The Gunpowder Plot – what if Guy Fawkes and Co had succeeded?
The Gunpowder Plot – what if Guy Fawkes and Co had succeeded?
London would have been subjected to a terrorist outrage unmatched until 9/11.
Historian and author Peter Tonkin is my special guest on Not In The Script just a few days before Bonfire Night. Here’s his fascinating account of what was known as The Powder Treason and what would have been the effect of exploding a metric ton of gunpowder.
It has long been recognised that traditional histories have tended to concentrate on the lives and doings of great men and women, particularly kings, queens and their most important advisors. Only more recently have historians become interested in the lives and experiences of ordinary people and the impact that ‘great’ events must have had on them.
This has long been true of what at the time was called The Powder Treason. And you can see why. There are two main sources of information about what happened during 1604 and 1605 leading up to the discovery of Guido Fawkes and his 36 barrels of gunpowder in the undercroft of the House of Lords during a search of the area prompted by the arrival of a mysterious letter in King James’ own hands at or about midnight on Monday, November 4th.
On the one hand there is King James’s own version (The King’s Book/The King’s History) together with the testimony of the survivors obtained under torture. Conspirators Robert Wintour, Digby, Grant and Bates were all ‘questioned’, tried and executed by hanging, drawing and quartering in St Paul’s Churchyard (an important public space before the Great Fire) on Thursday, 30th January 1606. The main surviving conspirators Thomas Wintour (Robert’s brother), Rookwood and Keyes were also questioned and tried throughout those three long months between their arrest and execution, and were hanged, drawn and quartered in Old Palace Yard outside Westminster Hall on Friday, 31st January 1606.
Fawkes, having suffered the worst of the torture, escaped the worst of the punishment by throwing himself headfirst off the ladder leading up to the gibbet and breaking his neck. Francis Tresham (also questioned) died of natural causes in the Tower of London on Monday, 23rd December 1605. The others involved in the plot (Catesby, Percy and the Wright brothers) all died at Holbeche House, mostly through gunshot wounds, on Friday, 8th November 1605.
From all this an ‘official’ narrative emerges of a group of desperate Catholic terrorists thwarted literally by Divine Intervention (that mysterious document – the famous Monteagle Letter), and the cunning of the Protestant God-appointed King.
On the other hand, there is Father John Gerard’s Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, and Father Oswald Tessimond’s Narrative, both of which offer contemporary, almost eye-witness accounts of the entire undertaking. (Tessimond heard the confession of Robert Catesby and it so distressed him that he in turn confessed what he knew to his Jesuit Superior Father Henry Garnet who would be executed for his part in the Plot on Saturday, 3rd May 1606). These effectively present us with a band of desperate Catholic gentlemen driven to terrible extremes by a seemingly never-ending series of punitive laws and broken promises from an increasingly hard-line Protestant government set on destroying Catholicism in England and Scotland altogether.
And where amongst all this, you may ask, are the ordinary men and women who were thronging the streets of Westminster on the morning of Tuesday, 5th November 1605, hoping to catch a glimpse of the king, his family, his lords and commons as they paraded into the Lords building for the State Opening of Parliament? And why should we consider them now, after they have waited anonymously, for all this time?
To begin with, how many were there? The numbers at the previous State Opening were huge. In 1604, the added attraction of a new monarch caused a higher turnout “than was ever seen on the first day of a Parliament in any man’s memory” (House of Commons Library) and it is likely that attendance on November 5th the next year would also have been huge. The public streets and squares around Westminster would have been packed with men and women, boys and girls taking a holiday to enjoy the spectacle.
Why worry about bystanders? Well, consider.
Fawkes was smuggled into England with Tom Wintour under an alias (as John Jonson) and placed in Thomas Percy’s lodgings next to the Lords’ Chamber because he was a military engineer; and a very good one. He was at the time commissioned as alferez (2nd Lieutenant) and was just about to be appointed Captain of Engineers. Engineer in those days meant a soldier adept in digging tunnels and placing petards (explosive mines) vide Hamlet’s ‘tis the sport to have the engineer/Hoist with his own petard’ – in other words, the bomb-maker blown up by his own bomb.
Whether or not Fawkes did in fact dig a tunnel from his lodgings under the Painted Chamber right beside the Lords chamber is disputed. But if he did, then the outcome is easy to predict. Confined by the walls and floor of the tunnel, the explosive power of the (originally) 20 barrels would have gone straight up and killed everyone in the building above with very little collateral damage.
But somewhere along the line the plan changed. The tunnel (if it was ever dug) was discarded and the powder was instead stored in the undercroft below the Lords building itself. Crucially one must understand that an undercroft is a storage area that stands below a more important building but at ground level. Fawkes understood the implications of the change and ordered another 16 barrels, bringing the total weight of explosive to the 36 barrels, equivalent to one metric ton (1,000 kilos, a little in excess of 2,200 lbs). This is what he was discovered standing guard over at midnight on Monday the 4th.
But what if his plan had worked? What if he had waited, undiscovered, for King James to take his seat or start his speech and then set the whole thing off? In a fascinating reconstruction of that very eventuality for his TV series Reel Truth Science, broadcaster Richard Hammond has reconstructed the event. With great difficulty matched only by unyielding tenacity, Hammond manages to recreate the long-vanished Lords building (at a secret weapons-testing site), to amass the powder, to rebuild the Lords Chamber and fill it with crash dummies representing some of the people who were there, and then to blow the whole thing up.
The effect is jaw-dropping. Even the explosive experts advising on the programme are astonished by the power of the blast, which can be assessed from the fact that the dummy representing the king, enthroned and ready for his speech, all but vanished. Only the top of the royal head survived and was found more than 100 metres away from the (literal) seat of the explosion.
What, therefore, would have been the actual effect? It seems likely that those eager observers packed into the streets and squares within 100 metres would have all died or been fatally injured at once. Those within 200 metres, deafened and wounded, further hurt by flying roof-tiles and a rain of burning beams and body-parts would have panicked and added to the death-toll as they sought to escape along narrow streets, setting up a fatal crush in consequence. Even as far away as 400 metres, windows would have shattered into lethally dangerous flying shards. Anyone in King Henry VII’s chapel at the eastern end of Westminster Abbey would have been showered (at the very least) with stained glass.
It would in many ways have been the most deadly terrorist outrage in history; unrivalled, perhaps, until 9/11.
Would any of the conspirators have realised the danger of massive casualties? Only Fawkes. The others were not very knowledgeable about gunpowder, as proved by the fact that they tried to dry their powder which had been wet by heavy rain during their attempted escape, in front of the fire at Holbeche House – their final refuge. It blew up, injuring several and blinding John Grant whose eyes were ‘burned out’. This also explains why when the Sheriff of Worcester arrived with his heavily armed men, on the morning of Friday, November 8th, the plotters chose to stage a final stand armed only with their swords.
But the moral question of innocent casualties had already been settled by the Church’s ruling on the ‘double-effect’. The Church recognised that any action could have (at least) two outcomes – one that was desired and one that was not. It was promulgated that if the desired outcome was sufficiently clear and acceptable then any undesired outcome might be forgiven. The plotters had already convinced themselves that killing the king and his council for the good of the vast majority of Catholics in England and the restoration of England and Scotland to the One True Church was such a positive desired outcome that the death of the Catholic queen and the innocent child Prince Henry, together with the Catholic members of the Lords and Commons, might be forgiven.
Did Fawkes really understand the potential slaughter he might unleash on hundreds of other ordinary and innocent citizens? If so, did he simply count their mass-murder as just another element of the ‘double-effect’?
The answer is that we simply don’t know. In all the eyewitness accounts, the detailed historical reconstruction and commentary since, there has never been an assessment of what the Powder Treason would have done to those excited commoners taking a holiday in order to see their new king and his queen go past with their Lords Spiritual and Temporal and their Loyal Commons, all berobed and in full State Panoply.
Returning to my original point – in this as in so much else, nobody seems to have given a second thought to the ordinary man and woman in the street and how all this might have affected them. Except, perhaps, for the mysterious stranger who stopped one of Lord Monteagle’s servants in the street on the evening of Saturday, October 26th, ten days before plot was due to come to its explosive conclusion, and passed him the coded letter that was eventually to unmask the entire conspiracy and save not only the king and his parliament but also those countless ordinary lives…
PETER TONKIN graduated from The Queen’s University, Belfast in 1975 having studied under Prof Rev W L Warren (History), Seamus Heaney and Alexander McCall Smith (English). He published his first novel, Killer, to international acclaim in 1978. He then divided his time between writing, teaching (English, History, Media, Philosophy, Classics and Law) and examining (A-Level Law for the Oxford & Cambridge Board).
Some of Peter’s books can be accessed here:
Shadow of the Axe (Queen’s Intelligencer Series Book 1)
Shadow of the Tower (Queen’s Intelligencer Series Book 2)
He’s working on Book 3 Shadow of Treason right now.
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Thank you all for your lovely comments. As you may have worked out from my biog. I was in Belfast on 17 June '74. In the belly of the beast, so to speak.
Fascinating reading, especially as I happened to be working at the Houses of Parliament at the time of the IRA bomb explosion in Westminster Hall, and probably missed being involved because I arrived in London on an earlier train that morning and was in Dean's Yard when it went off. It was nothing like the size of the conflagration that Fawkes might have been responsible for, but pretty terrifying even from the other side of Parliament Square.
As Fiona has said, thank you for a great article!