David Trim

November 5, 1605. Guy Fawkes did not plan the Gunpowder Plot, did not lead it, and was the most junior man in the room. He was the one caught with the matches because he was the explosives specialist, which is exactly the kind of job you give to the hired help. The man who planned it was Robert Catesby, and almost nobody remembers his name. Catesby was a Warwickshire gentleman from a Catholic family, charismatic, broke, and already a veteran of failed plots against the crown. He had been involved in the Essex rebellion in 1601. By 1604 he was in financial trouble and he recruited a group of wealthy Catholic landowners into a scheme to blow up the House of Lords at the state opening of Parliament. The motive was real grievance, not fantasy. English Catholics had expected relief when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, because his mother was Mary Queen of Scots and he had made encouraging noises. Instead the recusancy fines for not attending Anglican services were enforced harder, and by 1605 Catholic gentry families were being financially ruined by them. The plan was to kill the King, the Prince of Wales, the Lords and the Commons in one blast, then raise a rising in the Midlands and put James's nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic puppet. Guy Fawkes came into it because he had spent a decade fighting for Spain in the Low Countries and knew how to handle gunpowder. He was Yorkshire-born, went by Guido, and was hired expertise. The gunpowder went into an undercroft rented beneath the House of Lords. Thomas Percy, one of the conspirators, took the lease, and Fawkes posed as his servant under the name John Johnson to sit on it. The usual figure is 36 barrels. Modern estimates suggest that if it had gone off it would have destroyed the Lords chamber and done serious damage for a considerable distance around it. There is also decent reason to think the powder had decayed in storage and might have failed, though nobody can prove that either way. Then the letter. On October 26, Lord Monteagle received an anonymous letter warning him to stay away from Parliament. He took it straight to the government. The official line afterwards was that God had intervened to save the King. The much more likely explanation is Francis Tresham, a late recruit to the plot who was Monteagle's brother-in-law and who had no appetite for killing his own relatives. And this is where the conspiracy theories start, because they have been running for 400 years. The suspicion is that Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, James's spymaster, knew about the plot well in advance and let it mature so he could crush English Catholicism with maximum public effect. The argument people make is that the search was oddly slow, that the lease on a vault under Parliament should never have been available to an unknown Northerner, and that the whole thing was politically far too convenient. The honest answer is that there is no convincing evidence for it. Cecil ran a formidable intelligence service and may well have had an inkling, but a government that engineered the plot would not have waited until the night before to search the building. Treat the setup theory as a live suspicion that has never been proved. Monteagle himself was not a clean figure either. He had been mixed up in plans for a Spanish invasion before Elizabeth died and had been reported calling James odious to all sorts. The search happened on the night of November 4 into November 5. Fawkes was found in the undercroft with the powder, a lantern, slow matches and touchwood, booted and spurred to run. He gave his name as John Johnson and held that story for two days under interrogation. James personally authorised torture. Fawkes's signature on his confession of November 9 is a faint scrawl, barely formed, which is what a hand looks like after the rack. The rest of the conspirators rode for the Midlands and the rising that never came. Catesby and several others were cornered at Holbeche House in Staffordshire on November 8. Some of their own gunpowder, drying in front of a fire, went off and injured them before the fight even started. Catesby was shot dead there, along with Percy, reportedly by the same ball. Others were taken. The survivors were tried in January 1606 and hanged, drawn and quartered at the end of that month. Fawkes went last of his group and was weak enough from torture that he needed help up the ladder. He is supposed to have jumped, to break his own neck and avoid the disembowelling. For English Catholics the consequences lasted centuries. The Popish Recusants Act of 1606 required an oath of allegiance denying papal authority over the King, and Catholics were barred from the professions, from the universities, from the army and from public office. Full civil rights did not come until the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. And the bonfires started immediately. People lit fires in London on the night of November 5, 1605, within hours of the news. A letter from John Chamberlain describes great ringing of bells and great store of bonfires that same Tuesday night. An Act of Parliament then made November 5 an annual day of thanksgiving, compulsory church attendance included, and it stayed on the statute book until 1859. So Britain has an annual festival of fireworks commemorating a terrorist plot that failed, named after the hired technician rather than the man who planned it, and it was originally an enforced celebration of Protestant deliverance.