Was Guy Fawkes the brains behind the gunpowder plot?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Guy Fawkes<\/a> may have been the man charged with lighting the fuse to the gunpowder in the Palace of Westminster but he wasn\u2019t the leader of the gunpowder plot<\/a> \u2013 and was far from a lone wolf. There were 13 plotters in all \u2013 many drawn from elite English families \u2013 and the conspiracy\u2019s masterminds were Robert Catesby and his cousin Thomas Wintour.<\/p>\n Catesby was already under suspicion, as a Catholic and a supporter of the Earl of Essex\u2019s failed rebellion against Elizabeth I<\/a> in 1601. Fawkes, on the other hand, was unknown to the authorities, and that\u2019s one of the main reasons he was given such a critical role in the plot. Posing as a servant, he was able to gain access to the Palace of Westminster and, with the help of his co-conspirators, cart in the 36 barrels of gunpowder that he intended to explode under King James VI and I<\/a>\u2019s feet.<\/p>\n The great irony of Guy Fawkes\u2019s life is that it began in a conventional and respected Protestant family \u2013 he was the son of a Church of England official \u2013 but ended with an infamous attempt to take out the political establishment in the name of the Catholic faith.<\/p>\n Fawkes was born in York in 1570, in a house a stone\u2019s throw from York Minster. He might have become a merchant like his grandfather, but when his father died in 1579, Fawkes went to live with his mother\u2019s new husband, a committed Catholic. On reaching adulthood, he sold his small inheritance and went to fight on the continent for the forces of Catholic Spain.<\/p>\n A school friend, who became a Jesuit priest, described Fawkes as religiously devout, loyal to his friends, and \u201chighly skilled in matters of war\u201d \u2013 exactly what the gunpowder plotters were looking for.<\/p>\n \u00a0 Once the conspirators were agreed that they wanted to wipe out the king and his government, the Houses of Parliament were the obvious target. Catesby\u2019s justification for obliterating parliament was chillingly simple:\u00a0\u201cIn that place have they done us all the mischief, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u2018mischief\u2019 that Catesby referred to dated back to Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s parliaments, which had passed a series of harsh statutes aimed at forcing Catholics to conform to the Church of England. Catholic recusants (from the Latin recusare<\/em>, to refuse) were fined, intimidated and imprisoned. Priests and Jesuits dispatched to England in an attempt to maintain the Catholic faith risked torture and execution.<\/p>\n English Catholics welcomed James I\u2019s accession to the throne in 1603, hoping that it would usher in a period of greater toleration. Yet it was to be a false dawn. Two years on, it was becoming increasingly clear that the new king was prepared to grant Catholics few concessions. This was the background to the plotters\u2019 decision to target the state opening of parliament<\/a>, when the lords, Commons and the king himself would be assembled together. The fact that Catholic nobles might be caught up in the blast was accepted by Catesby as collateral damage: to him they were \u201catheists, fools and cowards\u201d.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1605, the Palace of Westminster was a ramshackle complex of converted royal apartments and dissolved ecclesiastical buildings, very different from today\u2019s high-security buildings. Westminster Hall was crammed with people attending the courts of King\u2019s Bench and Common Pleas. Taverns named \u2018Heaven\u2019 and \u2018Purgatory\u2019 plied their trade a stone\u2019s throw from the Commons and the Lords. In Henry VIII<\/a>\u2019s day, a brothel openly operated within the precincts of the palace.<\/p>\n The plotters knew that they had a good chance of passing undetected through this melee. Their initial plan was to occupy a property next to the House of Lords and to tunnel from one cellar to another, but the mining proved too time-consuming. Then they rented a coal cellar underneath the Lords\u2019 chamber. This enabled them to bring in the gunpowder without being challenged.<\/p>\n A security sweep failed to spot the significance of the pile of firewood and barrels that had accumulated in the cellar. But then the Catholic peer, Baron Monteagle, received a letter from an anonymous source, warning him to stay away from the Palace of Westminster on 5 November, as \u201cthey shall receive a terrible blow this parliament\u201d. The letter reached James I, who ordered a second search. Only then was the plot revealed, preventing nearly a tonne of gunpowder from tearing through parliament. The attitude of the Spanish was a key reason for the conspiracy\u2019s failure. English Catholics had looked to Spain for support since the reign of Elizabeth I. In 1569, a rebellion of the northern earls had hoped to depose Elizabeth with Spanish naval backing \u2013 although the ships never arrived. Later on, English Catholic naval pilots had sailed with the Spanish Armada.<\/p>\n But a generation after this, the political landscape had changed. And when, in 1603, Guy Fawkes went to Spain seeking military aid from Philip III, he found that the Spanish were less inclined to offer their support. For them, the accession of James I created an opportunity to end the costly war with England \u2013 and, in August 1604, Spanish and English delegations met at Somerset House in London to sign a peace treaty. Two Spanish noblemen, Don Juan de Tassis and the Constable of Castile (both of whom feature in the 2017 BBC drama Gunpowder<\/em>), can be seen in the portrait of the Somerset House conference that hangs in the National Maritime Museum. Spain\u2019s abandonment of English Catholics left the plotters to go it alone. For that to happen, the plotters would have needed to establish a new government, neutralise the Tower of London<\/a> and secure England\u2019s ports. Their plans to achieve all this were hazy at best.<\/p>\n Britain was a monarchy, so royal rule would have had to have continued under a new Catholic regime. The king\u2019s son, Henry, Prince of Wales, was a vigorous Protestant, and would in any case probably have died in the explosion. One of the plotters, Thomas Percy, wanted to kidnap Prince Charles (the future Charles I<\/a>). But Catesby favoured capturing the nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth, appointing a protector and marrying the puppet monarch to a Catholic husband.<\/p>\n The princess\u2019s household was based at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire, a swift ride from the Catesby family home at Ashby St Ledgers. Catesby invited the local Catholic gentry to hunt with him on 5 November, hoping they could use this as cover. But when the gunpowder plot failed, his support network melted away. Catesby and Wintour became fugitives, running between one Catholic house and another. They made their last stand at Holbeach House, advancing with swords against the sheriff\u2019s men armed with guns. Catesby and Percy died from the same bullet, while Wintour was captured to face trial. The burning of effigies of Guy Fawkes on Bonfire Night<\/a> might suggest that Fawkes was burnt at the stake. However, for men, the sentence for high treason was to be \u2018hanged, drawn and quartered\u2019, and that\u2019s the grisly fate that awaited Fawkes.<\/p>\n Prior to his execution, brutal torture was used to extract Fawkes\u2019s confession, including manacles \u2013 which were secured tightly around wrists and used to hang the accused by their hands for many hours \u2013 and, most likely, the notorious rack, which stretched the body, tearing tendons, ripping joints and fracturing bones.<\/p>\n It would have been a wretched Fawkes who was tied head-down to a hurdle and drawn to Old Palace Yard outside the Palace of Westminster, along with three fellow plotters. As the last to be executed, he would have witnessed the others being hanged, removed while still alive, and then dying during the physical mutilation that followed. First, the genitals were cut off and burned. The body was then disembowelled and decapitated, and finally quartered, with body parts displayed across the country.<\/p>\n Fawkes was spared the pain of the final stages because his neck broke as he hanged, bringing instant death on the gallows.<\/p>\n The gunpowder plot was the latest in a string of conspiracies aimed at re-establishing Catholic rule in England. For years, radical Catholics had been hoping to co-ordinate an uprising of recusant families with military support from sympathetic foreign powers. Yet few English Catholics had ever supported armed action against the Protestant regime.<\/p>\n The state had developed powerful weapons against insurgency. Elizabeth I\u2019s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham<\/a>, recruited an extensive network of informers and agents, penetrating the Catholic underground and infiltrating the continental seminaries where missionary priests were trained. This had enabled him to thwart previous attempts on the monarch\u2019s life, such as the Babington plot<\/a> of 1586, which aimed to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots<\/a>. After his death, Walsingham\u2019s secret service was maintained by his successor, Robert Cecil, who served both Elizabeth and James I.<\/p>\n Given the sophistication of the network that Walsingham bequeathed Cecil, it\u2019s perhaps surprising that the gunpowder plot came so close to achieving its objective. After all, Fawkes was only discovered at the 11th hour, allegedly as he hovered over the powder, ready to ignite a fuse. The need for Catholicism to be pursued in secret put domestic houses at the very heart of this community. Catholics disguised the symbols and accoutrements associated with their worship, sometimes in plain sight, among everyday furnishings. A dining table might double as an altar, a priest\u2019s vestments could be folded up and buried amid the household linen, and a chalice reserved for mass might be placed on shelves and rendered indistinguishable from ordinary drinking cups. A number of houses famously had \u2018priest holes\u2019, secret spaces behind fireplaces, staircases and walls in which not just the sacred vessels but also priests themselves could be hidden.<\/p>\n So the home \u2013 and, by extension, the women who kept those homes \u2013 were critical to keeping the faith alive. This can be seen in the life of Anne Vaux (played by Liv Tyler in Gunpowder<\/em>), a Catholic gentlewoman who was arrested on suspicion of being connected to the gunpowder plot. Like other women of her rank and religion, Vaux played a high-stakes role in maintaining Catholic underground networks, orchestrating meetings, acting as a gatekeeper and, crucially, supporting priests in rented safe houses and in her own home. When the gunpowder plot was discovered, Londoners were encouraged to light bonfires in celebration. Before long, 5 November had entered the calendar as a reminder of England\u2019s deliverance. Mingling with the older traditions of fire-making and feasting, it became a day of national rejoicing.<\/p>\n English settlers in America carried their anti-Catholicism across the Atlantic. Known as Pope\u2019s Day in colonial Boston, 5 November saw rival gangs fighting over effigies of the pontiff, and throwing them into the fire. You can witness something similar today in Lewes in Sussex, where bonfire societies parade through the town and hurl good-natured abuse at a volunteer dressed up as a cardinal.<\/p>\n But bonfire festivities are changing. As recently as the 1980s, huge numbers of families congregated in neighbours\u2019 back gardens to eat soup and cinder toffee and watch dad set off fireworks, while streets across the land resonated to the sound of children asking for a \u2018penny for the guy\u2019. Today, these traditions are rapidly disappearing.<\/p>\n![\""The\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2018\/01\/GettyImages-53036286-f0c24cc.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C409"\" "\\"\"The\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Why did the conspirators select parliament as their target?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>How did the plotters penetrate the Palace of Westminster?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Did foreign powers offer any assistance to the gunpowder plot?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
If the plot had been successful, would it have delivered England into the hands of a Catholic regime?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
How was Guy Fawkes punished for his crimes?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>How alive were the authorities to the threat of Catholic conspiracies?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
How did Catholics practise their faith without attracting unwanted attention?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Why do we call 5 November \u2018bonfire night\u2019?<\/h3>\n<\/div>
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