In the early hours of November 5, 1605, government agents searching the undercroft beneath the House of Lords found a man named Guy Fawkes guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder — enough to destroy the entire English Parliament. The Gunpowder Plot to blow up King James I and his government had been discovered hours before it was to be executed. Britain has remembered the fifth of November ever since.
A Plot Born of Persecution
England in 1605 was a Protestant kingdom that had fined, imprisoned and excluded its Catholic minority since Elizabeth I’s reign. When James I — son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots — proved no more tolerant than his predecessor, a group of Catholic gentry led by Robert Catesby turned to desperate measures. Their plan: detonate the gunpowder during the State Opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605, killing the King, the Lords and the Commons, then install James’s nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth as a puppet Catholic queen. Guy Fawkes — a seasoned soldier and explosives expert who had fought for Spain in the Netherlands — was recruited to guard and ignite the barrels, hidden beneath firewood in a rented undercroft.
The Letter That Betrayed Them
An anonymous letter, warning a Catholic peer to stay away from Parliament, reached the King’s spymaster; by November 4, the undercroft had been searched once without result. Just after midnight on November 5, a second search found Fawkes — “a very tall and desperate fellow,” as one account described him — leaving the gunpowder. Arrested and tortured, he revealed the names of his co-conspirators, most of whom died in a shootout at Holbeche House. Fawkes, Catesby’s plotter-in-chief, was executed in January 1606, defiantly jumping from the scaffold to break his neck before the full sentence could be carried out.
Bonfire Night, Four Hundred Twenty Years On
Parliament ordered November 5 commemorated as a day of thanksgiving, and England obliged with bonfires, fireworks and the burning of Fawkes effigies — a tradition, known as Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night, that survives four centuries later. The nursery rhyme fixed the date in memory: “Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.” Fawkes himself has been doubly resurrected: as the grinning mask of modern protest movements, thanks to “V for Vendetta,” and as history’s most famous failed revolutionary. On November 5, 1605, 36 barrels did not explode — and a national holiday was born from the silence.
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