The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 by Antonia Fraser

Author’s Note

    ‘That heavy and doleful tragedy which is commonly called the Powder Treason’: thus Sir Edward Coke, as prosecuting counsel, described the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It is a fair description of one of the most memorable events in English history, which is celebrated annually in that chant of ‘Remember, remember the Fifth of November’. But who was the Gunpowder Plot a tragedy for? For King and Royal Family, for Parliament, all threatened with extinction by terrorist explosion? Or for the reckless Catholic conspirators and the entire Catholic community, including priests, whose fate was bound up with theirs? In part, this book attempts to answer that question.
    Its primary purpose is, however, to explain, so far as is possible in view of imperfect records and testimonies taken under torture, why there was a Gunpowder Plot in the first place. The complicated details of this extraordinary episode resemble those of a detective story (including an anonymous letter delivered under cover of darkness), and, as in all mysteries, the underlying motivation is at the heart of the matter.
    Obviously, to talk of providing an explanation begs the question of whether there really was a Plot. Over the years – over the centuries – dedicated scholars and historians have divided into two categories on the subject. I have lightly designated these ‘Pro-Plotters’ – those who believe firmly in the Plot’s existence – and ‘No-Plotters’ – those who believe equally firmly that the Plot was a fabrication on the part of the government. My own position, as will be seen, does not fall precisely into either of these categories. I believe that there was indeed a Gunpowder Plot: but it was a very different ‘Powder Treason’ from that conspiracy outlined by Sir Edward Coke.
    By accepting that there was a Plot, I have also accepted that the conspirators were what we would now term terrorists. Certainly, the questionable moral basis for terrorism – can violence ever be justified whatever the persecution, whatever the provocation? – is a theme which runs through my narrative. And there is an additional problem: is terrorism justified only when it is successful? These are awkward questions, but for that reason, if no other, worth the asking.
    Writers on the subject of the Plot have, naturally enough, tended to draw their own contemporary comparisons. A student of Catesby family history in 1909 referred to ‘these days of [Russian] Anarchist plots’ as providing a suitable background for Catesby’s own conspiratorial activities. Donald Carswell, a barrister who edited The Trial of Guy Fawkes in 1934, likened the Gunpowder Plot to the Reichstag Fire of February 1933: ‘it turned out to be first-class government propaganda’, enabling the Nazis to suppress the Communists, as the Catholics had been suppressed after 1605.
    Graham Greene, providing an introduction in 1968 to the memoirs of Kim Philby, the Briton who spied for Stalin’s Russia, compared Philby’s Communist faith – ‘his chilling certainty in the correctness of his judgment’ – to that of the English recusant Catholics, supporting Spain and its Inquisition. Elliot Rose, in Cases of Conscience, published in 1975, the year in which the Vietnam War ended, drew a parallel between Catholics who refused to conform in the reign of Elizabeth and James I, and protesters against the Vietnam War. More recently, Gary Wills in Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1995) evoked the turbulent conspiratorial atmosphere in the United States after the assassination of President Kennedy to explain the world in which the play first appeared. (First performed in 1606, the text of Macbeth is darkened by the shadow of the Gunpowder Plot.) Certainly, the events of 5 November 1605 have much in common with the killing of President Kennedy as a topic which is, in conspiratorial terms, eternally debatable.
    It is appropriate, therefore, that in my case a book written