At the beginning of November 1605, James VI and I was shown a tip-off letter warning that the political establishment of England would receive a terrible blow in the Parliament that he was due to open on 5 November. James immediately guessed that the letter referred to an explosion.
To catch the plotters red-handed, it was decided not to search the vaults under the Parliament meeting chamber until the night of the 4th. At 11pm, the search party entered and found a man standing guard over a pile of firewood, 36 barrels of gunpowder and a fuse in his pocket. His name was Guy (or Guido) Fawkes.
If the gunpowder had exploded as planned, it would have wiped out most of the British royal family and the entire English political establishment. Nevertheless, the immediate political consequences were few. To James's credit, there was no widespread persecution of Catholics and the peace with Spain held.
But in the long term, the plot played an important part in the development of a myth. English Catholicism was a beleaguered minority faith, but in the fevered imagination of some Protestants, it became instead a vast politico-religious conspiracy masterminded by the pope in Rome, aimed not only at the conversion of the English but at the subversion of English Protestantism and English freedoms, and by the lowest possible means.
For more about the Gunpowder Plot, see Treason.
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