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How to build a radical: what the Gunpowder Plot can teach us about extremism today
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
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 to revisit what might be mistaken for a cosy old story of plots and plotters. Because when we compare our knowledge of radicalisation in the modern world with what happened to Fawkes and his fellow conspirators, many similarities become clear. Perhaps because the name of Guy Fawkes is so well known today, many people don’t realise that he wasn’t the most significant of the conspirators. The plot’s mastermind was actually a Warwickshire gentleman called Robert Catesby, whose role has been rather overshadowed by the dramatic circumstances of Fawkes’s capture and subsequent torture. What the Charing Cross tube picture does do accurately is give the sense that the group felt a strong social connection – like a band of brothers, which some of them were, literally: among the conspirators were two sets of siblings, including Christopher and John Wright. Read more | Why did the 1605 gunpowder plot fail? 9 big questions about the conspiracy to blow up parliament They were among Fawkes’s fellow plotters who had known each other during their childhoods in the city of York. There, the Catholic faith was alive and well – and subject to intense persecution – in the later years of the reign of the Protestant queen Elizabeth I. Guy was himself baptised a Protestant in 1570 but in his teens, it seems, he embraced Catholicism with all the fervour of a convert. His journey towards radicalisation could have begun as early as 1586, when he may have witnessed the appalling public execution of a York woman, Margaret Clitherow. Having been caught sheltering priests of the outlawed Catholic faith, she was crushed to death with heavy weights. In the eyes of her fellow Catholics, her death turned Margaret into a martyr. A brown and shrivelled hand, purportedly one of Margaret’s, is venerated today in the Bar Convent in York as a holy relic. It seems likely, then, that Fawkes and the Wrights would have realised early on that life would not be easy for them unless they gave up on Catholicism – or on the government. Guy Fawkes: an extremist abroad In his early twenties, Fawkes made a big life change. He sold his possessions near York and travelled to mainland Europe to fight as a paid soldier for the Catholic cause. Many modern-day extremists make similar life choices. Learning the trade of warfare abroad, surrounded by young men with the same beliefs and removed from the calming influence of family and community at home, the world view of a soldier fighting in the name of faith often narrows to black and white. Jason Burke, The Guardian’s international security correspondent, knows all about this process. An extremist fighter, he explains, is ‘best’ trained over several weeks in a special camp. It’s vital to prevent the wannabe soldier from going home each evening to see mum. Read more | Guy Fawkes “is like a modern-day jihadist,” says counter-terrorism expert In Europe, Fawkes was soon on the payroll of Catholic Spain, learning skills that would, in time, make him attractive to the plotters. In particularly, he became familiar with gunpowder and explosions. Meanwhile, another young man was also being radicalised – Robert Catesby, whose idea it later was to blow up the House of Lords in order to kill the king, some of his family, his members of parliament and the whole seat of power. Catesby had long been dissatisfied with the way England was governed. Under Elizabeth, his family had paid the fines exacted for refusing to attend Protestant church services. More dangerously, he got himself caught up in the Essex Rebellion of 1601. This wasn’t specifically a Catholic plot but, rather, involved a grouping of disaffected people of various stripes who aimed to change the power constellations at court. That uprising was unsuccessful, and Catesby was forced to pay a huge fine for his part in it. Then, in 1603, Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland inherited her crown. It seems that Catesby had high hopes of the new regime. England under James VI & I The new king knew that his succession as James I of England might well be challenged – so, being a clever politician, he tried to appeal to a wide base of potential supporters in England, hinting strongly that he’d be more sympathetic than Elizabeth to those of his future subjects who were Catholics. After all, he had a Catholic wife, Anne of Denmark. When James came to the English throne, though, those who knew him best perhaps weren’t surprised to find that the hinted-at new policy of tolerance never materialised – quite the opposite, in fact. Catesby and other Catholics were chagrined to find the new king proclaiming in parliament that he was never going to tolerate their religion. Another staging post on the journey towards direct action was passed. Catesby did not know Guy Fawkes at this stage, but they had one key thing in common: Fawkes’s new friends, the Spanish. Spanish archives contain correspondence from Fawkes, reporting from the European mainland on what he understood about the situation in England. The new king’s regime was not stable, Fawkes claimed, arguing that it was justifiable to use violence to promote the ‘right’ kind of religion. Fawkes was clearly ripe for recruitment as a Catholic conspirator. And so we come to vital documents for the history of the gunpowder plot: the records of the confessions made by the surviving conspirators after it was all over. I looked at one set, held at Hatfield House Archives, which take us right into the room during some of the plotters’ meetings, allowing us to overhear those dangerous conversations. Read more | Traitor or Faithful: British history's most notorious treason cases One of the conspirators, Thomas Wintour (sometimes spelled Winter), described the moment when Catesby told him that he’d thought of a way of restoring Catholicism to England. His idea was to blow up parliament on the day of its opening session, killing the king and all of the MPs who had passed unjust laws against Catholics. Chillingly, Catesby believed that those actions were reason enough for them to die. Catesby had a task for Wintour. He was to travel to Europe to find some “confident” gentleman – meaning one in whom they could have confidence – to act as the plot’s technician. He’d heard that a certain Guy Fawkes might be a suitable candidate – and one who also offered another important advantage. Having lived abroad for so many years, few people in England would remember Fawkes’s face. Catesby was already on the authorities’ radar, but Fawkes might walk down the street in Westminster without being recognised. To further obscure his identity, Fawkes also did something common in modern-day extremism: he adopted a war-name. He would now go by the moniker John Johnson. The failure of the Gunpowder Plot The plot was taking shape. After the planned explosion in Westminster, Catesby intended to take advantage of the chaos. With James’s regime in disarray, a great uprising would be launched in Catesby’s native Midlands, and Catesby would snatch James’s daughter, Elizabeth, to place her on the throne as a puppet queen. But time ticked on. There was a delay when the opening of parliament was postponed, and soon there were just too many people in on the secret. Then there was a leak. One plotter, anxious that Catholics present in parliament on the key day would also lose their lives, wrote an anonymous warning: the Catholic Lord Monteagle received a letter telling him not to attend. Read more | Alternate history: what if… the gunpowder plot had succeeded? This missive, known as the Monteagle Letter, made its way into the hands of the authorities, where it caused much concern. Was the threat real? Many questions remain about how much the authorities already knew at that point, but certainly an extra patrol was laid on in Westminster. As every schoolkid now knows, Fawkes was found hiding in a cellar with his dark lantern, his barrels of gunpowder and the fuse to ignite an explosion that would very likely have transformed Britain’s religion. Interrogation and torture of Guy Fawkes Captured and taken to the Tower, Fawkes next experienced something else still common worldwide: interrogation. I asked psychologist Laura Farrugia, assistant professor at Northumberland University, who helps to train police in carrying out ethical and effective interviews, to assess the techniques used on Fawkes. She noted that the initial questions posed by authorities at the Tower, who were accustomed to interrogating suspects, were concise, targeted, comprehensible. Whenever Fawkes knew or guessed that the authorities already knew the answers, he gave them freely. Read more | 9 places associated with Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot However, Fawkes didn’t name his fellow conspirators. So the king himself stepped in, drawing up a list of less-successful, more ‘clever’, complicated questions that would have been difficult and confusing for any suspect to answer. Unsurprisingly, this approach failed. Nevertheless, Fawkes did say something that provides perhaps the first and the last piece in the jigsaw of his radicalisation: he would not betray his friends. Extremists were, and are, social creatures. They rely on friendship and camaraderie. This, as well as their political and religious beliefs, keeps them going. The king ordered torture, and Fawkes did eventually crack. Ironically, though, the authorities didn’t need his information. They had followed other leads, tracking Catholics who had left London suddenly just before the attack, and eventually caught up with the key plotters in a safe house in the Midlands. Thomas Wintour’s confession recounts a scene, just before the authorities stormed in, that would have been romantic – if it were not acted out by men who’d been willing to take hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. They agreed to die together. And when the local sheriff entered, guns blazing, Catesby did just that, taking a bullet that killed him. Fawkes and a few other surviving conspirators were hanged, drawn and quartered in London. The plotters would perhaps have been mortified to know that their plot not only failed in its aims but even helped to secure James’s regime. It turned him into a survivor – someone with God on his side. He insisted that his personal achievement in defeating this plot be commemorated on its anniversary every year. Four centuries later, many Britons are still obeying him – even though most have forgotten exactly why. This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The gunpowder plot: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
John Cooper tackles listener questions on the infamous plot to blow up parliament on 5 November 1605
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
The letter that betrayed the gunpowder plotters
Who wrote the words that prevented Guy Fawkes from lighting the fuse? Daniel Hahn rereads the letter that betrayed the 1605 plotters...
"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 Parker, Lord Monteagle, the man who on 26 October 1605 had his dinner interrupted by a servant bearing this mysterious missive. The letter spoke of “a great blow” that Parliament would receive, and advised Monteagle to absent himself; it referred to “the love that I bear to some of your friends”. It rejoiced in the thought that the bloodshed was deserved, and planned not just by man but also by God. Monteagle was a Catholic, or had been once; the priest Oswald Tesimond described him as “a Catholic at least according to his innermost convictions”. He had this same summer written a letter to chief plotter Robert Catesby expressing his discontent at the standing of Catholics under the new regime. Besides this, Monteagle had very lately been imprisoned for his involvement in the Essex Rebellion. Although his status in court had lately been on the ascendant, he was perpetually under suspicion, so he greatly appreciated the chance to prove his loyalty to the King. He didn’t lose a moment, leaving his fellow diners and rushing the letter to Whitehall, to Secretary of State Robert Cecil. Read more | Why did the 1605 gunpowder plot fail? 9 big questions about the conspiracy to blow up parliament The King was out of town on a hunt, but on his return a few days later Cecil passed the letter on to him. The “divinely illuminated” James brilliantly deduced (from the word “blow” and the reference to burning) that the letter was warning of a plot to blow up Parliament. Cecil had surely worked out the barely hidden meaning long before, but was never one to miss an opportunity to flatter the vain King and so complimented him most enthusiastically on his God-sent inspiration and his incisive intelligence. And of course they were correct: there was indeed a plot to blow up Parliament, on 5 November. Cecil ordered a search of the rooms under the Parliament chamber – revealing 36 barrels of gunpowder and a startled Guy Fawkes. This much, at least, we know. The rest, as they say, is history; but of course history is never so simple. With his network of informers intercepting correspondence across the Continent, it may be that Cecil knew of the plot long before Monteagle rushed into his audience clutching the tip-off. But if Cecil didn’t know, or didn’t know for sure, if he had any doubts at all – then this old page now in the National Archives can be credited with preventing an extraordinary coup, an incomprehensibly audacious, ambitious attempt to eliminate monarchy and government and all establishment, and replace it with … who knows? A Catholic England? In disguise So to the letter itself. The writing has certainly been disguised. The hand is clumsy, but deliberately so – it’s easy enough to see places where it has been altered to hide the writer’s natural style. The prose and the vocabulary, meanwhile, are sophisticated. If we were meant to be fooled by the hand into thinking this the work of some barely literate servant, the words belie this. On the podcast | The Gunpowder Plot Prime suspect for writing the letter has always been Francis Tresham, the plotters’ last recruit, enrolled mainly for his recently inherited wealth. From the moment he joined the inner circle of plotters, Tresham had expressed his doubts about the justification for such massive loss of life, questioning whether, for instance, the Catholics in Parliament shouldn’t be saved. And Tresham’s sister Elizabeth was married to Lord Monteagle; does the wording in the letter – “some of your friends” – refer to Monteagle’s wife? Circumstantial evidence aplenty, then. And indeed, suspicion fell on Tresham from the start. Catesby and another plotter Thomas Wintour summoned him to meet them at once; these two dedicated men were quite prepared to kill their friend for his betrayal. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2005/11/GettyImages-466989052-a0af8f7-e1667234019452.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt=""Guy Fawkes keeping watch upon Tresham and Lord Mounteagle" by the English illustrator George Cruikshank (1792 - 1878) (Picture by Getty)" title=""Guy Fawkes keeping watch upon Tresham and Lord Mounteagle" by the English illustrator George Cruikshank (1792 - 1878) (Picture by Getty)" /> And yet somehow Tresham was able to win them round. Whatever he said, whatever oaths he swore, Catesby and Wintour left the meeting convinced that Tresham was no traitor. And Catesby was not a man easily fooled. Maybe it wasn’t Tresham, then? After the failure of the plot Tresham spent weeks in the Tower of London signing statements, writing letters to Cecil, insisting that he’d opposed the plot all along and even offering assistance with the investigation – and yet never does he mention the letter. Odd, isn’t it? And besides, the tone of the letter does seem convinced by the righteousness of the plot and doesn’t sound like the voice of a waverer. But if not Tresham, then who? Unusual suspects There are at least as many possibilities as there were plotters. And no wonder there was a weak link. With so many men involved in the Gunpowder Plot – an unfortunate 13 – it would have been impressive if there had not been at least one Judas. And we mustn’t assume that the letter was necessarily the work of one of them. Couldn’t a devious Monteagle have written it himself? If he’d suspected something was afoot and feared he would be implicated (he knew many of the conspirators, after all), such a letter would be a fine way of preventing the plot, demonstrating his innocence, and proving his allegiance to the King, at a stroke. He did after all do extremely well out of the whole situation – earning the gratitude and trust of James and Cecil, along with a generous pension, and even a poem by Ben Jonson in his honour. Read more | Remember remember the 5th of November: why Bonfire Night is a 400-year-old political hot potato Many historians have suggested something more Machiavellian still, that a well-informed Cecil wrote the letter himself (or had one of his many shady functionaries do it). This would be an excellent way of officially “discovering” the plot without having to reveal any of his sources – let the plotters entangle themselves in their scheme while you remain in apparent ignorance, and then swoop in and save the day – there’s even a contemporary woodcut of the letter being delivered from God by an eagle. Just the sort of political theatre that came easily to Robert Cecil. As an added bonus it’s a useful way of testing Monteagle too – have the letter delivered, and if it’s not back in your hand by nightfall you know the man is no friend of the King’s. And yet… And yet there are countless other possibilities. Was it Catesby’s cousin Anne Vaux? Or consipirator Thomas Percy (as Monteagle suggested)? Or Monteagle’s sister, Mary? And so many other questions, too… Among those who enjoy these things, the argument will continue to rage. In another four centuries we’ll still be questioning what it is we’re dealing with – a tip-off to blow the plotters’ cover, a planted excuse to officially discover an open secret, an attempt to save a friend, a test of loyalty? We’re sure that the letter exists, we know what it says, when it was delivered and to whom. And all the rest? Well, the rest is mystery. Historians have the luxury of doubt, of argument and counter-argument, which is what makes it such fun after all. Daniel Hahn OBE is a British writer, editor and translator. He is the author of many non-fiction works, including The Tower Menagerie: The Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild Beasts (Simon & Schuster, 2004) This article was first published in the November 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine
Remember remember the 5th of November: why Bonfire Night is a 400-year-old political hot potato
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...
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 Protestant England from Catholic threats: in 1558 he had saved the English from Mary I, in 1588 he saved them from the Spanish Armada, and now in 1605 he had saved them from a Catholic takeover founded on an act of terrorism. But these sermons also demonstrate that as the political crises of 17th-century England unfolded, remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot became politically contested. The plot was captured by the Parliamentarians in the Civil Wars and their aftermath as a powerful element in their version of English history, while in 1660 preachers were using Fifth of November sermons to represent the Restoration as a divine deliverance on a par with that of 1605. Timeline: 5 November – from plot to party 1606 In January, Parliament, meeting for the first time after the plot, passed an Act ‘For a Public Thanksgiving to Almighty God every Year on the Fifth Day of November’. This, by ensuring that the plot was remembered annually in every parish church in England, was probably the decisive factor in prolonging its memory. The act was repealed in 1859. 1673–85 Period of intense political instability initiated by the public acknowledgement by James, Duke of York, heir to the throne, of his Catholicism, and incorporating the Popish Plot scare and the Exclusion Crisis. Anti-Catholic feeling reached new heights, and Fifth of November rituals became heavily politicised. 1688 Replacement of James VII and II by William and Mary. That William, portrayed as the saviour of English Protestantism, landed on 5 November made that date doubly memorable, while his landing, like the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, was interpreted as evidence of divine providence and God’s favouring of the English. 1709 A Fifth of November sermon by High Church and Tory clergyman Henry Sacheverell defied the dominant consensus by playing down fears of Catholicism and instead attacking Whigs and Non-Conformists as the ideological heirs of Charles I’s executioners. The ensuing political crisis emphasised the Fifth’s continuing status as a powerfully symbolic date. 1841 Publication of Guy Fawkes, or the Gunpowder Treason, a novel by the best-selling author William Harrison Ainsworth. This symbolised changing attitudes by portraying Guy Fawkes and other Catholics in a sympathetic light: Ainsworth declared that in writing the book his ‘one doctrine’ was toleration. 1850 In 1850 a Catholic hierarchy was reinstalled in England following Catholic emancipation in 1829. This provoked widespread hostility, and in that year and those following, celebrations included the burning of effigies of popes, prominent Catholics, and High Church Anglicans regarded as collaborators. 1870–80 The old-style, frequently riotous, disorders of Fifth of November, whether anti-Catholic or not, largely died away. It became increasingly domesticated, or was celebrated through officially organised, and usually civic, displays and celebrations. 2003 Royal assent given to the Fireworks Act 2003. This attempted to limit the sale of fireworks, ban their being let off in the streets, and place severe regulations on public firework displays. Felt by some commentators to denote the legislating of traditional Bonfire Night celebrations out of existence. But it was the heightened political and religious strife of 1673–85 which was to see the Fifth develop a more sharply defined political significance. The failure of Charles II to produce an heir meant that his brother, James Duke of York, would succeed. In 1673 James made his conversion to Catholicism public, and married a Catholic, Mary of Modena. That year London apprentices (doubtless with the collusion of their elders and betters) burnt a giant effigy of a pope. As England experienced the turmoils of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, similar pope-burnings occurred on 5 and on 17 November, Queen Elizabeth I’s Accession Day, another symbolically important date in England’s Protestant calendar. When James came to the throne in 1685, official attempts to subdue anti-papal demonstrations on the Fifth of November increased the dismay felt at the accession of a Catholic. But in 1688 James II was removed when William of Orange, husband of James’s daughter Mary, landed in England to take the throne. He landed in Devon, on 5 November. Accordingly, far into the 18th century, preachers at Fifth of November services could add another deliverance to their list, and remind congregations that on that date not only was England saved by divine providence from the Gunpowder Plot, but also from a popish, and hence tyrannical monarch. The preachers found a further menace in the emergence of that potential Catholic superpower, Louis XIV’s France. What if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? Dr John Cooper explores what might have happened next Pope Day: how was the Fifth celebrated in the 18th century? Although we have evidence on how preachers might put a spin on the significance of the Fifth of November in the 18th century, we as yet know little about how the Fifth was celebrated on a popular level. But there is information on the Fifth of November rituals in Britain’s North American colonies. New England Puritans had initially been opposed to observing the date, but by the early 18th century it was widely commemorated. It was known as Pope Day, indicating perhaps that the Fifth first assumed importance in the colonies at the time of the pope-burnings in England of the 1670s and early 1680s. The day was specially significant in Boston, where rival working-class crowds from the north and south ends of town would parade, both with an effigy of a pope on a carriage. Pitched battles broke out as each mob tried to capture the other’s pope. But in the colonies the date again assumed a political significance. The popular demonstrations which accompanied the run-in to the American Revolution show how the ceremonies of Pope Day helped school American urban mobs in the crowd action which was to be turned so effectively against the British Authorities. Who was burnt in effigy? The early 19th century was to witness an increase in references to popular celebrations of the Fifth in England. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries it had been a pope, the devil, or Jacobite Pretenders who were burnt in effigy. By 1800 or so it was Guy Fawkes. The reasons for this change remain elusive, although it might be that it was becoming less acceptable to be openly anti-Catholic. Nevertheless, anti-Catholicism was still there. The Act for Catholic Emancipation had been passed in 1829, in the face of massive opposition, but it was the reinstallment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 which really unleashed hostile reactions in Fifth of November celebrations. Effigies of a pope were burnt anew, as were effigies of Cardinal Wiseman, the learned and civilised Irish Catholic clergyman who, as Archbishop of Westminster, now headed the Catholic church in England. But against this continuing anti-Catholicism must be set another tendency. In novels, popular drama, and works of history directed at the general reader, a more even-handed treatment of the plot was being presented, in which old-style anti-Catholicism was heavily toned down or marginalised. The plot was, by the early Victorian era, even made the vehicle for pantomimes. Gunpowder treason and plot: read more about the places associated with the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament Public order problems But whether fuelled by anti-Catholicism or not, the Fifth of November became an annual occasion for severe public order problems in a number of English towns. The issue was a clash between the new standards of public order demanded by Victorian town councils, and a desire among the lower orders to celebrate the date in what they perceived to be the traditional manner. One such town was Lewes in Sussex, which still enjoys large-scale celebrations. Others were Guildford, where from 1858–62 the town authorities more or less turned the town over to the “Guildford Guys” on the day, and Exeter, where in 1867 and 1879 riotous mobs celebrating around bonfires in the Cathedral Close had to be cleared at bayonet point by regular infantry. But the Fifth was tamed. This was due partly to the growth of working-class respectability, and partly to the development of domesticity among the upper working and lower middle classes. These would buy fireworks and celebrate with their families in gardens or backyards. In many towns, the old plebiean desires for excitement were channelled through the medium of civic fireworks displays. Bonfire Night, by the end of the 19th century, had essentially been de-politicised. This, one hopes, is something which will continue. Nobody is currently telling us to hate Catholics, and although at Lewes and a few other places modern politicians are sometimes burnt in effigy along with Guy Fawkes, there is little real edge present. The rigorous observance of the Fifth of November is being replaced by a bonfire season; effigies of Guy Fawkes are burnt infrequently; one rarely sees children out on the streets begging for “a penny for the Guy”, and the occasion is becoming circumscribed by regulations, most recently the Fireworks Act of 2003. It is assuming the aspect of an ideologically neutral fire festival to challenge the onset of winter. But as we gather round the bonfires, we need to remember that the Fifth of November has a history, and one that has frequently been politically and ideologically charged. James Sharpe is professor of history at the University of York and author of Remember, Remember the Fifth of November (Profile Books, 2005) This article was first published in the November 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine
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...
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 bishop, new targets had been found for the bonfire. The kaiser and even a few suffragettes found themselves so treated, and the tradition continued with Adolf Hitler. Today the guy is alive and well, although it is as likely to be an image of the prime minister as Guy Fawkes, getting the sort of grilling you don’t get in parliament, but which Guy himself wished they had all got. Justin Pollard is a historian, television producer and writer This article was first published by HistoryExtra in November 2014
Why did the 1605 gunpowder plot fail? 9 big questions about the conspiracy to blow up parliament
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...
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 conspirators select parliament as their target? Once the conspirators were agreed that they wanted to wipe out the king and his government, the Houses of Parliament were the obvious target. Catesby’s justification for obliterating parliament was chillingly simple: “In that place have they done us all the mischief, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.” The ‘mischief’ that Catesby referred to dated back to Queen Elizabeth I’s parliaments, which had passed a series of harsh statutes aimed at forcing Catholics to conform to the Church of England. Catholic recusants (from the Latin recusare, to refuse) were fined, intimidated and imprisoned. Priests and Jesuits dispatched to England in an attempt to maintain the Catholic faith risked torture and execution. English Catholics welcomed James I’s accession to the throne in 1603, hoping that it would usher in a period of greater toleration. Yet it was to be a false dawn. Two years on, it was becoming increasingly clear that the new king was prepared to grant Catholics few concessions. This was the background to the plotters’ decision to target the state opening of parliament, when the lords, Commons and the king himself would be assembled together. The fact that Catholic nobles might be caught up in the blast was accepted by Catesby as collateral damage: to him they were “atheists, fools and cowards”. How did the plotters penetrate the Palace of Westminster? In 1605, the Palace of Westminster was a ramshackle complex of converted royal apartments and dissolved ecclesiastical buildings, very different from today’s high-security buildings. Westminster Hall was crammed with people attending the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas. Taverns named ‘Heaven’ and ‘Purgatory’ plied their trade a stone’s throw from the Commons and the Lords. In Henry VIII’s day, a brothel openly operated within the precincts of the palace. The plotters knew that they had a good chance of passing undetected through this melee. Their initial plan was to occupy a property next to the House of Lords and to tunnel from one cellar to another, but the mining proved too time-consuming. Then they rented a coal cellar underneath the Lords’ chamber. This enabled them to bring in the gunpowder without being challenged. A security sweep failed to spot the significance of the pile of firewood and barrels that had accumulated in the cellar. But then the Catholic peer, Baron Monteagle, received a letter from an anonymous source, warning him to stay away from the Palace of Westminster on 5 November, as “they shall receive a terrible blow this parliament”. The letter reached James I, who ordered a second search. Only then was the plot revealed, preventing nearly a tonne of gunpowder from tearing through parliament. Did foreign powers offer any assistance to the gunpowder plot? The attitude of the Spanish was a key reason for the conspiracy’s failure. English Catholics had looked to Spain for support since the reign of Elizabeth I. In 1569, a rebellion of the northern earls had hoped to depose Elizabeth with Spanish naval backing – although the ships never arrived. Later on, English Catholic naval pilots had sailed with the Spanish Armada. But a generation after this, the political landscape had changed. And when, in 1603, Guy Fawkes went to Spain seeking military aid from Philip III, he found that the Spanish were less inclined to offer their support. For them, the accession of James I created an opportunity to end the costly war with England – and, in August 1604, Spanish and English delegations met at Somerset House in London to sign a peace treaty. Two Spanish noblemen, Don Juan de Tassis and the Constable of Castile (both of whom feature in the 2017 BBC drama Gunpowder), can be seen in the portrait of the Somerset House conference that hangs in the National Maritime Museum. Spain’s abandonment of English Catholics left the plotters to go it alone. If the plot had been successful, would it have delivered England into the hands of a Catholic regime? For that to happen, the plotters would have needed to establish a new government, neutralise the Tower of London and secure England’s ports. Their plans to achieve all this were hazy at best. Britain was a monarchy, so royal rule would have had to have continued under a new Catholic regime. The king’s son, Henry, Prince of Wales, was a vigorous Protestant, and would in any case probably have died in the explosion. One of the plotters, Thomas Percy, wanted to kidnap Prince Charles (the future Charles I). But Catesby favoured capturing the nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth, appointing a protector and marrying the puppet monarch to a Catholic husband. The princess’s household was based at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire, a swift ride from the Catesby family home at Ashby St Ledgers. Catesby invited the local Catholic gentry to hunt with him on 5 November, hoping they could use this as cover. But when the gunpowder plot failed, his support network melted away. Catesby and Wintour became fugitives, running between one Catholic house and another. They made their last stand at Holbeach House, advancing with swords against the sheriff’s men armed with guns. Catesby and Percy died from the same bullet, while Wintour was captured to face trial. How was Guy Fawkes punished for his crimes? The burning of effigies of Guy Fawkes on Bonfire Night might suggest that Fawkes was burnt at the stake. However, for men, the sentence for high treason was to be ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’, and that’s the grisly fate that awaited Fawkes. Prior to his execution, brutal torture was used to extract Fawkes’s confession, including manacles – which were secured tightly around wrists and used to hang the accused by their hands for many hours – and, most likely, the notorious rack, which stretched the body, tearing tendons, ripping joints and fracturing bones. It would have been a wretched Fawkes who was tied head-down to a hurdle and drawn to Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster, along with three fellow plotters. As the last to be executed, he would have witnessed the others being hanged, removed while still alive, and then dying during the physical mutilation that followed. First, the genitals were cut off and burned. The body was then disembowelled and decapitated, and finally quartered, with body parts displayed across the country. Fawkes was spared the pain of the final stages because his neck broke as he hanged, bringing instant death on the gallows. How alive were the authorities to the threat of Catholic conspiracies? The gunpowder plot was the latest in a string of conspiracies aimed at re-establishing Catholic rule in England. For years, radical Catholics had been hoping to co-ordinate an uprising of recusant families with military support from sympathetic foreign powers. Yet few English Catholics had ever supported armed action against the Protestant regime. The state had developed powerful weapons against insurgency. Elizabeth I’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, recruited an extensive network of informers and agents, penetrating the Catholic underground and infiltrating the continental seminaries where missionary priests were trained. This had enabled him to thwart previous attempts on the monarch’s life, such as the Babington plot of 1586, which aimed to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. After his death, Walsingham’s secret service was maintained by his successor, Robert Cecil, who served both Elizabeth and James I. Given the sophistication of the network that Walsingham bequeathed Cecil, it’s perhaps surprising that the gunpowder plot came so close to achieving its objective. After all, Fawkes was only discovered at the 11th hour, allegedly as he hovered over the powder, ready to ignite a fuse. How did Catholics practise their faith without attracting unwanted attention? The need for Catholicism to be pursued in secret put domestic houses at the very heart of this community. Catholics disguised the symbols and accoutrements associated with their worship, sometimes in plain sight, among everyday furnishings. A dining table might double as an altar, a priest’s vestments could be folded up and buried amid the household linen, and a chalice reserved for mass might be placed on shelves and rendered indistinguishable from ordinary drinking cups. A number of houses famously had ‘priest holes’, secret spaces behind fireplaces, staircases and walls in which not just the sacred vessels but also priests themselves could be hidden. So the home – and, by extension, the women who kept those homes – were critical to keeping the faith alive. This can be seen in the life of Anne Vaux (played by Liv Tyler in Gunpowder), a Catholic gentlewoman who was arrested on suspicion of being connected to the gunpowder plot. Like other women of her rank and religion, Vaux played a high-stakes role in maintaining Catholic underground networks, orchestrating meetings, acting as a gatekeeper and, crucially, supporting priests in rented safe houses and in her own home. Why do we call 5 November ‘bonfire night’? When the gunpowder plot was discovered, Londoners were encouraged to light bonfires in celebration. Before long, 5 November had entered the calendar as a reminder of England’s deliverance. Mingling with the older traditions of fire-making and feasting, it became a day of national rejoicing. English settlers in America carried their anti-Catholicism across the Atlantic. Known as Pope’s Day in colonial Boston, 5 November saw rival gangs fighting over effigies of the pontiff, and throwing them into the fire. You can witness something similar today in Lewes in Sussex, where bonfire societies parade through the town and hurl good-natured abuse at a volunteer dressed up as a cardinal. But bonfire festivities are changing. As recently as the 1980s, huge numbers of families congregated in neighbours’ back gardens to eat soup and cinder toffee and watch dad set off fireworks, while streets across the land resonated to the sound of children asking for a ‘penny for the guy’. Today, these traditions are rapidly disappearing. The American import of Halloween has largely usurped bonfire night, firework sales are more heavily regulated, and villages wishing to host bonfire events have to raise eye-wateringly large sums for insurance, threatening their long-term future. Will the next generation be able to recite the old rhyme, ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot?’ And what will the original story of the gunpowder plot mean to Britons in 100 years’ time if we no longer make Guys and build bonfires? John Cooper and Hannah Greig are senior lecturers in early modern history at the University of York This article was first published in the November 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
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?
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 for failing to hold her husband’s attention: James’s preference for his male favourites is well attested. Anne was the second daughter of Frederick II, king of Denmark and Norway, and his wife Sophia, daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg. The idea of marrying her to James, then king of Scots, was first mooted in the early 1580s when Anne was just a child. But negotiations foundered, partly because England’s queen Elizabeth I favoured a match between James and Catherine de Bourbon, sister to the future Henry IV of France. James eventually settled the matter himself. According to a contemporary account, he took the portraits of both candidates into his bedchamber to pray and meditate for three days. When at last he emerged, he declared his choice: Anne. The decision had probably not been too difficult for the 23-year-old king, because Catherine was seven years his senior, whereas Anne was just 14 and already renowned for her beauty. Although she had never met the king of Scots, she was also said to be so much “in love with him that it were death to her to have it broken off”. A proxy marriage took place in Denmark in August 1589, and the couple finally met three months later. Anne was taken aback when her betrothed kissed her full on the mouth “after the Scottish fashion”, but soon recovered and they were married in person on 23 November. There followed several months of merrymaking, during which the newlyweds gave every appearance of being delighted with each other. The couple returned to Scotland in May 1590. Anne was something of a novelty to her new subjects, who had not had a resident queen since the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots had fled to England more than 20 years before, and they welcomed her with great rejoicing. However, it was not long before cracks began to appear in the new marriage. Although she gave the appearance of a dutiful consort, Anne was ambitious for power, and soon began meddling in the turbulent world of Scottish politics. She also fell prey to the charms of the maverick Earl of Bothwell, who posed a serious threat to her husband’s regime. Although Anne had conceived during the early weeks of her marriage, she suffered a miscarriage in September 1590, and it would be three years before she was pregnant again. Anne gave birth to the longed-for prince, Henry, in February 1594. James was delighted with his wife, but their relations soon soured when he insisted that the boy be raised in a separate household at Stirling, just as he himself had been. The queen complained bitterly at being parted from her infant son, but it no avail. The rift in their marriage this opened up would never be healed. Nevertheless, Anne conceived regularly during the years that followed, giving birth to Elizabeth in August 1596 and Charles (the future Charles I) in November 1600. Tragically, the couple lost four children in infancy, and the queen also suffered a number of other miscarriages. After her husband inherited the English throne in March 1603, Anne travelled to Stirling so that she could take custody of her firstborn son and take him with her to England. This angered her husband, but Anne ignored his protests. In June, she set out for London with Henry and his younger sister, Elizabeth, never to return to Scotland. Anne was crowned with her husband in Westminster Abbey on 25 July 1603. Although the ceremony signalled the triumph of the Stuart dynasty, the queen’s refusal to take the Anglican communion fuelled rumours that she was a closet Catholic. It also renewed tensions with her husband. Increasingly, the royal couple lived separate lives at court, and the gossips there noted that they did not converse together. “He was ever best, when furthest from the queen,” remarked the courtier Sir Anthony Weldon. James had long been rumoured to be homosexual, and throughout his reign – both in Scotland and in England – he surrounded himself with a succession of beautiful young men. He made no effort to hide these from his wife, who was forced to suffer the humiliation of seeing them paraded in front of the court. James’s licentious behaviour was mirrored by the court that he established in England, which provided a sharp – and shocking – contrast to that of his predecessor, the ‘Virgin Queen’. It was also at odds with his uncompromisingly Protestant faith and his determination to rid his kingdom of Catholicism in any form. Soon there was a growing body of enemies to the Stuart regime. The most deadly was a group of “Catholic gentlemen” led by Robert Catesby, who hailed from a family of prominent recusants and who had joined the Earl of Essex’s ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth I. He and his fellow conspirators hatched a shocking and audacious plan to blow up the House of Lords with “a great quantity of gunpowder” during the state opening of parliament on 5 November 1605. This was to be the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands, during which James’s nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, would be installed as the Catholic head of state. It was only thanks to an anonymous letter to the authorities, received in late October, that the king and his Protestant regime were not wiped out. When the House of Lords was searched at around midnight on 4 November, just hours before the plot was due to be executed, a huge cache of gunpowder was discovered in a vault – more than enough to reduce the entire building to rubble. Read more about the Gunpowder Plot Disaster averted News of the discovery sent shockwaves across the kingdom. “The plot was to have blown up the King at such time as he should have been set on his royal throne, accompanied with all his children, nobility, and commoners, and assisted with all bishops, judges, and doctors,” reported the MP Sir Edward Hoby, “at one instant and blast to have ruined the whole state and kingdom of England.” All of the conspirators were eventually rounded up, and those not killed in their attempts to flee faced the terrifying prospect of a traitor’s death. The men had hinted that some “great patron” had privately supported the plot, but even under torture they refused to give a name. This has sparked intense speculation ever since. A popular theory is that the king’s secretary of state, Robert Cecil, had secretly sponsored the plot as a means of whipping up fear and hatred of Catholics. But another potential candidate has been largely overlooked: Queen Anne herself. Driven by years of emotional abuse by her husband, did she see the plot as the means to rid herself, and the kingdom, of her tyrannical and immoral husband? She was closely aligned to the gunpowder plotters in ideology and beliefs: her Catholic sympathies had grown stronger since her arrival in England. In the months leading up to the plot’s discovery, Anne had gathered about her an enclave of intimate Roman Catholic bedchamber attendants. Among their number was Jane Drummond, later Countess of Roxburghe, who facilitated the queen’s private Catholic worship. This included smuggling priests into court and disguising them as her personal attendants. The Spanish ambassador reported that “Mass was being said by a Scottish priest, who was simply called a ‘servant’ of [the queen’s] lady-in-waiting, Lady Drummond.” Behind the scenes If Anne was capable of such subterfuge in order to satisfy her spiritual needs, it is at least possible that she was able to provide clandestine support to Catesby and his fellow plotters. Her priests would have been the perfect intermediaries. The Catholic underworld in Jacobean England was tightly knit, and priests supplied more than just spiritual fulfilment. Many of them had an extensive network of contacts among the gentry and nobility, and could be relied upon for their discretion. Father Henry Garnet is one notable example. He was closely connected with the gunpowder plotters and, though he privately disapproved of their schemes, he was later executed for complicity. But though Anne had ample motivation to rid herself and the kingdom of her depraved husband, could she really have countenanced the murder of her two sons? Both Henry and Charles had been due to attend the opening of parliament – a fact of which the gunpowder plotters were well aware. Indeed, it fitted their scheme perfectly because their aim was to place Princess Elizabeth on the throne as a puppet queen whom they could marry to a Catholic suitor. Anne would certainly have supported the notion of female sovereignty, particularly if it led to the re-establishment of Catholicism in England. In addition, her son Henry was becoming even more of a religious reformist than his father, which must have grieved his mother sorely. Whether her faith was stronger than her maternal bonds must rest with conjecture. What is certain is the strength of Anne’s convictions. She once asserted that “honour goes before life”, and a contemporary observed that she could be “terrible, proud, unendurable” to anyone who crossed her. In the aftermath of the gunpowder plot, Anne’s relationship with James deteriorated even further. Before long they were barely on speaking terms, even in public. James made no secret of his derision for his “stupid wife”. Anne was increasingly afflicted by ill health, including a gynaecological condition that seems to have been caused by complications with her last pregnancy in 1606. This hampered marital relations, which created an even greater distance between Anne and her husband. James did not trouble to visit his wife during the last illness-racked months of her life. Neither did he show any regret when she died on 2 March 1619. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, but her husband chose not to erect a tomb in her memory. It was left to Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, whom the plotters had intended to put on the throne, to realise her mother’s ambitions. As queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth would wield considerable influence and establish a bloodline that, a century after Anne’s death, would wipe out all trace of the Stuart dynasty (Elizabeth’s daughter Sophia was the mother of Britain’s first Hanoverian king, George I). If Queen Anne was the “great patron” of the gunpowder plot, then she took the secret to her grave. Only in fiction have I been able to cast her in that role more decisively. But the prospect that she really was behind the most notorious terror plot in British history remains a tantalising one. Tracy Borman has written numerous books on the Tudor and Stuart periods. Anne of Denmark features in Tracy’s debut novel, The King’s Witch (Hodder & Stoughton) This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
Alternate history: what if… the gunpowder plot had succeeded?
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
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 destruction of life and property would have been devastating. Modern estimates of a detonation on this scale (calculations by the University of Aberystwyth’s Centre for Explosion Studies, and a television recreation of the explosion by Richard Hammond) suggest that the House of Lords, the nearby House of Commons and Westminster Hall would all have been destroyed. Since 5 November would have been the start of a new session of parliament, the king and queen would have been at Westminster to receive the nobility and bishops in the Painted Chamber. With them would have been Henry, Prince of Wales, 11 years old and already identified as a strong Protestant. MPs would have clustered at the back or in the corridor leading into the Lords, listening to the king’s speech and waiting to elect their speaker. The opening of parliament was a moment of solemn theatre when the entire establishment of church and state – royal family, nobility, senior churchmen, knights and burgesses, principal officers of the crown and prominent courtiers – came together in one tightly packed space. For anyone intent on destroying the Protestant state, it was an opportunity like no other. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/03/GettyImages-529011281202-458f9c0-8ff5197.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The gunpowder plotters of 1605. What might have happened had the conspiracy been successful? (Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="The gunpowder plotters of 1605. What might have happened had the conspiracy been successful? (Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The Palace of Westminster was not just a home for parliament. It was also the epicentre of royal administration, where the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas sat and the revenues of the crown were audited in the Exchequer. Westminster had been abandoned as a royal residence following a fire in Henry VIII’s reign, freeing its medieval fabric to be divided into a labyrinthine network of offices. Hundreds of royal officials worked and lived at Westminster, which was also far more accessible to the public than it is today. The opening of parliament was a chance to see the royal family in procession, still a novelty after 40 years under a childless queen. Many spectators would have been caught in the blast, injured by flying glass or trapped under rubble as nearby buildings collapsed. Another casualty of the explosion would almost certainly have been Westminster Abbey, facing the House of Lords across Old Palace Yard. The Henry VII Chapel would have been most exposed, its delicate fan-vaults collapsing onto the tomb of Elizabeth I lying below. A counter-factual history would have Fawkes slipping away from his cellar (he was arrested in his spurs, implying he intended to escape rather than to die a martyr) to watch the explosion from a safe distance. With the king and his key ministers all dead or dying, English government would have ceased to exist. The small garrison in the Tower, and the lord lieutenants who acted as military commanders in the counties, would have lost their entire chain of command. Without a monarch or a parliament that could act in the king’s name, there would have been no one to give orders and no means of authorising legitimate government. Want to learn more about the Gunpowder Plot? Here are some of our most popular articles... Remember remember the 5th of November: read more about how Bonfire Night evolved from plot to party What if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? Dr John Cooper explores what might have happened next Gunpowder treason and plot: read more about the places associated with the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament A state of national paralysis? In this state of national paralysis, the plotters had to act fast. Catesby had prepared a rendezvous with local Catholic gentry close to his family home in Northamptonshire, under cover of a day’s hunting. Their target was King James’s daughter Elizabeth, nine years old and under the guardianship of the Protestant Lord Harington at Coombe Abbey. Harington moved the princess to nearby Coventry when he heard about the plot, but his small retinue would have been quickly overwhelmed by Catesby’s armed band. Proclamations would have been issued announcing the rule of Queen Elizabeth II and the restoration of the Catholic faith. Such a young ruler would need a Protector: conveniently Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland was both a Catholic sympathiser and a kinsman of the plotter Thomas Percy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-544251010202-5501902.jpg" width="623" height="788" alt="Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of King James I. Nine years old at the time of the plot, Elizabeth was a key target of the plotters, says John Cooper. Portrait by an unknown artist, 1613. (VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of King James I. Nine years old at the time of the plot, Elizabeth was a key target of the plotters, says John Cooper. Portrait by an unknown artist, 1613. (VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> Two totally different scenarios could then have played out. Everything pivoted on the person of Prince Charles, Duke of York. At just four years old, Charles was the next heir to Prince Henry. The gunpowder plotters were unsure how to factor Charles into their plans, probably because they couldn’t be certain whether he would have been present at the opening of parliament. Charles was not a robust child (he had only just learned to walk), and might not have been capable of attending a long and tiring day of royal ceremony. If he escaped the explosion at Westminster, then Charles would be king by inheritance. Thomas Percy was deputed to kidnap him from his household in London. With the Prince of Wales dead and both Charles and Elizabeth in the hands of the rebels, loyalists to the monarchy would have had no figurehead around whom to rally. But if Charles had been moved to safety, to Scotland or to his mother’s native Denmark, then the Protestant establishment might have been able to regroup. Faced with the demand to proclaim Elizabeth as queen, many towns would probably have played for time until their corporations could establish which side was likely to win, just as they had done in 1553 during the attempted Protestant coup to put Lady Jane Grey on the English throne. More alternate history What if... Alexander the Great hadn't died so young? What if... Boudica had defeated the Romans? What if... the Spanish Armada had landed in England? What next? A religious civil war, like those which had crippled France during the later 16th century? The break-up of the union of the crowns of England and Scotland, barely two years old and wholly dependent on the person of James VI and I? Instead of the Flight of the Earls from Ulster [when a large proportion of Ulster’s Gaelic aristocracy fled Ireland for the continent], a resurgence of Catholic forces in Ireland and the overwhelming of the Protestant plantations? All of this is speculation; but sometimes taking a counterfactual perspective can reveal the deep forces underlying the accidents of history. Dr John Cooper is a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of York, and was a historical advisor to the 2017 BBC drama series Gunpowder This article was first published on HistoryExtra in November 2017
Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot: everything you need to know
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…
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 gunpowder plot? While fighting in Flanders for the Spanish in around 1604, Fawkes met Thomas Wintour, a fellow disgruntled English Catholic. Wintour encouraged Fawkes to join a group of conspirators in a plot to assassinate the king. For 18 months, Fawkes and 12 others calculated a plan to blow up the House of Lords, kill the king, and replace him with a Catholic alternative. In order to do this, the group transported 36 barrels of gunpowder to the cellar below parliament, and planned to set the gunpowder alight when James I opened parliament on 5 November 1605. However, the plot was foiled by Robert Cecil – James I’s dedicated minister. On 4 November 1605, Fawkes was caught in the cellar while guarding the gunpowder, and was arrested for his involvement in the plot. During his imprisonment in the Tower of London, Guy Fawkes was continuously tortured for two days. Finally, Fawkes admitted his involvement in the plot and signed a confession. He signed his name ‘Guido Fawkes’. After his confession, Fawkes apparently remarked that he had collected so much gunpowder in order to “blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains”. Despite attempting to kill the new king of England, James I apparently praised Fawkes for being dedicated to his cause and for having a “Roman resolution”. How did Guy Fawkes die? Guy Fawkes was sentenced to death by being hanged, drawn and quartered ­– a typical ‘traitor’s death’ at the time. On 31 January 1606, Fawkes took to the scaffold in Westminster in London. It has been suggested that after the noose had been placed over his head, Fawkes purposely jumped from the scaffold in order to break his neck. By doing this, he avoided being cut down after being hanged and having his organs cut from his body while still alive. Fawkes’s dead body was cut into quarters and sent to different parts of the country, where they were put on display for the public to see. The story of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot has continued to be told ever since, and in the 19th century it became customary to burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire every year on 5 November, Bonfire Night, to mark the failure of the plot. On the podcast | 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 Want to learn more about the Gunpowder Plot? Here are some of our most popular articles... Remember remember the 5th of November: read more about how Bonfire Night evolved from plot to party What if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? Dr John Cooper explores what might have happened next Gunpowder treason and plot: read more about the places associated with the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament This article was first published on HistoryExtra in November 2015.
Hannah Greig and John Cooper explore the story of the 1605 attempt to blow up the king and parliament
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.