Episode #213 - Have We Misremembered the Gunpowder Plot? (Part I)

Have you ever heard of the Million Mask March?

If you haven't, you might be forgiven because in recent years it's become a relatively small event.

But around a decade ago, the Million Mask March was a bona fide global phenomenon.

On November 5th, 2013, the first ever Million Mask March drew huge crowds of protesters in dozens of cities around the world.

The UK's Guardian newspaper reported that sizable gatherings occurred in cities as diverse as Vancouver, Tel Aviv, Dublin, Paris, Chicago, and Sydney.

But by far, the largest demonstrations were in London, England, and Washington, D.C.

The event was meant to bring together a number of protest movements that had blossomed in the early 2010s.

As you might remember, in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement took over the parks in Lower Manhattan's financial district to protest the role big finance had played in the 2008 crash and ensuing recession, among other grievances about the corrupting power of money in Democratic politics.

Even though though that first occupation of Wall Street officially ended by the winter of 2011, it inspired the globally-minded Occupy movement.

In 2013, Occupy was still a potent force for boots-on-the-ground activism.

At the same time, the so-called hacktivist group Anonymous, which had come together on various internet image and message boards around 2003, was also having a bit of a moment in terms of mainstream media attention.

The group was behind several online pranks, cyber attacks, and street protests focused on upending attempts at internet censorship by governments, large corporations, and other moneyed interests.

In 2008, the profile of this nebulous group of internet activists was raised after they started a campaign meant to disrupt the operations of the Church of Scientology.

The anonymous hackers opposed the group's attempts to scrub the internet of embarrassing videos and Scientology's attempts to silence its critics through lawsuits and intimidation.

This proved to be just one of a series of well-publicized campaigns disruptive enough to earn Anonymous a spot on Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People list in 2012.

By that point, Time was giving Anonymous credit for frustrating, quote, Arab dictatorships, the Vatican, banking and entertainment firms, the FBI and CIA, the security firm Stratfor, and even San Francisco's BART transport system, end quote.

So it was that in 2013, Anonymous had just enough of a profile that it could bring together a big tent of disparate movements, including Occupy and a handful of other civil liberties, internet freedom, anti-austerity, and anti-corruption movements.

Not to mention a smattering of anarchists and libertarian groups spanning the entire political spectrum.

The result was the Million Mask March, a sometimes rowdy but largely peaceful set of demonstrations.

According to an organizer's Facebook page for the event, and you know this is 2013 because I'm quoting a Facebook page, the march was meant to protest: quote, the encroaching destruction of many civil liberties, the pushes to make the internet yet another part of the surveillance state, the government's disregard for migrants, for the poor, the elderly, and the disabled, and the capital, profit, and greed of the few put before the well-being of the many.

End quote.

The cause was broad and the goals were nebulous.

But to be fair, the same thing could be said of many protest movements.

But if I can massacre some Gen Z slang, what this particular protest movement had was vibes, or more specifically, party vibes.

All of the events that year were suffused with a certain carnival atmosphere.

The gathering encouraged a certain kind of rambunctious political theater in keeping with Anonymous's anarchic prankster reputation.

The other thing these protests had was an image.

The Million Mask March was so named because all the attendees were encouraged to wear a mask.

This was ostensibly done done to preserve the anonymity of the protesters, which was fitting given the group's staunchly anti-surveillance position.

But of course, the protesters weren't going to wear just any masks.

They were going to wear the mask that had become the de facto symbol of Anonymous, the Guy Fawkes mask.

Or, more specifically, the version of the Guy Fawkes mask made popular by the film adaptation of Alan Moore's beloved graphic novel V for Vendetta.

You know the mask I'm talking about.

It has the bone white face, the distinctive mustache, the goatee, and the mischievous close-lipped smile.

The choice of the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol for anonymous made a certain amount of sense in 2013.

The final moments of the 2005 film V for Vendetta, where a ragtag army of British citizens wearing Guy Fawkes masks descends on Westminster to witness the destruction of the fascist-controlled parliament buildings, certainly helped associate the mask with anti-authoritarian protests in the early 21st century popular imagination.

But perhaps the attraction to the Guy Fawkes image went deeper than that.

The now iconic mask had first been introduced in 1982 when the first issue of V for Vendetta went on sale.

The idea to dress the comic book's morally ambiguous anti-fascist freedom fighter V as a resurrected Guy Fawkes originally came from the illustrator David Lloyd.

The original Guy Fawkes had famously been one of the key men in the 1605 gunpowder plot, an attempt by a group of religiously motivated English Catholics to use a huge stash of gunpowder to blow up the English Parliament buildings and assassinate King James I.

Over the centuries in the UK, commemorations of the foiling of the gunpowder plot on the 5th of November had evolved into their own type of carnival.

By the mid-1800s, Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire night as it was also called involved wearing garish masks and burning Guy Fawkes in effigy.

David Lloyd's V for Vendetta mask was inspired by the traditional Guy Fawkes Night masks, but he made some significant choices about his design, which arguably helped turn the mask into a more striking symbol.

In an article for Pinup magazine, the critic Philippa Snow explained, quote, Despite the mask's goatee and mustache, V does not appear to be strictly male or female.

The mask's cheekbones, squeezed high by its eerie smile, are rouged like dolls' cheeks.

It does not seem to suggest an every man so much as an every man, woman, other,

making it an ideal symbol for a group with a fluid, unknowable identity.

End quote.

I would also add that there's something about the mask's impish smile that seems to fit perfectly with internet-based political activism, steeped as it is in irony, meme culture, and the plausible deniability of a joke.

In many ways, the Guy Fawkes symbol has become completely unmoored from its own history, and arguably the V for Vendetta source material.

The American academic Lewis Call has argued that the Guy Fawkes mask has become what philosophers in the post-structuralist school call a free-floating signifier.

This is, quote, when a particular word or symbol is not fixed to a particular content, but is mobile and can produce different meanings, end quote.

The mask is a symbol that can literally mean anything, or, as he puts it, quote, it never signifies the same way twice, end quote.

In many ways, the Million Mask March is a perfect example of how malleable the Guy Fawkes mask can be as a symbol.

On another Facebook page quoted by The Guardian, the march was described as, quote, a call for anonymous WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party, Occupy, and the Oath Keepers to defend humanity, end quote.

Now, I said earlier that the Million Mask March was a big tent, politically speaking, but it truly does not get any bigger than listing Occupy beside the Oath Kepers.

For those not familiar, the Oath Keepers are a notorious fascist militia group.

A group of six Oath Keepers, including their founder, were eventually found guilty of sedition as a result of their actions during the events of January 6th, 2021.

Now, it's unclear if the extreme right-wing oath keepers were in fact marching alongside the largely left-leaning crowds at the first Million Mask march.

But the fact that the Guy Fox mask seemed an appropriate symbol for all the groups present speaks volumes.

Or, as Lewis Cole writes of the mask, quote, a symbol can actually become so freighted with multiple meanings that in the end it collapses under its own weight and escapes meaning altogether.

The question I'm interested in is how did we get here?

The anonymous mask may have escaped meaning, but it started its life as the representation of a real historical figure.

How does Guy Fawkes the man figure into his 21st century role as a weirdly malleable symbol?

Does the modern Guy Fawkes mask have anything to do with the historical Guy Fawkes?

There's a centuries-old English rhyme that goes Remember, remember the 5th of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.

I see no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

There's no doubt, given the ubiquity of Guy Fox's face in the early 21st century, that 420 years on, the gunpowder plot is still being remembered.

But what exactly are we remembering?

And what have we forgotten?

Let's see if we can find out today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five

Episode number 213.

Have we misremembered the gunpowder plot?

Part one.

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.

It simply must be told.

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This week, we are starting a new series where we will explore the evolving historical understanding of England's 1605 gunpowder plot and its most enduring symbol, Guy Fawkes.

Now, I think it's easy to argue that in the 21st century, Guy Fawkes, the symbol, has very little in common with Guy Fawkes, the 17th century plotter.

I can't help but agree with Lewis Call, who, as I quoted earlier, has said that the Guy Fawkes mask has become so freighted with multiple meanings that it's collapsed under its own weight and has escaped meaning altogether.

When you Google Guy Fawkes mask for sale, you will see it called a hacker mask or the anonymous mask just as often as you will see it named after the 17th century bomber.

In one sense, this is a classic example of fake history, a historical figure misremembered and transformed into a myth.

But in another way, this is an example of a historical figure almost becoming ahistorical.

The quote-unquote truth about Guy Fawkes scarcely matters now when it comes to how people perceive his stylized image.

The only other symbol that comes to mind that's meaning has been so thoroughly transformed in the modern era is the swastika.

I could tell you all day long about the ancient origins of the swastika, or what it symbolizes in Hindu or Buddhist religion, or how the Navajo people used the symbol in ritual as the whirling log.

But even if you're given all that historical and cultural context, when you see a swastika, you're going to think about the Nazis before you think about anything else.

If you notice a swastika scrawled as graffiti somewhere, no amount of historical context will make you think, huh, I wonder if that's meant to represent the Navajo whirling log.

With all exceptions made for Hindu and Buddhist communities in South Asia, the Nazi use of the swastika transformed it into a symbol of hate, and it doesn't look like it will ever come back from that.

The face of Guy Fawkes has gone through a similar transformation.

However, the meaning of the image has remained considerably more ambiguous.

Is the Guy Fawkes mask a menacing image or a symbol of hope?

Is its wearer a violent anti-democratic militiaman or a peaceful campaigner opposed to government austerity and a champion of freedom of expression and equity for marginalized people?

Both?

Neither?

That and more?

What I want to argue over over the course of this series is that Guy Fawkes's current status as a morally and politically ambiguous symbol, vaguely associated with an anti-authoritarian impulse, is,

in fact, weirdly appropriate.

This is because in the four centuries that have elapsed since the gunpowder plot, the way the event has been remembered has gone through a number of changes and evolutions, some of which are quite surprising.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the gunpowder plot was the one historical event that the English were encouraged never to forget.

In the aftermath of the plot, it was decreed that there would be a yearly day of Thanksgiving on November 5th, the day the plot was uncovered.

What started as an occasion for solemn church observances, where English churchgoers were encouraged to thank God for rescuing king and country from a dastardly act of Roman Catholic terrorism, eventually evolved into a raucous street party and fireworks display known as Bonfire Night.

As the name suggests, these parties involved the lighting of huge fires, and by the 18th century, burning effigies, first of the Pope and then of other well-known English Catholics, and then, much later, Guy Fawkes himself.

But as time went on, Bonfire Night took on its own meanings, many of which were barely connected to the commemoration of the gunpowder plot.

By the same token, Guy Fawkes went from being a nearly forgotten part of the conspiracy to being a reviled, murderous zealot and the plot's chief villain, only to be later reimagined as a sympathetic, if ultimately misguided, victim of state oppression, and then transformed again into a courageous anti-hero anti-hero willing to get his hands dirty for the cause of liberating all oppressed people.

Given these wild swings in the popular understanding of Guy Fawkes over the centuries, it seems only right that his face ultimately represents moral ambiguity and a strange mix of villainy, righteousness, and heroism.

So today I want to get into the facts of the 1605 gunpowder plot.

What was its context?

Why did it happen?

Who was involved?

And how was it stopped?

This will hopefully give us a good grounding in the event that has inspired so many diverse waves of remembrance.

Then, in the next part of the series, I want to explore how the meaning of the gunpowder plot was shaped in its aftermath.

We'll examine how the commemoration of the gunpowder plot shifted and changed over the centuries, along with the image of Guy Fox.

But let's start by heading back to England in the early 1600s to explore the context for why a group of conspirators wanted to blow up Parliament in the first place.

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To understand the gunpowder plot, you first have to understand the state of religion in England in 1605.

Now, whenever I explore a topic that has to do with 16th or 17th century Europe, I find myself having to recap the massive world-changing event that was the Protestant Reformation.

In fact, just a few months ago, when we looked at the story of the Spanish Armada, I spent a good chunk of the first episode of that series explaining how the unfolding conflict between Roman Catholics and the various Protestant denominations played out in the English context.

In many ways, those episodes make a fantastic prequel to this series, so if you want to go deeper on this stuff, then please check out episodes 198 and 199.

But what you need to know is that by the turn of the 17th century, Europe was 80 years from the monk Martin Luther's famous criticisms of the mainstream Western Christian Church.

The emergent strains of Protestant Christianity that had come in his wake were by now firmly established in many parts of Europe.

As the 1500s became the 1600s, the conflict between these Christian groups was becoming increasingly violent, and England was no exception.

Now, of course, England had had its own unique experience of the Reformation.

King Henry VIII famously moved to make himself, and by extension, all future English monarchs, the supreme head of the Church of England in 1534.

Henry's move broke England away from Rome and the influence of the papacy, but it remained an open question for well over a century just how theologically Protestant this new Church of England was going to be.

The The various English monarchs that followed Henry ended up answering that question in quite different ways.

This meant that if you were an English person who remained a practicing Roman Catholic through all of this, your existence in your home country could go from being fairly normal to incredibly dangerous, depending on the temperament of the monarch and the religious politics of any given moment.

English Catholics were sometimes tolerated, but were often persecuted.

Now, occasionally, such as during the reign of Queen Mary Tudor, they were empowered to do a little persecuting of their own, but that would prove to be a bit of a historical exception.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I,

England's Catholic minority lived through a particularly difficult period.

Elizabeth was a staunch Protestant whose feelings towards her Catholic subjects were never particularly warm.

Her approach to English Catholics slid on a scale that went from cautiously tolerant on the low end to violently hostile on the high end.

It's been pointed out by many historians that Elizabeth's hostility towards her Catholic subjects always tended to be more political than theological.

Evidence shows that Elizabeth was actually fairly open-minded when it came to debates about the nature of God.

She was more concerned about Catholics in England as a potentially insurgent political force.

During her reign, there were a number of plots orchestrated by Catholic nobles to depose the Queen, such as the so-called Rising in the North that had attempted to install the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne.

There was also the Babington plot, a Catholic attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth and free the imprisoned Mary and once again make her queen.

The foiling of both of these coup attempts were followed by the crown tightening the screws on all of England's Catholics, not to mention the ultimate execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Now, I can't help but perceive a dark chicken and egg effect with these rounds of persecution.

Elizabeth, or sometimes her zealous underlings, harsh treatment of Catholics tended to inspire plots, and those plots in turn inspired more harsh treatment, and on and on.

What came first?

The chicken or the egg?

In 1588, when England found itself threatened by the Spanish Armada, persecution of Catholics became more intense.

Philip II of Spain was, after all, framing his attempted invasion of England as a liberation of English Catholics.

Now, as we discussed in the Spanish Armada series, this was just rhetoric, as Philip probably had no real intention of occupying England for any extended period.

But still, the rhetoric had an effect.

Many English Protestants became increasingly paranoid of a Roman Catholic fifth column in the country, secretly working to aid a Spanish invasion.

This paranoia about an enemy within was accompanied by more laws meant to make Roman Catholic existence in England as difficult as possible.

So, when we are talking about the persecution of Catholics in England, what are we talking about?

Well, in 1559, Queen Elizabeth issued the Act of of Uniformity, which made it illegal not to attend Church of England services.

Roman Catholic Masses had been forbidden in England for years, although many continued to happen in secret or in private chapels.

The most obvious way that an English person demonstrated their Catholicism at the time was by conspicuously not attending Church of England services, or recusing oneself.

As a result, these folks became known as the recusants.

The Act of Uniformity created a financial penalty for being a recusant.

If you didn't attend a Church of England service, you could be fined one shilling a week.

As Elizabeth's reign progressed and the cycle of plots, crackdowns, and threats from foreign Catholic monarchies became more intense, so too did the laws targeting Catholics.

In 1581, the fine went from being an annoying but manageable one shilling a week to an enormous 20 pounds a month.

Now, converting 16th century money is a famously imprecise thing, but 20 pounds would be the equivalent of a few thousand pounds or a few thousand dollars today.

It would be financially crippling for anyone but the very wealthy.

Further, anyone who helped someone convert to Catholicism or even just talked to someone about converting could be found guilty of treason and put to death.

In the lead-up to the crisis with the Spanish Armada, harboring Catholic priests in England, and especially Jesuits, also became punishable by death.

Now,

the thing with all 16th century law is that it was applied unevenly and with varying degrees of efficiency.

If you were an English Catholic who happened to live in a part of England where many of the officials were sympathetic or were maybe secretly Catholic themselves, you might never be harassed.

However, if you lived in a place where the local sheriff or nobleman was a hardline Puritan, then you might be shaken down quite regularly, or were at higher risk of being imprisoned or tried for treason.

So, when Elizabeth died in 1603, there was some hope among English Catholics that things might change.

The man who would be succeeding Elizabeth as ruler of England was James VI of Scotland, the son of Elizabeth's old rival and the secret hope of many English Catholics, Mary, Queen of Scots.

Now, given that James would eventually be the target of the gunpowder plot, I think it's worth taking a minute to get to know him.

Why did this king inspire such a potentially catastrophic act of political violence?

Well, when he first became the king of England, that was certainly certainly not a foregone conclusion.

Despite years of hand-wringing over the succession of the childless Elizabeth, the ascension of James was exceptionally smooth.

At first, anyway.

James was just about to be thirty seven years old when he took the English crown, and by that point he had already been king of Scotland for literally his entire life.

Various political machinations had put him on the throne of Scotland as an 18-month-old toddler.

This meant that a regency controlled Scotland until the king came of age.

He finally established complete control over his government in 1583, which meant that by the time he became king of England, he had been governing Scotland for a solid twenty years.

In other words, he was a seasoned ruler who had learned how to be king in a country that, in the 16th century, was famously hard to govern.

Now, there was some reason for English Catholics to be optimistic about this new king, who was now styling himself James I of England, and eventually James I King of Great Britain and Ireland.

Not only was he the son of the famously Roman Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, he had been baptized a Catholic at birth, and he had even married as a Catholic to a Catholic princess, Anne of Denmark.

But despite that, James had been a practicing Protestant for many years, deeply influenced by Calvinism.

Now, James had had his conflicts with the austere Scottish Presbyterian Church, and he certainly did not identify as a Puritan, but

he was a Protestant.

If he had not been a Protestant, then it's unlikely that he would have become the King of England in 1603.

Still, there was a feeling that given that James had been steeped in Catholicism from a young age, he could be relied on to be more tolerant towards English Catholics.

James also fancied himself as a great conciliator.

You see, the Tudor monarchs had liked to present themselves as warriors.

Both the kings and the queens produced by the House of Tudor had a ferocious military side to their public image.

But that was never James's style.

He fancied himself a scholar and a philosopher.

By the time he became king of England, he had already authored three books on topics as diverse as demonology and statecraft.

James liked the idea of governing as a rex pacificus.

He would be a peaceful king who believed that his mission was to restore balance, not just to his kingdom, but to all the monarchies of Europe.

He was a staunch believer in the divine right of kings and was vocal in his conviction that God had chosen him and the house of Stuart to rule and rule well.

But he believed that ruling involved a certain degree of compromise and conciliation, at least sometimes.

Now, James is one of those kings who for many centuries was not treated particularly kindly by English language historians.

You see, for a long time, historians looked back on this period and saw it as just a prelude to what they considered to be the big event of England's 17th century, that being England's Civil War.

This era-defining conflict between the forces of Parliament and the English crown would see James's son, Charles I, beheaded by Parliament in 1649.

Now, it is true that the Civil War was a massive, messy conflict that in many ways set the stage for the type of constitutional monarchy that the UK still has today.

So when historians were looking back at this momentous event, they often characterized the reign of James I and the rise of the House of Stuart as the start of a period of misrule in England that progressed inevitably towards the Civil War.

This view was especially popular among English historians from the late 17th century all the way through to the the Victorian era.

Now, it is true that James had his weak points as a ruler.

He tended to be loose with royal finances and loved to pick favorites from the nobility upon whom he showered titles, privileges, and expensive gifts.

Managing the English Parliament also required a certain touch, which James did not always possess.

He got a reputation for pedantically lecturing the house about his divine right to rule.

Through no fault of his own, James was also born with, let's say, an unusual physicality.

Many of his contemporaries commented on his spindly legs, his large frame, his strange way of walking.

No one failed to mention the size of his head.

He had a big head.

His tongue may have also been unusually large, which caused him to lisp.

The poor guy also had a stutter.

This, paired with the fact that he had a pronounced Scottish accent, did nothing to help him with the skeptical English parliamentarians.

The English of the early 17th century were not shy when it came to expressing their prejudices about Scottish people.

They slandered them as backwards and nearly barbarous.

When James arrived in London with an entourage of Scottish lords, nicknamed the Hungry Scots, many English aristocrats were openly disdainful.

So, James was a Scottish guy with a lisp and a stutter who liked giving long speeches about how he was God's chosen on earth and was better than the mere mortals in Parliament.

You could see how that might not always go over so well.

However, in recent decades, there's been a reappraisal of James by historians.

Expert David Bucholtz has pointed out that now most historians of the period no longer accept the old conceit that James I made the English Civil War inevitable.

A lot of things needed to break in just the right way for that event to take place.

Laying it all at James's feet disregards all the other factors that make a massive event like a war or the execution of a king possible.

It's also been argued by the historian Pauline Cook that James had many merits as a ruler.

and remained reasonably popular right up until his death.

He deftly negotiated a face-saving end to the expensive and increasingly unwinnable war with Spain.

While James was sometimes clumsy with the English Parliament, he had been incredibly skillful at managing the politics of Scotland, which, at the time, was not easy.

David Bucholtz has even suggested that James may have been the best Scottish king of the 16th century.

When James first entered London to be crowned King of England, he was greeted by cheering crowds.

Among those revelers, no doubt, were some English Catholics who hoped that James might dial back some of the more oppressive religious policies of his predecessor.

At first, he made some moves that suggested that he might just be a friend to England's Catholics, or at least more of a friend than Queen Elizabeth had been.

Within days of arriving in the capital, James made the symbolic move to release a well-known Jesuit priest who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for performing exorcisms.

Now this was a small thing, but it was a signal to Catholics that perhaps he was not going to be as harsh.

He even hinted at some leniency when it came to the hated recusancy fines.

Now the sources are mixed on this point, but it does seem like James hugely relaxed the collection of these fines in the first year of his reign.

It's been estimated that in the last year of Elizabeth's reign between 5 and 10,000 pounds worth of fines were collected from recusant Catholics.

By contrast, in James's first year as the King of England, the amount collected dropped to around 300 pounds.

If those numbers are anywhere close to accurate, that's significant.

However, James also made the change that Scottish lords could now collect recusancy fines, and they had a habit of singling out wealthy landowning English Catholics to collect from.

So, it was clearly a mixed bag.

Many of the more radical Catholics felt like James was not doing enough, and some felt like they needed to act.

Sure enough, just a few months into James's reign as the King of England, a plot was cooked up by two Catholic priests to kidnap the king and demand concessions for English Catholics.

This scheme, known as the Byplot, was uncovered before the plotters could take any action.

And, ironically, the discovery of this plot had some initially positive outcomes for English Catholics.

This was because a handful of loyal English Catholics revealed the plot to the King's Privy Council.

In thanks for the loyalty of these Catholics, James agreed to ease the fines on recusants who came forward and sued for a pardon.

This was interpreted by some as yet another sign that the new king was going to be more tolerant.

Not even a straight-up Roman Catholic plot was prompting a crackdown.

At least, not yet.

But as the trials associated with the byplot unfolded, James soon found himself less sympathetic to the plight of English Catholics.

He was also facing pressure from the Puritans, the hardcore Calvinist wing of English Protestantism.

The Puritans wanted the king to show zero tolerance for anything that they considered popish religion in England.

Whether it was pressure from the Puritans, the full scope of the byplot revealed in the trials, or, as one source suggests, new tensions with the Pope, who had tried to pull James' wife, Queen Anne, back into the Roman Catholic fold by sending her gifts, by early 1604 James I was singing a very different tune when it came to Catholicism in England.

In February of that year, James issued a proclamation giving all Catholic clergy a month to leave the country, after which time they could be arrested.

This was then followed in April by the introduction of a bill in English Parliament that would classify all English Roman Catholics as excommunicates.

In other words, there would be no coming and going from the Church of England.

If you were a recusant, you were banned, and you had to work very hard to get yourself unbanned.

So, just a year into the reign of James I,

any hopes that things might get better for English Catholics had been dashed.

On top of that, the war with Spain was now over,

so Catholics couldn't even hold out hope that they would be delivered by a fleet of Spanish warships.

The hardliners started to believe that if things were going to change, they were going to have to do something dramatic.

And that something

was blow up Parliament.

So let's pause there, and when we come back, we'll get into the details of the gunpowder plot.

Given the slippery nature of the primary sources, giving a straightforward accounting of the 1605 gunpowder plot is a challenging thing.

As historian James Sharp has pointed out, quote, the main sources are all, inevitably perhaps, biased.

There was the government version promulgated immediately after the plot's discovery, two contemporary Catholic accounts written by priests, which are well informed, but obviously slanted in a particular direction.

And the confessions of the plotters themselves, some of them extracted after torture, or at least acute psychological pressure, can be skewed in hopes of protecting friends or family.

Now, as I hope to get to as this series progresses, there are some reasons to question the official narrative of the plot, or at least question how the plot was characterized by those who sought to use the event to gain some political advantage in the aftermath.

But with all that said, there are some basic facts about the gunpowder plot that are generally agreed on by most historians.

So we should start there.

Now, it's hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of the gunpowder plot.

Some sources have it that conversations began in early 1604.

Another well-known account tells us that the plot began in June of 1604.

But the most widely repeated version of events is that things truly got underway on May 20th, 1604, when a group of six men met quietly at London's Duck and Drake Inn.

And man, an author could not have written that better.

I love that they met at a place called the Duck and Drake.

This group had been brought together by one Robert Catesby.

Now, one of the biggest misconceptions about the gunpowder plot was that Guy Fawkes was the ringleader.

Over the centuries, he's not only become the face of the plot, but he's also the only plotter that most folks know by name.

But it's clear that Robert Catesby was the brains behind the operation and the plot's driving force, or as historian Antonia Frazier has called him, quote, the dark prince at the center of the gunpowder plot, end quote.

Catesby was the wealthy son of a knight from Warwickshire in England's West Midlands region.

His family were well-known Catholic recusants.

The Catesbys had been fined as recusants many times over the course of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and on at least one occasion, Robert Catesby's father had been imprisoned for his refusal to attend Church of England services.

This meant that Robert was tightly connected to a network of secret Catholics, or crypto-Catholics, as they were often called, and to the more public Catholic recusants living in the West Midlands.

By the time the gunpowder plot rolled around, Catesby had some experience living the life of a known Catholic agitator in England.

In 1604, this was not his first rodeo.

Just a few years earlier, in 1601, Catesby had been implicated in a plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth, known as the Essex Rebellion.

While that plot hadn't been explicitly religious, it had attracted many Catholic nobles, who had hoped that a toppled Elizabeth might be replaced with a Catholic monarch.

When that plot failed, Catesby was imprisoned.

but managed to get himself released after some friends helped him pay a hefty fine.

Now Robert Catesby had a reputation for being dashing, handsome, athletic, and hugely charismatic.

One contemporary would describe him like this: quote, his countenance was exceedingly noble and expressive.

His conversation and manners were attractive and imposing, and that by the dignity of his character, he exercised an irresistible influence over the minds of those associated with him.

End quote.

He was the roguishly charming guy who could talk you into making bad decisions.

Ladies and gentlemen, at the risk of embarrassing myself, Catesby had what the kids call Riz.

He could rizz him up.

He was a Rizzler.

This helps explain how Catesby was able to cobble together the early group of conspirators.

Now the other five men who met at the Duck and Drake that day were Thomas Percy, John Wright, Thomas Winter, and Guido Fawkes.

Yes, you heard me correctly.

Guido.

Believe it or not, at the time of the gunpowder plot, Guy Fawkes was not even calling himself Guy Fawkes.

He was Guido.

Fawkes had been born in Yorkshire and was likely raised as a Protestant during his early years.

However, after his father died and his mother remarried a recusant, Guy was encouraged by his stepfather to convert to Catholicism.

This he did with noted zeal.

As a young man, he became such an ardent Roman Catholic that in 1591 he sold off his possessions and traveled to the Netherlands to fight with the Army of Flanders.

Now, those of you who listened to the Spanish Armada episodes might remember that the Army of Flanders was the Catholic Habsburg force that was fighting against the Dutch rebels on the continent.

The Army of Flanders was the army that was supposed to invade England had the Spanish Armada been successful.

It's hard to overstate just how scandalous and frankly treasonous it was for an Englishman to join the Army of Flanders in the late 1600s.

Now, some of you might remember that one American who was found fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan after the invasion in 2001.

Now, I'm not trying to equate the Army of Flanders with the Taliban, but Fox's choice to fight for them would have been perceived in a similar way by English Protestants at the time.

Our sources tell us that he distinguished himself as both a soldier and a particularly godly Catholic while fighting in the Netherlands.

Importantly, while with the Army of Flanders, he got familiar with gunpowder and battlefield explosives.

Fox eventually achieved enough of a profile within the Army of Flanders that he felt like he had enough clout to make a trip to Spain in hopes of getting King Philip III to support a Catholic rising in England.

It was around that time in 1603 that Fox started using the Italian version of his name, Guido, presumably to shore up his Roman Catholic bona fides when petitioning the King of Spain.

Now, Philip III politely declined Fawkes' request, so he returned to the Netherlands.

But by 1604, he was persuaded by Thomas Winter, who you might remember was one of those other early conspirators at the Duck and Drake, to return to England and meet with Robert Catesby.

Catesby, he was told, could use a man with his particular expertise.

So, Guy Fawkes was not the ringleader of the gunpowder plot.

He was the demolitions expert, and ultimately, the trigger man.

Fox did not come up with this plot, but he would be the guy in charge of lighting the fuse.

Now, the story goes that most of the broad strokes of the gunpowder plot were all sketched out in that first meeting at the Duck and Drake.

Although that seems a little unlikely given the timeline of events.

But still, we're told that Catesby argued that night that they needed to strike not only at the king, but also at Parliament, since so many of the anti-Catholic measures had come as acts of parliament.

The plan was to wait until the opening of parliament in 1605.

Now, at first, they didn't know exactly when that date would be, and sure enough, the date ended up up being changed a number of times because of various political reasons.

The attempted attack would eventually fall on November 5th of that year.

It was important that they struck during the opening of Parliament because the King and virtually everyone else in government would be present that day in the House of Lords for the proceedings.

The plotter's job was to blow them all up with a huge amount of gunpowder.

In the lead-up to this, Robert Catesby would use his connections among the Catholics in the West Midlands to foment a rebellion.

When the parliament buildings exploded, these rebels would hopefully be inspired to rise up en masse.

Next, the plotters would kidnap the king's third child, Princess Elizabeth, a nine-year-old girl that they hoped would be young enough to be easily converted to Catholicism and then made into their figurehead.

If they were successful, Elizabeth would be placed on the throne of England, and before anyone had time to clean up Westminster, England would be a Roman Catholic nation once again.

Or so was the hope.

The only question was how were they going to do this?

How were they going to smuggle enough gunpowder under the House of Lords to create an explosion big enough to have the desired effect?

When they met on May 20th, they presumably had not worked this out yet.

But then they had a huge stroke of luck.

One of the plotters, Thomas Percy, happened to be related to an influential English nobleman, the Earl of Northumberland.

In June of 1604, Northumberland used his influence to get Thomas Percy appointed as a gentleman pensioner.

Now,

what is a gentleman pensioner?

Well, they were a crew of 50 aristocratic men meant to act as a bodyguard for the king.

They were actually more of a colorful escort than a real set of guards, but if you were a young noble looking to advance in the English court, it didn't hurt to be a gentleman pensioner.

In practice, it was a cushy job for the ambitious sons of connected gentlemen.

So, when Thomas Percy became a gentleman pensioner, he now had a reason to be living in central London close to the Palace of Westminster, which is still home to the Houses of Parliament.

By the summer of 1604, Percy had found a house very close indeed to the palace.

He rented a small dwelling in the Westminster Precinct, just steps away from the House of Lords.

The home also had easy access to the Thames River.

This meant that gunpowder could be brought across the river at night and hidden at Thomas Percy's rented apartment.

Now, at one point, the plan was for the plotters to dig a tunnel that would lead from the rented house directly underneath the House of Lords.

They may have even started to dig this tunnel.

But in March of 1605, this all proved unnecessary when Thomas Percy obtained the lease to a storeroom that just happened to be owned by his Westminster landlord.

This storeroom was perfectly positioned directly under the ground floor of the House of Lords.

If enough gunpowder could be ignited in that storeroom, then there was little chance that the houses of parliament or anyone inside would would survive the blast.

Now, one of the ambiguous parts of the plot is exactly how these men got their hands on the 36 barrels of gunpowder that they eventually stockpiled in that storehouse.

It's clear that this required both money and connections.

So, as a result, they brought on more conspirators.

By the summer of 1605, seven more men had been brought into the plot.

This meant that in the end there were a total of 13 gunpowder plotters, which honestly seems kind of cursed.

Now one of these new conspirators was a man named Robert Keys, and he apparently had a good hookup for gunpowder.

Historian James Sharp explains, quote, it is surprising that private individuals were able to assemble so much explosive without attracting official attention.

But the conspirators had the necessary connections, and the end of the war against Spain had created something of a buyer's market for gunpowder, end quote.

Once procured, the powder was brought across the Thames River by boat at night and then quickly moved into the rented storehouse.

Most of this was was directed by Guy Fawkes, who was then posing as Thomas Percy's manservant under the amazing alias John Johnson.

He might as well have just kept his first name and been Guy Incognito.

Now, it all seems a little strange that the plotters were able to move so many barrels of gunpowder without anyone noticing.

But historian Antonia Frazier has pointed out that in the 1600s, the Palace of Westminster was, quote, a warren of meeting rooms, semi-private chambers, apartments, and commercial enterprises of all sorts.

There were taverns, wine merchants, a baker's shop on the same block as Thomas Percy's lodging.

Booths and shops were everywhere, end quote.

The point is, in 1605, it wasn't unusual to see someone moving barrels in and out of a storehouse in Westminster.

Taverns, wine shops, bakeries, they all would have been moving things around with barrels.

We also need to remember that there was nothing even close to modern security around the palace of Westminster at the time.

This was a bustling part of London.

When you consider that the cargo was brought in piecemeal and under the cover of dark, it all becomes a bit more plausible.

By the evening of November 4th, 1605, the plotters had managed to assemble 36 barrels of powder under the House of Lords.

In 2003, a study done by the Explosives Center at the University of Abberswith estimated that if that powder had been successfully detonated, and that's assuming that the powder was dry and in no way degraded, it would have caused a damage radius of nearly 500 meters.

All the buildings in a 40-meter radius would have surely been destroyed, including the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Hall, and Westminster Abbey, not to mention all the surrounding streets.

It would have been catastrophic.

But then, at the eleventh hour, the plot was foiled.

A week before Parliament was scheduled to sit on November 5th, William Parker, Lord Mount Eagle, received a very disturbing letter.

Mount Eagle had once been a well-known Catholic recusant, but, like many, the crowning of the new king had convinced him that it was time to embrace the Church of England, although his Catholic sympathies were still well known.

Being a lord of the realm, Mount Eagle was planning on attending Parliament on the fifth, along with the other peers.

But this anonymous letter soon had him thinking twice.

Here it is, rendered into modern English by the British National Archives.

Quote,

My lord, out of the love I have for some of your friends, I want to make sure you are safe.

Because of this, I would advise you not to attend this sitting of Parliament, because God and man have agreed to punish the wickedness of this time.

Do not think this is a joke.

Go to your estate in the country where you will be safe, because although there is no sign of any problem yet, this Parliament will receive a terrible blow, but they will not see who it is that hurts them.

This advice should not be ignored, as it may do you some good, and it can do you no harm because the danger will have passed as soon as you have burned this letter.

I hope God grants you the grace to make good use of it and that He protects you.

End quote.

Mount Eagle did not burn that letter.

Worried that he might be implicated if the hinted blow to Parliament actually took place, Mount Eagle immediately turned the letter over to the authorities.

Specifically, he gave the letter to the king's chief minister, Robert Cecil.

Now, according to some, Cecil was skeptical of the letter at first and did not act right away.

But on November 1st, he dutifully passed the letter along to King James, who took it extremely seriously.

He ordered that the night before Parliament was to sit, the palace of Westminster and the surrounding area should be thoroughly searched.

That night, two separate searches were conducted.

The first noticed nothing out of order, except a tall man standing in the dark by a storeroom near the House of Lords.

But that first group of searchers just didn't want to bother him, so they headed back and reported to the king.

The king then had to explicitly order that a second search party go and investigate.

This second group sent by the king seized this suspicious looking man who was loitering around after midnight by a weird storeroom.

That man was of course Guido Fawkes.

When they searched him, they found that he had the keys to the storehouse with him.

They then unlocked the door and noticed that there was a huge amount of firewood stacked up at the entrance.

But as soon as that was removed, the barrels of gunpowder all became visible.

Fox was then searched more thoroughly, and on him were found three long fuses, or matches, as they were known at the time.

These were meant to ignite the gunpowder.

The jig was up.

The next step was to interrogate the foiled trigger man.

His confession, which was procured after a brutal session of torture, eventually revealed the full scope of the plot.

Within a week, all the other conspirators were dead, captured, or in the wind.

The destruction of Westminster had just been narrowly averted.

The next step was to start telling the story of the gunpowder plot.

It was a story that would be first told at trial, and then again and again, year after year, as the English dutifully remembered the fifth of November.

However, the story of the gunpowder plot would not remain static.

Not only would interpretations of the event change radically as the years went by, some would eventually come to question the basic facts of the case.

For some,

the story of the 5th of November just didn't add up.

Was it possible that the gunpowder plot was an inside job?

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will continue our look at Guy Fox and the gunpowder plot.

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