The Gunpowder Treason And Plot
The original version of this post appeared on my Livejournal in 2007
Today is 5 November 2024. On this day in 1605, an English Catholic veteran and explosives expert named Guy Fawkes was caught in a cellar underneath the House of Lords at the Palace at Westminster. The chamber was filled with approximately 1,800 pounds of gunpowder—enough, even in terms of the relatively crude chemistry of the time, to render most of the Westminster complex a ruin.
If all you know about the Gunpowder Plot is what you learned from reading or watching V for Vendetta, then three things must be understood at the outset.
The plot would not merely have blown up the Palace as some kind of symbolic act. It would have been an act of mass murder that would have left England without crown, parliament, or judiciary
The plot was not the act of a single man wishing to strike a blow for freedom, but a piece of a conspiracy that would have replaced Anglican religious tyranny with Catholic religious tyranny
The poem, "Remember, remember the Fifth of November..." is not a reminder to lovers of freedom to fight for their liberties, but a reminder to patriots to guard against treason and show no mercy to traitors.
When James inherited Elizabeth's throne in 1603, there had been hopes that a new king and a new parliament might lead to a new era of toleration for Catholics and other dissenters from the Church of England. A full restoration of Catholicism, as had happened under Mary I, was more than anyone hoped for. But toleration for Catholics seemed a reasonable thing to expect, since James' own mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been staunchly Catholic
Catholics and Puritans alike found their hopes dashed by 1604. Really, they'd never had any hope. Aside from Parliament's lack of interest at the time in upsetting the status quo, there was never any chance that James would significantly alter a religious settlement that so empowered the Crown.
James was a firm believer in the divine right of kings and that all authority in a state emanated from the person of the monarch. Catholicism, which included the notion that the Pope was the supreme temporal authority on Earth, was distasteful to him because it meant someone in the world held greater authority over his lands than he did. On the flip-side, less "high-church" Protestant ideas, including the Presbyterianism he'd grown up with in Scotland, were anathema to him because they eliminated the hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, and priests that were ultimately responsible to a single supreme head--in England's case, the monarch! If anything, he would have liked to have imposed a settlement upon Scotland with himself as the Supreme Head of an episcopal hierarchy, just as he'd inherited from Elizabeth in England.
With domestic hopes dashed and no apparent help in the offing from foreign powers, Robert Catesby drew together a band of conspirators to take matters into their own hands. The hope was to abduct the royal children (who would not be present at the State Opening), destroy the Crown in Parliament during the State Opening, create an uprising in the Midlands, set the Princess Elizabeth on the throne, and restore Catholicism as the primary faith of England. The settlement they had in mind, had they succeeded, would have been no more tolerant than the one they were supplanting. The only difference would have been the return of allegiance to the Pope.
The original plan for the destruction of the English government called for tunneling through under the palace from nearby lodgings. The work went far more slowly than expected, so the plotters considered it a stroke of good luck when the State Opening had to be delayed from summer 1604 to sometime in 1605 due to plague in London, and then again to autumn 1605. By the time the Opening was actually looking like it might happen soon, the plotters found their tunnel was still well short of its goal.
The plotters had another stroke of luck shortly thereafter, however. There were spaces in the undercroft of the palace that were leased out regularly, and the lease came up on one right under Lords. The conspiracy successfully secured the lease, and began moving their store of powder into the cellar.
It was the last stroke of luck the conspiracy was due to have.
As the plot moved toward its culmination, someone sent a letter to a prominent Catholic baron, William Parker, Baron Monteagle. The letter was fairly vague, but warned him to avoid the State Opening to which he had been summoned. Monteagle had been a conspirator against the Crown in the past, having encouraged Phillip III of Spain to invade on behalf of the Catholic faith as recently as 1602. Despite this, he had been at some pains to reconcile with the new king, and thus had received a summons to Parliament as Lord Monteagle.
Indeed, since Monteagle was already acquainted with many of the conspirators, it's not out of the question that he was already acquainted with the conspiracy. Some say that Monteagle concocted the letter himself as a way to notify the government and curry favour without implicating himself. Others say that one of the conspirators, likely Francis Tresham, who was related to Monteagle by marriage, and had been vocally opposed to the Gunpowder Plot, wrote the letter in hopes of saving Monteagle's life. Still others suggest that Tresham may have been an agent for Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and the letter was his way of bringing the plot out into the open. If so, he was poorly rewarded, since he died in prison.
At any rate, Monteagle apparently wanted nothing to do with the plot. He first made a point of sharing the letter with a gentleman named Ward, who was an intimate of one of the conspirators. He then proceeded to London, where he shared the letter with Cecil, who was James' chief minister in much the same way his father had been Elizabeth's. Through Ward and his friend Winter, the conspirators knew the beans had been spilt, but chose to continue the plot when Guy Fawkes inspected the cellar and found that nothing had been touched.
5 November 1605 finally marked the State Opening of Parliament, commencing the second session of the first parliament elected under James I. In attendance in the chamber of the House of Lords were King James, much of the royal family, all the officers of state, most of the English nobility (tho' not the Scots nobles, since they still had a separate parliament), and the elected knights of the shires and boroughs.
Had the plot succeeded, in one swift stroke, England's government would have been entirely decapitated.
Cecil and his men, however, apparently had more detailed information about the plot than just the veiled letter Monteagle shared with them, and had left the cellar untouched in hopes of snaring a conspirator and not merely preventing the plot's success. Guy Fawkes was apprehended in the cellar, torch in hand, just before he could set off the pile. He was arrested and put to the torment. His confessions yielded little the government had not discovered by other means.
Meanwhile, the rest of the conspirators fled London. Those that escaped arrest actually attempted the second phase of the plot, an uprising in the Midlands. It failed utterly, and Catesby was killed in the shoot-out.
In the end, Fawkes and several others who had been captured were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Guy Fawkes managed to jump off the platform, breaking his neck, and thus was not forced to endure the full procedure. By contrast, Robert Keyes tried the same trick only to have the rope break, and thus had the dubious joy of being drawn and quartered fully conscious.
In the end, the plot was entirely counterproductive. Anti-Catholic sentiment hardened and increased, putting off any chance of Catholic emancipation for 200 years. Even had it succeeded, English Catholic rebels consistently overestimated the number of English Catholics, and more importantly, the number of them that would join a rebellion. Chances are fairly strong that, even had Gunpowder Plot succeeded in the destruction of the government, England would have become more violently anti-Catholic, rather than becoming reconciled to Rome.
There can be no question but that the government of James and his parliament was, by modern standards oppressive, particularly on the question of religion. There can also be little question that James aspired to a kind of benign tyranny, believing in divine right and absolute monarchy, and resenting the deep-seated traditions in England that made it impossible for him to govern effectively without Parliament. From that standpoint, the success of the Plot would have meant the destruction of a tyrant and his works.
However, there can also be no question that Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby, and their fellows were in no way sons of liberty. The government they would have established in place of James and Cecil would have been just as tyrannical against Protestants and Puritans as James and Cecil were against Catholics and Puritans. Having murdered the King, Queen, the Lords and Commons, they would have set the abducted, nine-year-old daughter of the King up as a puppet in her father's place, and invited in agents of Rome and the Inquisition. The destruction of everyone who actually knew how to govern would have left England wide open for civil unrest within and invasion from without.
Later writers, frustrated with the weaknesses of parliamentary government, looked wistfully upon Fawkes and his ilk's failure, thinking that if only he had succeeded, perhaps something better would have arisen in its stead. But these writers, who include some fairly intelligent people appear to have ignored both Fawkes intent, and the most likely outcomes of success. Success in full would have simply been the substitution of one tyranny for another; and any partial success would have yielded an era of chaos as factions contended for the explosively vacated throne, unlikely to end in a regime any of us would consider an improvement.