Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blame a chocolate boarding and I'm fair 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 it 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 afwarded 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 our listeners to Blaine and 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 strick And 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 mastermind 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 conflictus 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 had been subject to religious legislation that required them to attend a 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 Simon 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 twounds that's pretty set. Forty dollars or so about that. So Elizabeth had been excommunicated by the pope, and she saw recusants 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 anal 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 toward 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 sixteen 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 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 and let live philosophy. Almost so Catholics caughtland 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 sympathy 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 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 forged 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 going to start talking about this conspiracy by talking about the conspirators specifically. The plot began with a man named Robert Catesby, and Catesby was a devout Catholic and he had become very disillusioned with the government 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 lad by Robert Devereaux, who was the second Earl of Essex back in sixteen o one. So Katesby 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. Catesby was also kind of a ringleader of a small group of men who had taken part in 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 Katesby 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 o 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 Katesby'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 sixteen o 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 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. Peters School in York, which also had Catholic leaning, so that probably had a big influence in how his views turned out he 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 Fife 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 Katesby 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 the gunpowder in at night from Catesby's house across the tents, 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 were 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 sixteen o 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 this 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 sixteen o 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 waters to pack the gunpowder, thirty six barrels of it, in fact, right where it would be the most dangerous. So we're not going to end with a bang for this episode. We're gonna keep you hanging and continue with a part two. I know those of you in England will probably get to your celebrations now. You can email us maybe and let us know what you what you do for Guy Fox Day, whether you have a bonfire or sell effigies in the streets, or whether you do anything at all. We're kind of interested to see how many people observe and commemorate this day. And I've read all kinds of strange and neat things that people do to celebrate it. I think I read something about rolling flaming barrels down the street in certain towns. So let us know what you do. UM, if you do anything fun or different where you live. UM, we'd love to know where History podcast at how stuff Works dot com or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at mst in history and I think we do have a blog post. Molly Edmonds wrote it for how to Stuff like stuff you can do for Guy Fox Day, mostly involved food you can eat. I get the idea there are some traditional foods, but you can find that by looking on the blogs on our home page at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow the house Stuff Works iPhone up has a ride. Download it today on iTunes

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to blame a chocolate boarding and I'm fair 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 it 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 afwarded 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 our listeners to Blaine and 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 strick And 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 mastermind 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 conflictus 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 had been subject to religious legislation that required them to attend a 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 Simon 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 twounds that's pretty set. Forty dollars or so about that. So Elizabeth had been excommunicated by the pope, and she saw recusants 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 anal 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 toward 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 sixteen 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 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 and let live philosophy. Almost so Catholics caughtland 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 sympathy 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 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 forged 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 going to start talking about this conspiracy by talking about the conspirators specifically. The plot began with a man named Robert Catesby, and Catesby was a devout Catholic and he had become very disillusioned with the government 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 lad by Robert Devereaux, who was the second Earl of Essex back in sixteen o one. So Katesby 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. Catesby was also kind of a ringleader of a small group of men who had taken part in 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 Katesby 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 o 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 Katesby'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 sixteen o 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 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. Peters School in York, which also had Catholic leaning, so that probably had a big influence in how his views turned out he 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 Fife 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 Katesby 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 the gunpowder in at night from Catesby's house across the tents, 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 were 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 sixteen o 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 this 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 sixteen o 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 waters to pack the gunpowder, thirty six barrels of it, in fact, right where it would be the most dangerous. So we're not going to end with a bang for this episode. We're gonna keep you hanging and continue with a part two. I know those of you in England will probably get to your celebrations now. You can email us maybe and let us know what you what you do for Guy Fox Day, whether you have a bonfire or sell effigies in the streets, or whether you do anything at all. We're kind of interested to see how many people observe and commemorate this day. And I've read all kinds of strange and neat things that people do to celebrate it. I think I read something about rolling flaming barrels down the street in certain towns. So let us know what you do. UM, if you do anything fun or different where you live. UM, we'd love to know where History podcast at how stuff Works dot com or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at mst in history and I think we do have a blog post. Molly Edmonds wrote it for how to Stuff like stuff you can do for Guy Fox Day, mostly involved food you can eat. I get the idea there are some traditional foods, but you can find that by looking on the blogs on our home page at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow the house Stuff Works iPhone up has a ride. Download it today on iTunes