GUNPOWDER, TREASON & PLOT

Remember, remember, the fifth of November, so the poem goes, but what was the true story behind the Gunpowder Plot – and was its protagonist Guy Fawkes really a freedom fighter or a fool?

- NEIL JONES

A clerk noted in the margin of the journal of proceedings of the House of Commons, 5 November 1605: “This last night the Upper House of Parliament was searched by Sir Tho. Knevett; and one Johnson, servant to Mr Thomas Percye, was there apprehended; who had placed 36 barrels of gunpowder in the vault under the House, with a purpose to blow King and the whole Company, when they should there assemble. Afterwards divers other gentlemen were discovered to be of the Plot.”

It is a remarkably dry, bureaucratic record of a conspiracy that came within a whisker of blasting King James I, the Lords and Commons to high Heaven, and later a shocked Parliament would rage over the “most barbarous, monstrous, detestable and damnable Treasons.” They would also discover that ‘Johnson’ was in fact Guy Fawkes, and in the cloak-and-dagger world of 17th-century intrigues there was much more to untangle. Even now people differ over whether Fawkes – burnt in effigy atop bonfires every November – was a freedom fighter or foolhardy fanatic. In the 450th anniversary of his birth in 1570 in York, it’s timely to look again at his story.

Guy was the second of four children of Edward Fawkes, a lawyer in York’s ecclesiastical courts, and was raised a Protestant. However, when he was eight his father died and his mother Edith subsequently married a Catholic, Dionis Baynbrigge: influencing Guy, despite widespread persecution of Catholics at the time, to convert to Catholicism too.