The intention of the conspirators behind the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was to blow up parliament and create a state of chaos in which Roman Catholics would be restored to power in England. If successful, the conspiracy would have resulted in perhaps the biggest man-made explosion in history to that date. The plot was exposed by the Roman Catholic Lord Monteagle, who was warned off going to parliament by a relative among the conspirators, who were all quickly arrested. Fawkes was arrested in the cellar beneath the House of Lords with a ton of gunpowder at his back.
He was taken to King James’ bedchamber at 1 o’clock in the morning where he calmly faced down the king and his ministers, saying plainly that he wanted to kill the king and destroy parliament. James asked Fawkes why he was so keen on killing him, and Fawkes replied that the king had been excommunicated by the Pope, and that dangerous diseases required ‘desperate remedies’. For good measure, Fawkes told the Scottish king and his courtiers that one of his aims had been to ‘blow the Scots back to Scotland’, a detail that was suppressed by the government at the time as it could only have encouraged sympathy for Fawkes among the English, many of whom regarded the Scots who accompanied James as a grim lot, extreme both in corruption and in their Protestantism. Fawkes’ one regret was that the scheme failed. Robert Cecil described Fawkes at the meeting thus: ‘He carrieth himself without any feare or perturbation ...; under all this action he is noe more dismayed, nay scarce any more troubled than if he was taken for a poor robbery upon the highway. . . he is ready to die, and rather wisheth 10,000 deaths, than willingly to accuse his master or any other’.
A thoroughly spooked James then granted permission for torture to be used on Fawkes, instructing the interrogators thus: ‘The gentler tortours are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad maiora tenditur [and thus by steps extended to greater ones], and so God speed your good work’.
What Happened Next
The torture Fawkes received on the rack was terrible – we have the signature of his first name ‘Guido’ after torture and the comparison with earlier examples of his writing are shocking. He was hung, and as the 1911 Britannica says, ‘the usual barbarities practiced upon him after he had been cut down from the gallows were inflicted on a body from which all life had already fled’. As for James, he confirmed his public reputation for cowardice by going into seclusion for a while.
It has been (cautiously) argued that the plot may be seen as a partial success in that it possibly prevented further anti-Catholic legislation, but in truth the Catholic-Protestant question was already becoming part of other questions relating to Britain’s governance, and the lasting effect of the plot was to delay Catholic emancipation until the 19th century.