The Gunpowder Plot, Part 1

Under Queen Elizabeth I, English Catholics were subject to discriminatory laws. When King James I took the throne, Catholics unsuccessfully petitioned him for toleration. Tune in to learn how this led a group of Catholics to attempt regicide.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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,

(00:22):
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.

(00:47):
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

(01:10):
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,

(01:31):
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,

(01:53):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:36):
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

(02:57):
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.

(03:20):
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

(03:42):
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

(04:03):
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

(04:24):
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

(04:47):
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

(05:09):
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,

(05:32):
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,

(05:53):
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

(06:17):
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

(06:37):
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.

(06:58):
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

(07:22):
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.

(07:43):
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

(08:05):
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

(08:28):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:13):
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.

(09:34):
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

(09:56):
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

(10:17):
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

(10:38):
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

(11:00):
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

(11:23):
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,

(11:45):
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

(12:07):
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

(12:28):
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

(12:49):
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

(13:10):
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

(13:31):
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

(13:53):
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

(14:13):
there are some traditional foods, but you can find that
by looking on the blogs on our home page at
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(14:36):
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