The circumstances that transformed a certain Guy into England’s greatest terrorist began years before the near success of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605. In fact, it could be argued that his destiny may have been determined on the very day he was born, April 13, 1570, when he was given the perfect name for an Englishman turned French villain: Guy Fawkes.
Guy was, and is, a distinctively French name, complete with the usual French pronunciation that gives it a vowel sound “ee” rather than “ay” after the hard G that begins the name—if it refers to a Frenchman, that is. The “guy” we use so often in our English conversation nowadays has the “ay” vowel, as did the “Guy” of the original Guy Fawkes, born and raised far from France in northern England.
Looking further back in time, that French Guy comes from a Germanic name wido, meaning either “wood” or “wide.”
Guy had been firmly established as a familiar English name long before Guy Fawkes was born. The French-speaking Normans who conquered England in 1066 and then ruled for the next several centuries brought the name Guy with them and used it often. So it was by no means a rare or exotic name, just an English name that emphasized its Frenchness and its association with the ruling classes.
Perhaps most notable of the Guys in English memory was the legendary Guy of Warwick, a mostly mythical figure from long ago, comparable in prowess to King Arthur. Beginning as a humble page at the court of Earl of Warwick, in order to gain the hand of the Earl’s daughter he embarks on heroic adventures. At first he kills the huge marauding Dun Cow and then a huge boar, making the neighborhood safe. Then he goes off to the Continent and gains the glory needed to make the daughter his wife, only to set out for the Holy Land, disguised as a pilgrim and encounters many more adventures. Very English, making Warwickshire his home, but still very French.
The distinctive French association with the name Guy has continued to this day. Probably the most notable of later Guys is the 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant, author of six novels and several hundred short stories. Meanwhile, the name Guy continues to be used for males born in England and America, like bandleader Guy Lombardo, Silicon Valley marketing executive Guy Kawasaki, Pittsburgh Steelers football player Guy Whimper, and even the Muppet Guy Smiley along with numerous others, famous or not.
But to return to the 16th century, we find our particular Guy Fawkes: unquestionably an Englishman, born in York in northern England to a highly respectable family, but one that did not shy from its centuries-long association by name with France.
Later, during his long military career on the Continent fighting for Catholic Spain against the Protestant Dutch in the Low Countries, Fawkes started calling himself “Guido” rather than “Guy,” perhaps to emphasize his religious distance from Protestant England. On his confessions under torture after his arrest, he signed his first name as “Guido.” But he never tried to conceal his English birth and upbringing.
His one pseudonym, which he used only in the Gunpowder Plot, was by contrast ultra-English: John Johnson. Using that name he posed as a servant to Thomas Percy, a simple caretaker of the house Percy rented conveniently next door to that part of Westminster Palace where the House of Lords met. “John Johnson” was chosen for good reasons: It was English, it was common, and it was (in another sense) common. If you were looking for a name that sounded English, then or now, you would likely choose John, and then for good measure double it to John Johnson. Not a hint of French or any other foreign tongue there. If you were looking for a name that sounded familiar because so many bore it, again John would be a natural choice. It was the most popular name given to English sons born in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it has remained so ever since. It was nearly as anonymous as John Doe, the standard name given to an unknown party in legal proceedings.
And if you were looking for a name that suited a servant rather than a master, John would again be a good choice; it suggested the ordinary citizen, not a member of the nobility.
John Johnson was as close to being invisible as Guy Fawkes could have devised, a name ideally intended to evoke the least notice as Guy quietly went about his business in London. Perhaps he enjoyed the effect of the choice of his pseudonym, so distant from the distinguished name by which he had been known.
He was the first—and for a while the only—conspirator to be arrested, around midnight November 4 with damning evidence in hand. And with that he became immediately the focus of attention. He was promptly brought to the king’s chamber for interrogation well before sunrise in that morning of November 5. There he openly admitted the Gunpowder Plot and its aim to restore Catholic rule to England. But he persisted in identifying himself as plain John Johnson, making that name an important part of his claim to know little about the conspirators.
If John Johnson really had been his name, or if he managed to keep that alias through all the interrogations that soon followed, instead of “you guys” might we nowadays be saying “you johns”? No. In that case, we would never have heard of either, and this book wouldn’t exist. The developments deriving from the name Guy are unlikely enough as it is. But Guy is distinctive enough to serve, by odd chance, as the origin of a modern pronoun. John is not.
Like Guy, Fawkes was French in spelling and origin, but equally well established in English as a surname. It too was imported into England with the Norman conquest of 1066. Ancestry.com tells us that it derives ultimately from a Germanic name meaning “falcon.” But say it aloud and it sounds like “fox,” as some have interpreted it.
Like nearly everyone in England, Guy’s English ancestors had been Catholic until Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church in 1534. At the time of Guy’s birth, and indeed even to the present day, despite strenuous efforts by rulers and governments many English people remained Catholic, except during the reign of Queen Mary (1553–1558), when Catholic affiliation and worship were strictly forbidden and punished.
So on April 13, 1370, that son was born to Edward and Edith Fawkes. On April 16, in the church of St Michael Le Belfrey in the center of York, he was baptized and given the name Guy. The newly renovated Belfrey was of course affiliated with the Church of England, as were all the authorized churches in the kingdom.
Guy’s father, a lawyer, had to be a staunch supporter of the Church of England, since he served both the ecclesiastical and consistory courts of the Church in York, responsible for administration of church law. His mother, as far as historians know, presumably followed suit. She, however, had been a Catholic.
In the city and vicinity of York, numerous Catholics maintained the old faith, but it had to be in great secrecy, since Catholic “recusants” had to pay with fines and sometimes their heads for defying the government. The Church of England held all religious authority, and people had every inducement to accede to its authority. As for Guy, some of his relatives and connections in York were Protestant, some Catholic. But for his first eight years, he belonged to the Church of England.
When Guy was 8 years old, however, his father died, and his mother married another Catholic. Any Protestant–Catholic balance in the household came to an end. Guy was learning the Catholic way.
And the Catholic way, ever since Henry VIII proclaimed himself head of the English church, had been the way of uncompromising opposition. Often it was in secret, with increasing numbers of specially trained Jesuit priests being smuggled into England and protected by Catholic loyalists. Many an estate had a concealed “priest hole” to hide a Jesuit who would conduct Catholic services for the family.
Though by 1605 England had been Protestant for half a century, it had been Catholic for nearly a thousand years, and there remained plenty of secret Catholics who welcomed and supported Catholic attempts to regain the throne and overthrow the government.
In addition to the clandestine, however, there were numerous overt assaults on the Protestant government of England. The Gunpowder Plot was only the latest of them.
As we have noted in the previous chapter, Henry VIII’s main contribution to the Church of England was simply to establish that its head was to be the English monarch rather than the pope. Exactly what the new Protestant practices should be was up for grabs. The rituals were by no means fixed, though they got a start with the Book of Common Prayer, compiled by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and first published as the rule of faith and practice for the Church of England during the reign of Henry’s young son Edward VI in 1549.
Within a few years, in 1553, Edward died and Mary took the throne, aggressively abolishing the Book of Common Prayer, restoring the Latin Mass that had been prohibited under Edward, banning the English-language Bible, and doing her best to make England Catholic once more. Three hundred Protestant clergy and lay people who had been leading the English Reformation under Edward were burned at the stake in an extreme effort to save their souls (and England).
Then came yet another abrupt turn of the wheel, Mary’s death in 1558 leading to Elizabeth’s succession. A revised Book of Common Prayer was issued in 1559. Catholics once again were ostracized, and the deadly Catholic–Protestant conflicts continued in earnest, with the shoe on the other foot.
Pope Pius VI in 1570 officially excommunicated Elizabeth, leaving little doubt which church she would have to support if she wished to remain queen of England. Not that there had been any doubt beforehand, but the pope’s action made it certain.
In 1588, Pope Sixtus V repeated the excommunication. He proclaimed, in Latin of course:
First, for that she is an heretic and schismatic, excommunicated by two [of] His Holiness’s predecessors, obstinate in disobedience to God and the See Apostolic, presuming to take upon her, contrary to nature, reason, and all laws both of God and man, supreme jurisdiction and spiritual authority over men’s souls. Secondly for that she is a bastard, conceived and born by incestuous adultery, and therefore uncapable of the kingdom. . . . Thirdly for usurping the Crown without right. . . . The supreme Bishop. . . doth excommunicate, and deprive her of all authority and princely dignity, and of all title and pretension to the said Crown and kingdom of England and Ireland; . . . and absolving the people of those States, and other persons whatsoever, from all obedience, oath, and other band of subjection unto her, or to any other in her name.
So many Catholic plots against Elizabeth were attempted, one after another, that contemporaries had to label them to keep them distinct. All failed, but some came close to ending her reign, generally by attempting to assassinate her and often with hopes for aid from Catholic Spain or France.
Among the most extreme were:
•The Northern Rising of 1569, led by the Duke of Norfolk, with the aim of deposing Elizabeth and putting her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne.
•The Ridolfi Plot of 1571, again led by the Duke of Norfolk, but named for a Florentine banker who acted as a go-between among Norfolk, the Spanish ambassador, and the pope. Spain would provide troops to invade England in support of the plot. Norfolk was executed.
•The Throckmorton Plot of 1581, named for Francis Throckmorton, who acted as go-between for Mary and another Spanish ambassador. This time French troops were to invade.
•The Parry Plot of 1584–1585 was supposedly the plan of William Parry, a Welshman in perpetual financial difficulty, to shoot the queen. He was a double agent for her and for the Catholics. Whether it was a real plot involving Sir Edmund Neville or an attempt to get Neville implicated continues to be debated. He got nowhere executing the plot and was himself executed.
•The Babington Plot of 1586–1587, named for Mary’s page Anthony Babington, with the help of others, involved murdering Elizabeth to set Mary on the throne. Mary was in on this plot. She hoped Spain and France would help by invading England. The ambitious plan was doomed from its inception, however. Elizabeth’s devoted supporter Sir Francis Walsingham’s clandestine network of spies monitored the plot from its inception, surreptitiously reading letters from the conspirators that were enough evidence to lead to their executions, including that of Mary.
•The Stafford Plot of 1587 would kill Elizabeth by blowing up gunpowder put under the queen’s bed. After this and the Babington and so many other attempts to supplant her with Mary, Elizabeth finally but reluctantly had Mary executed on February 8, 1587.
Yet the plots kept coming.
•Most famous of all undoubtedly was the Spanish Armada, a fleet of 130 ships that sailed in 1588 to bring Flemish troops to conquer England. A stout defense and worse weather destroyed that attempt.
•The Lopez Plot of 1594 was allegedly the intention of Roderigo Lopez, the queen’s personal physician, to poison her with the collusion of Spain. He maintained his innocence, but Elizabeth had him hanged. The existence of this plot remains a question, unlike all the others.
Most of the plots were by Catholics intending to restore the Catholic faith in the kingdom. But there were others too, led by unhappy people or factions within Protestant England. Most notably, in 1601 the Essex Rebellion, led by the queen’s disgruntled former favorite, ended with Essex’s beheading.
Elizabeth’s final years, ending in 1603, weren’t pretty. Wars, taxes, bad weather, and harvests, even the Black Death in 1592–1594 made life challenging. And the plots went on and on, though none succeeded.
Despite lack of success, Catholics continued to plot as the 17th century began. Religion continued to be too important a matter to allow heresy to rule, whether heresy was defined as the Church of England or Catholicism, or even Puritanism, to make matters more complicated.
•Again and again Catholics sought help from the king of Spain, now Philip III. In what became known as the Spanish Treason, in 1603 English Catholics sought funds from the king, as well as another Spanish Armada to conquer England. Philip expressed interest and sometimes encouragement, but nothing substantial developed.
Here Guy Fawkes begins to enter the picture. Having made a name for himself over the past 20 years in the English Regiment of the Catholic Spanish Brigade that fought in the Netherlands, he was a member of the delegation sent to Spain in 1603 to persuade Philip to launch his invasion.
Meanwhile, as the queen’s health deteriorated, Catholics and Protestants alike waited to learn whom she would designate as her successor. Elizabeth had used this tactic successfully throughout her reign, keeping various factions attentive and at bay by encouraging one and then another without indicating her preference—if indeed she had any.
Only on her deathbed in 1603, when she could no longer speak, Elizabeth signaled with her hands that James, for many years already King James VI of Scotland, would be her successor. At least that was the decision reported by those who attended her. After her death he was duly crowned James I of England on July 25, 1603.
The change of ruler encouraged Catholics to wait and see if James might exhibit more tolerance toward Catholics than his predecessor. His mother, after all, had been none other than Mary Queen of Scots, who had done her best for the latter part of her life to bring England back into the Catholic fold up to the point of losing her life for trying. Furthermore, James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, had recently converted to Catholicism and maintained a friendly correspondence with the pope. She assured the pope that her children would be raised as Catholics and encouraged him to believe James would be tolerant of Catholics and Catholicism.
In a letter at that time to Robert Cecil, his secretary of state, James expressed himself in favor of such “diversity”:
I will never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion, but I would be sorry that Catholics should multiply as they might be able to practise their old principles upon us.
But like Elizabeth, James knew that his position as monarch depended on remaining Protestant as head of the independent Church of England.
•And despite hopes of tolerance, threats of assassination did not cease. In James’s inaugural year of 1603 he was the target of two somewhat related plots, simply called the “Bye Plot” and the “Main Plot.” The inept Bye Plot, contrived by Father William Watson, was to kidnap James and hold him in the Tower of London until he fulfilled his promises of tolerance to Catholics. But then at the same time there was the Main Plot, this time a mainly Protestant revolt involving Puritans, the most extreme of the non-Catholics, yet at the same time seeking money from Spain to kill the king and his family so that the crown could go to Lady Arabella Stuart, whose religious affiliation was not so clear. Lady Arabella could then possibly marry a Catholic. We’ll never know, because the Main Plot was foiled.
James himself had been raised a Presbyterian in Scotland. But he differed from the Presbyterians and other Puritans in wanting a hierarchical church, with a system of bishops under overall authority of the monarch.
Seeing attacks from Catholics and Puritans alike, and an influx of Catholic recusants and priests from abroad with hopes of greater tolerance, James decided that tolerance wasn’t the way to go. He chose instead to stay with the established Church of England, declaring much to the satisfaction of the defenders of the English faith in February 1605 his “utter detestation” of the “superstitious religion” of the Catholics and that he was so far from favoring it that if he thought his son and heir would give any toleration to the Catholics, he would wish him fairly burned before his eyes.
So the momentary hopes for tolerance collapsed as the laws against Catholics were strictly and harshly enforced. And so came about the Gunpowder Plot, destined to be by far the most famous in the many decades of Catholic attempts to restore their faith. With the Gunpowder Plot, incidentally and quite unintentionally, began the sequence of events that led to “you guys” today.
Ever since it was undertaken and almost succeeded, the Gunpowder Plot has been associated in the public mind with Guy Fawkes. But the inventor of the plot and its unquestioned leader was a different man, Robert Catesby.
Catesby was a gentleman of some means and strongly Catholic background, of highly regarded character and military prowess, who had been involved in the Essex Rebellion against Elizabeth but escaped that occasion without punishment except for a large fine of 4000 marks.
When the new King James banished Jesuits and other Catholic priests and enforced the harsh fines against recusant Catholics, Catesby dreamed up his plot. But it was not just another in the endless series of Catholic plots aimed at dethroning a Protestant king by personally attacking the monarch or by sending an invading fleet or army. It was so outrageous that no one before Catesby had even imagined it, and so unimaginable it almost succeeded because the rulers and their spies and agents were not on the watch for it.
Catesby’s plot was to be the grandest ever, several orders of magnitude greater than any previous ones. He figured out a way with one horrendous stroke to wipe out not only King James and his queen but the entire English government as well, including the Lords and Commons alike, the Privy Council, bishops of the Church of England, and senior judges, the latter all members of Lords.
How would this happen? Simply enough, with one horrendous stroke, by blowing up the House of Lords at the State Opening of the new session of Parliament, when all these dignitaries would attend in the presence of the king. The tremendous explosion would come from barrels of gunpowder hidden in the cellar under the House.
What would come afterward was more complicated and less certain. James’s 8-year-old daughter Elizabeth, living elsewhere, would be kidnapped and put on the throne with a Catholic protector. And then, presumably, English Catholics would rise up in support of the plotters.
And then again, they might not. To attempt to kill the king and possibly a few others was one thing, and something the country had become all too familiar with ever since Henry VIII’s break with the pope in the previous century. But to kill several hundred people, nearly all the government of the country? Even some of the plotters had their moments of hesitation.
But they also had their moments of fascination. One way or another, this audacious plot would go down in history over any others.
And so the plot took shape. As interrogation of the surviving plotters later revealed, Catesby first explained his awesomely simple plan to two others in a meeting at his London home in February 1604. As the time grew near, more were recruited and sworn to secrecy. All told, at the end there were 13 involved in the plot. To keep it secret, they involved as few as they could, but the logistics of placing 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords undetected required significant manpower.
Thomas Wintour, one of the three at that first meeting, later declared:
He [Catesby] said that he had bethought him of a way at one instant to deliver us from all our bonds, and without any foreign help to replant again the Catholic religion, and withal told me in a word it was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder; for, said he, in that place have they done us all the mischief, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment.
The conspirators next met in a London suburb in May 1604. That time their number had grown to five. Before proceeding, the conspirators one after another swore this oath, holding a prayer book:
You shall swear by the Blessed Trinity, and by the Sacrament you now propose to receive, never to disclose directly or indirectly, by word or by circumstance, the matter that shall be proposed to you to keep secret; nor desist from the execution thereof till the rest shall give you leave.
One of the newcomers recruited at this early stage and brought to this meeting was Guy Fawkes. Catesby needed someone experienced in underground explosions, and Fawkes was clearly the choice: a committed Catholic, a man of strength and probity and distinguished bearing, and one who had become an expert at using mines in warfare.
In the low marshy grounds of the Netherlands where the English Regiment fought on behalf of Spain against the Dutch Revolt, Fawkes had become skillful at destroying fortifications by undermining them with gunpowder. He had learned where and how to place a barrel of gunpowder effectively and how to connect it to a trail of slow-burning gunpowder called a train, or to a so-called slow match, that is, a rope soaked in limewater and saltpeter.
With the needed expert in charge, the work began. The House of Lords chamber was on the first level above a long disused basement. To prepare for the work of the miners, one of the conspirators, Thomas Percy, rented a house close to the House of Lords and installed “John Johnson,” Fawkes’s assumed name for the next year and a half, in the house, ostensibly as caretaker.
The State Opening was scheduled for February 7, 1605. That deadline put the conspirators to work in earnest. They had much to do to prepare for that date: digging the mine in the cellar, to begin with, and then bringing in the gunpowder, in barrels that would be large and difficult to hide as they were being delivered to the heart of London. (Some historians say, for complicated reasons, that this mining phase never happened. It wasn’t essential to fulfilling the plot.)
It was only in October 1604 that they had all matters in hand: the rented house occupied by “John Johnson,” adjacent to the House of Lords cellar and connected by a narrow path to the Thames River; barrels of gunpowder at Catesby’s London house, to be delivered by night to the rented house; and workers to aid Johnson in siting and preparing the explosives.
Further delay was caused by unexpected difficulties in leasing the house. Not until shortly before Christmas could the actual mining begin.
Even so, the work went slowly. Right next to the seat of government wasn’t the easiest location to conduct such a major operation in total secret. Amazingly, they did so during all the preparations, probably because the idea of blowing up the House of Lords was, as mentioned before, unthinkable—to anyone aside from Catesby and the conspirators he recruited and swore to secrecy. It’s even possible that a spouse or friend of the plotters, hearing an inadvertent mention of an aspect of the plan, would have dismissed it as unthinkable. Whatever the reasons, the secret remained intact.
And then there was the matter of the cellar. True, it was unused, undisturbed, and uninspected by the authorities, but the cellar walls happened to be nine feet wide, as well as nine feet tall, and made of brick. That’s a lot of mining to make room for lots of barrels of gunpowder.
But they went to work in earnest: a crew of five gentlemen, listed by biographer John Paul Davis as “Wintour, Guy, Catesby, Wright and Percy.” As a modern-day guy, Davis uses Fawkes’s first name un-self-consciously, while referring to the others conventionally by their last names.
Whether they would finish in time for the State Opening in February soon became a moot point, because it was postponed further, till October 3, 1605, on account of the plague.
And in March 1605 they had unexpected luck. Near where they were working, the men heard noises that sounded something like shoveling coal. Fawkes went to investigate and found that indeed, coal was being shoveled. A coal merchant had rented a spacious vault right under the House of Lords and was now removing the coal. Percy immediately arranged to lease that space, and from then on the work was much easier: no digging required, just moving the barrels of gunpowder to a more effective location than originally chosen.
To move that much material inconspicuously still wasn’t easy, but they did so that spring and summer of 1605 without further complications. In case the authorities should investigate, they covered the barrels with wood—supposedly firewood for Percy’s house.
From time to time, as needed, an additional conspirator would be added. All told, there would eventually be 13. In addition to Fawkes, Catesby eventually had recruited John Wright, Thomas Wintour, Thomas Percy, Robert Keyes, Thomas Bates, Robert Wintour, Christopher Wright, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby, and Francis Tresham.
We generally refer to them by their last names, of course—all except Guy Fawkes. At first, once he shed the alias John Johnson, the man called “Guido” in Europe confessed to his real name, and he was normally referred to in official proceedings by his last name, like all the others. It was not until some years after the plot was prevented and Parliament issued orders to celebrate the country’s deliverance with bonfires that he generally became spoken of as Guy.
The State Opening had one final postponement, from October 5 to November 5. The delay made Fawkes worry whether all the gunpowder already in the vault would work. So to be sure, he bought more. He had made a trip to France that summer for fresh dry powder. All told, on the eve of the State Opening there were 36 substantial containers of various kinds—technically not just barrels but also firkins and hogsheads—ready to be exploded in the morning of November 5.
Meanwhile, the king and his ministers had finally learned that some sort of trouble was in the works. The tip came from Lord Monteagle, a friend of Catholics but also of the king, who received an anonymous letter on October 23, warning him “as you tender your life to devise some excuse to shift off your attendance at this parliament. For God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. . . . For though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this parliament. And yet they shall not see who hurts them.”
Sir Robert Cecil, the king’s secretary of state and spymaster, was promptly informed and prepared to take action. But there was little indication of what the danger to the Parliament would be.
In England, as elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, November is a dark time of year. Even in London. Perhaps especially in London, since the capital city had the tallest buildings in the country, and the closest together. Nowadays when the sun sets there on a November day, the lights of the city go on. But in 1605, of course, there was not a single electric light. Torches and lanterns were the best they could do, and they didn’t drive much of the dark away.
In the dark night of November 4, 1604, the London sun set early. If there was a royal astronomer paying attention, and if it wasn’t too cloudy, he could note the slanting sun set at 3:52 p.m., though he wouldn’t have expressed it that way or so precisely. It was Tuesday by the old-style calendar then in effect, Saturday by the new one that was adopted more than a century later. Sunrise would come at 7:49 a.m. after a night unlike any England has ever experienced before or since.
So it all came down to this night. Moving quietly through the familiar dark narrow streets near the Houses of Parliament, a tall, athletic, dark-clad figure arrived once more at the house next to the House of Lords. If the night watch noticed him, they paid him little heed, since he had been a familiar figure in that neighborhood for well over a year.
Who was this man? None other than Guy Fawkes, alias Guido, alias John Johnson, unknown to the nation as yet, but destined before dawn to become one of the most memorable figures in English history.
Fawkes looked around at the silent street. Then, satisfied that no one he knew was in sight, he slipped in the door and went to work. Fawkes put the final touches on the fuses connecting to the barrels. He had touchwood and a tinder box in his pockets to light them—with a new pocket watch from Percy to properly time the lighting.
They were very slow-burning fuses, and for good reason; Fawkes needed to get far away before such a powerful explosion. He wore boots and spurs, ready to make a quick exit.
Satisfied that everything was ready, he left for a while. When a search party sent by Cecil entered the cellar and looked around, they noticed a tall, rough-looking man along with unremarkable piles of wood. They felt something suspicious about the situation, but they couldn’t find out. So they left without arresting the man or uncovering anything else.
But a second search party was sent to inspect once again. This time, shortly after midnight on November 5, they found the man still there and arrested him. Searching his pockets, they found the touchwood and tinder box and confiscated them.
There would be no explosion after all.
Present-day scientists have been curious about how powerful the explosion would have been and what damage it would have caused if Fawkes had succeeded in setting it off. Supposing all the gunpowder in those 36 barrels had been dry and ready to blow, members of the British Institute of Physics in 2003 figured that the roughly 2.75 tons of gunpowder would have destroyed not only the House of Lords but most buildings within a radius of about one-third of a mile, including the rest of the Palace of Westminster. That would be about 25 times as much explosive as needed. The BBC quoted researcher Catherine Gardner of the University of Wales as saying, “There is a possibility that the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall would have been completely obliterated, although we can’t know for sure.”
And so the worst terrorist attack in the history of England never happened after all. It could even be argued that it might have been the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world. Many lives have been lost at one blow in other attacks, of course, like that of September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But no other attack would have taken so much of the government of a country.
It is with such a possibility in mind, perhaps especially this Gunpowder Plot, that since the 1960s a lower-ranking Cabinet member is selected to stay far away from the US Capitol during the president’s annual State of the Union address. Everyone else in the government assembles for that occasion in the House chamber: the full membership of the House and the Senate, the Supreme Court, the rest of the Cabinet, and other high officials. The Cabinet member who stays away is called the “designated survivor,” who would be next in line to serve as president if those at the State of the Union were destroyed. It isn’t likely to happen, but the premise has become a successful television series featuring Kiefer Sutherland.
If the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded, it is possible to imagine that world history might have been changed. For example, the North American continent might have become part of Latin America as Spain, after the explosion, accepted an invitation by English Catholics to occupy the country. Or maybe not; the devastation of the ruling classes might have been so stunning that many English Catholics would have had no sympathy for the plotters.
But by good luck or good detective work, it didn’t happen. The terrorist plot was stopped before the fuses were lit for 36 barrels of gunpowder in the ground-level cellar under the Houses of Parliament. And so instead of instigating regime change, what became known as the Gunpowder Plot instigated language change, big time.