Guy Fawkes did not lead the Gunpowder Plot. He did not plan it and recruited nobody. He was hired abroad, for what he knew about powder, by Robert Catesby, the man who conceived the plot, found the money, chose the day, and died four days after the cellar door opened, untried and unconfessed. Four centuries on, the hired man is the effigy, and there is no word in the language derived from Catesby.
The popular story descends from the government that foiled the plot. It was printed within weeks and read aloud in every parish church, by Act of Parliament, from 1606 to 1859. This book begins where the plotters began instead: in the Catholic England of their fathers, where hearing Mass cost a hundred marks and a year in prison, where a recusant paid 20 a month or forfeited two-thirds of his land, where a priest ordained abroad was a traitor by statute, and where the pursuivants came at night. The thirteen men who swore the oath at the Duck and Drake in May 1604 were nearly all kin, nearly all from that Midland gentry world, and they turned to powder when a new king they had been led to hope in reimposed the fines within a year.
Then the plot itself, told from the confessions, Cecil's letters and the printed record, each source weighed by how it was obtained: the undercroft leased beneath the Lords; the barrels brought across from Lambeth; the unsigned letter delivered to Lord Monteagle at Hoxton on 26 October 1605, whose writer has never been identified; Knyvet's midnight search; the king's written permission for torture; the ride to Holbeche House; the trial in Westminster Hall; the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet, hanged over what he had known of the plot and under what seal he had learned it; and the carpenter Nicholas Owen, who built the priest-holes and died in the Tower without naming one.
The plot was an attempt at mass killing for a religious cause, and the book says so. The persecution before it is documented at the same length. Neither excuses the other, and the narration speaks in neither the government's voice nor the martyrologists'. Where the evidence is open, it stays open: the mine never found, the "decayed" powder, how early Cecil knew, and the case that the government staged it all, given a full hearing and declined.
What you'll learn:
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The story was written by the men who foiled the plot. This is the one the documents tell.
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