“Remember, remember, the 5th
of November – gunpowder, treason and plot”. This was the day on which the
opening of Parliament in 1605, attended by King James I and all the members of
the Houses of Lords and Commons, would have been sabotaged by a massive
explosion, had the plot succeeded. The plotters hoped thereby to start a
revolution that would have resulted in the restoration of a Catholic regime in
Great Britain, following years of repression of Catholics under Queen Elizabeth
I and now her successor James, despite him being the son of a Catholic mother,
namely Mary Queen of Scots.
There were fourteen people in the plot, which was led by a
Catholic nobleman named Robert Catesby. The plan was to take advantage of the
complex geometry of the old Parliament buildings, which were eventually burned
down in 1834 although not as the result of any plot. The buildings had been
built piecemeal over hundreds of years, and one anomaly was that cellars belonging
to adjoining private houses ran underground beneath the chambers of Parliament.
Catesby and the plotters had rented one of these houses
earlier in the year, because they knew that its cellar ran underneath the House
of Lords, where the Opening Ceremony would take place on 5th
November. They spent the intervening
months storing barrels of gunpowder in the cellar, just one or two at a time so
as not to attract attention. When the night of 4th/5th
November arrived, there were 36 such barrels in the cellar, each containing
about 100 pounds of gunpowder.
There has long been a question mark over whether the plot
would actually have worked, given the age of some of the gunpowder and the fact
that it was being stored in an underground cellar close to the River Thames,
which must surely have been subject to damp. There is always the possibility
that only a few of the barrels would have exploded, if any, and the result
would not have been as spectacular as the plotters hoped.
However, the viability of the plot was never put to the
test, due to the humanitarian feelings of one of the plotters. Somebody (it has
never been established who) sent a letter to Lord Monteagle, a Catholic, that
advised him to think up an excuse for not attending the Opening Ceremony “as you tender your life”. The
letter contained the words “I say they shall receive a terrible blow this
Parliament”. Monteagle rapidly passed the latter up the chain of command until
it reached the king, who seized on the word “blow” as having something to do
with gunpowder.
Catesby and the conspirators got to know about the existence
of the letter, and there was some debate among them whether or not to abandon
the whole idea. However, the conclusion was that the risk should be taken to
proceed, seeing as they had come so far.
Thus, on the night of 4th November, a thorough search was
made of the cellars beneath Parliament and the cache of gunpowder was found,
guarded by one of the plotters, a certain Guido Fawkes. His job would have been
to light an 8-hour fuse and make his escape long before the explosion would
have happened.
Fawkes was taken to the Tower of London where he was
interrogated, firstly by King James in person. Under torture, he revealed the
whereabouts of the “safe house” in Warwickshire to which most of the others
fled after hearing of Fawkes’s arrest. Catesby and his companions were
therefore followed to the house by soldiers and killed after a brief shoot-out.
The other conspirators were soon rounded up and sent to the
Tower where, along with Fawkes, they suffered the traitors’ death of being
hanged, drawn and quartered.
The traditional British ceremony of Bonfire Night, with the
burning of a “guy” and the setting off of fireworks, has always been held to be
the result of a spontaneous outpouring of relief on the part of the country’s
largely Protestant population at being saved from a dastardly Catholic plot.
However, there is little evidence to show that such celebrations were held
until after 1689, when William of Orange became King William III by deposing
King James II.
William chose the date of 5th November on which
to land in England in 1688. He appreciated the significance of that date, given
that he was a Protestant prince who was ousting a Catholic king, and it may
well be that it was the second “5th of November” that is really
being remembered today.
© John Welford
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