Gunpowder Plot (1605): Guy Fawkes and the Plan to Kill James I

The Gunpowder Plot was a conspiracy by a small group of English Catholics to kill King James I and his leading ministers by blowing up the House of Lords at the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. Led by Robert Catesby, the plotters packed a cellar beneath the chamber with gunpowder, but an anonymous warning letter exposed the scheme and Guy Fawkes was arrested on guard. The failure of the plot is still remembered in Britain every year on Bonfire Night.

Background: Catholics in Protestant England

Since the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559, the Church of England had been Protestant, and Catholics who refused to attend its services, known as recusants, faced heavy fines. Catholic priests, especially Jesuits trained abroad, could be executed for treason simply for working in England. Many Catholic families nevertheless kept their faith, often protected by sympathetic gentry.

When James VI of Scotland became King of England in 1603 through the Union of the Crowns, many Catholics hoped for toleration. James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been a Catholic, and he had made encouraging remarks before his accession. At first fines were relaxed, but in February 1604 James publicly declared his hostility to Catholicism and ordered Jesuits and seminary priests to leave the country. Collection of recusancy fines resumed. Peace talks with Spain, which led to the Treaty of London in 1604, also ended hopes of foreign help for English Catholics.

The conspirators

Robert Catesby, a charismatic Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire who had already been involved in the Earl of Essex’s rebellion of 1601, conceived the plan in early 1604. On 20 May 1604 he met Thomas Wintour, John Wright, Thomas Percy and Guy Fawkes at the Duck and Drake inn in London, where they swore an oath of secrecy.

Guy Fawkes, born in York in 1570, had converted to Catholicism and served for about a decade in the Spanish army in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt, where he adopted the name Guido and gained experience with gunpowder. Thomas Percy, a relative and agent of the Earl of Northumberland, held a post as one of the king’s Gentlemen Pensioners, which gave the plotters a respectable cover.

Over the following year eight more men joined: Robert Keyes, Christopher Wright, Robert Wintour, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham and Catesby’s servant Thomas Bates. The wealthier recruits were brought in largely to provide money, horses and arms.

The plan

The conspirators intended to kill the king, his eldest son Prince Henry and much of the political elite in a single blast at the State Opening of Parliament. At the same time, Digby was to gather Catholic gentry in the Midlands under cover of a hunting party and seize the king’s daughter Princess Elizabeth, then aged nine, from Coombe Abbey near Coventry. She would be proclaimed queen and raised as a Catholic.

The plotters first rented a house next to the Parliament buildings, and later accounts say they tried to dig a tunnel, although historians doubt whether such a tunnel ever existed. In March 1605 Percy leased an undercroft, a ground-floor cellar directly beneath the House of Lords chamber. The conspirators moved 36 barrels of gunpowder into it, hidden under firewood and coal. Modern estimates of the total weight vary, but it was more than enough to destroy the chamber above.

The opening of Parliament was postponed several times because of plague, and it was finally fixed for 5 November 1605.

Discovery

On the evening of 26 October 1605 Lord Monteagle, a peer with Catholic family connections, received an anonymous letter at his house in Hoxton warning him to avoid the opening of Parliament, because those present would “receive a terrible blow”. Monteagle took it straight to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, the king’s Secretary of State. When James saw the letter on 1 November, he is said to have interpreted it as a warning about gunpowder.

The government waited until the last moment. On 4 November the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Suffolk, and Monteagle inspected the Parliament buildings and noticed an unusually large pile of firewood in the cellar, watched by a servant who called himself John Johnson. Shortly before midnight a second search led by Sir Thomas Knyvet found the gunpowder and arrested “Johnson”, who was carrying matches and a slow fuse. He was Guy Fawkes.

Flight, capture and trials

Fawkes was taken to the Tower of London. On 6 November James authorised the use of torture, starting with the milder methods and proceeding further if necessary. Within days Fawkes gave his real name and, over the following interrogations, the names of his fellow plotters. His shaky signatures before and after questioning survive.

Most of the conspirators had fled to the Midlands and tried to raise support, but almost no Catholics joined them. On 8 November, at Holbeche House in Staffordshire, a spark ignited gunpowder they were drying by the fire, injuring several of them. Later that day the Sheriff of Worcestershire’s men surrounded the house. Catesby, Percy and the two Wright brothers were killed; others were captured.

Francis Tresham, arrested in London, died in the Tower on 23 December 1605. The remaining eight were tried in Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606 and found guilty of high treason. Digby, Robert Wintour, Grant and Bates were hanged, drawn and quartered in St Paul’s Churchyard on 30 January. Thomas Wintour, Rookwood, Keyes and Fawkes were executed in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, the next day; Fawkes died of a broken neck from the fall from the gallows.

The government also pursued the Jesuits. Father Henry Garnet, the head of the Jesuit mission in England, who had learned something of the plot in confession, was tried and executed on 3 May 1606.

Consequences

The plot strengthened the anti-Catholic mood in England for generations. In 1606 Parliament passed new laws against recusants and introduced an Oath of Allegiance, which required Catholics to deny the Pope’s power to depose kings. Catholics remained excluded from many offices until Catholic emancipation in 1829.

For James I, the failure of the plot reinforced his image as a monarch protected by Providence. Salisbury’s handling of the crisis increased his power, and some writers have since claimed that he engineered or exaggerated the plot to discredit Catholics. Most historians accept that the conspiracy was real, while acknowledging that the government knew more, and earlier, than it admitted.

The Observance of 5th November Act, passed in January 1606, ordered special church services every year. Bonfires had already been lit in London on 5 November 1605 to celebrate the king’s escape, and the custom spread across the country.

Over time the anniversary took on a strongly anti-Catholic character, with effigies of the Pope often burned alongside or instead of Fawkes, especially during political crises in the later seventeenth century. Children began to carry home-made effigies, called “guys”, through the streets asking for pennies, and from the nineteenth century the word “guy” came to mean an oddly dressed person and, later, any man. The traditional rhyme beginning “Remember, remember the fifth of November” dates from popular verse of later centuries.

Today Bonfire Night is largely a secular festival of fireworks and bonfires, celebrated in towns such as Lewes in Sussex with elaborate processions. The plot also has a modern afterlife: a stylised Guy Fawkes mask, popularised by the comic and 2005 film V for Vendetta, became a symbol used by protest movements around the world.

Myths and facts

Myth: Guy Fawkes led the plot. Robert Catesby was its organiser and leader. Fawkes became the face of the plot because he was caught with the gunpowder.

Myth: the gunpowder was too old to work. Some powder may have decayed, and the conspirators had to replace part of it. However, a controlled experiment staged for British television in 2005 suggested that a blast of that size would have destroyed the House of Lords chamber and anyone in it.

Myth: Fawkes was burned on the first Bonfire Night. Bonfire Night celebrated the king’s survival; “guys” were added to the fires later. Fawkes himself was executed by hanging in January 1606.

Myth: Parliament is still searched because of the plot by law. The ceremonial search of the cellars by the Yeomen of the Guard before the State Opening is a tradition, not a legal requirement.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1604, 20 May: Catesby, Wintour, Wright, Percy and Fawkes meet and swear an oath.
• 1605, March: Percy leases the undercroft beneath the House of Lords.
• 1605, 26 October: Lord Monteagle receives the anonymous warning letter.
• 1605, 4–5 November: Fawkes is arrested in the cellar shortly before midnight.
• 1605, 6 November: James I authorises torture in Fawkes’s interrogation.
• 1605, 8 November: Catesby and three others are killed at Holbeche House.
• 1606, 27 January: The surviving conspirators are tried at Westminster Hall.
• 1606, 30–31 January: Eight conspirators are executed in London.
• 1606, 3 May: Father Henry Garnet is executed.
• 1859: The compulsory 5 November church services are abolished.

Why it matters

The Gunpowder Plot was one of the most ambitious assassination attempts in British history. Its failure deepened Protestant suspicion of Catholics for centuries and created Bonfire Night, a festival still celebrated across Britain more than four hundred years later.