SYMHC Classics: Gunpowder Plot

Published Nov 5, 2022, 1:00 PM

This 2011 episode covers the discriminatory laws English Catholics faced under Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, which led a group of Catholics to attempt regicide. But the plot was discovered days before the event. 

Happy Saturday. Since it is November five, also known as Guy Fox Day or Guy Fox Night, we are replaying prior hosts Sarah and Deblina's episode on the Gunpowder Plot as today's Saturday classic. This originally came out as two parts that were separated by an entire week that was on November two and n Each of those parts is shorter than today's episodes typically are, so we are running both of them together today, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblina Chocolate Boardy and I'm Sara Dout And the topic we're about to discuss isn't exactly obscure, and at least some of our listeners, the British contingent that is, probably won't be able to say that they missed in history class. It has to do with a certain celebration that's coming up in England on November five. Some call it Bonfire Day, others call it Fireworks Night, and still others know it as Guy Fox Day, referring to the man whose name is most associated with the notorious Gunpowder Plot. Athwarted attempt to blow up Parliament on November five. It's also called the Powder Treason. Yeah, and people celebrate or commemorate this day in different ways, and it's changed a lot over the years, but the alternate names for the event really give you a good general idea of what goes on. People set off fireworks and they light up their bonfires, and often a top of those bonfires, they'll burn Guy Fox in effigy, so that might throw some of you guys for a loop. Children will often sell those effigies eventually they call them guys. They'll go out and they'll sell them on the street and they'll ask for a penny for the guy. And those same kids are probably also pretty familiar with a famous rhyme. Do you want to read it off for Scenarstaplina? Sure, it's remember remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot and thanks at least in part to pop culture references. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But many people outside of the UK have heard this rhyme too, and perhaps they even know the name Guy Fox. I mean, if you've ever seen the two thousand six movie V for Vendetta, for example, this will surely ring a bell, or if you just work in the house Stuff Works office. One of our coworkers, Jonathan Strickland of tech Stuff, is definitely a fan of of rattling off this rhyme from time to time. It's always fun to hear. Yeah, And he and I were actually talking about that in reference to the fact that there are a lot of misconceptions out there about who exactly Guy Fox was and what November five is commemorating. Some simply think that Fox was the hero of the day, and they might be surprised to learn what we just told you that he's burned in effigy, or they at least think that he was the master mind of the Gunpowder plot, which wasn't the case at all. He's actually kind of a minor character, not a master criminal at all. Really, right, So we're going to take a closer look at the Gunpowder plot, the motives behind it, and the players involved, including who really instigated the whole thing. And we're also going to discuss some conflicting theories over the origins of the plot, but we're going to get to that later. First, we're gonna give you the generally accepted version of events, and to do that we need to kind of set the scene a bit. So there's an overarching conflict at the time which ends up leading to the events will discuss, and the conflict is between English Catholics and English Protestants. And by the time the gunpowder plot was devised, Catholics in England had had pretty rough go of it for many years, being persecuted. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, who was a Protestant, they'd been subject to religious legislation that required them to attend to parish church every Sunday. And it wasn't just that they had to go to church every Sunday. If you didn't go, it was known as recusancy. And according to an article by i'm in Adams in History Today, the penalty for recusancy was originally a one shilling fine, but that ended up going up to twenty pounds a month by fight one, which I mean that still sounds like a lot of money today. Twenty pounds that's pretty stee forty dollars or so about that. So Elizabeth had been excommunicated by the pope and she saw Recusans as potential traders, thus the really high fine and the strict rules about what Catholics had to do right. And there were other parts to these penal laws as they were called um one that declared that it was treason basically to convert a subject to Catholicism, and also treason for a Jesuit or a priest to enter the country. People who broke these laws were executed. But towards the end of the fifteen nineties Catholics started to have a little bit of hope. Elizabeth was getting older and she was childless and didn't have an air so there was the thinking, hey, maybe the next monarch would be a little bit more tolerant of Catholics. And when James the sixth of Scotland took the throne in six o three after Elizabeth died, making him King James the First of England, he kind of seemed to be that guy. His wife, for example, Anne of Denmark, she was Catholic, and with Anne's help, James had sort of campaigned for support from other Catholic powers in Europe and from the Pope also before Elizabeth's death, to kind of prepare himself to not have opposition when he took the throne in England, so those things kind of gave Catholics a little bit of hope. They're like, okay, he seems friendly towards Catholics. And also, according to an article in History Review by Pauline Croft, James was pretty open minded at least seemed that way at first. He said to have commented that he didn't really want there to be more Catholics in England, so he didn't want there to be more converts or for more people to come in. But if they kept their Catholic nous kind of on the down low and followed the law, he wouldn't bother them, or at least there wouldn't be major violence, like a live in, let live philosophy. Almost so Catholics caught wind of this, and some people thought, well, maybe it means the end of the recusancy laws period, and some Catholics even went as far as to petition James before his coronation for toleration, really hoping that something would come out of this new monarch. James wouldn't go that far, and he said that he'd suspend the monthly recusancy finds for as long as they continued to support him, so he kind of offered a halfway bargain there, and he also added a few people with Catholic sympathies to the Privy Council, including the Earl of Northumberland. So yeah, I mean that seems like a bit of a win, especially coming after Elizabeth. But for many Catholics, they were just disappointed that they were disappointed that there weren't more changes than they saw under James. And as evidence of how disgruntled some people were with James already, two plots against the king were discovered as early as June and July three, just to give you an idea of exactly how all soon. That is, Elizabeth had died in March um, so really just a couple of months. These plots were called the Bye and the Main plots, and there were different people involved in each, but just to give you a summary of these. In the by plot, the goal was to kidnap the King and his eldest son, Prince Henry, and forced James to replace his chief ministers and to declare Catholic toleration. And the main plot, on the other hand, conspirators hoped to get rid of James entirely, and to put his English born cousin, Lady Arabel Stewart, on the throne. According to Crofts article, though both of these plots were pretty incompetent, which I guess is probably why they didn't work out, But the fact that they were found out didn't stop others from cooking up their own conspiracies, which is where the gunpowder plot begins. So we're gonna start talking about this conspiracy by talking about the conspirator specifically. The plot began with a man named Robert Catesby, and Catesby was a devout Catholic and he had become very disillusioned with the govern ment early on when he saw his father being persecuted for not conforming to Church of England rules. And Katsby himself had been imprisoned for a brief time after fighting in an uprising led by Robert Devreaux, who was the second Earl of Essex back in sixteen o one. So Katsby really wasn't like the Catholics who were entering James Rain with a lot of hope and thinking there was a lot of promise. He didn't trust in those promises, and he he wasn't counting on anything. Katsby was also kind of a ringleader of a small group of men who had taken part in the Essex Revolt with him, including Jack and kit Wright and Francis Tresham. Other men related to them were also sympathetic to their cause. Thomas Percy, for example, who worked for and was related to the Earl of Northumberland, was brother in law to the Rights and then Robert and Thomas Wintour, who were known for giving priest refuge in their homes, were related to Katesby. So at first they hoped that maybe Spain would invade England to help the Catholics, and they offered their support to Spain in that regard. But Spain was actually hoping to end hostility with England at the time, and was in the process of starting to negotiate a peace treaty to that effect, so Katsby and his buddy started to give up on Spain as a solution. We're not sure exactly when the idea for the plot started brewing, but by the beginning of sixteen oh four, Katesby shared with tom Win Tour that he thought of a way to solve their problem al right, So in January, the King had announced that he was going to call parliament soon, and Katsby's idea was to blow up the House of Parliament while they were in session, and apparently when Tour was kind of hesitant about this, but Katsby was a smooth talker and ultimately convinced the gang. So Kidsby held a meeting of people who were to be involved in the plot on May four in London at the Duck and Drake lodging house in the Strand, and he had three of his posse there, Tom Wintour, Thomas Percy and Jack Right. But there was a fifth person to a very important one, none other than Guy Fox himself. So Fox is an interesting character in this whole discussion about the tensions between the Protestants and the Catholics. He was a militant Catholic convert from Yorkshire. He was born in April thirteenth, fifteen seventy to a Protestant dad and a Catholic mom. His dad died when he was young, though, so his mom and her actions in the underground Catholic community in England really ended up being a big influence on him. Fox also went to St. Peter's School, in York, which also had Catholic leaning, so that probably had a big influence in how his views turned out grew up, and that's also where he might have met the Wright brothers. He ended up going into military service abroad, serving in the Spanish Army in the Netherlands from fifteen ninety three to about sixteen o four. In sixteen o three, though, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Spain to try and convince them to invade England, much like Catesby and friends did before. And that's also where he might have come into contact with Katesby's crew through these interactions, so just looking for areas where he might have met up with them or where they may have heard of him. At any rate, Katesby and his fellow plotters needed someone like Fox in the mix. He was their muscle of sorts. He knew something about guns and AMMO, and since he'd been away from England for so long, his face was unknown, and that's a key point to remember, very important because he was going to have to do some sort of reconnaissance type work. So those five conspirators had their meeting in the Strand and they took an oath of secrecy, and they said mass, and then they talked about the plan. So by that time, Parliament had been in session since March and was expected to last at least a couple of months. More so, the plan was to lease a house next to the House of Lord's Chamber in the old Palace of Westminster. Then they would dig a tunnel from the sellers of the least House to the foundations of the Chamber and put some gunpowder in there. They'd bring gunpowder in at night from Catesby's house across the towns. So you can start to get the sense of why it would be important to not be a guy everybody recognized around town. Yeah, you wouldn't want to be recognized because there was a lot of at stake. If this worked, they were going to be blowing up Parliament. They were going to be killing the king. Also his son, and his other son was sickly. So the plan after this was to kidnap young Princess Elizabeth and basically make her their puppet queen. But I mean, the details surrounding this are still kind of sketchy, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more later. But once they settled on a general Plan, or part one of the plan, at least they set to it. Percy leased the house with the help of his connections to the Earl of Northumberland, but then on July seven, Parliament was postponed and scheduled to reconvene in February of six five. Before that meeting ended, though, they did manage to reconfirm all of those penalties that applied to Catholics and recusancy fines were reinstated, so adding fuel to the potential explosive fire exactly. So, they agreed to start working again in the fall keep moving towards their plot, but Parliament was delayed again until October six oh five, and eventually it was rescheduled again until November five, so they agreed to start work again that February. That March, though, they had a stroke of luck the lease for a ground floor seller between their tunnel and the House of Lords meeting space became available. According to the BBC, that seller extended right underneath the House of Lords, so it allowed the plotters to pack the gunpowder, thirty six barrels of it, in fact, right where it would be the most dangerous. So when we saw them last March, of sixteen o five. Our conspirators had just lucked out, and they had gotten the chance to Lisa Seller, which would was used at the time for coal storage. I believe that extended right underneath the House of Lords, so it made the tunnel unnecessary. It's a really good break for them, exactly. So the plotters started filling up the cellar with barrels and barrels of gunpowder, sneaking in at night, and they kept it pretty well concealed too. They covered it with iron bars and lots of bundles of kindling, so you couldn't just tell it was a cellar full of gunpowder. So over the next few months they managed to get about thirty six barrels of gunpowder in there, which was definitely enough to demolish everything in the immediate area, including of course the king and his heir and the members of parliament. But that was only if the gunpowder was fresh enough by the time they actually ignited it. And some folks have suggested that the gunpowder might have decayed um others say, well, maybe they were able to replace some of it, but that turns out to be a moot point, and it still would have done some damage we can assume. But during this time Fox assumed the role of the seller's caretaker, posing as a John Johnson, a servant of Thomas Percy, who was the plotter who would lease the space. And Fox was really well suited to this role too, because, as we mentioned in the previous podcast, he'd been out of the country for some time. So his appearance, which Gunpowder plot historian Antonio Frasier has described as quote tall, powerfully built, with thick reddish brown hair, a flowing mustache in the tradition of the time, and a bushy, reddish brown beard, was pretty much unknown in London at that time, which is fortunate because he does sound like a guy you probably would recognize if he saw him. Twice. Yes, very distinctive. So the plot seemed to be progressing steadily, but before fall even rolled around, the conspirators did something you should probably never do if you're really trying to keep a secret. They let more people in on it. Kind of a lot, but we'll just give you a refresher because there are a lot of names here, and they worked to add many more names to their party. But the original conspirators were catesby Tom Wintour Thomas Percy, Jack Right, and Guy Fox. So in the spring of sixteen o five, they included Robert Wintour, who was Tom's brother, Kit Wright, who was Jack's brother, and John Grant, who was Wintour's brother in law. Another guy, Robert Keys, who was probably related to the Wintour brother somehow or another, was also led into the group, as was katesby servant Thomas Bates. So, I mean, I guess you figure you can trust your your brother. So they're telling a few people, but this is already starting to swell to a pretty large group of men. Yeah, And then it got even worse when the plotters took a break from the preparations they were doing over the summer. Katesby also brought Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby, and Francis Tresham, Katesby's cousin by marriage, into the fold, mainly because of their wealth. Katesby had been funding this whole thing by himself so far, and he really needed some help to see it to its completion. And Rookwood and Digby were also so supposed to have a role in what will refer to as Part two of this plan. They both had a lot of horses that were going to be useful in the uprising that Katesby was planning after the explosion, but more specifically after the explosion, which would take place after Fox lit a slow match in the cellar. As soon as the King had come into the House of Lords. Katesby would ride from London to the Midlands, where he'd meete Digby, and Digby would have been waiting beforehand with some servants that the Red Lion and dun Church disguised as a hunting party. From there, they would supposedly go to kidnap Princess Elizabeth, the King's daughter, from the home of her governor and proclaim her queen. And we mentioned her in the previous podcast as well. And the reason that they were going to proclaim her queen is because Prince Henry would have died in the explosion. He was the oldest son of the king and four year old Prince Charles was too sickly. There were some there was some question as to whether or not he was going to survive, and they didn't want to place all their hopes on him. So yeah, that was the general idea of the plot. But what was going to happen next, after they had kidnapped Princess Elizabeth is sort of unclear. In an article for History Today, Simon Adams says, that's quote one of the major mysteries of the plot. So presumably they would just try to marry Elizabeth off to some other Catholic European prince and solidify their Catholic regime that way, and they would create their own puppet queen essentially. According to an article by Pauline Croft in History Review, though, Tresham was uneasy about the whole plot pretty much as soon as he heard it. So giant red flag here. He's not liking what he hears. You can't take it back once you tell somebody all about your plot either. But regardless of how everyone felt about it, I mean, that's still more than ten people. That's just a lot of people to be involved in what's supposed to be a secret plot. So maybe what happened next really isn't that surprising. On October five, just days before Parliament was set to meet William Parker, who's better and own as Lord Monteagle, received an anonymous letter warning him to quote, devise some excuse to shift your attendance at this Parliament to avoid quote a terrible blow. So basically, stay away for your own good, don't go to parliament. So Lord Monteagle was a former Catholic himself. He had also participated in that Essex uprising with Katesby and friends that we mentioned in the earlier podcast, and he had at least publicly converted to the Protestant religion. Still he had Catholic connections, especially through his marriage. Trasham was Montegal's brother in law, so um, unfortunately for Kate's By, Tresham had a few brothers in law to consider. But that's why the letter is often attributed to Tresham because of that family connection. But we really don't know for sure who sent it, who warned Lord Monteagle. Yeah. Croft actually throws out some other potential sources of the letter. She writes, for example, that Tom Winter sometimes served as montegal secretary, so there's a connection there. But there's another theory that's even more interesting to me at least. Croft also suggests that it's possible that Monteagle himself wrote the letter and just incorporated information that he gleaned from some of his Catholic cohorts to tip people off under under the guise of an anonymous letter right but regardless of where it came from. Montegal shared this letter with Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, the head of the monarchy secret police, and the King's Secretary of State. Salisbury, in turn, of course, shares the letter with the King, and there aren't any specifics in the letter, so they wait a couple of days before they raise any sort of alarm. Katesby in the meantime he hears about the letter too, and he's obviously worried that the plot has been betrayed, so he consults with his co conspirators and they actually decided just to go ahead with the plan. They suspected I've read that Tresham was at fault, but he swore to them that he didn't do anything, so they just said, okay, let's go. They weren't going to just complete rushed into it blindly though, just sname case. On November four, Percy visited with his boss and his relative, the Earl of Northumberland, whose connections had of course helped Percy lease the house in the cellar in the first place. He checked with him to try to gauge whether or not the Earl of Northumberland knew anything about the plan. Ironically, Percy did not warn his relative to try to stay away from Parliament himself that day. But Percy left the meeting feeling pretty reassured that they were in the clear. Nobody knew it was good, so it is all just full speed ahead for the gunpowder plotters, or so they think, because Saulisbury by this time has ordered the area all around the Palace of Westminster, which houses Parliament, to be searched. During the first search, though they didn't find anything, though they did run into Fox there. He was, of course, posing as John Johnson, and so they took him basically for what he was posing to be. They took him for a servant. The gunpowder, as we mentioned, was concealed, so they didn't see that in the search either. They did notice all of that kindling, though, the kindling that we mentioned that was concealing the gunpowder, and they thought it was a little weird that that was all there. But when they realized that Thomas Percy, who was of course a well respected gentleman pensioner, was leasing the space, they figured, all right, it's probably okay. But then, according to that Craft article, again Montego raised suspicient about the fact that Percy was leasing the space even though he had his own home in London, you know, like, why does Percy need this place anyway? The King ordered another search after that, and they found Fox at about midnight on November four, along with the gunpowder, very incriminating slow match and a watch that Percy had given him to check the time with. So the plot was done caught red handed. So for Box was arrested as John Johnson and thrown into the Tower of London, where it said that he was interrogated and tortured to reveal the names of the other conspirators, even though torture was illegal in England at the time. It took two days to break Fox down for him to finally give up the names of the others who were involved in the plot. Percy's name, of course, had already been linked with the leases, so there was already a warrant out for his arrest. Meanwhile, though Kate Sby Rookwood, the right brothers, Percy and Bates all roads in the Midlands where part two of the plan was supposed to happen. But of course that wasn't going to happen now. Instead, they met up with the other co conspirators, raided Warwick Castle for fresh horses, and then went looking for help and apparently got refused by several Catholic safe houses. They just kept going from house to house, but nobody would join them and nobody would offer them help. I was interested in that point because, I mean, it suggests me at least that word of the plot must have spread really quickly, I mean all the way up in the Midlands. Two houses to know better than to actually accept the people into your home. Well, a big deal was made out of it, which we're going to touch on a little bit later, But at that time, yeah, I guess people knew it wasn't a good idea to to protect these people. So they eventually stopped at Whole Beach House in Staffordshire, where they thought they could at least put up a defense there. But they messed up right in the beginning by putting their damp gunpowder by the fire to dry, So of course the gunpowder exploded and it burned a couple of them in the process. It blinded one guy. It's all rather ironic if you think about it long and hard. But of course at this point the odds were even worse for them. Not only are they on the run for high treason, but they are injured, and according to Croff, they considered just getting out of the whole thing, blowing themselves up at this point. But by November eight men led by the High Sheriff of wush sure did them. In the rest of the way. They have this quick battle. Katesby the rights and Percy ended up dying from their wounds. It sounds like it was probably the best way to go. Thomas, Wintour could and Grant were captured. Five of the guys were still free, but not for very long. By the new year, all of them were captured, and then Tresham, when he was contained in the tower, fell ill and died. And some people think that maybe he was poison. Maybe even Monteagle took mercy on him because of that letter of warning and slipped him some poison helped him escape what would ultimately be a far worse punishment of drawing and quartering, which is the fate the rest of them were destined for. Yep, all the plotters who weren't dead were put on trial January six, six and of course they were all found guilty of high treason and executed over the next couple of days. They were all hanged, drawn and quartered. So the plot was ultimately unsuccessful, and maybe because of that, it's been the subject of debate for many years. Some have even suggested that there was no plot, that the plotters were actually set up by the government, specifically the Earl of Salisbury, who knew that the backlash after the plot was exposed would just reinforce Protestantism and strength and hatred towards Catholics in England. Yeah, and in a nineteen interview with The New York Times, Fraser, who we mentioned earlier, said that the reason the origins of the plot are up for debate is that researchers are trying to quote draw conclusions from imperfect records and testimonies taken under torture. She says that you really have to assess the evidence and make up your own mind. And for her part, she does believe there was a plot. According to Teaching History, most historians do generally accept this idea. Now they do think there was something going on, but the results of government conspiracy would have been aiming for still came to pass. The Gunpowder plot just made anti Catholic feelings in England more intense. There were new laws preventing Catholics from practicing law, serving as officers in the army or the navy, and they weren't allowed to vote. On the evening of that Guy Fox was caught. November five, sixteen o five, the first Guy Fox hype celebration took place. The people of London rang bells and lit bonfires to celebrate the fact that the King and his nobility were safe. In sixteen o six, the English government passed an act to make the celebration an annual event, which at first was religious in nature, with sermons and everything, and then later it became more of a raucous social event. In the seventeenth century people started burning effigies of the pope on the fires, and in the eighteenth century is when the Little Guy effigy appeared. Yeah, And in eighteen fifty nine, since there was an increased emphasis on religious toleration, the sixteen o six Act was finally abolished and the Bonfire night. At that point the celebrations really started to morph into private bonfires and fireworks parties that children would go sell the guys on the street to fund and over the years it really became more of a family event in a lot of places with fireworks displays, kind of how we would celebrate Fourth of July here on sounds sort of similar to that, although people can definitely actos so if we're wrong about that, but certain similar elements. Right. So now Bonfire Night celebrations still exist, but they compete with other false celebrations like Halloween, and I'm really interested. We asked during the last podcast for people to send us um some examples of things that they do to celebrate Bonfire Night, if they celebrated it at all, and so hopefully we'll get to read some of those on an upcoming podcast. Kind of awesome to have this always, like I guess the week after Halloween to you can bring out your costumes again. Maybe I don't know, if you celebrate both and it's just like a two week long celebration or something exactly. The gunpowder plot didn't leave a mark, though, of a more serious mark than just all these bonfire parties. The Houses of Parliament are still searched just before the State Opening, which has been held in November since nine even though Parliament's website says this is retained as a picturesque custom rather than a serious anti terrorist precaution, for which of core there are proper mean I'm glad they qualified that for us. But Guy Fox on the gunpowder plot have also been invoked quite a bit in art and pop culture. One of the most well known examples is the one that we mentioned in part one of this podcast, which is the two thousand six movie V for Vendetta, based on the comic book series by Alan Moore, in which an anarchist known as V tries to bring down the government. Basically, that's the basic plot line of this and V wears a Guy Fox mask. And if you haven't seen this movie, I do highly recommend it, especially now that we've kind of gone over the story. I did enjoy it, Sarah, you haven't seen it, right, haven't seen it? And I know now that I've admitted that. Whenever we admit there's a certain movie we haven't seen, we usually hear from people telling us I can't believe you haven't seen that. You're still getting Harry Potter email. I'm still getting Harry Potter emails. We're still getting ned Kelly emails, so you know, I'm sure you'll get emails about this one too, but maybe because of the movie and its association with popular revolution and anti establishment ideals that mask. The Guy Fox mask has shown up in other places to members of the hacker group Anonymous have been known to wear it. I was talking to Jonathan Strickland of tech Stuff about that recently. He brought it up to me when he found out we were doing this, and recently people involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement have been wearing it too, So it is interesting to see how this idea of Guy Fox is still very political. It makes me wonder, though, how many of the people wearing the masks today really know the story of Guy Fox, or even if they know who Guy Fox is and they know about the bonfires, did they know the whole history of the plot. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old House Stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media. It at Missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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