The Gunpowder Plot:
Filling in the gaps
Was Guy Fawkes really a suicide bomber?
Almost everyone assumes that Fawkes meant to light the fuse and then escape, perhaps in a boat waiting on the Thames. Other sources say that he meant to light the fuse and ‘stand by’ while the gunpowder went off.
I don’t believe any of this. If you look at the evidence, it seems clear that Fawkes would have died on the 5th of November and he knew it.
In November 2003, The Times ran a front page feature on the damage that would have been done by the 36 barrels of gunpowder smuggled by the conspirators into the cellar beneath Parliament in Westminster if it had exploded: ‘Complete destruction of all buildings within 135 feet (42 metres) and partial collapse of walls and roofs out to 354ft (108m).’ In addition, ceilings would have collapsed and windows shattered up to 1,600ft (488m) away. In the same article, Dr Geraint Thomas, head of the Centre for Explosion Studies at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, said that, given the amount of gunpowder that Fawkes and his friends stockpiled for the 5th, you would have to have been a third of a mile away from the blast to have been OK.
No boatman I know can pick up a passenger, then row a third of a mile to safety in the time it takes even a long ‘slow’ fuse to burn. Fawkes had been a sapper so he knew explosives and what they could do.
Furthermore, stone cellars near rivers tend to be damp. In 1605, fuses were an inexact technology. With so much at stake for the plotters, I find it hard to believe that Fawkes would have risked laying an unusually long fuse (or powder trail) on a damp stone floor. He would more likely have used a short fuse and stayed close, inside the total destruction zone (which would have included Westminster Abbey), to be sure that it did not go out.
Whether you consider him a martyr or a terrorist, Fawkes was certainly willing to die for the Catholic cause.
