Dan Snow's History Hit - The Gunpowder Plot

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

On 5 November 1605, an audacious plan to decapitate the British state was foiled when Guy Fawkes and nearly a ton of gunpowder were discovered in an undercroft beneath the House of Lords. The plan was to blow up King James I and the majority of the nation's religious and political leadership during the State Opening of Parliament and incite a Catholic uprising across the country. It was hatched by a group of disillusioned Catholics, led by Robert Catesby, in a bid to end Catholic persecution and install a monarchy friendly to what they believed to be the true faith. With the discovery of Guy Fawkes, the plot was foiled and many of its participants met bloody ends at the hands of the vengeful authorities. On the anniversary of the plot, better known as Guy Fawkes Night, Dan explains how and why the conspiracy came about, why it failed, what the impact of the plot was and why it has become so embedded in Britain's national identity.

Welcome everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the 5th of November. Remember, remember, the 5th of November everyone. Why should we remember it? Why have we been encouraged to celebrate that day with fireworks and bonfires? Well, listen up. I'm going to tell you the story of what's become known as the Gunpowder Plot. But actually it's a title I think always always diminishes what happened in 1605. This was not just a gunpowder plot. It was one of the most radical plots to destroy an existing political hierarchy in history. It was certainly the most ambitious attempt to reshape Britain, I think, since, well, possibly since Alfred the Great and his successors came up with the very idea of a kingdom of England. In November 1605 a group of plotters attempted to kill almost everyone

in the British political and religious establishment. They wanted to destroy the seat of government and the parliamentary archives, all the bits of paper, the data centre of the kingdom. They just wanted to decapitate the English state. It failed. The gunpowder plots did not do those things, but it had a very profound effect on Britain's religious, cultural, political identity for centuries to come. And in this pod, I want to explain all of that and what it was all about and the events of that dramatic night in November 1605. Obviously, in these explainer episodes, I do a lot of monologuing, but I have great help from historians far cleverer and better at this stuff than me, particularly Dr. Leonie James, who was at the University of Kent when she talked to one of our history podcast producers a few years ago, and Jessie Childs, great friend of the pod award-winning historian wonderful person and

she talked to suzanne lipscomb on not just the tutors our sibling podcast a few weeks ago and i'm using some of her audio on this episode as well if you want to watch documentaries about the 17th century the tricky old 17th century you can use a history hit tv we've got our own history channel folks it's like netflix for history we've got our own history channel, folks. It's like Netflix for history. We've actually got a history channel. It's crazy, I know, but it's true. You go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv. Anywhere the internet works, you can get this.

Historyhit.tv, and you get 30 days free if you sign up today for a very small subscription for the cost of a pint of beer. You can get a subscription to the world's best history channel and not have to look at any aliens on it at all. Wonderful. But in the meantime, folks, buckle up for another one of my explainers

as I tell you all about the tumultuous events of November 1605 and what led up to it and what came of it. Enjoy. Remember, remember the 5th of November. Gunpowder treason and plot. We see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes. Guykes guy twas his intent to blow up king and parliament threescore barrels were laid below to prove old england's overthrow catched with a darkened lantern and burning match. So, holler boys, holler boys, let the bells ring. Holler boys, holler boys, God save the king. And what shall we do with him? Burn him. As that rhyme, brilliantly written up by Tristan Hughes of the Ancients podcast, thank you Tristan, as that rhyme reminds us, the rhyme that was once so familiar to every school child and adult in Britain and beyond. For centuries, there had been a sense in Britain of salvation from catastrophe. There were church services of Thanksgiving mandated by law. Children would recite that rhyme. The streets of Britain and the

parts of its empire beyond Britain blazed with bonfires on the 5th of November as people gathered around them to celebrate the survival of King James, the survival of Parliament, the survival of monarchy, the survival of King James and his Parliament, but more than that, the survival of a particular version of Englishness, the survival of monarchy, of the king in parliament, of a kind of Englishness that emphasised an insular contempt for European empires, the Catholic faith, a kind of Englishness that drew its strength from memories of defeats of the Spanish Armada, of Drake's piratical expeditions around the world, an Englishness embodied by Elizabeth I, a thread that would run through English and British history for centuries to come. And I don't doubt that initially, certainly,

Parliament felt a very real sense of that preservation, that deliverance. Parliament had been saved, those individuals, from being killed, from being blown to smithereens in the most appalling terrorist attack in British history. Hours before the King, King James VI of Scotland, King James I of England. You'll notice that I keep getting England and Britain mixed up in this podcast and I do that kind of deliberately because there are two different states, England and Scotland, existing on the island of Britain at the point, but they're now ruled by one person. Many of King James's Scottish nobles came with him and are important figures at the English court.

It's an English state, but there is a creeping sense of Britishness here that James, for one, was very, very keen to foster for obvious reasons. Anyway, hours before that King, James I and VI, was due to open Parliament in November 605, where he would have been watched by the great Lords of Church and State, by members of Parliament, to House of Commons, as well as House of Lords, another man, festooned with matches and flammable devices, was arrested only metres away from where King James would be speaking later that day. He was arrested beneath the floor of the House of Lords, standing next to one tonne of gunpowder. That man's name was Guy Fawkes, and he was hours away from the most consequential mass murder in history, and it happened. Guy Fawkes has remained by far the most famous of

the plotters, but in a way he doesn't deserve to be that at all. He was the fall guy. He was the guy who was going to light the match. The powder, if you like, had been amassed, well, figuratively and literally by other conspirators. And this is a story of how a close-knit faction of religious zealots drifted so far, or were pushed arguably, so far into the fever-ridden swamps of extremism that they were able to conceive of this monstrous act. And it all stems back, folks, one of the great upheavals of English and British history, the Reformation. Of course it does. The troublesome consequences of Henry VIII's inability to conceive a son with Catherine of Aragon. The break with Rome. The gigantic upheaval that saw England and Scotland as well reject the authority of the Pope and effectively leave the Catholic Church.

Now this was a very serious business. There was money and power at stake. There was European grand strategy but perhaps more importantly than that, there was eternal life and damnation at play here. This was something people believed in. If you did not worship in the manner prescribed by the Pope in Rome, you risked eternal damnation in the pits of hell. And as a result, in the 16th century, following Henry's radical decision, it wasn't really one radical decision,

it was a series of steps forward and backwards. But anyway, following and during the reformations, there were rebellions. I mean, England was brought to the brink, possibly over the brink, of civil war several times. Often in the north, although we mustn't forget the West Country Prayer Book Rebellion on David VI, the West Countrymen obviously wanted their moment in the sun as well. But often it was northern lords and commoners alike who rose up in rebellion. They were attached to their traditional faith, their traditional ways of doing things, their feast days, the rhythm of their year, the way they were married, the way they welcomed new children to the world, and the way they died. And these revolts led to pitch

battles, massacres, civil conflicts. Of course, in Ireland, it led to even more violence, barbaric. So extra dimension of savagery was added to the Anglo-Irish conflict, an ongoing, often smouldering, sometimes brightly blazing war of colonisation, of supremacy in the island of Ireland, now given an extra dimension by the fact that the incoming settlers from England had a different religious faith to the Catholic Irish, a ratcheting up of ill-feeling and violence on that island that would lead to upheavals and slaughters over the decades that followed. When Mary I died, Henry was succeeded by young Edward VI and his very ultra-Protestant councillors. He died young. His sister Mary survived, Catholic. She did her best to reintroduce the Catholic faith

to England, but she also died without leaving an heir. And her Protestant younger sister, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, the so-called Protestant whore, was made queen. England's Catholics were obviously dismayed. They were now trapped between a sovereign who demanded obedience to her as head of the church and their pope, who was not interested in compromise. The pope excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570 and specifically instructed England's Catholics to disobey her on pain of their own excommunication. This was a rock and hard place. There were lots of attempts to killobey her on pain of their own excommunication. This was a rock and

hard place. There were lots of attempts to kill Elizabeth during her reign, seven or eight attempts, most fairly inept and rubbish, but significant enough, of course, for her to oversee a network of spies, torture and kill Catholics, to run agents in European cities and at home, and to live under the threat of domestic unrest or foreign invasion. Elizabeth had been at war with Spain since 1585, and that foreign invasion was very real, of course, three years later. Spanish armadas sailed up the Channel, and subsequent armadas were also sent. In 1585, the English Parliament passed an act that any priest trained abroad, so the Englishman who'd gone abroad to train as a Catholic priest and was found in England would be hung, drawn and courted.

It was an act of treason. And yet the problem is that mass is the central sacrament of the Catholic church and the Catholic faith. You have to have a priest that conducts mass. You cannot live as a proper Catholic without a priest who makes that Holy Communion. So elite Catholics

were able to set up a sort of network, a network of safe houses, places where priests were hidden. You go around the big house, the National Trust house, you see the priest holes, that's why they're there. Women in particular ran this network. They tended not to be suspected by the authorities and they were able to run these domestic spheres, these houses, in a way that allowed that worship to continue. And in response, Elizabeth's men would bang on those houses, inspect them, search for priests and priest holes. They would torture, they would fine, and in some case they would kill. Around 189, I think, Catholics were killed in the last couple of decades of Elizabeth's reign. Many others were fined. This was religious persecution. Most people conformed in some way, unsurprisingly. They did not want to risk the loss of their worldly possessions or

their lives. They embraced the new way of worship, Protestantism, or they stuffed wax in their ears during sermons. They would attend church. But some people refused outright. They were called recusants, recusare, to refuse in Latin. A few thousand of them, perhaps, and they did not conform. Now let's hear from the very brilliant Jesse Charles, who's written so wonderfully about this exact subject, on how certain interconnected families stayed true to their old faith and worked together to ensure that they could worship in a way that they found acceptable.

The whole gunpowder plot network is this sort of trellis of Catholicism in the Midlands. It's all sort of Shakespeare country and they're very interconnected, all of them. The Catesbys and the Treshams and the Vauxes particularly, it all sort of starts with them in 1581 when the fathers, we're talking about the first generation of Catholics in Elizabethan England,

are arrested for harbouring Edmund Campion, who was a Jesuit priest. It all starts really in the 1580s. Elizabeth I is excommunicated in 1570. There are other plots before, but in the 1580s, the Jesuit priests come in. Edmund Campion was this celebrated, brilliant speaker, but he'd converted to Catholicism. He'd trained abroad as a priest, he came back in disguise as a jewel merchant, and they put him up in their houses, these fathers,

William Vaux, Thomas Tresham, and William Catesby, and they were arrested for it and they were imprisoned for it. So there's this bond that goes back at least till 1581 with these fathers. So what you get with the second generation, with Francis Tresham, with Robin Catesby and the Vaux family, especially Robert Catesby, is this sense of frustration. They've seen their fathers broken by imprisonment, by fines. They've seen their fathers try really quite hard to be loyal to the Queen and to the Pope and they haven't got anywhere and they are branded non-subjects. Thomas Tresham described his life as moth-eaten. He said he was drenched in a sea of shameless slanders. So you get to the end of Elizabeth's reign and they are so demoralised

and disenfranchised, these young men. They're angry young men and they want to do something about it. They don't want to wait around. They think James VI of Scotland might be the answer. He is, after all, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who is a sort of Catholic martyr in their eyes. And they hope that there will be a relaxation of the penalties against Catholics, which include fines for not going to church, which include not even being allowed a priest in your house. And at first it seems quite promising. There's hope that it might get better. And then quite soon after the honeymoon period, the fines are reintroduced, the priest's outlawed again. And so it's this absolute fury that after all these years in Elizabeth's reign of waiting, they haven't got anything out of it. And so something must be done. Something must be done indeed. And actually, just as a segue, when you go to those

houses in Warwickshire that you mentioned today owned by the National Trust, they're such wonderful places to go and get a sense of that world. I visited Cofton Court in Warwickshire this summer for a history hit TV programme on Warwickshire and Shakespeare's Country. It's coming out soon. Check it out. You get a lens there. It's a lens rich to see this period. You get a prosperous courtier, George Throckmorton, who lives there. He expands it. He's a courtier to Henry VIII. Life is going well. He marries a member of the Vaux family, another ancient family, Catholic family, members of which were certainly adjacent to the gunpowder plot in 1605, but then disaster struck.

He found himself on the wrong side of history as Casanova Aragon was passed over for Anne Boleyn and his career and that of his family would never be the same again. They didn't want to leave the Catholic faith. His sons actually chose different paths. You get Nicholas Swartmorton, the youngest son. He embraced Protestantism. He became a close advisor to Elizabeth. But the oldest boy, the heir

to Cofton Hall was Robert. He was thrown out of Parliament for his faith. He had to leave other offices as well. His daughters married prominent Catholics. One grandson was Robert Catesby. The other, Francis Tresham, two of the key conspirators in the gunpowder plot that you heard Jesse mentioned. There's a priest hole in that house and there's amazing liturgical vestments and objects for the secret saying of mass and giving the last rites and things like that in the house. It's an extraordinary place to go. Anyway, that is the community of angry young men that Jesse's talking about and they are hoping, hoping, that when Elizabeth I dies, which she does in March 1603, she has no children,

and the heir was her cousin, the son of Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI of Scotland. Surely this son of the martyred Catholic Queen would be favourable to Catholics, right? The recusants played. Some of them obviously more than pray, and some of them took notice of a very interesting moment just before Elizabeth I's funeral. A gunpowder mill on the Thames exploded and dozens of people were killed. It was a powerful indication of the explosive potential of gunpowder and that would not go unnoticed by some of these men. The reason their minds would turn to gunpowder was because they'd be horribly disappointed by James I. He'd sort of talk the talk a bit, but when he got to the throne, he proved to be pretty anti-Catholic as well. And after a few sort of whispers, conspiracies, and plots, James increased pressure on Catholics and kept up many of Elizabeth's anti-Catholic

policies. He was also very disappointed in Catholics. He was desperate for peace with Spain to finish the war started by his predecessor. And when he did complete that peace with Spain, that obviously removed the possibility of a Spanish invasion. Domestic Catholics felt they'd lost their great external ally, the mighty Spanish empire, which might come and sort of rescue them through invasion or other means. And they also felt betrayed because Spain had not made toleration of Catholics a condition of the peace. So James hadn't had to concede toleration to Spain in order to make that peace. They felt abandoned by everyone. Their misery continued. And they decided to take matters into their own hands. They decided to act. There was a key meeting on the 20th of May, 1604, at the Duck and Drake

pub, a tavern just off the Strand, where all the best meetings take place in the pub. At that meeting was Robert Catesby, Thomas Pursey, Thomas Winter, Jack Wright, and Guy Fawkes. And Jessie will tell us exactly what took place there. It's there that Catesby says that the nature of the disease requires so sharp a remedy. So what he's saying is we've tried everything and this is our last resort. And this is when he says we will blow up the Parliament House with powder. And he says because that is the place where they have done us all the mischief and that is the place that God has reserved for their punishment which is I mean not unlike 9-11 you know they are targeting the seat and the symbols

of power Washington and New York for Catesby it's Westminster and what this would mean at the state opening of parliament would be the king the queen the princes the lords the b, the princes, the lords, the bishops, the MPs, the judges. Also, all the records. So how do you efface a society and a culture? You get rid of the records. All the parliamentary archives would have gone up to. Anything within sort of 100 metres, it's been estimated, would have gone up. All the people would have died there.

So this is incredibly radical, but they sort of feel that they've tried everything else. This plan, as is often the way with plans that are dreamt up in a pub, was vague. It was big on bang, but short on post-conflict planning. Sounds strangely familiar. It was kill everyone, then they ride north. They find James's daughter, King James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was being raised out of London. You set her up as a puppet and with Catholic advisors all around her, and you hope that England returns to the Catholic fold. It's a bit like perhaps the Iraq war in 2003. A lot of attention paid to the kinetic phase and not that much planning for what might come afterwards. As Jessie will tell us again,

let's have a listen. Parliament is prorogued because of plague. And so everything is delayed. And Catesby has these wild ideas about taking over the government. I don't think he'd really thought through what he was going to do afterwards. I think it was an act of vengeance, an act of fury, an act of terror.

Then he starts thinking, OK, well, let's have a Catholic government. Let's start again. You know, we've wiped the slate clean. What are we going to build up? And that's when it becomes really unfeasible, not only because you bring in more people and so it's more likely to be betrayed, but there just aren't enough Catholics in the country who no one is going to support a new government built on terror. support a new government built on terror. So it was to be the Palace of Westminster. It was to be the seat of Parliament, a royal palace in which the king summoned his parliament, king in parliament. It was nothing like the Palace of Westminster today, which was built in the 19th century. It was a crazy warren of medieval buildings, shops and even pubs.

In fact, there had been a brothel until the mid-16th century inside the Palace of Westminster. There were private houses there. There were staircases and tunnels and undercrofts and basements. It was actually the perfect place to spring this kind of trap. Robert Catesby was in charge, but these aristocratic gentlemen needed a man of action. They needed Guy Fawkes. He was the odd one out, really. He was a soldier.

He was a doer. He was the man to light the fuse. Let's hear a bit more from Dr. Leonie James about Guy Fawkes. He became the most famous of the plotters because, essentially, he was the one who was given responsibility for guarding the gunpowder. And the reason he was given this job was because he was the one who had, at the time they used the phrase, his face was the least well known. So people wouldn't recognise him. And one of the reasons why they wouldn't recognise him was because he was of relatively low birth.

And that's partly to do with his background. I mentioned that he was recruited in Flanders by this John Winter. Guy Fawkes has a really interesting personal story. He was a Yorkshireman by birth, and he was actually brought up a Protestant for the first probably decade of his life, until his father died, his father having been a Protestant, and his mother remarried into a Catholic family.

And it was at that point that he seems to have been heavily impressed by Catholicism and thereafter became a Catholic. And in the early 1590s, he was so convinced that, you know, Catholicism was the way forward that he actually sold his house in Yorkshire and went off to the Low Countries to fight in the Spanish army against the Dutch. So fighting in a Catholic army against the Protestant Dutch. Guy Fawkes had been born in York. His dad was actually a Church of England official, worked at the Church of England,

but he died and his stepfather, his mum had remarried when he was 10 or 11 or so, and his new stepfather was a Catholic and seems to have influenced him enormously. He leaves England, decides to abandon England, and goes to fight for Catholic Spain. Elizabeth I's nemesis. He fights the Netherlands against the Protestant rebels, against the Catholic Spanish Empire. He develops military skills. He knows his way around gunpowder. And he becomes, you might say radicalized, he becomes a bit of a zealot, a true believer in the Counter-Reformation, a true believer in the reassertion of the true faith, of the Catholic faith across North and Northwest Europe. The advantage of him is he's unknown to the English Secret Service and he's recruited in Flanders by one of the plotters. The rest of these gentlemen are very well known to the English Secret Service.

Catesby and Winter were on the fringes of the 1601 rebellion, the completely incompetent so-called Earl of Essex's rebellion of 1601. They were arrested again when Elizabeth died. Obviously, people just went and ran up the usual suspects. So they were on everyone's radar. If they were seen wandering around the Palace of Westminster with huge barrels, they would probably not get away with it. Guy Fawkes, though, he was a no-name. He was perfect.

Okay, folks, let's take a break and hear from the sponsors. More on the gunpowder plot after this. What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now? Who won the Hundred Years' War? Could England's lost patron saint be buried under a tennis court in Suffolk? How did England's last medieval king end up under a car park? And were the Dark Ages really all that dark?

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House of Lords. They may have tried, we don't know, but in the interrogations that followed the plot, it seems that there was some claim that they tried to dig a tunnel in which they could plant gunpowder. However, this proved too difficult, too time-consuming. And so in March of 1605, they managed instead to rent a, you could call it a basement, you call it an undercroft, a kind of vault, sort of referred to as a cellar. It's directly under the House of Lords. Now, Fawkes brought 20 barrels of gunpowder in there, they brought up Thames, then they were unloaded, often in broad daylight, taken into the Palace of Westminster. This would not have been unusual, there were goods coming and going all the time. They were slowly taken in by Guy Fawkes, remember the one who has a clean rep from the authorities. So he takes 20 barrels of

gunpowder in, followed by another 16 more on the 20th of July, 1605. On the 28th of July, however, there's a wrinkle in the plans. The ever-present spectre of plague in the 17th century is still dealing with the waves of bubonic plague that have been afflicting Europe since the 14th century. So that threat meant that London was seen as plague-ridden, and the opening of Parliament was delayed till Tuesday, the 5th of November. By that stage, there were 36 barrels of gunpowder in place in that storeroom. Guy Fawkes came and went a bit, but he would come back and check up on it from time to time. And there was some concern that some of the powder was spoiling through the rest of that summer and autumn, that fall.

But it was a lot of gunpowder. It is estimated to be about one metric tonne of gunpowder. Now that, modern estimates and simulations have implied, would be enough to completely destroy the building, anyone in it within a radius of around 100 metres. It would have been a catastrophic blast that would successfully have decapitated the English state. As the months go on, Catesby slowly brings more and more people into the plot, which would probably prove his undoing. But Francis Tresham was invited in in the middle of October.

He was a cousin of Catesby's and others like Everard Digby and Ambrose Rockwood, who were also encouraged to get ready for the rising that would take place after the explosion. However, as the day grew closer, there was concern among the conspirators that some of their friends and even their family members would be present in Parliament on the day of the planned explosion. There were still peers of the realm, there were still lords that were Catholic or had Catholic sympathies, and some of the conspirators didn't really want to see them killed as well. One of them, we don't know who, ended up sending an anonymous note to a member of the House of Lords to keep away from Parliament that day. Now suspiciously the Lord in question was Lord Monteagle and he was Francis Tresham's brother-in-law so you know Tresham is clearly a suspect in that one. Monteagle was sitting at

dinner on Saturday the 26th of October and a servant appeared saying that he'd been given a letter by a stranger in the road. The letter went as follows. My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore, I would advise you as you tender your life to devise some excuse to shift your attendance at this parliament, for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. He goes on to say, For though there will be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow, this Parliament,

and yet they shall not see who hurts them. The mysterious author then asks Montaigle to burn the letter as soon as he's read it. Now Montaigle immediately got on his horse, rode to Whitehall, handed the letter to Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, the stalwart advisor to Elizabeth I and now to James I. While Cecil was pouring over the contents of this letter, one of Montaigle's servants, a guy called Thomas Ward, actually took a message to Robert Catesby saying that their plot had been betrayed. Catesby suspected Tresham was responsible for the letter. He confronted Tresham and Tresham promised he had not sent the letter, but he did urge him to abandon the plot. Catesby refused.

The die was cast. On the 1st of November, the king returned back to London from a hunting expedition and was shown the letter by Cecil. Clever guy old James I. He immediately sees in the fact that when it said that there will be a terrible blow this Parliament, the King immediately thought that meant some stratagem of fire and gun powder. Like the one that had killed, by the way, his father, Darnley, in 1567. I don't know if you remember the podcast I did with Kate Williams about Mary Queen of Scots and Darnley, but Darnley's house was blown up and he was found dead naked in the garden. A curious murder mystery that's yet to be solved. So James would have been aware of this method of assassination. Also, Stuart family have an unfortunate relationship with gunpowder. It's just the way it goes. They've

had several accidents in that department. So he instructed members of his privy council to search Parliament, both above and below. On the 4th of November, whilst one conspirator, Digby, was ensconced in a kind of hunting party, ready to abduct Princess Elizabeth the following day, Catesby and others set off for the Midlands, leaving London. Guy Fawkes was given a pocket watch to time the fuse and other conspirators started collecting weapons. What happens next is slightly unclear. It seems perhaps there might have been two searches of Parliament. One was on the 4th of November

when they found a large pile of firewood in the undercroft beneath the House of Lords and what looked like a servant who was in fact Guy Fawkes, and he told him the fire would belong to his master, Thomas Percy. Now that mention of Percy alerted the authorities, something perhaps slightly strange was going on, because he was known to them. And so the king insisted on a more thorough search, and late that night, a search party headed by Thomas Knivett returned to the Undercroft. Thomas Knivett was the MP for Westminster and he was the keeper of Whitehall and Westminster palaces, so he knew his way around. He had a close friend with him, Edmund Doubleday,

and very in the depths of the night, perhaps in the wee small hours of the morning, they went back down. They challenged Guy Fawkes and they tried to search him. There's an account of the arrest that's published a few years later in 1631 that paints a vivid picture. It says, Fawkes very violently gripped Master Doubleday by the fingers of the left hand.

Through pain thereof, Master Abel offered to draw his dagger and to have stabbed Fawkes, but suddenly better thought himself and did not. Yet in the heat, he struck up the traitor's heels and withal fell upon him and searched him. And in his pocket, he found his garters, wherewith master Doubleday and others that assisted him bound him they bound him up with their own garters

disappointing now it's an entry from the journal of the house of commons which is held in the parliamentary archives and the following day there's a note made by Ralph Ewins who's the clerk of the time about what happened the night before it says this last night the upper house of parliament was searched by Sir Thomas Gnivet and one Johnson. By the way, I should say at this point, Guy Fawkes developed a really brilliant alias for himself. You're going to love this. I mean, master spy.

Ready? John Johnson. Well done, Johnny. So anyway, it says, This last night, the upper house of Parliament was searched by Sir Thomas Gnivet and one Johnson. There you go, Guy Fawkes. Servant to Sir Thomas Percy was there apprehended who had

placed 36 barrels of gunpowder in a vault under the house with a purpose to blow the king and the whole company when they should dare assemble afterwards diverse other gentlemen were discovered to be of the plot now let's hear from another source about that night it's also read out by tristan the brilliant tristan hughes this is actually what James VI and I wrote about that night himself. The Duke of Suffolk carried out the search. There, having seen all the lower rooms, he found in the vault under the upper house great stores of logs, faggots and coals. stores of logs, faggots and coals. And, asking Wynard, keeper of the wardrobe, to what use he had put those lower rooms and cellars, he told him that Thomas Percy had hired both the house

and part of the cellar or vault under the same, and that the wood and coal therein was the said gentleman's own supply. The army commander found Thomas Percy's man, Guy Fawkes, standing outside, his clothes and boots on, at so dead a time of night. He decided to arrest him. Then he went and searched the house, where after he had made them turn over some of the billets and coals, he found one of the small barrels of powder, and afterwards all the rest to the number of thirty-six barrels great and small. And then, searching the fellow whom he had taken, found three matches, and all other tools wanted to blow up the powder ready upon him.

tools wanted to blow up the powder ready upon him. So in the darkness of the medieval warren of rooms and undercrofts beneath the old palace of Westminster, a fight had broken out. Guy Fawkes, or John Johnson as we should maybe call him, had been apprehended, festooned in match. Match, by the way, is a kind of slow-burning cord or twine. It's like a fuse, basically. Like this piece of fuse that comes out the bottom of a firework when you light it, and it slowly progresses. The flame goes up and gives you enough time to escape. That's what Matches are. They were usually a length of hemp or flax, which had been chemically treated to burn slowly, giving him half a chance to escape before the whole place went sky high. Anyway, so they find Guy Fawkes. There's a struggle. They apprehend him. And with

only hours to go before the great and good of England and Britain gather in the room above, a vast supply, one ton of gunpowder is is found in the chambers below, and the plot is blown. As I mentioned, modern tests have shown that it's very probable that much of the building would have been destroyed. There would have been an appalling loss of life. One of the great questions is, would Guy Fawkes have stayed to the end to make sure it happened? In which case, would he have martyred himself? Or would he have lit the match, expecting God to be on his side, and made for a ship on the Thames and headed off to the continent. Instead Fawkes would be going no further than the Tower of London. He was arrested. Catesby still fled north by the way.

Robert Catesby persuaded his companions bizarrely to continue with the second part of the plan. They tried to rally the Catholics of England in the Midlands. They stole horses from Warwick Castle. Around 50 people rallied their banner, but these soon melted away. And the authorities caught up with these conspirators on the morning of the 8th of November at Holbeach House in Staffordshire. Several, including Catesby, had already been injured. Probably quite ironically, actually, they'd been partially blown up when they tried to dry out their water-soaked gunpowder. So they were nursing injuries. It was clear there was going to be a hopeless last stand.

When the Sheriff of Worcester arrived with 200 men, he besieged Old Beach House, and within a matter of minutes, a small, wounded, bedraggled collection of would-be rebels was routed. Robert Catesby was determined to die a martyr. He shouted, stand by me Tom, talking to his friend Thomas Winter, and we shall die together. Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, Christopher and Jack White were killed, Thomas Winter and Ambrose Rookwood were captured and brought to London. Others who had been directly involved in the plot or were plot adjacent were locked up and the government used the revelation of the plot to clamp down even further on Catholics. Great houses were targeted and searched even more closely than before. Men and women were

arrested, fines were levied and many Catholics were left destitute. Meanwhile what about Guy Faulkstone in London? He was defiant initially. When one of the lords of the Privy Chamber asked him what he was doing in possession of so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered that it was intentioned to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains. James decided that Fawkes should be tortured lightly at first, I'm talking about manacles for example, but more severe if necessary, and eventually authorising the use of the rack. James said the gentler torches are to be used first unto him and then quoted the Latin et sic per gradus ad imar tenditur and so by degrees proceeding to the worst. Fun enough Guy

Fawkes eventually broke and named a few of his fellow conspirators but by that stage the battle in the north was over. Guy Fawkes and the surviving conspirators were fellow conspirators. But by that stage, the battle in the North was over. Guy Fawkes and the surviving conspirators were condemned to death. James only killed 25 Catholics in his whole reign, and most of them over this plot. Their trial was pretty much a foregone conclusion, but it began in late January 1606. They were taken to Westminster Hall,

where they were displayed in a purpose-built scaffold. The King and his family were watching in secret. They were found guilty of high treason. And the attorney general, Sir Edward Coke, said that they would be condemned to be drawn backwards to their death by a horse, his head near the ground. They were to be put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of boast.

Their genitals cut off and burnt before their eyes, their bowels and hearts removed. Then they would be decapitated and their dismembered parts of their body displayed so they might become prey for the fowls of the air. On the 31st of January, that dragging took place from the Tower of London to Westminster. Within sight of the building they had come so close to destroying, Guy Fawkes and his conspirators faced death. He was weakened by torture. He signed a piece of paper both before and after his torture, and the post-torture signature is barely a scrawl, implying that he was very badly wounded.

He began to climb the ladder up to the scaffold, but for some reason, he either jumped to his death or the rope was incorrectly set. So Guy Fawkes actually managed to avoid the agony of the latter part of his execution. He jumped and broke his neck so he didn't have to live through the final seconds of his own disemboweling. The plot was over. The conspirators nearly to a man, dead. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's

Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Killed or executed. The celebrations started almost instantly,

the very evening of the plot being foiled. Let's hear from Dr Leonie James about why she thinks it became such a national event. The reason that it became so embedded in the English calendar, if you like, it was partly to do with James himself. In the aftermath of the plot, he essentially passed an Act of Parliament called the Thanksgiving Act. And this Act said that on the 5th of November every year, special church services should be

held to celebrate, to give thanks for the fact that he'd been delivered from almost near death. And people were obviously annually reminded of the fact that he'd been delivered from almost near death. And people were obviously annually reminded of the fact that the 5th of November represented a Protestant triumph over Catholicism, if you like. That continued really on the religious side for a couple of hundred years. Bonfires were a very 17th century thing. So on many occasions, royal weddings, famous battles being fought, coronations, people would light bonfires in the streets and have parties. And that actually started quite spontaneously almost at the moment of the plot itself. So from the very early days when the news of the failed plot became known,

people did have bonfires in the streets. And that has continued. became known people did have bonfires in the streets and that has continued. In the early days it wasn't Guy Fawkes who was kind of burnt as an effigy on these bonfires it was actually the Pope and that continued for quite a while. It wasn't until the 19th century really that we start to get the emergence of Guy Fawkes being the effigy on the bonfire, and it starts to become known more openly as Guy Fawkes Night on a more general basis. But the 5th of November is a really interesting date, really, because it became embedded in the English national calendar

from 1605 onwards, essentially, and it became associated with English Protestantism. It was actually used in terms of propaganda as well. At strategic moments across the century, it was symbolic, the 5th of November, of the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism. When William III invaded the country, Dutch William III invaded the country in 1688 to try and clear up the mess from Catholic James II, he invaded on the 5th of November. He chose that date specifically to kind of remind

people of here we are again, we're kind of putting down the potential Catholic aggressor. It was kind of effectively woven into the fabric of English life in this way. So partly to do with James, partly to do with bonfires being a way of celebrating anyway in this church. And for hundreds of years from that night, Bonfire Night became a celebration of Protestantism and Britishness. As Jessie Charles points out, a tradition that endured for a long time. It's seen as this sort of step towards the apocalypse. It's been called an icon event, along with the Armada and various others. And it becomes very much part of this Protestant national sensibility. And that's part of why anti-popery is such a powerful cultural

force. If you look at the Civil War of the 17th century, anti-popery is one of the huge, most important factors in it. This fear Charles I ironically a steward is being infected is being undermined by Catholicism just as powerfully if not as obviously as 36 barrels of gunpowder would have done and that is one of the great great fears and one of the motivating factors and forces for the Puritan revolution of the civil war the legacy goes on way beyond that too I mean if you look at the act of settlement it's got some incredible anti-papal weeds in it. I mean, it was only in 2013 that the law was changed to allow an heir to a throne married to a Catholic to keep their place in the succession line. I'm not Catholic, but I think some Catholics would argue that it's still

the last prejudice. You know, you can still bash the Catholics in a way that you can't with other faiths. It's just one of those things that if we understand our history, we have to get to grips with this on a religious level, but on a political level too. So the impact of anti-popery, the impact of the gunpowder plot felt deep into the 21st century. the impact of the gunpowder plot felt deep into the 21st century. That's it, folks. That's my explainer. Thank you so much for the help from Jesse Childs and Leonie James and Tristan for reading out those lovely quotes. I'll be back next month with another explainer. Watch this space. Go and check out History Hit TV.

Make sure you go and subscribe. But in the meantime, thanks very much for listening to another one of my explainers. Till next time. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history

of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, you've been doing another episode. Congratulations, well done you.

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