawkes’s words, and that the conspirator was asked to sign his name to verify that the record was accurate. On one page, his signature is clear and confident: Guido Fawkes. Two days later, though, his name is no more than the faintest of scrawls. Historians generally agree that this difference is because, in the time between scribbling the two signatures, he’d been tortured and had lost the use of his hands. A few weeks later, he would also lose his life. Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder Plot conspirators It’s quite extraordinary to think that, 400 years later, this tale of violence has morphed into an annual occasion for family-friendly fun. The reason for lighting bonfires and fireworks on the fifth of November is now largely forgotten. Technically, we’re celebrating the foiling of a plot against King James VI & I, planned by Catholic extremists whom many would call terrorists. Read more | Remember remember the 5th of November: why Bonfire Night is a 400-year-old political hot potato If you step off a London Underground train at Charing Cross, you can admire an enormous tiled image of the gunpowder plotters that takes up the whole height of the platform wall. Seen by thousands of commuters, tourists and schoolkids on a London day out, the image of the conspirators – with their tall hats, flowing locks and furtive body language – makes them look like a rather stylish rock band. But with violence and religious extremism wreaking havoc round the globe today, it seems timely …

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The gunpowder plot: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2022-11-06T09:51:07.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: John Cooper tackles listener questions on the infamous plot to blow up parliament on 5 November 1605
encoded: What drove a group of plotters to attempt to blow up the king on 5 November 1605? To what extent did the conspiracy sour relations between Protestants and Catholics? And why do we continue to be so fascinated by this extraordinary episode today? Speaking with Spencer Mizen, John Cooper answers listener questions about the gunpowder plot. Watch | John Cooper answers: What was the Gunpowder Plot? View Green Video on the source website

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The letter that betrayed the gunpowder plotters
type: item
date: 2022-11-01T10:20:57.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: Who wrote the words that prevented Guy Fawkes from lighting the fuse? Daniel Hahn rereads the letter that betrayed the 1605 plotters...
encoded: "My Lord out of the love I bear to some of your friends I have a care of your preservation therefore I would advise you as you tender your life to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time and think not slightly of this advertisement but retire yourself into your country where you may expect the event in safety for though there be no appearance of any stir yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them this council is not to be condemned because it may do you good and can do you no harm for the danger is passed as soon as you have burned the letter and I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it to whose holy protection I commend you." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2017/10/GettyImages-588890593-6108be8-e1667231894937.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="Anonymous letter written to Lord Monteagle" title="Facsimile of the anonymous letter written to Lord Monteagle with which it was possible to foil the conspiracy of the powders. The catholic conspiracy was designed by Robert Catesby with the aid of the military Guy Fawkes, to eliminate the protestant King James I and explode the House of Lords the same day of his inauguration. Manuscript, November 5, 1605. (Photo by Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images)." /> It’s not much to look at – a scrap of paper with a few quick lines, unsigned. It’s nothing grand or formal, there’s no seal or signature flourish; just 160 words or so, handwritten, on a yellowed page, a little smaller than A4. But though it’s barely known today, document SP 14 / 216 (2) has, arguably, more mystery and more immediacy than anything else in the vast National Archives collection, and is the trigger for one of the most engaging hypotheticals in British history: what if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? The Monteagle Letter takes its popular name from William Par…

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Remember remember the 5th of November: why Bonfire Night is a 400-year-old political hot potato
type: item
date: 2021-11-04T14:23:27.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: Ahead of Bonfire Night, which marks the anniversary of the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, historian James Sharpe explores the significance of the Fifth of November...
encoded: Numerous accounts of the Gunpowder Plot have been written, and its story told and re-told many times. But the story of the changes in how this failed act of terrorism has been remembered over the centuries remains virtually unknown. For if Gunpowder Plot itself has a history, so do the rituals of the Fifth of November. Reconstructing that history shows how the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot has frequently been an occasion for political contestation. This story begins in January 1606 when Parliament, whose planned opening on the previous 5 November had been so rudely interrupted, finally met. Both houses readily responded to a suggestion that some measure should be taken for commemorating this horrifying instance of Catholic perfidy and God’s intervention in preserving England. The result was “An Act for a Public Thanksgiving to Almighty God every Year on the Fifth Day of November”. This act was not repealed until 1859, and it was the incorporation of this annual service of public thanksgiving in the Church of England’s Prayer Book which, more than anything, ensured the survival of the Fifth of November as a national festival. Listen | Historians Hannah Greig and John Cooper, consultants on the BBC drama Gunpowder, explore the story of the 1605 attempt to blow up the king and parliament How was Fifth of November celebrated in the 17th century? We know comparatively little about how the Fifth was celebrated in the early 17th-century. Churchwardens’ accounts from a wide geographical scatter of parishes record disbursements for bell-ringers and for wood for bonfires. Some cities enjoyed more elaborate celebrations, while a stream of Fifth of November sermons survive. These sermons demonstrate how the memory of Gunpowder Plot was constantly evolving. They invariably contained a powerful anti-Catholic message, but they also located the discovery of the plot firmly in a providentialist model of history, a model which emphasised God’s continual interventions to save Pr…

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A very short history of bonfire night
type: item
date: 2021-11-04T14:23:00.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: Bonfire night, also known as Guy Fawkes Night, takes place every year on 5 November. It marks the anniversary of the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, in which 13 men including Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up the House of Parliament in London. But how have people marked the occasion through history? Historian Justin Pollard brings you the facts...
encoded: No one was more delighted by the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot than James VI and I, who had narrowly avoided becoming the first king to sit on a rocket-propelled throne. So he allowed bonfires to be lit to celebrate, provided they were “without any danger or disorder”. A few months later parliament passed the Observance of November 5th Act, effectively making the celebration compulsory. How you celebrated remained up to you (as long as you went to church). In Canterbury in 1607 they set off 106 pounds of gunpowder, giving a hint of things to come. Listen | Historians Hannah Greig and John Cooper, consultants on the BBC drama Gunpowder, explore the story of the 1605 attempt to blow up the king and parliament By the late 17th century festivities were getting a shade rowdy, as Londoners took to stopping coaches and demanding beer money, and throughout the 18th century its popularity grew mainly with the burgeoning urban poor. Their children discovered a new way of turning a profit on the night, getting a ‘penny for the Guy’ – an effigy-burning habit started in 1625 when Charles I married a Catholic, inspiring the immolation of papal images. Remember remember the 5th of November: read more about how Bonfire Night evolved from plot to party The rowdiness also continued. This ‘tradition’ dates from at least the 1790s when 4 November is recorded as ‘Mischief Night’ – a time for pranks such as putting treacle on door handles and swapping around garden gates. By the 19th century this was getting a bit boisterous. In Guildford they regularly attacked the magistrate’s house and, in 1864, a policeman was killed. By March 1859 the government had repealed the 1606 Act. The Guildford mob was controlled, and the violence of the evening re-directed at the poor old Guy. Not that he was necessarily Guy Fawkes. What if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? Dr John Cooper explores what might have happened next Ever since 1831, when an enthusiastic Exeter crowd burnt an effigy of their new b…

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Why did the 1605 gunpowder plot fail? 9 big questions about the conspiracy to blow up parliament
type: item
date: 2021-11-04T14:20:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: John Cooper and Hannah Greig, historical advisors on the 2017 BBC drama Gunpowder, answer the biggest questions on the Catholic conspiracy to obliterate king and parliament in 1605...
encoded: Was Guy Fawkes the brains behind the gunpowder plot? Guy Fawkes may have been the man charged with lighting the fuse to the gunpowder in the Palace of Westminster but he wasn’t the leader of the gunpowder plot – and was far from a lone wolf. There were 13 plotters in all – many drawn from elite English families – and the conspiracy’s masterminds were Robert Catesby and his cousin Thomas Wintour. Catesby was already under suspicion, as a Catholic and a supporter of the Earl of Essex’s failed rebellion against Elizabeth I in 1601. Fawkes, on the other hand, was unknown to the authorities, and that’s one of the main reasons he was given such a critical role in the plot. Posing as a servant, he was able to gain access to the Palace of Westminster and, with the help of his co-conspirators, cart in the 36 barrels of gunpowder that he intended to explode under King James VI and I’s feet. Listen | Historians Hannah Greig and John Cooper, consultants on the BBC drama Gunpowder, explore the story of the 1605 attempt to blow up the king and parliament The great irony of Guy Fawkes’s life is that it began in a conventional and respected Protestant family – he was the son of a Church of England official – but ended with an infamous attempt to take out the political establishment in the name of the Catholic faith. Fawkes was born in York in 1570, in a house a stone’s throw from York Minster. He might have become a merchant like his grandfather, but when his father died in 1579, Fawkes went to live with his mother’s new husband, a committed Catholic. On reaching adulthood, he sold his small inheritance and went to fight on the continent for the forces of Catholic Spain. A school friend, who became a Jesuit priest, described Fawkes as religiously devout, loyal to his friends, and “highly skilled in matters of war” – exactly what the gunpowder plotters were looking for. Watch | Dr John Cooper answers: What was the Gunpowder Plot? View Green Video on the source website Why did the co…

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Anne of Denmark: a killer queen?
type: item
date: 2021-08-11T04:07:00.000Z
creator: Tracy Borman
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: Anne of Denmark was wed as a teenager to the fiercely Protestant James VI (and later I), but had strong Catholic sympathies. As the state of her marriage deteriorated, Tracy Borman asks, could Anne have been a "great patron" behind the gunpowder plot?
encoded: In July 1603, not long after his arrival in London, King James VI and I dispatched the spy and adventurer Sir Anthony Standen to Italy so that he might spread the news of James’s accession to the English throne. What should have been a straightforward mission backfired spectacularly. During Standen’s meeting at the Vatican, Pope Clement VIII gave him a rosary and asked him to present it to the new king’s wife, Anne of Denmark. Anne’s Catholic sympathies had already stirred up trouble during her years in Scotland. Although she outwardly conformed to her husband’s reformism, it was rumoured that she had secretly converted to Catholicism several years before James ascended the English throne. When Standen presented Anne with the pope’s gift, the king flew into a rage and ordered his envoy to the Tower. The queen pretended indifference, but privately worked for Standen’s release. The controversy eventually died down, and Anne resumed her outwardly conformist behaviour. But she had certainly not relinquished her Catholic beliefs. They would become her chief source of comfort during the turbulent years of her husband’s reign in England, during which her relationship with James steadily deteriorated. They also gave her a sympathy with her husband’s increasingly discontented Catholic subjects – one that may have led her to support one of the most shocking terror plots in British history. No dumb blonde Anne of Denmark is not one of our most famous queen consorts. Traditionally, she has been either overlooked by historians or dismissed – by unnamed sources – as “anonymous”, “an uninteresting woman” lacking in intellect and influence. She has even been described as a “dumb blonde” who failed to captivate her more intelligent and cultured husband. More recent scholarship has proved such claims to be erroneous. Anne was culturally more sophisticated than James, and she was an active patron of music, art and architecture in both Scotland and England. Neither can she be blamed fo…

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Alternate history: what if… the gunpowder plot had succeeded?
type: item
date: 2020-11-03T04:05:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: Dr John Cooper, a specialist in early modern history at the University of York, speculates about what would have happened if Guy Fawkes had succeeded in blowing up parliament in 1605
encoded: The 1605 gunpowder plot to assassinate James VI and I and destroy the English parliament might seem to be a pretty unlikely sort of conspiracy: the action of a handful of desperate men with next to no chance of success. Catholics were under constant surveillance from the security services, their houses raided and their priests imprisoned and executed. The ringleader Robert Catesby, played by Kit Harington in the BBC drama Gunpowder, was already a marked man for his involvement in the Essex rebellion in 1601 [a rebellion led by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, against the regime of Elizabeth I]. A lot depended on Guy Fawkes, who was outside the inner core of the plotters and was a convert rather than a cradle Catholic. How could such a small band, with its own internal tensions and suspicions, hope to bring down the government when so many previous conspiracies had failed? Listen | Historians Hannah Greig and John Cooper, consultants on the BBC drama Gunpowder, explore the story of the 1605 attempt to blow up the king and parliament And yet the gunpowder plot came frighteningly close to dismembering the entire structure of monarchy, church and state in one spectacular strike. Government propagandists worked hard to conceal this fact, assimilating the plot into a long list of failed Catholic uprisings since Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth I. But it could all have been so different, and James’s government knew it. The significance of the barrels stacked in the cellar under the House of Lords was missed in the first security sweep of the palace. It wasn’t until a second search that 18 hundredweight of gunpowder was discovered under a pile of firewood. According to the Jesuit priest Oswald Tesimond, who had been at school with Guy Fawkes and wrote an account of the plot, Fawkes was arrested carrying three fuses to prime the powder. A shaded lantern with a candle stood ready to supply the flame. Destruction and devastation If the plot had run as intended, the dest…

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Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot: everything you need to know
type: item
date: 2019-11-05T09:05:13.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Family and parenting
description: Every year on 5 November people mark the anniversary of the failure of the gunpowder plot, in which 13 men plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London in the hope of killing the Protestant king, James I and VI. But how much is known about Guy Fawkes, the conspirator most closely associated with the foiled scheme? Here we bring you the facts…
encoded: Who was Guy Fawkes? Born: c.April 1570 in York Died: 31 January 1606 in Westminster, London Remembered for: Conspiring against James VI and I and planning to blow up the House of Lords. Every year on 5 November people mark the anniversary of the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. Family: Guy Fawkes’s father, Edward Fawkes, worked for the Church of England, and his mother was named Edith. In 1568, before Guy was born, Edith gave birth to a daughter who died several weeks later. Fawkes had two sisters who lived into adulthood, named Anne and Elizabeth. Guy Fawkes’s father died when he was a child, and after this his mother remarried. Fawkes’s stepfather was named Dionis Bainbrigge. His life: The exact date of Guy Fawkes’s birth is unknown, yet there are records that he was baptised on 16 April 1570 at St Michael le Belfrey church in York. Despite his parents being Protestants, Fawkes’s mother remarried after his father’s death in 1579, and Fawkes became influenced by his stepfather’s Catholic practices. Despite it being a crime to be a Catholic during Elizabeth I’s reign, Fawkes converted to Catholicism during his teenage years. Fawkes attended St Peter’s School in York. After leaving school, he found a position in the household of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu, and his successor Anthony-Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount Montagu. In 1592, Fawkes sailed overseas to join the Catholic Spanish army, which was fighting the Protestant Dutch forces over the control of the Netherlands. By 1603, Fawkes had risen through the ranks of the Spanish military and was recommended for a promotion to captain. It was during his time abroad that Fawkes adopted the Italian name 'Guido', and he developed a great knowledge of the use of gunpowder. In 1603, Fawkes travelled to Spain and petitioned the Catholic king, Philip III, to wage war against England and the new Protestant king, James VI and I. However, Philip declined Fawkes’s petition. What was Guy Fawkes' involvement in the 1605 gunpowde…

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The Gunpowder Plot
type: item
date: 2017-10-19T14:33:47.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
description: Hannah Greig and John Cooper explore the story of the 1605 attempt to blow up the king and parliament
encoded: Historians Hannah Greig and John Cooper, who are consultants on the new BBC drama Gunpowder, explore the story of the 1605 attempt to blow up the king and parliament. Plus they reveal the challenges involved in recreating the events for the small screen.

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