The Fire-master’s Mistress by Christie Dickason (Harper Collins, 2005)The Gunpowder Plot:
Filling in the gaps
Christie Dickason
When I started to write The Firemaster’s Mistress – my novel about two fictional characters who get tangled up with Guy (Guido) Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot – I wanted to make the history part ‘right’. But I found it impossible to learn what really happened.
In her fascinating book The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and faith in 1605, Antonia Fraser argues that few of the facts about the plot are unambiguous (and she backs up this argument with 653 references citing more than 276 different sources). Countless historians and scholars have studied the evidence and drawn conclusions. The trouble is, they often disagree.
I had to choose among them, so I set out to do some detective work of my own.
- Who wrote the Monteagle letter?
- Was Guy Fawkes really a suicide bomber?
- Did Fawkes really betray his co-conspirators under torture?
- Where do the ‘facts’ come from?
- Find out more
