A man for all treason

IN a discreet corner of the Duck and Drake, barely touched by candlelight, a group of men huddled together, whispering, nodding, glancing over their shoulders. Robert Catesby had called together his friends Thomas Percy, Thomas Wintour and John Wright to hatch a plan they hoped would change the face of England. With them was a fifth man, outside of their circle but valued for his expertise. He was Guy Fawkes.

May 20, 1604. In a pub in the fashionable Strand district of London, the Gunpowder Plot was born. After taking an oath, the five adjourned to the room next door, where a Catholic priest performed mass to sanctify the solemn undertaking they had just agreed: to blow up Parliament House, wiping out England's ruling class at a stroke.

The plot grew out of Catholic disaffection with the ruling Protestant elite. After enduring years of persecution during the long reign of Elizabeth, England's Catholics hoped for some respite with the accession of James I, son of the staunchly Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.

But despite some early favourable signs, they were to be disappointed. Perhaps fearful of Catholic extremism, reinforced by the discovery of the Bye Plot to kidnap him in 1604, James introduced his own crackdown: denouncing Catholicism, expelling priests and reintroducing fines for those found practising the religion.

While the majority of Catholics stoically accepted these restrictions, among the disillusioned was Robert Catesby, a charismatic figure whose father had been imprisoned for harbouring a priest. He was not prepared to contain his disappointment any longer, and instead sought a violent end to the regime.

His plot was simple. They would blow up Parliament House at the State Opening in 1605, killing James, his wife Queen Anne, their son and heir Prince Henry, privy councillors, nobility, clergy, judges and the principal squires of England. They would then kidnap the nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and use her to swing the country to them.

TO this end, they hired a cellar beneath Parliament and filled it with gunpowder, hiding it beneath iron bars and faggots. Guy Fawkes, who had fought for the Spanish in Flanders and had experience of explosives, was deputed to light the fuse and agreed to watch the cellar by himself.

But the plot was discovered when one of the conspirators, believed to be Francis Tresham, recruited after the Duck and Drake meeting, wrote a letter to Lord Monteagle, warning him to avoid the opening of Parliament. Monteagle took the letter to the king's first minister, Lord Salisbury.

Salisbury ordered a search of Westminster. Around midnight on November 4, Guy Fawkes was discovered hiding in the cellar, surrounded by gunpowder.

Fawkes was arrested and brought before the king, but declined to give any information beyond saying his name was John Johnson and he was a servant of Thomas Percy.

Torture was illegal in the 17th century and required specific authorisation from the king. In a letter on November 6, James I gave that consent, writing: "The gentler tortours are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad mia tenditur (and so by degrees proceeding to the worst)."

The tortures used are not known but likely to have included the manacles, where the prisoner was suspended by his hands, or the rack. Within days, Fawkes had given details of the plot and named his co-conspirators.

The other plotters escaped to the Midlands, but on November 8 were surrounded at Holbeche House in Staffordshire, where Catesby and three others were killed and another three captured. Five others were still at large, but by January all the expanded circle of conspirators had been arrested.

James ordered bonfires to be lit in thanksgiving for the discovery of the plot, but while bonfires and fireworks are the lasting legacy of a 17th century religious conflict, there are some parallels with the threat of terrorism today, according to James Sharpe, professor of history at York University and author of a new book on the plot.

"What the Gunpowder Plot reminds us is that there are people who are willing to kill and be killed for the sake of religion, and this is something which most English people today have a lot of problems getting their heads around," he says.

He says the 17th century Protestant view of international Catholicism is comparable to Ronald Reagan's view of communism as an "evil empire", but the similarities to today go deeper.

'IT was religious, but religion cuts heavily across politics and with the existence of Catholics and Protestants you had the possibility for the first time of subjects who are ideologically opposed to you, and when combined with religion you can see parallels there."

Once the explosives had gone off, the conspirators aimed to start an armed rebellion in the Midlands which would then spread around the country. But even when their plot failed, they behaved as if it had succeeded, announcing that the king was dead. Despite this, very few supporters rallied to their cause, and the plan to capture Princess Elizabeth had to be called off. Far from being delighted that violence was being perpetrated in their name, the vast majority of Catholics were horrified.

"It is probably similar to the situation with most Muslims today," says Prof Sharpe. "Most Muslims would be horrified by the July bombings, and there were Muslims killed of course, and most of the Catholic population in 1605 were pretty horrified."

After the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the expected revenge massacres of Catholics never materialised. There were localised crackdowns, but the legacy has been felt much more in entrenching discrimination against Catholics which can still be felt today.

'THERE was anti-Catholic propaganda for the next two and a half centuries, where the Plot is regularly held up as demonstrating just how awful the Catholics are," says Prof Sharpe. "Once the dust had settled, it was a tremendous propaganda victory for the Protestants."

An Act of Parliament passed in 1606 stipulated that parish churches had to hold a service of thanksgiving on November 5, a requirement only dropped in 1859. Catholic men were prevented from voting until 1829, and as late as 1850 Bonfire Night was an anti-Catholic frenzy, where effigies of the Pope, Catholic clergy and even sympathetic Anglican bishops were burned, in response to the reintroduction of Catholic bishops into England.

This propaganda triumph persists in the Acts of Parliament covering the Royal succession, which maintain that no Catholic can inherit the throne, and that anyone in line to the throne who marries a Catholic must renounce their right of succession. It's not just fireworks keeping the memory of the Gunpowder Plot alive.

* Remember, Remember the Fifth of November: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot by James Sharpe (Profile Books, £15.99).