Guy Fawkes and the Conspiracy of the Gunpowder Plot

"Remember remember the Fifth of November. The Gunpowder Treachery and the Plot. I know why the Gunpowder Treachery should one day be forgotten. On November 5, 1604, thirteen men conspired together to blow up the Palace of Westminster in London on day when the most powerful men in England would meet in Parliament. The authorities learned of the plan through an anonymous letter and the terrorists were arrested just in time. The first man they found at the scene was Guy Fawkes, who had. been guarding kegs of

gunpowder

in the basement beneath the palace. If you're American, you probably know Guy Fawkes from the movie V for Vendetta and probably associate him with anarchy.

This association has been further boosted in recent years with usage. of Guy Fawkes masks by the Anonymous organization. If you are from the United Kingdom, you already know Guy Fawkes Night, which is celebrated every November 5 with a bonfire and fireworks. Almost everyone has heard of the famous Gunpowder Plot, but few people know the details about Guy Fawke's life or the motivations behind why he and his friends wanted to blow up Parliament in the first place. Although this is a biography of his life, Guy Fawkes is a very small part of this larger story. To fully understand the motivations behind the Gunpowder Plot, we must first explain the conflicts between English Catholics and Protestants at the time.

So what about Catholics? For much of human history, the most powerful religion in the world was the Roman Catholic Church. If a country was Catholic, its citizens considered the reigning Pope as their religious leader, and in the minds of some, this authority was more important than their loyalty to their actual King or Queen because whoever has access to God has access to their mortal soul. . In many ways, the Protestant Reformation was a way to eliminate all the power held by Popes and Bishops. It was sort of like cutting out the middleman for the average person's access to God.

Because, you see, Catholics are taught that if you want your sins forgiven, you have to tell a priest every bad thing you've done in confession. A priest is sworn to secrecy, kind of like a therapist. But still, everyone knew that these men held the deepest, darkest secrets of their congregation. Not only confession was encouraged. It is mandatory. And even the smallest sin left unsaid could mean you'll go to hell. Furthermore, the Catholic mass was said in Latin, so everyone had to study the language. Uneducated peasants needed to rely on a translation from their priest. Basically, the religion is set up in such a way that the priests and the Pope were given enormous power over their congregation.

In 1558, Elizabeth declared that there should be an “agreement,” stating that all English citizens should convert to Protestantism. Bishops who were previously part of the Catholic Church had to renounce their allegiance to the Pope if they wanted to live. It was now compulsory for all Englishmen to attend Protestant religious services every Sunday, and they were attending. If someone missed too many services, he was fined or sent to jail. After hearing this, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth from the Catholic Church. In 1570, she ordered a papal bull encouraging all Catholics to depose her. Basically, don't be loyal to her queen.

He called her "Elizabeth, the pretended queen of England and servant of crime." You can probably see why this was problematic. Catholics were now seen as enemy agents. People from the lower classes quickly converted to Protestantism. They could not afford to pay the high fines, and many of the illiterate peasants could not speak or read Latin anyway. So it was an easy choice to make and a symbol that they were loyal to the Queen of her. But for the educated people of the upper class, this was not such an easy conversion. On the one hand, this was taking away their freedom to choose their religion, and there were many people who still truly believed that the Catholic Church was the only true church.

These people were called “recusants,” which comes from the Latin word recusare, which means “to reject.” These people who broke the law and continued to practice their Catholic faith believed they were fighting for their immortal souls. Since much of the religion depends on a priest to say mass and confess, recusant Catholics began hiding priests in their homes. This was completely illegal and harboring a priest was punishable by death. If a family was known to be Catholic, the royal guard would appear unannounced at all hours of the day and night to ransack their homes, searching for hidden priests.

Upper-class Catholic families who refused to attend Protestant mass continued to pay expensive fines, to the point of losing their entire family inheritance. Many English Catholics were forced to move to Flanders, which was a safe area. After the death of Elizabeth I, the Scottish King James VI assumed the throne and became King James I of England. Catholic citizens had no idea how his reign would differ from Elizabeth's and waited to see what would happen next. The Life of Guy Fawkes Not much is known about Guy Fawkes' childhood, except that he was born in 1570 in York, England, the son of Edward and Edith Fawkes.

His family was Protestant and his father even worked for the Church of England. They were law-abiding Protestants who went to church every Sunday. Her mother came from a line of Catholics, but she decided to renounce her faith to conform. Guy Fawke's father died when he was 8 years old and his mother was widowed for years before deciding to marry a Catholic man. They began to practice the faith in secret and baptized Guy and his brothers in a secret ceremony at the church of St. Michael le Belfrey. He attended St. Peter's School in York, which had many recusant Catholic teachers and students.

He was able to attend mass in the homes of people who were hiding priests. As an adult, he decided to continue practicing that Catholic faith and became passionate about trying to help protect it. At some point, Guy Fawkes is said to have married and had a son. There are records from 1590 that a man named Guy Fawkes married a woman called Maria Pulleyn and a birth certificate for his son, Thomas Fawkes. When he was 21 years old, he would have been old enough to receive his inheritance. That same year, there are lease documents for a 3½-acre

plot

of land and a house signed by Guy Fawkes, including a seal with the image of a falcon, which was on his family crest.

He once had a very normal life. He entered the service of Anthony Brown, 1st Viscount Montagu as a footman. At that time, working in the service of a Lord was considered a very respectable job among the lower class, especially compared to being a farmer. But for some reason, Brown didn't like Guy Fawkes, so he fired him. Back then, your reputation was everything, and it must have been difficult for you to get another job without a good letter of recommendation. He managed to work for Brown's grandson after Anthony Brown's death. According to the records, it would appear that he struggled to maintain stable employment.

So, at age 21, he left England and moved to Flanders. He fought alongside the Spanish army, to do their part in the Eighty Years' War. At the time, Spain was considered the protector of the Catholic faith and, during the war, defended Dutch Protestantism in the Netherlands. While he was fighting with the Spanish, he decided to call himself "Guido." One of his compatriots described him as "of excellent natural qualities, very resolute and universally learned", and he was "sought by all the most distinguished of the Archduke's camp for his nobility and virtue". People say that he was very tall and muscular.

He had reddish-brown hair and beard and was basically described as the perfect soldier. Despite having these descriptions, no one knows what Guy Fawkes is really like, because there was never a portrait painted of his likeness. We only have the cartoons that depicted him after his death, and they were mostly drawn in such a way that they made him look like a villain. In most of the pictures, he has black hair and a beard with an upturned mustache. The Gunpowder Plot After King James I came to power, Catholics waited with bated breath to see what would happen next.

A recusant Catholic named Thomas Percy was a cousin of Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland. Although he was not a Lord himself, Percy was able to take it upon himself to request an audience with the King. He pleaded for clemency on behalf of English Catholics. Wanting to gain popularity among his new English subjects, James was vague and made sure not to make any promises. It was still very early in his reign and he was not yet sure what he should do about the tensions between Protestants and Catholics. Basically, he told Percy not to worry, because he personally had no ill will towards Catholics.

Percy believed that King James was going to offer some kind of relief and that he might be preparing to repeal Queen Elizabeth I's laws. Percy was very happy about this and returned to tell his friends and family that they no longer had to worry about be persecuted for their faith. Some even hoped that perhaps James would convert to Catholicism and the entire country would return to practicing the one true church. For about a year, English Catholics were able to live normal lives. James temporarily stopped collecting the fees that recusant Catholics were required to pay for missing Protestant service.

He also did not pressure his guard to search Catholic houses for priests. However, the laws enacted by Elizabeth I were still in force. He had not repealed them because he was waiting to see what the reaction of the Protestant Parliament would be to him. In the summer of 1604, members of Parliament finally realized that Catholics were no longer persecuted and began to pressure King James to punish them harshly. What they felt about Catholics was very similar to what communists felt in the Cold War. Many of them believed that if they were not eliminated, they would cause an uprising.

James then restored the same laws that Elizabeth I had established. Suddenly, Catholic homes were once again searched and treated as criminals. The Catholic people in England had been oppressed for so long, but what triggered their anger was the sense of false hope. They felt betrayed by King James, and that was enough to make some want to kill him. Although Guy Fawkes is best remembered for the Gunpowder Plot, the ring's leader was actually a man named Robert Catesby. He began making plans in 1603 and first recruited a man named Thomas Winter. Catesby and Winter traveled to Spain because they had associates who were Catholic.

Spain was also designated protector of the Catholic faith. Since Catholics in England were being persecuted once again, they asked the Spanish for help to prevent King James from killing his people. However, the Spanish were not interested in getting involved. Catesby and Winter returned to England and decided that if they were going to find someone to help them, it would have to be at home. They found John Wright and Thomas Percy. Winter had gone to school with Guy Fawkes and seemed like the perfect candidate to help them with the

plot

. After all, Fawkes had a lot of experience fighting in Spain and knew a lot about

gunpowder

.

He was smart and knew how to stay calm under pressure. In May 1604, the five men were seen together at the Duck and Drake Inn in London. They whispered about their plot and swore loyalty and secrecy. The group was biding their time, trying to figure out the finer details of the plan as time passed. Thomas Percy had the resources to buy a property in London that was very close to the Palace of Westminster. Guy Fawkes began living with him, posing as a lackey named "John Johnson." This way, they would never seem out of the ordinary to anyone who witnessed them in the city.

In those days, it was not uncommon for men to purchase gunpowder, especially if they planned to sail abroad. They needed gunpowder to use their weapons and cannons to defend themselves against pirates. The only problem was buying small quantities over a long period of time, so as not to raise suspicions. Guy Fawkes would use his connections to slowly gather a cache of gunpowder kegs left over from ships entering the harbor and take them back to Thomas Percy. At the time, the Palace of Westminster had a collection of smaller buildings. Lords and other members of the upper class came and went from these buildings regularly without being stopped by security.

The rules were very relaxed and, in fact, Thomas Percy found it easy to rent storage space in the basement beneath the Palace, claiming it was for his cousin, the Earl of Northumberland, to store her firewood for the winter. Parliament Day continued to be delayed and the group of conspirators grew from 5 to 13 men. However, unfortunately for them, the extended time combined with the greater number of people being told about the plot meant that the secret was much more likely to come to light. a catholic mancalled Lord Monteagle was preparing to be present in Parliament. A masked man handed a letter to one of Monteagle's servants and handed it over immediately.

He said; “My lord, out of the love I have for some of his friends, I take care of his preservation, therefore, I would advise you, when giving up his life, to invent some excuse to change his assistance to this parliament. . . because although there does not seem to be any commotion, I say that they will receive a terrible blow.” Although it was late at night, Lord Monteagle quickly ordered his servants to prepare the horses so he could deliver the letter to Robert Cecil, King James' spymaster and secretary of state. Historians have debated theories about who really wrote that anonymous letter.

He could have been one of the 13 conspirators. It may even have been Lord Monteagle himself, writing a false letter after hearing letters through the Catholic recusant rumor mill. He was awarded 500 pounds a year for his loyalty to the crown. Back then, that was a small fortune. Even more historians believe it was Robert Cecil. After all, he was the spymaster, and some believe that he knew about the Gunpowder Plot for a long time and orchestrated the whole scene to look like the hero. An extensive search took place at the Palace of Westminster on 4 November. At first they found nothing that worried them and began to believe that the letter was a hoax.

But later that day, the royal guard learned that there were cellars beneath the palace that had not yet been searched. A royal official named Sir Thomas Knyvett was told that one of them was being used to store firewood, so he led a group of royal guards to search the area. When they arrived, they found Guy Fawkes taking care of the firewood. Instead of wearing the clothes of a vigilante, Fawkes wore riding boots, spurs, hat and cloak, as if he were preparing to jump onto a horse at any moment. They pushed aside the piles of wood to reveal 36 kegs of gunpowder.

The royal guards searched him and found a box of long matches. Fawkes was immediately arrested. On November 6, King James wanted to meet Guy Fawkes face to face. He interviewed him and asked him if he regretted it. He really wanted to know how someone could be so ruthless as to be willing to kill so many people, even the little children who would have been present in Parliament. Fawkes said his only regret was that the plan failed. Fawks still called himself "John Johnson" and refused to reveal the names of his accomplices. King James ordered Fawkes to be tortured and interrogated.

They suspended him with handcuffs and then placed him on the rack so that his arms and legs could stretch out of his sockets. He finally relented and confessed. In the before and after signing him, we can see that he could barely write his own name after enduring so much pain. While Guy Fawkes was tortured, the rest of the conspirators fled. Robert Catesby began announcing to the villages that King James had died and called on Catholics to rise up to claim their rightful place in the kingdom. They rode from town to town, but instead of the huge army he expected, it was only about 40 men who decided to follow him.

Ironically, Catesby and his men accidentally blew themselves up with the very gunpowder they had brought with them. Without Guy Fawkes there to help them with his experience, they thought that to dry out the damp, they should spread the gunpowder in front of an open fireplace. Of course, it exploded and one of the men went blind. The rest were now burned and injured. One of the men asked Robert Catesby what they were going to do next. He replied: "We want to die here." On 8 November the Sheriff of Warwickshire arrived with a small army of 200 men. There was a shootout between the two groups.

The weakened Catholic men did their best to go out and fight, but it was clear that the king's guard would overpower them. Robert Catesby was shot, but crawled to the nearby chapel. He was later found on the floor of the church, hugging a statue of the Virgin Mary. The men who were left alive were taken prisoner and sentenced to die by hanging along with Guy Fawkes. Death and legacy On January 31, 1606, Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators were found guilty of treason and his punishment would have been “hanged, drawn and quartered.” This meant that a man was dragged through the streets before being hanged on the gallows.

But just before he was about to suffocate to death, they released him. As he gasped, they plunged a knife into his stomach and pulled out his insides. Then, they cut off his arms and legs while he was still alive. Then four-quarters of his body were taken to the four corners of England. While Guy Fawkes stood before the crowd, King James declared that these Catholic traitors were trying to blow up the entire island of England. This would have been physically impossible, of course, but it was enough to make people very angry. They shouted and booed, calling him a traitor.

Before they could torture him again, Guy Fawkes jumped and broke his neck. Even though he was not alive to feel the pain, they still cut his body into pieces. The gunpowder plot had almost succeeded. And if it weren't for the anonymous letter, Guy Fawkes may have managed to light the fuse. If the gunpowder kegs had exploded, they would have been powerful enough to bring down the palace and nearby buildings. He would have killed the king and princes, as well as some of the most powerful nobles in the country. This would have left the throne to James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth.

They hoped that since she was so young, she would be easy to manipulate like some kind of puppet. Many believe that Robert Catesby would have eventually gotten more Catholics to follow him, and this would have erupted into an English civil war. After this incident, Parliament passed the Thanksgiving Act of 1606, which was a law that English citizens were to pray and thank God because the terrorists did not kill the King. That day became known as “Guy Fawkes Night”, or “Bonfire Night”, and is celebrated every year on November 5. People usually celebrate by lighting a large bonfire and burning a life-size Guy Fawkes doll.

There is also a fireworks show, to symbolize the explosions that never happened. Since then, everyone has always remembered Cinco de Noviembre.