Shortly after midnight on 5 November 1605, a search party led by Sir Thomas Knyvet descended into an undercroft rented beneath the House of Lords and found a tall man in a cloak, spurred and booted as if ready to ride, carrying a lantern and slow matches. Behind him, under piles of firewood, lay 36 barrels of gunpowder — enough to obliterate the chamber above, where King James I was due to open Parliament within hours. The prisoner gave his name as John Johnson. Under interrogation he would eventually admit to being Guy Fawkes — and to a conspiracy whose actual leader most people today could not name.
That leader was Robert Catesby, a charismatic Warwickshire gentleman from a persecuted Catholic family. English Catholics had hoped that James, son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, would ease the penal laws against them; when he did not, Catesby recruited a band that eventually numbered thirteen, including Thomas Percy, the brothers Thomas and Robert Wintour, and a Yorkshire-born soldier of fortune, Guy Fawkes, who had fought for Catholic Spain in Flanders and preferred to be called Guido. The plan was breathtaking in scope: annihilate king, Lords and Commons in a single blast, raise a rebellion in the Midlands, and install James's nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, as a Catholic puppet queen. Percy's court connections allowed the plotters to rent the undercroft directly beneath the Lords' chamber, and Fawkes, the explosives man, was given the job of firing the powder and escaping across the Thames.
The Monteagle letter
On 26 October an anonymous letter was delivered to William Parker, Lord Monteagle, a Catholic peer, urging him to stay away from the opening: "they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament; and yet they shall not see who hurts them." Monteagle took it straight to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, the king's chief minister. The letter's author has never been identified — suspicion has always fallen on Francis Tresham, a late recruit to the plot and Monteagle's brother-in-law, but nothing was ever proved. Astonishingly, the conspirators learned that the letter had reached the government and pressed on anyway, gambling that the powder had not been found. A first search of the undercroft on 4 November, led by the Earl of Suffolk, noted only a suspiciously large stock of firewood and a tall "serving man"; Knyvet's second search, near midnight, found everything.
The gentler tortures
James personally authorised the interrogation in a note of chilling bureaucratic calm: "the gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur" — and so by degrees proceeding to the worst. Fawkes held out for days before naming his confederates, and his signatures on the confessions are usually read as the before-and-after of the rack: one a firm "Guido Fawkes", another a barely legible, trembling scrawl. Catesby never faced trial. He and the other plotters fled towards the Midlands, where — in an irony no novelist would risk — a spark from a fire ignited gunpowder they had spread out to dry at Holbeche House in Staffordshire, burning several of the fugitives. The next morning, 8 November, the sheriff's men stormed the house, and Catesby died in the shoot-out, reportedly clutching a picture of the Virgin Mary. The surviving plotters were tried in Westminster Hall and hanged, drawn and quartered in January 1606, in St Paul's Churchyard and Old Palace Yard; Fawkes, the last to mount the scaffold, jumped or fell from the ladder and broke his neck, escaping the conscious agony of the full sentence. Whether the plot could even have succeeded is still argued over — one tradition holds the gunpowder had decayed and might never have fired.
Parliament passed the Observance of 5th November Act within months, mandating annual thanksgiving, and the bonfires have never really gone out. The effigies of the "Guy" burned each November gave English its most casual word for a man. And before every State Opening of Parliament to this day, the Yeomen of the Guard ceremonially search the cellars of the Palace of Westminster by lantern light — pure ritual rather than security, since the original undercroft itself vanished when the old palace burned down in 1834. Four centuries on, the plot's failure is still celebrated with fire — and the man who merely guarded the powder has swallowed the fame of the man who lit the idea.
Quiz nuggets
- Guy Fawkes was arrested just after midnight on 5 November 1605 guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder, giving his name as John Johnson.
- The plot's leader was Robert Catesby, who was killed resisting capture at Holbeche House in Staffordshire on 8 November 1605.
- The anonymous Monteagle letter of 26 October warned of "a terrible blow this Parliament"; Francis Tresham is the suspected but unproven author.
- James I's warrant ordered "the gentler tortures" first — Fawkes's post-rack signature survives as a barely legible scrawl.
- The Yeomen of the Guard still ceremonially search the cellars of the Palace of Westminster before every State Opening of Parliament.