The Powder Treason

On the morning of Friday 8 November 1605 it was raining in Staffordshire, and the gunpowder was wet. The men who had carried it off from Lord Windsor's armoury the day before had forded a swollen river on the way to Holbeche House, and now they spread it in front of the fire to dry. A spark reached it. Robert Catesby's face was burned, Ambrose Rookwood with him, and John Grant was blinded. Several of the party slipped away. The rest knelt before a picture of the Virgin and waited.

The Sheriff of Worcestershire came late in the morning with about two hundred men, and the fight lasted about an hour. The Wright brothers were shot. Thomas Wintour took a ball in the shoulder. Catesby and Thomas Percy fell to a single musket shot at the door, and Catesby died inside the house holding the picture. He had thought of the plot and brought in every man in it, and he died untried.

Four hundred years of November bonfires have never burned him. They burn the man he hired.

The Law, the Men, the Cellar, the Memory

The Powder Treason: Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby, and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 opens thirty-five years before the cellar, with a papal bull nailed to a bishop's gate in London. From 1570 every English Catholic was, in law, a potential traitor. Edmund Campion was hanged, Margaret Clitherow was pressed to death at York, and the Catholic gentry of the Midlands learned to live in houses with hiding places worked into the chimneys and stairs by a carpenter named Nicholas Owen. The plotters' fathers paid that world's fines and sat in its prisons.

Then came the hope and its collapse. James VI of Scotland, son of a Catholic queen, let Catholic envoys believe he would ease the law, came south in March 1603, relaxed the fines, and brought them back within a year. In August 1604 Spain made peace at Somerset House and stopped acting as English Catholicism's protector. Catesby concluded that nobody abroad was coming, and his answer was thirty-six barrels in a rented vault under the House of Lords and a soldier from the Army of Flanders to light the match.

The book states without hedging that this was a plan to kill the king, his heir, the Lords and the Commons of England in a single instant, bystanders included, and it gives the law that made such a plan thinkable the same weight, told first. Neither is allowed to explain the other away.

The judgment fell hardest on people who had tried to stop it. Henry Garnet, the Jesuit superior who had asked Rome to forbid Catholic violence, went to the scaffold for a secret he had received in confession. Owen died under the manacles in the Tower. Parliament put 5 November into the calendar by statute, and for the next two and a half centuries English congregations heard the government's version from the pulpit each November, while the loyal Catholic majority who had refused to rise paid for the plot in fines, oaths and exclusion.

Why I Wrote This

The Enterprise of England ended with a peace signed at Somerset House in 1604, and I kept thinking about the people that treaty left behind. A little over a year later some of them were under the House of Lords with thirty-six barrels. The official narrative was in print within a month, and the version most of us carry around descends from it almost unchanged. The language kept a word for the man with the match and nothing for the man who thought of it. That seemed worth a book: how a hunted church produced thirteen men who meant to kill several hundred people, how a state turned the night it caught them into a festival, and who paid for the festival for the next two and a half centuries.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Guy Fawkes lead the Gunpowder Plot?

No. Robert Catesby conceived it, recruited every other member, found the money and set the day. Fawkes was brought over from the Spanish Army of Flanders because he knew gunpowder and nobody in London knew his face. He became the famous one because he was the only conspirator in custody during the first critical week, and because an effigy needs a single figure.

Who wrote the Monteagle letter?

Nobody knows, and the book does not pretend to. Francis Tresham, whose sister was Monteagle's wife, had the strongest motive but denied it convincingly and died in the Tower without claiming the credit that might have saved him. Anne Vaux had the fear and the connections, but no document links her to it. Monteagle himself and Salisbury's office have both been accused. The verdict stays open, which is where the evidence leaves it.

Was the Gunpowder Plot a government setup?

Almost certainly not, though the question deserves better than a dismissal. The case for a frame-up was argued seriously in 1897 and rests on real anomalies, and the book gives it a full chapter. It comes down where most historians do: the plot was real and Catesby's, the government shaped the story heavily afterwards, and Salisbury probably knew from 26 October and let the plot ripen, with anything earlier possible but unprovable.

Why do the British celebrate Bonfire Night on 5 November?

Because Parliament told them to. An Act of January 1606 made 5 November an annual day of thanksgiving, with church attendance required and the Act itself read aloud, and the bonfires followed the bells. For the first century the figure on the fire was usually the pope; the guy took over during the eighteenth century, and the "Remember, remember" rhyme is a folk verse recorded later still. The statute was repealed in 1859. The fires did not notice.

What happened to the Gunpowder plotters?

Four died at Holbeche House on 8 November 1605: Catesby, Percy and the brothers John and Christopher Wright. Francis Tresham died of illness in the Tower on 23 December. The remaining eight were tried in Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606 and hanged, drawn and quartered over the two days that followed, four in St Paul's Churchyard and four, Fawkes among them, in Old Palace Yard opposite the building they had meant to destroy.

If You Liked This, You Might Like

• The Thirty Years' War — the nine-year-old princess the plotters meant to seize at Coombe Abbey grew up to be the Queen of Bohemia whose crown opened Europe's religious war thirteen years later.
• Anne Boleyn — the marriage that took England out of the Roman obedience, three generations before the plotters' fathers began paying for the consequences.
• The Black Death — plague kept proroguing the Parliament the plotters meant to destroy, two and a half centuries after 1348.

The law first, then the men the law made, then the cellar, the judgment and the memory: a history of the Gunpowder Plot that gives the persecution and the barrels equal weight and refuses to let either explain the other away.

A standalone history on the English-history shelf, beside Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.