November is a time to observe a curious tradition in Britain. People across the country light bonfires at this time of year and recite the same poem to themselves over and over again. "Remember, remember, the 5th of November...". Every schoolchild in England knows these lines of poetry. Because on November 5th, it's Bonfire Night! It commemorates the luckily unsuccessful attempt by a certain Guy Fawkes to blow up the English Parliament on that very day in 1605. Ah...if only the story of this gunpowder plot were as simple as it seems in nursery rhymes...
Who was Guy Fawkes?
The powder conspiracy, the so-called Powder Treason in English, is thus clearly associated with a name for every English schoolchild. It was that bastard Guy Fawkes who wanted to send Parliament, the King and all his lords to hell at once. Luckily for everyone, he could only be stopped a few days before his crime, which is still celebrated every year today. The Gunpowder Plot blew up and Parliament didn't blow up with it. All's well that ends well. As far as the background to these events is concerned, however, things are much less clear. Because even if he gave the face for the conspiracy and is known to this day, Guy Fawkes was by no means the mastermind behind the assassination. It involved a total of thirteen people, high-ranking Catholic members of English society. And Guy Fawkes? … he was her dirty man.
England had long had a problem with religion in the early 17th century. Almost 70 years earlier, Henry VIII had led his country out of the Catholic Church, largely to divorce his wife. Since then, the country has been caught in a perpetual back and forth. During her short reign, Henry's daughter Mary tried to use force to make her country Catholic again, which earned her the nickname "Bloody Mary" not entirely undeservedly. Her half-sister and successor, Elizabeth, turned the tables again, and under her the persecution of Catholics was once again the order of the day. When a new king - James of Scotland - finally took the English throne in 1603, the country's Catholic population watched spellbound as he took his first steps. When, after a brief period of relaxation, the discrimination and persecution continued under James, some of them took action.
But as I said, the most important character is not Guy Fawkes, or Guido Fawkes as he actually called himself. Rather, a certain Robert Catesby was at the center of the conspiracy that developed from 1604 onwards. Like almost all of his later co-conspirators, he was a Catholic country gentry and was just beginning to rally like-minded people and plan an assassination plot against the new king and the Protestant nobles who were supporting him. Guy Fawkes probably "only" became part of the plot on recommendation. Unlike the others, he didn't belong to the aristocracy and until recently had been out of the country at all. As a volunteer he had fought in Flanders on the Spanish side against the Protestant Dutch. He was considered ideologically reliable, experienced in combat and an explosives expert, which didn't come at a bad time for Robert Catesby.
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Why did the powder conspiracy fail?
So, as the year 1605 progressed, participants in Robert Catesby's endeavor finally got down to action, after nearly a year of planning. The specific plan was quickly devised:they wanted to blow up the English Parliament in Westminster on the very day it met. Because on this occasion, the king and his family also traditionally gathered in the parliament building. In addition, of course, all the MPs were present - the country's Protestant elite, as the Catesby conspirators no doubt saw it. So getting rid of them all at once was an attractive prospect. The conspirators would then incite the Catholic gentry to revolt and put King James' young daughter on the throne as their puppet. But the conspirators had to be patient for now. The opening of Parliament was repeatedly postponed and ultimately set for November 5, 1605, a few months later than usual.
That turned out to be quite lucky for the assassins at first. One of the co-conspirators, a man named Thomas Percy, had meanwhile been appointed to the king's ceremonial bodyguard. On the one hand, this was a confirmation for the group that nobody was on the trail of their plan. On the other hand, his new position also gave Percy a welcome reason to rent a house not far from Parliament. A house whose basement gave direct access to the vaulted cellars beneath the parliament buildings. So he moved there in the spring of 1605, along with his servant John Johnson. Of course, that was just Guy Fawkes' somewhat unimaginative alias. In the months that followed, they finally began dumping barrels of gunpowder in the basement disguised as winter supplies.
But why did they fail when everything looked so good? Here the source situation is unfortunately somewhat difficult. What is certain is that shortly before the planned assassination, a Catholic member of parliament received a letter advising him not to attend the November 5 opening. It is not entirely clear who wrote this letter. There are suspicions that it was one of the conspirators themselves. But it could also have been one of the wives of the conspirators, or even the MP himself, who had heard about the powder conspiracy elsewhere and now wanted to ingratiate himself with the king. What is certain, however, is that this MP went straight to State Secretary Robert Cecil, and even if the letter did not contain anything specific about the plans, Cecil finally had the cellars under Parliament searched. There the guards found Guy Fawkes guarding the now 36 kegs of gunpowder they had accumulated - enough to reduce the entire district to rubble.
The inglorious end of Guy Fawkes and company
Guy Fawkes was of course immediately arrested and, on the King's direct orders, tortured until he released the names of his co-conspirators. After their plot was uncovered, however, they headed towards the English Midlands in the hope that at least the second part of their plan would work out. Robert Catesby wanted to ride from court to court calling on the Catholic populace to revolt, even if the king and his parliament were still in office. But there was nothing to be done. None of the Catholic nobles were willing to take such a risk, and so the few remaining conspirators around Catesby had to move ever further north-west. They ended up at Holbeche House, near Stafford - now a nursing home, by the way, in case anyone wants to get rid of a relative with a pinch of historical pomp. There they waited for the king's men.
Without their military expert Guy Fawkes, however, the group proved somewhat clumsy. Since their gunpowder supplies had gotten wet during the long ride through the rain, they now tried to dry them near the open campfire. The result was exactly what one imagines. Everything blew up and the whole group suffered moderate to serious injuries, although none died. Finally, on November 8, the last battle against a few hundred royal troops followed. Robert Catesby and some of his supporters died in the fighting. The others were taken back to London and executed alongside Guy Fawkes in January. Although "execute" is too neutral a term here...they were hanged to the point of suffocation, then had their intestines torn out while they were alive before being beheaded and quartered. Apparently the people were fine with that. The first bonfires are said to have been lit for the king's survival as early as 1605, which, given the plot, seems both fitting and macabre. They have survived to this day as Bonfire Night.
What has also survived in England for a long time is state-supported anti-Catholicism, which only assumed more radical features as a result of the powder conspiracy. With the Glorious Revolution at the end of the 17th century things got even worse. It would not be until well into the 19th century that Catholic Britons were granted real civil rights. In Northern Ireland we see the resulting problems to this day. The danger of a Catholic overthrow was always present in the years that followed. Even more frequently, however, there were conspiracy theories that fantasized about such an overthrow. I'm talking about one of them, the papist plot of Titus Oates from 1678, on the podcast this week. Listen!