Episode #214 - Have We Misremembered the Gunpowder Plot? (Part II)

If you don't mind, I'd like to start today with a dramatic reading.

But first, let me set the scene.

The lights come up, and the stage is dressed as a dark cave.

A young woman lies sleeping on a rocky ledge.

Downstage, a mustachioed and goateed man paces back and forth.

He looks at the exhausted woman and can't help but muse out loud about the societal injustice that brought them to this sorry point.

His soliloquy begins, quote,

Poor sufferer, your couch is less rugged than the hearts of persecutors.

It is thus they would bruise and trample upon all who have the sin of poverty upon their souls.

But I shall yet live to set my foot on their many proud necks.

The day will come, haughty masters, deceive not yourselves.

Ye look upon the poor as slaves, and set up rulers over them.

Any law you make is but to keep them more in subjection.

They are ground down to better their morals.

Their harmless sports are cut, lest they should become vicious.

Their hours of relaxation limited for fear they might grow idle.

Kind, considerate rulers ye are.

But the time will assuredly dawn when the people will shake off all these galling fetters, when every man shall sit under his own roof, and none have power to make him fear.

Hear me, ye lords of the earth, you who are for your possessions too much yearly, you evil giants of England, ye who keep a city guard to feed the beggars on stones, to imprison like dogs the poor and helpless.

Hear my warning and beware.

Ye are sharpening the fangs of the people, and when ye least dream of it, will find their teeth buried fast and deeply in your throats.

Ye are going full gallop to the devil.

End quote.

That stirring monologue comes to us from the play Guido Fawkes, or The Prophetess of of Ordsall Cave.

The speaker, as you may have guessed, was the one and only Guy Fawkes, but please call him Guido.

The play premiered in Manchester in June of 1840 and was a modest success.

In many ways, it was typical of the melodramas popular at the time.

In it, the gunpowder plot helps provide some dramatic stakes for what's otherwise a drippy tale of doomed romance.

After its run in Manchester, the show was more or less forgotten, except by historians who study historical memory.

This play stands as an excellent example of a shift that occurred in the popular understanding of Guy Fawkes in the mid-1800s.

Now, if I was teaching a class on this, this is where I would get the opinions of my students.

Also, I would have gotten the biggest ham in the class to give a suitably over-the-top reading to kick things off.

But this is where I would ask my students what jumped out at them.

How would they describe this character?

Who does he see as his enemies?

Who are his allies?

How would you describe his cause?

I would say this version of Guy Fox is ferocious, but reasonable, even righteous.

His rhetoric can be violent.

He speaks of setting his foot on the proud necks of his enemies and promises them that the fangs of the people will one day be buried deep in their throats.

However, he also positions himself as a champion of the downtrodden.

He's not simply a Catholic avenger.

He's looking for justice for, quote, all who have the sin of poverty on their souls, end quote.

His enemies aren't England's Protestants, per se, but the rich, or as he calls them, the haughty masters who feed the beggars on stones.

In this play, Guy Fawkes isn't so much a religious radical as he is a kind of proto-socialist, moved to violence by the injustice of wealth inequality.

The play clearly borrows elements from Shakespeare's Macbeth.

The protagonist is guided by various supernatural elements, and characters have prophetic visions about the future.

Like Macbeth, the figure at the center of the play is ultimately a villain.

However, he's allowed to be sympathetic and even heroic at times.

Now, this particular 1840 play was based on a serialized novel later compiled in 1841 called Guy Fawkes or The Gunpowder Treason by the British author William Ainsworth.

But where the book more clearly reflects the religious motivations of the gunpowder plot, while also arguing for religious toleration, the play makes the religious elements far more muted.

In many ways, the play is more a reflection of the politics of 1840 than it is the politics of 1605.

Guy Fawkes sounds more like a French Jacobin revolutionary or one of the popular adjutants that would usher in reforms during Europe's revolutionary summer of 1848.

The audiences in Manchester would have no doubt recognized elements of Fawkes's rhetoric borrowed from their city's own labor movement.

This reimagining of Guy Fawkes as a vaguely left-wing champion of the people moves him closer to what he would represent in the graphic novel The Four Vendetta.

And then finally, the symbol used by internet hacktivists.

With a little spin, a villain can become a sympathetic villain.

And that sympathetic villain can then easily become an anti-hero.

And it's not much of a step for an anti-hero to become an unambiguous hero.

Wrestling fans know this as the babyface turn.

I would wager that this transformation has only been possible for Guy Fawkes because the gunpowder plot was unsuccessful.

From a distance, we can marvel at the audacity of trying to blow up one of England's most iconic buildings and killing the king, parliament, and a good chunk of the aristocracy in one fell swoop.

The fact that it didn't happen means that we don't have to reckon with the horror of how many people would have been murdered as a result.

And even if you're the kind of person who believes that the king and parliament deserved that grisly fate, you have to remember that the explosion would have injured or killed dozens, perhaps hundreds of innocent people as well, who just happened to live and work in the Westminster Precinct.

We're talking pages, servants, cleaners, tavern owners, tavern goers, shopkeeps, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, even the beggars who feed on stones.

But because no one was ultimately hurt, we aren't forced to do that moral calculus when reckoning with the gunpowder plot.

I sincerely wonder if Guy Fawkes could have been revived as a a folk hero if those 36 barrels of gunpowder had actually exploded that day.

In England, there's an old joke that Guy Fawkes was the last man to enter parliament with honest intentions.

It's a dark little jab at disingenuous politicians, but I wonder how comfortable people would be ironically toasting Guy Fawkes if he'd successfully blasted a half-kilometer hole in central London.

But he didn't, so he can be Guy Fawkes, champion of the little guy.

But I would argue that draining Guy Fawkes of his Roman Catholic convictions has the effect of warping our understanding of history.

Fawkes was not a left-wing firebrand.

In fact, the concept of the left and right wings of the political spectrum didn't even exist in 1605.

He wasn't an advocate for the poor.

He didn't care about the rights of Parliament or the early push for representative government in England.

He and his co-conspirators wanted parliament destroyed and replaced by a strong Catholic monarch.

He was concerned with the rights of the people so long as they were his people, English Catholics.

The England that the gunpowder plotters wanted to create was not a more equitable, tolerant, and just society.

It was just a place where their group, Roman Catholics, were on top, or at least were no longer being ground down by the Protestant elites.

But by the time Guido Fox or the Prophetess of Ordsall Cave was being staged, things had changed.

Even though tensions between Catholics and Protestants had certainly not disappeared, by the mid-19th century, the religious politics of the 17th century were starting to seem distant and less relatable.

As a result, Guy Fawkes, the literary character, needed to represent something more contemporary if he was going to be in any way compelling.

Meanwhile, the celebrations of the 5th of November were becoming less about historical remembrance and more about contemporary grievances with local authority.

What started as an occasion to celebrate the preservation of the traditional order, that being God's salvation of king and parliament on the 5th of November, became an occasion when order routinely broke down.

The effigy of Guy Fawkes that was burnt on the bonfire eventually evolved into the less historically precise figure known simply as the Guy.

The guy could stand in for literally anyone who the crowd deemed worthy of immolation.

The groups of rowdy men who often led the festivities used the night to blow off steam and push back against local authorities that were trying to tame what they believed to be authentic working class culture.

During the mid-19th century, bonfire night became a time to lampoon political figures, voice discontent, and, in some locales, literally do battle with the police force.

In this regard, the revelers often had more in common with the man they were throwing on the fire than the authorities who had originally compelled them to remember, remember the 5th of November.

But perhaps the gunpowder plot was always destined for this type of radical reinterpretation.

Almost immediately after the apprehension of Guy Fawkes, the story of the gunpowder plot was already being shaped by those who wanted to use it for political purposes.

Is it possible that we have been fed a corrupted narrative of the gunpowder plot?

Is the whole story of a radical terrorist attack actually a clever misdirection?

Could it be that the gunpowder plot was actually a false flag operation?

The 17th century equivalent of the Reichstag fire?

A plot that had all the appearances of being the work of religious zealots, when in actual fact, it was orchestrated by a high-ranking government minister looking to manufacture a crisis that would shore up the shaky reign of King James I?

What if the plan wasn't foiled, but was actually executed perfectly?

Was the gunpowder plot a conspiracy inside a conspiracy?

Let's find out today on our fig history.

Episode number 214, Have We Misremembered the Gunpowder Plot?

Part 2.

Hello and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story.

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This week, we are concluding our series on the 1605 gunpowder plot and the remarkable afterlife of the plot's demolition man, Guy Fawkes.

This is part two in a two-part series, so if you've not heard part one, then I strongly suggest that you go back and give that a listen now.

In that first part, we spent some time exploring Guy Fox's somewhat surprising 21st century transformation into a malleable, almost unplaceable symbol favored by internet hacktivists and anti-authoritarian campaigners of all political stripes.

Then we went back to England in the early 17th century, and I did my best to give some historical context around the original gunpowder plot.

Specifically, we looked at the religious tensions between England's Protestants and the so-called recusants, English Roman Catholics who refused to attend Church of England services.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, recusant Catholics were subject to fines and harassment.

Catholics bold enough to harbor Jesuits or attempt conversions could find themselves imprisoned or even executed.

When King James VI of Scotland took the English throne and became James I of Great Britain and Ireland, there was an initial glimmer of hope that the new king was going to usher in a new era of tolerance towards England's Catholics.

However, a year into his reign, a series of plots and renewed tensions with the Pope severely diminished any sympathies James may have had for his Roman Catholic subjects.

It became clear that the harsh treatment that had become common under Queen Elizabeth was going to continue under James.

It was in this climate of disappointment and despair for English Catholics that the gunpowder plot was hatched.

As we heard, the ringleader of this plot was a Catholic aristocrat from England's West Midlands named Robert Catesby.

As I hopefully hammered home, Catesby and not Guy Fawkes was the mastermind of this plot, or as historian Antonia Frazier poetically puts it, he was, quote, the dark prince at the heart of the gunpowder plot, end quote.

Fawkes was a devout Roman Catholic recusant from Yorkshire who had left England in the 1590s to fight with the Army of Flanders.

That was the Catholic Habsburg force that was tapped to invade England during the threat of the Spanish Armada.

One of the earliest conspirators, a man by the name of Thomas Winter, recruited Fox from the Netherlands because of his militant Catholic bona fides and his experience with gunpowder and other explosives.

The plan to destroy the palace of Westminster and kill King James and a huge chunk of England's political class in the process was very nearly pulled off.

The conspirator Thomas Percy had been made a gentleman pensioner, which put him close to the king and gave him the cover cover to rent a small house near Parliament and a storehouse fortuitously located directly beneath the House of Lords.

But as we heard, the plot was uncovered at the eleventh hour when a letter meant to warn the formerly Catholic Lord Mount Eagle of the attack on Parliament was passed to Robert Cecil, the King's chief minister.

Cecil then passed the letter to the King, who had Westminster thoroughly searched the night before the opening of Parliament on November 5th.

Sure enough, Guy Fawkes was found out front of the storehouse just past midnight with a number of fuses on his person.

When the storehouse was searched, the barrels of gunpowder were discovered and the plot was officially foiled.

Now,

one thing that you may have noticed is that I've tried not to overwhelm you with the names of every single person involved.

This is one of those topics where if you're not careful, you can very quickly drown in the names of side characters or people with just a passing involvement in the plot or its discovery.

I've done my best to only introduce someone by name when I think they are relevant or needed for the story to make sense.

So, if you have a personal favorite plotter or English minister that that I haven't mentioned, many apologies.

But I'm trying to keep this tight, so let's not let it become a weird 17th century attendance list.

Now, obviously, I don't want to miss anyone important,

but hopefully as we go forward, I'll keep getting the balance right.

So, what became of the rest of the plotters after Guy Fawkes was arrested?

And how was the story of the gunpowder plot eventually presented by the officials who would write the first draft of history.

Well, let's get into it.

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When the gunpowder plot was discovered just past midnight on November 5th, it did not remain a secret for very long.

News that Guy Fox, alias John Johnson, had been arrested, spread quickly around London.

By the end of the day, most of the other gunpowder plotters had pulled up stakes and left the city.

Many of them, including the ringleader Robert Catesby, headed for the largely Catholic Midlands region.

There, they hoped they might be safe.

Luckily for them, Fox held up fairly well during his interrogation, at least for a little while.

One account even has it that he was steely and defiant when he was made to face King James in the flesh.

Apparently, James disgustedly demanded how Fawkes, quote, could conspire to so hideous a treason against my children and so many innocent souls who had never offended him, end quote.

To that, Fawkes coldly replied that, quote, a dangerous disease requires a desperate remedy, end quote.

When he was asked why he needed so much gunpowder, he apparently spat back, quote, to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains, end quote.

Now, these little bits of venom may have been Fox's attempt to present himself as a violent lone wolf.

But this didn't really convince many people because almost immediately he was recognized as John Johnson, the servant of Thomas Percy.

And it was quickly revealed that Percy, the newly installed gentleman pensioner, had been renting the storehouse where all the gunpowder had been found.

So at the very least, Thomas Percy had to have been in on the plot.

Now, interestingly, almost all the sources comment on the bravery shown by Fox during his interrogation.

Even the king himself was said to have been impressed with Fox's steely resolve.

This detail has been emphasized as a key part of the Guy Fox mystique, and has certainly contributed to his modern reimagining as an anti-hero.

He also managed to withstand two solid days of torture, which likely involved being stretched on a brutal device known as the rack.

But on November 7th, he broke.

and made a detailed, albeit coerced, confession.

We have copies of Fox's signature and documents from both November 5th and November 7th.

The difference between them tells the tale of how brutal his handling was over those two days.

The November 7th signature is barely a scrawl.

However, even before Fox broke, the authorities had already been able to make a short list of likely conspirators, given Thomas Percy's known associates.

The fact that many of those men, including the known Catholic malcontent Robert Catesby, had fled for the Midlands, all but confirmed suspicions.

Now, while the plotters were on the run, there was an attempt to whip up the hoped-for Catholic rebellion, and a group of Catholic noblemen even met with Robert Catesby and a few of the other conspirators in the Midlands town of Dunchurch.

But when the lords realized just how desperate the plotters truly were, most of the gentlemen quickly abandoned them.

There would be no Catholic rising in England's Midlands.

At least, not that year.

Now, apparently, some of the conspirators wanted to turn themselves in in hopes that King James might show them mercy, but most of them were talked out of it by the Riz King himself, Robert Catesby.

Catesby clearly knew that he was cooked and could expect no mercy, so he planned to go down fighting.

It's yet another testament to his dark charm that he was able to convince many of his fellow conspirators that they should do the same.

A group of seven of the total 13 plotters eventually holed up in a house in Strathordshire, just north of Birmingham.

There they waited to make their last stand.

In a weird twist of poetic irony, the plotters almost did themselves in when they nearly blew themselves up with, you guessed it, gunpowder.

Apparently on their journey north, they had brought with them a barrel of powder that had gotten wet in the rain.

They then made the reckless decision to try and dry out the gunpowder in front of a fire at their safe house.

Predictably, a spark hit the powder and the whole thing exploded, blinding one of the conspirators, John Grant, and damaging the hideout.

It also removed any doubt about where the fugitives were hiding.

By November 8th, government forces had surrounded the house.

Of the seven plotters, four were shot and killed, while three others were wounded and captured.

Among the dead was Robert Catesby.

Apparently, one bullet managed to kill both Catesby and Thomas Percy.

But it should be said that many historians are skeptical of that particular story.

Getting a 17th-century musket ball to pass through not one, but two plotters, and the two most consequential plotters at that, seems almost too perfect.

But still, that's the story that we get.

Another story has it that with his dying breath, Robert Catesby crawled to a portrait of the Virgin Mary and clutched it to his chest as he bled out.

Now, again, that's one of those stories that seems a little too perfect in its demonstrative Catholicism, but it's what we're told.

The rest of the plotters were rounded up within the next few days, save for two men who managed to stay on the run for three months before finally being arrested in January of 1606.

Now almost immediately, the authorities started to craft their own version of events that placed at the center of this conspiracy not Robert Catesby or Guido Fox,

but a group they were convinced were behind all nefarious Roman Catholic plots in the country.

The Jesuits.

To this end, the authorities turned their attention to four known Jesuit priests operating in the country, with some loose connections to the plotters.

Two of these men, Fathers Tessemund and Gerard, managed to escape the country and eventually authored their own accounts of the whole debacle.

The other two Jesuits, Fathers Henry Garnet and Edward Oldcorn, were eventually discovered by the authorities and were tried along with the other conspirators.

Now, the interesting thing is that it seems very clear that the powers at B wanted to shape the public perception of this event so that most of the blame fell on the Jesuits, even though it seems fairly clear that the Jesuits had very little to do with it.

At the trial for the first group of plotters, England's Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, acted as the prosecutor.

In his opening statement, he declared that the gunpowder treason was, quote, beyond all examples, whether in fact or fiction, even the tragic poets who did beat their wits to represent the most fearful and horrible murders, end quote.

After setting the stage, he then laid out exactly who the government sought to blame.

Quote, The principal offenders are the seducing Jesuits, men that use the reverence of religion, yea, even the most sacred and blessed name of Jesus, to cover their impiety, blasphemy, treason, rebellion, and all manner of wickedness.

For the Attorney General, the worst Jesuit of all was Father Henry Garnet.

The government's version of events was that Garnet and his cabal of undercover Jesuits had been behind the plot from the start.

Many of the plotters confessed that they had taken communion at a secret mass at the Duck and Drake that fateful night when the plot was first fully articulated.

The man who gave them communion was the now escaped Father Gerard, a known associate of Father Henry Garnet's.

At trial, this secret mass was presented as the Jesuits giving their blessing and encouragement to the gunpowder plot right from day one.

It was also shown that Father Garnet had met with Robert Catesby and that Father Garnett had knowledge of the plot.

But the Jesuit insisted that the details of the plot had been disclosed to him by another priest in the context of holy confession.

He insisted right to the end of his life that he had always been staunchly opposed to the extreme violence of the gunpowder plot.

And many historians believe him, given his track record in counseling English Catholics against violence.

He argued at trial that the only reason he did not disclose the plot to the authorities was because he had learned of it in the context of confession, and he could not break his vows as a priest.

But once Father Garnet's knowledge of the plot had been demonstrated, the prosecutors were able to spin a version of events where he and the other Jesuits had clearly orchestrated the whole thing.

In those first few years after the foiling of the gunpowder plot, As the English were settling into their yearly remembrance of the event, Garnet, not Fox or Catesby, was often cited as the chief plotter.

According to an early account of the plot, most government writing about the event in the early 17th century referenced, quote, Garnet, a Jesuit, and his confederates, end quote.

So, this is where things get funky when we're examining how the gunpowder plot was remembered.

Right from the jump, a skewed and demonstrably inaccurate version of events was being pushed by the authorities.

Now, why do this?

Well, any of you listening who are familiar with this period know that any antipathy felt by Protestants toward Roman Catholics was doubled, maybe even tripled, when it came to the Jesuits.

This was because in the 17th century the Jesuits were the most evangelical wing of the Catholic establishment who had been formed with the express purpose of fighting against the forces of the Reformation.

And to be clear, the Jesuits in England were trying to make the country more Roman Catholic.

Now in this case they were not behind the gunpowder plot.

As historian James Sharp argues, Father Garnet, the chief Jesuit implicated in the plot, found out about about it late and had always been dead set against it.

But if the Protestant powers at B were going to bring the hammer down on English Catholics, they weren't going to miss a chance to kneecap the Jesuits.

But this means that the official account of the gunpowder plot, as articulated at trial, was inaccurate.

The details had been massaged by the English authorities to serve a political purpose and justify a renewed crackdown on the Jesuits.

So, this then raises the question, if the king's ministers had been willing to bend the truth to implicate the Jesuits, then what else might they have been willing to lie about?

This has opened the door for some very elaborate conspiracy theories.

Starting in the 17th century, there were writers who alleged that the whole plot had been a false flag operation, an elaborate ruse planned by powerful Protestant ministers meant to vilify English Catholics, purge the country of Jesuits, and shore up the new reign of King James I.

So let's pause here a moment and catch our breath.

Then when we come back, we'll explore if these conspiracy theories have anything to them.

In the 17th century, a number of Catholic writers, dissatisfied with how the gunpowder plot was being presented in England, started writing their own accounts of the plot.

Some of these writers went so far as to argue that the men who had been hung for treason were not, in fact, behind the gunpowder plot at all.

In the late 19th century, this conspiracy theory was revived in a much-discussed book by the Catholic priest John Girard, a man named for one of those Jesuits implicated in the 1605 plot.

Now, whether or not we accept Gerard's take on the gunpowder plot, there's no denying that his arguments have influenced the way that this moment in history has been discussed ever since.

In the 19th century, Gerard argued that the gunpowder plot had not been the brainchild of Robert Catesby, but was instead the elaborate design of King James I's first minister, Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury.

In 1605, Robert Cecil was easily one of the most powerful men in England.

Cecil had been a leading minister during Queen Elizabeth's reign and had served in a number of different roles, mostly to do with foreign affairs and state security.

As such, he became one of the few ministers privy to the operations of Elizabeth's growing network of spies.

When Queen Elizabeth died, Cecil was instrumental in getting King James recognized as Queen Elizabeth's heir.

In fact, many historians credit Cecil's behind-the-scenes machinations for James's relatively smooth ascension to the English throne.

This meant that when James became King of England, Cecil became the key man at court.

By 1605, he was James' first minister and the de facto head of the nascent security and intelligence services.

If anyone could pull off a plot like this, it was Robert Cecil.

Now, we should recognize that there are a number of things about the official gunpowder plot narrative that seem a little fishy.

First, the timeline of events doesn't always add up.

It seems a little counterintuitive that Robert Catesby would lay out his whole plan to bomb Parliament at the Duck and Drake on May 20th, 1604, before he knew how they were going to get the gunpowder underneath the palace of Westminster.

We're told he was just confident that they would find a way to do it.

But then, amazingly, everything falls into place.

So they are able to do exactly that.

Right on queue, the plotter Thomas Percy gets made a gentleman pensioner and has cause to rent a home in Westminster.

And it just so happens that the person he rents the house from also owns a storehouse directly underneath the House of Lords.

And guess what?

That perfectly located storehouse was also for rent.

You have to admit, that was incredibly convenient.

Then, these private individuals managed to purchase an astonishing 36 barrels of gunpowder.

Now, even given historian James Sharpe's explanation that the end of the war with Spain had created a buyer's market for powder, it's still an incredible stroke of good luck that the authorities did not notice a handful of gentlemen quietly buying up an enormous amount of explosive.

It was also similarly fortuitous that the plotters managed to transport the gunpowder and load it into the storehouse under the House of Lords without detection.

Now, this was obviously not impossible, but it still required a certain amount of good luck.

And then, for the plot to be discovered at the 11th hour with the trigger man in position and all the evidence right where it needed to be, it's almost like the whole thing had been planned that way.

The conspiracy theory goes that all these fortuitous coincidences were not coincidences at all.

Behind the scenes was Robert Cecil carefully orchestrating the whole thing.

And in the end, he got exactly what he wanted, the public execution of a handful of known Catholic malcontents and a crackdown on the Jesuits.

Friends, I will concede that there are many elements of the official version of the gunpowder plot story that are legitimately suspicious.

But to make the case that Robert Cecil secretly dreamt up the plot and set it in motion, then you need to show some evidence that Cecil had a man on the inside of the conspiracy.

Because here's the thing.

Clearly, many, if not all, of the gunpowder plotters were sincere Roman Catholics who believed in the righteousness of their attack.

There's no world where Guido Fox, English turncoat fighting for the Habsburgs, was secretly working for the Arch Protestant Robert Cecil.

For this conspiracy theory to work, that means that one of the original plotters was actually an Agent Provocateur who knowingly deceived the other plotters in order to ensnare them in a trap.

In other words, Guy Fawkes was misled by a fake plotter.

So, who could it have been?

Well, if you're making the case that Cecil designed the plot, then that means he needed to have the Riz King himself, Robert Catesby, in his pocket.

According to the plotter's confessions, Catesby was the one who first pitched the plot and was instrumental in keeping it together.

Anytime a plotter wavered, voiced some doubt, or brought up some concerns about the collateral damage, Catesby was always the one who talked them back around.

While the other conspirators were certainly important in organizing and executing the plot, Catesby was consistently and reliably pointed to as the man with the plan.

The question is, was First Minister Robert Cecil secretly controlling Catesby?

Now, I'll admit, it seems hard to believe that Robert Catesby, a known Catholic agitator, would suddenly betray his fellow Catholics after years of fighting for the cause.

But researcher Martin Beardsley has explained that Catesby was, quote, a decadent spendthrift with suspect morals and strong Protestant connections, the kind of man who might put his scruples to the side if the right kind of rewards were dangled in front of him, end quote.

So, Beardsley believes that it's not out of the question for Catesby to have been bought.

Catesby was also the plotter who had been communicating with the Jesuits.

The Jesuits would not have been implicated in the plot had it not been for Catesby.

And implicating the Jesuits was clearly important to First Minister Robert Cecil.

But the only problem is that there's absolutely no evidence that Robert Catesby and Robert Cecil had any kind of relationship.

There's nothing that connects them.

If Catesby was bought, then what was his promised reward?

The fact that he ultimately chose to run to the Midlands and died fighting also makes it seem less likely that he had some special deal with the First Minister.

There's no evidence that he was ever paid or offered anything else that would incentivize him to betray his religion and his friends.

Now, there have been other plotters who have been suspected of being government moles, and that might be worth considering.

But for Robert Cecil to have truly been behind the whole plot, he would have needed Catesby.

And there's just no evidence that Catesby was a turncoat.

Now, with all that said, many historians have embraced the idea that while it's unlikely that Robert Cecil cooked up the gunpowder plot, it is likely that he knew about it for weeks, perhaps even months, before the fated 5th of November.

Cecil let it play out so it could be revealed in the most damning and politically useful way.

As mentioned earlier, Robert Cecil was the head of a network of spies and informants that had been built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and then inherited by James I.

By 1605, this network had become reasonably effective at sniffing out potential plots, especially Roman Catholic plots.

It would have been remarkable if something as audacious as the gunpowder plot had completely escaped detection.

Not impossible, mind you, but remarkable.

In the last episode, I mentioned that as the plot got in motion, more conspirators were brought on board to help finance the project and procure the gunpowder.

The more people who were let in on the secret, the less secure the secret became.

The last person to be brought into the plot was one of Robert Catesby's cousins, a man named Francis Tresham.

In 1605, Tresham had just recently inherited his father's vast estate and had become fairly wealthy in the process.

Catesby approached his cousin in mid-October 1605, just a few weeks before the attack, to provide an influx of cash needed to get the project over the line.

However, Tresham would later claim that he was never fully comfortable with the plot.

In his official confession, he was emphatic that at that first meeting, he told Catesby that he thought the plot was morally indefensible and spiritually damnable.

Further, he also worried that no matter what the outcome of the plot might be, the reprisals against English Catholics would surely be terrible.

In the end, not even the Rizmaster himself, Robert Catesby, was able to get Tresham to fork over much money.

Although, Tresham would end up gifting a small amount to one of the other conspirators.

But Francis Tresham now knew the plan, so for all intents and purposes, he was a plotter.

But this guy was obviously the least reliable of all the 13 men in on the plot.

Francis Tresham may have been the leak.

In fact, it's long been assumed that Tresham was the secret author of the infamous Mount Eagle letter.

You might remember from the last episode, that was the anonymous letter received by Lord Mount Eagle warning him not to go to Parliament on November 5th.

That letter proved to be instrumental in the foiling of the plot.

Tresham knew Lord Mount Eagle.

He was uncomfortable with the excessive violence of the plot.

It's entirely plausible that he was the one who blew the whistle.

Now, if you're comfortable with the idea that Francis Tresham wrote the Mount Eagle letter, then it's equally plausible that he had been loose-lipped about the plot generally.

This may have meant alerting the authorities directly, relaying the message through an intermediary, or simply blabbing it to someone who then felt compelled to pass along the information.

Even if Tresham was not an outright mole, he still may have been bad with the secret.

Interestingly, the other plotters believed that Tresham wrote the Mount Eagle letter.

Once the existence of the letter was revealed, Catesby and the early conspirator Thomas Winter confronted Tresham and threatened to hang him for writing it.

But somehow, Tresham managed to convince his potential murderers that he had not, in fact, been the author.

Was he just trying to save his skin, or was Tresham telling the truth?

Well, interestingly, a growing number of historians think he was telling the truth.

So, if Tresham wasn't the author, then who was?

A modern handwriting analysis of the Mount Eagle letter has demonstrated that whoever wrote it consciously disguised their handwriting.

It's been argued that Lord Mount Eagle may have authored the letter himself.

He may have been given a verbal warning about the attack, but then chose to manufacture the letter so that the authorities might take the threat more seriously.

Also, if Lord Mount Eagle could play like he received an anonymous letter, it would seem less like he was associating with treasonous bombers.

But there's another theory that has been forwarded by historians Antonia Frazier and Alan Haynes, and that is that the true author of the Mount Eagle Letter was none other than the king's first minister, Robert Cecil.

Now, to be clear, they don't think that Robert Cecil cooked up the entire gunpowder plot.

But they do think that once the plot became known to him, he skillfully manipulated its endgame.

Antonia Frazier has pointed out that well before the arrival of the Mount Eagle letter, Cecil had made some passing comments about a Catholic stir that he was aware of.

She argues that while it's impossible to know exactly how much Cecil knew, it's very likely that the plot was being whispered about in Catholic circles.

It's also likely that the huge amount of gunpowder being purchased was noticed by Cecil's informants.

So this helps explain how the gunpowder plotters were able to procure so much powder and move it to Westminster without being detected.

They were detected, or at least some part of what they were doing was detected.

But Cecil chose to let it play out.

Historian Alan Haynes has suggested that Cecil wrote the Mount Eagle letter himself and had it delivered to the Lord so he could terminate the plot exactly when and how he wanted.

A few days after the plot was discovered, Cecil let it slip in a correspondence that the Mount Eagle letter had been written, quote, in a hand disguised, end quote.

It's been argued by the Catholic historian Francis Edward that Cecil could only have known that the handwriting was disguised if he had written the letter himself.

Alan Haynes has even guessed that the letter may have been used as a warning shot to the plotters.

If the existence of the letter became known, the plotters might abandon the whole thing ahead of time.

As Haynes puts it, Cecil may have believed that the letter might have, quote, saved lives by jerking the plotters back to reality, end quote.

Historian Antonia Frazier, on the other hand, has guessed that the full scope of the gunpowder plot was not clear to Robert Cecil until late October 1605.

She believes that Lord Mount Eagle was likely tipped verbally by Francis Tresham.

Then, the Lord verbally passed the warning on to Robert Cecil.

From there, she believes that Cecil and Lord Mount Eagle worked together to produce the letter.

The person who actually did the writing of the letter is almost beside the point.

Fraser believes that both men knew it was a fake.

Further, she argues that the letter was perfectly designed to get the attention of King James.

Remember, King James fancied himself an intelligent man with excellent deductive skills.

He loved playing detective.

And sure enough, it was the king who got to have the central role in the ultimate discovery of Fox and the gunpowder.

As Antonio Fraser puts it, Robert Cecil may have been the one, quote, who knew so well how to manipulate his royal master.

End quote.

So, was the gunpowder plot an inside job?

No,

the best historians of the plot do not think so.

However, the official version of events is not the full story.

Many of the strange strokes of luck experienced by the plotters make much more sense when you realize that the authorities knew about the plot ahead of time and let it play out.

The only part that was potentially stage-managed by Robert Cecil was the dramatic foiling of the plot and the subsequent framing of the Jesuits.

What do you call that?

A partial conspiracy?

A mini-conspiracy?

I don't know.

I'll let you guys cook up a punchy name for that.

The work of historians like Antonia Frazier have given us a more complete and nuanced understanding of the gunpowder plot.

In the last 20 years, the way the plot has been perceived by students of history and folks who are interested in this period has certainly changed.

But the popular understanding of the gunpowder plot is a different story altogether.

That has also gone through some remarkable changes, but it's had less to do with careful historical research and more to do with the evolving vibe on the streets.

So let's take one more break, and when we come back, we'll explore how the commemoration of the 5th of November and Guy Fawkes has brought us to our current moment.

The gunpowder plot is notable in English history not only for its audacity, but also for its longevity as a cause for public celebration and commemoration.

The transformation of this potentially horrendous terrorist attack into a type of public spectacle happened almost immediately.

This first took the form of the gruesome public execution of the plotters, which involved partially hanging them, mutilating their genitals, disemboweling them, and then having their bodies drawn and quartered.

The prisoners were considered lucky if they managed to break their necks and died quickly during the initial hanging.

Punishment in the 17th century was a grisly affair, meant to be watched by as many people as possible.

But of course, things did not end there.

On January 21st, 1605, a bill was introduced in Parliament titled, An Act for Public Thanksgiving to Almighty God Every Year on the Fifth Day of November.

The act quickly passed into law.

According to historian James Sharp, it was the least contentious bill passed during James I's reign, where almost everything would prove to be contentious.

So it was that the foiling of the gunpowder plot was to be celebrated every year on the 5th of November.

For the first few decades after 1605, these acts of public thanksgiving took the form of Church of England services.

In their sermons, Church of England ministers would take the opportunity to rail against the evils of popery and frame the ultimate foiling of the gunpowder plot as evidence of God's special relationship with England.

This was then folded into an understanding of history that became popular among English writers in the 17th century.

The so-called English providentialist history taught that England had a special destiny in the history of the world, and that God wanted England to be Protestant and had intervened on a number of key occasions to keep England Protestant.

One of these times was in 1588 when England was threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The fact that much of the fleet was eventually wrecked by brutal storms off the coast of Scotland and Ireland was attributed to a Protestant wind sent by God.

Similarly, it was argued that God had intervened once again to save King James and Parliament from the Roman Catholic gunpowder plot.

These church services were also accompanied by public celebrations that involved lighting bonfires, shooting off the 17th century equivalent of fireworks, or simply exploding small quantities of gunpowder.

But the meaning of this event did not remain static for long.

Even in the 17th century, the 5th of November proved to be a malleable event that almost every political faction managed to co-opt.

The event that was originally meant to celebrate the Stuart monarchy was kept around even after King Charles I, a Stuart monarch, was executed by Parliament.

During the period of Oliver Cromwell's protectorate, when the Puritans had taken control of England, most public holidays and festivals were banned.

Even Christmas celebrations were curtailed.

However, one of the few public celebrations that was allowed to carry on was the November 5th Thanksgiving.

The Puritans seemed to have appreciated the anti-Catholic nature of the event.

So, they let it continue.

They seem to have easily sidestepped the fact that the event was originally meant to celebrate God's salvation of the Stuarts, a monarchy they had deposed.

Under Cromwell, Bonfire Night was about God affirming the ascendancy of Protestants in England, and nothing else.

But then when the Restoration came and Charles II, a Stuart monarch, was once again on the throne, Bonfire Night just kept happening, and some of the old meanings associated with God saving the Stuart King were able to return.

But then, cut to the Glorious Revolution, when the Stuarts were deposed yet again.

Believe it or not, Bonfire Night survived that as well, and was able to absorb yet more sometimes contradictory meanings.

As fate would have it, one of the key events of the Glorious Revolution occurred on the 5th of November.

The Dutch Prince William of Orange, who had been invited by Parliament to depose the current king and rule alongside his Stuart bride, Mary II,

landed his army in England on November 5th.

So, after that, Bonfire Night became a celebration of both the foiling of the gunpowder plot and the arrival of William and Mary.

Now, it was around this time that Bonfire Night started to get a bit more rowdy and a bit more theatrical.

Sometime around the end of the 1600s, the celebrations started including the burning of effigies.

But notably, the effigies being burnt were not of Guy Fawkes.

In fact, for the first 200 years of November the 5th celebrations, Guy Fawkes was barely mentioned.

If any of the plotters were going to be singled out for special denunciation, it was more likely to be the framed Jesuit father, Henry Garnet.

But the first reports we have of effigies being burned on bonfire night usually tell us that the figure being burned was the Pope.

Yes, burning the Pope seems to have been the convention for most of the 18th century.

The tradition of burning the Pope on bonfire night seems to have even spread to the American colonies.

In the mid-18th century, Boston and New York were both known for having particularly rowdy bonfire nights, where effigies of the Pope were gleefully set aflame.

In Massachusetts, bonfire night simply became Pope Day.

Parades organized by groups of working-class Bostonians would feature effigies of the Pope accompanied by effigies of the devil, and the paraders took to dressing as the devil's imps.

Historian James Sharp adds, quote, There was a great rivalry between the North End and the South End parades, and the two would fight to try and seize the other's pope and burn it with their own.

The two groups became more structured, each having a leader who organized the parade and directed any fighting, end quote.

So, in Boston, the event was part anti-Catholic hate march, part capture the flag, and part yearly rumble.

But that tradition seems to have died out around the time of the American Revolution.

George Washington himself believed that the custom of burning an effigy of the Pope was, quote, ridiculous and childish, end quote.

To that end, he banned any soldiers or officers under his command from participating in bonfire night festivities.

It wasn't long after that that that Pope Day completely vanished.

But just as Pope Day was dying out in America, Bonfire Night was becoming increasingly elaborate and chaotic back in Britain.

Over the course of the 1700s, when Bonfire Night became both the celebration of the Glorious Revolution, as well as the foiling of the gunpowder plot, it started to be celebrated in a way reminiscent of other European carnival days, sort of like an English Mardi Gras.

Much like the Bostonians dressed as Satan's imps, by the late 1700s, revelers in the UK were commonly showing up in costume.

Masks of all descriptions, some very similar to other European carnival masks, started to become a common sight on bonfire night.

Like other carnival traditions, bonfire night also became associated with heavy drinking and the loosening of moral standards.

The bonfire night revelers embraced the carnivalesque idea that the social order was being turned on its head, at least for one night.

Now, this was fairly ironic given the tradition's origins as a celebration of God's divine protection of the king.

But the party itself had taken on a social function that no longer had much to do with celebrating an averted assassination.

Despite its growing rowdiness, in the 1700s, bonfire night was still largely encouraged and patronized by Britain's elites.

But as the 18th century became the 19th century, this shifted.

Again, I'll turn to historian James Sharp, who explains that, quote, Popular commemorations of the 5th of November became a symbol of how social relationships and social control were changing in the 19th century.

In many areas, local elites had organized civic celebrations of the fifth across the 18th century.

But increasing concerns about fire dangers and deeper worries about public order and social discipline engendered by the French Revolution meant that elites withdrew their patronage from such events so that the celebrations passed into the hands of the lower classes.

End quote.

So it was that in the early 1800s, Bonfire Night became a decidedly lower class celebration, shunned and even feared by some of Britain's elites.

At the same time, attitudes towards Britain's Catholics were changing.

As the 19th century progressed, Catholics were being enfranchised and were regaining their civil rights.

Britain's upper crust was becoming more secular, and having openly anti-Catholic views was was becoming de classe.

As such, an overtly anti-Catholic street festival seemed all the more vulgar to many upper-class Britons.

The upper-class retreat from Bonfire Night and their attempts to tame it once again reshaped its meaning.

Bonfire Night became an expression of working-class pride.

The anti-Catholic displays became just as much about sticking it to the upper crust who were trying to impose their new morals on people they considered to be their social inferiors as it was about intimidating Roman Catholics.

It's like no haughty lord is going to tell me I can't burn the Pope.

By the mid-1800s, Bonfire Night became notorious for civil unrest, violence, and groups of revelers fighting the local police.

What were these revelers fighting for?

Well, that could change drastically depending on the year, the region of the UK, and even the town in question.

Sometimes these bonfire night riots were old-fashioned expressions of anti-Catholic prejudice.

Years when Parliament passed legislation giving Catholics greater civil rights were usually occasions for particularly violent bonfire nights.

In 1850, when the Catholic hierarchy, that's bishops, etc., returned to Britain after centuries of banishment, bonfire night was accordingly vitriolic and ferocious in some parts of Britain.

But often, protests, both peaceful and violent, on bonfire night, had to do with considerably more local concerns.

People used the political theater associated with bonfire night to lampoon, or sometimes straight-up attack, local politicians, police, or unscrupulous business people.

Often the bonfire boys, as the revelers were sometimes called, were quite literally fighting for their right to party.

Attempts to restrain bonfire night, move the sight of the bonfire, or call off the celebrations altogether were often met with violence.

Groups of masked men used the occasion to demonstrate to the local authorities that they could not control what they believed were the customs of the people.

The chaos in the streets became the point and the thing to fight for.

This became especially acute in the 1850s when yearly riots became the norm.

To give you a flavor of this, here's a first-hand description of a particularly violent bonfire night in the English town of Guildford in 1852.

Quote, Quote:

In the evening, a number of people amounting to several hundreds came into the town from the neighboring villages, armed most of them with bludgeons, with their faces blackened, and many, I believe, in women's attire.

In short, the whole town was for these three or four hours in a state of complete riot, with no one to oppose their lawless proceedings.

End quote.

I like that description because it very concisely gets across the strange mix of carefree party vibes and genuine menace that came to characterize Bonfire Night in the mid-1800s.

You have to admit, it's a rare event that combines cross-dressing, blackface, and bludgeonings.

But the lack of opposition to the revelers described in that account did not last long.

By the 1860s, battles between bonfire night societies, police, newly deputized special constables, and in some cases, the British Army had become common in some parts of England.

It would take repeated, violent shows of force from the authorities, which sometimes involved breaking up celebrations with bayonets, before bonfire night was fully tamed.

Now, of course, bonfire night never fully went away, but by the turn of the twentieth 20th century, it lost much of its violent edge.

But it was when Bonfire Night entered its wild period, associated with lower-class resistance to bourgeois and aristocratic authority, that Guy Fawkes made his emergence as the night's most recognizable symbol.

Around the year 1800, the effigy most commonly burnt on Bonfire Night became that of Guy Fawkes.

Now why, after nearly 200 years, was Fawkes suddenly singled out as the gunpowder plotter worth burning?

Well, as historian James Sharp has pointed out, during the French Revolution, the English became a little less gung-ho about burning the Pope in effigy, as it seemed too reminiscent of the anti-clerical French revolutionaries.

Just as that was happening, people were being reintroduced to Guy Fawkes by way of pantomimes, farces, and cheap melodramas performed on the English stage.

The earliest of these to survive is 1793's Guy Fawkes or The Fifth of November.

These early plays presented Fawkes as a two-dimensional mustache-twirling villain.

Now, it's hard to say what came first, the effigies on the street or the portrayals of Fawkes on stage, but it seems like the plays certainly encouraged the effigies, which in turn encouraged more plays.

But as we saw in the introduction, by the 1840s both literary and dramatic portrayals of Guy Fawkes were starting to change.

He was being presented as a more sympathetic villain, and in some cases, as a bit of a folk hero.

The effigies of Guy Guy Fawkes also became similarly malleable.

In years when anti-Catholic sentiment was at a high point, the effigies were usually meant to unambiguously depict the 17th century Catholic trigger man.

But other times and places, the Guy Fawkes effigy barely had anything to do with its namesake.

The effigy became commonly known simply as the guy.

Sometimes he was dressed in 17th century garb with the characteristic hat, mustache, and goatee, but not always.

The guy could be dressed in almost anything.

We're talking colorful dresses, crowns, clown costumes, capes, all sorts of stuff.

The more ridiculous, the better.

The guy was often paraded through the streets on an improvised sedan chair, and children would go around begging passers-by for a penny for the guy.

For these kids, it wasn't always clear that the guy was supposed to be Guy Fawkes.

He was just the guy, a silly toy meant to be burnt.

And this is my favorite detail of all.

The transformation of the guy effigy also transformed the word guy in the English language.

It was in the mid-1800s that a guy became synonymous with an anonymous man.

Now, the first known uses of the word guy in this context were usually meant as insults directed at men's fashion victims.

These were dandies or anyone wearing anything that seemed kind of garish.

In the early 1800s, if you saw a colorfully dressed man, you might say, there goes the guy, or look at that guy,

meaning that he was so wildly dressed that he reminded you of the guy that you burnt on bonfire night.

But by the mid-1800s, it wasn't just foppish dandies who were called guys.

It was all of those rowdy bonfire night revelers.

Anyone dressed in a costume on bonfire night might be called a guy because they were dressed up like the guy.

Soon, entire organizations who directed bonfire nights were being called guys.

For instance, those cudgel-wielding revelers from the town of Guildford that I described earlier?

Well, in the 1850s, they were known as the Guildford Guys.

Around the UK, a drunken, rowdy, and potentially violent bonfire night enthusiast became synonymous with being a guy.

And this is what really blew my mind.

See, when I started this research, I thought I was going to tell you that the hacker group Anonymous and the affiliated anti-authoritarian revelers who attended the Million Mask March back in the early 2010s had chosen an ironic, even inappropriate symbol when they adopted the Guy Fawkes mask.

After all, Guy Fawkes was a religious zealot.

He wasn't an anti-authoritarian.

He believed in the supreme authority of the Pope, as opposed to the supreme authority of the King of England.

He was not a democratically-minded man of the people.

He palled around with aristocrats and fought against the nascent Dutch Republic.

I thought I was going to tell you that the comic book and then the film V for Vendetta had given these 21st century protesters the wrong impression of who Guy Fawkes truly was.

But now I've come to believe something different.

It is true that the current use of the Guy Fawkes mask has little to do with the original Guy Fawkes, but...

It has a lot to do with the Guy Fawkes tradition and the changing meanings of Bonfire Night.

Over the course of four centuries, Bonfire Night has been through a number of fascinating mutations.

By the mid-19th century, it had taken on the vague purpose of demonstrating that the people would not be easily controlled.

Guy Fawkes became the guy.

And strangely, the people that burned him also became the guys.

What did the guys want?

Freedom.

Freedom from authority, freedom from bourgeois manners, freedom from the police, freedom to burn this place down if they wanted to.

That sounds quite a lot like the revelers at the Million Mask March.

Long before Alan Moore and David Lloyd used the image of Guy Fawkes for their anti-fascist avenger in V for Vendetta.

Guy Fawkes had already become associated with a type of anarchic anonymity.

The guy could be anyone, and anyone could be a guy.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore an all-new historical myth.

If you happen to be listening to this right when it's released, it is November 5th.

So, to my British friends, have fun on Bonfire Night.

And to my American friends, it's election night.

So, hang in there.

I'm thinking about you.

Just want to send you all the love in the world.

Before we go this week, as always, I need to give some special shout-outs.

Big ups to Noah Rolfe,

to Lindsey Brown,

to

Angharad Thomas, to Charles C.

Weber,

to

Zafari,

to Philip McRill,

to Brian Brazil,

to

Shelini Sharma,

to distant lights,

to Colin Cove,

to

Unlawful Waffle.

That's good.

I like that.

Unlawful waffle.

To Carol the Warlock.

To

someone who writes their name using the Cyrillic alphabet.

So, hey, I love you.

I just do not know how to pronounce those letters.

But thanks for supporting.

To Danielle San Filippo.

And to Jamien.

All of these people have decided to pledge at $5 or more every month.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Patrons, if you have not voted in our poll yet, please go and vote.

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And all the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

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