The Gunpowder Plot: Treason Beneath Westminster
Featured in A Catalogue of Catastrophe by Jodi Taylor
The origins of the Gunpowder Plot lie in the turbulent religious politics of Tudor and early Stuart England. The Protestant Reformation, initiated decades earlier by Henry VIII’s break with Rome, had plunged the nation into cycles of persecution, suspicion, and sectarian division. Under Elizabeth I, Catholics were subject to fines for recusancy, meaning refusal to attend Anglican services, exclusion from public life, and, in some cases, brutal execution.
When James I ascended the throne in 1603, many English Catholics dared to hope for tolerance. James, the Scottish king who united the crowns of England and Scotland, was the son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, and had hinted at a willingness to ease the punitive laws against his mother’s co-religionists. Those hopes quickly withered. Parliament remained fiercely Protestant, and by 1604 the new monarch had reaffirmed the anti-Catholic legislation. For a small group of radicals, disillusionment turned into desperation.
At the heart of the conspiracy was Robert Catesby, a charismatic and devout Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire. Catesby’s vision was simple but chilling: to obliterate the political establishment in a single, devastating explosion during the State Opening of Parliament, when the King, Lords, and Commons would all be present. In the ensuing chaos, the conspirators hoped to install a Catholic monarch, possibly James’s young daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and restore England to the old faith.
Catesby recruited a circle of trusted allies, including Thomas Percy, Thomas Wintour, John Wright, and, later, Guy Fawkes, an experienced soldier who had fought for Catholic Spain in the Netherlands. Fawkes’s military expertise made him invaluable; he knew how to handle gunpowder, how to ignite it, and how to die bravely if need be.
The conspirators leased a cellar directly beneath the House of Lords, disguised as a coal store. By early 1605, they had transported 36 barrels of gunpowder into the chamber, enough to demolish the building and kill everyone inside. Their plan was both audacious and naïve. Fawkes would ignite the fuse, escape across the Thames, and join the rebels who were to rise in the Midlands.
But secrecy proved impossible to maintain. In late October, an anonymous letter reached Lord Monteagle, a Catholic nobleman loyal to the crown, warning him to refrain from attending Parliament. “They shall receive a terrible blow,” the letter cautioned, “and yet they shall not see who hurts them.” The message was swiftly passed to the authorities.
In the early hours of 5 November 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet led a search of the Palace of Westminster. In the vaults below, they found a man cloaked and booted, carrying fuses and matches. When questioned, he gave his name as John Johnson, a servant of Thomas Percy. The lie did not hold for long. Under torture in the Tower of London, the prisoner revealed his true identity, Guy Fawkes.
His confession unravelled the web of the conspiracy. Catesby and several of his followers fled north, attempting to incite a Catholic uprising, but they were hunted down and killed or captured. Fawkes and the surviving conspirators were tried for high treason in January 1606. Their sentence was grim: to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Fawkes cheated the executioner slightly by leaping from the gallows and breaking his neck before the mutilation began.
The Gunpowder Plot had failed, but its consequences were far-reaching. It hardened anti-Catholic sentiment and gave the government cause to tighten its surveillance of the Catholic community. Annual celebrations of the King’s deliverance began almost immediately, with bonfires and bell-ringing sanctioned by royal decree. Over time, these evolved into the Bonfire Night festivities familiar today, where effigies of Guy Fawkes, the Guy, are burnt amid fireworks and revelry.
Yet Fawkes’s image has shifted with the centuries. Once reviled as a traitor, he has become a complex symbol, of rebellion against tyranny, of the power of an idea, and of the thin line between conviction and fanaticism. The face that once terrified England now stares out from protest masks around the world.
Working as Recovery Agents Max and Markham jump back to 1605 to prevent The Gunpoder Plot. Read more about this in “A Catalogue of Catastrophe” by Jodi Taylor. It’s available in paperback, eBook and audiobook formats.
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