Gunpowder Treason - a 400 Year Old Lie

96 people died at the Hillsborough Stadium on 15 April 1989.  Even as the full scale of the disaster was becoming apparent, the authorities - police, politicians, the press - were concocting a story about it.  It was all caused by drunken football fans, they said.  Those same fans had picked the pockets of the dead and urinated on the paramedics who were trying to help.

We now know that that story was a pack of lies, although it took more than two decades for the truth to come out.  But what had happened was a political elite, composed of extremists, had cooked up and spun a false yarn designed to demonise a perceived enemy.  That enemy was, (a) football fans, who were seen as hooligans, and (b) the people of Liverpool, who remained obstinately opposed to the socio-economic insanity of Thatcherism.  The disaster provided an excuse for the State to denigrate those who seemed unable to fight back while, at the same time, covering up its own incompetence.

So what has that got to do with the Gunpowder Plot?

Well, we now know the truth about Hillsborough, 25 years ago, and few commentators would have the gall to repeat the lies told by the police and the government back then.  We do not, however, know the truth about the "powder treason", 409 years ago, because historians insist on repeating the lies.

The Radio Times reports that BBC2 has "just given the green light to Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot".  "It's a total retelling," says the writer, "which uses the interrogation of Fawkes's number three, Thomas Winter, who gave away the whole story."

Okay, before we go any further ...

Fawkes was not the ringleader.  That was Robert Catesby.  Guy Fawkes was essentially a hired hand.  Arguably, Thomas Wintour was Catesby's number three.  But did he give away the whole story?

"We restage the interrogation and get inside the plot, which was huge", continues the writer, Adam Kemp, breathlessly.  Restage the interrogation, hunh?  That'll be interesting.  I can only assume we will mention the fact that Thomas Wintour had been shot in the shoulder when he and his comrades were finally cornered by a local posse.  Whether he would have been capable of composing his ten-page confession in neat handwriting is open to doubt.  But the signature on the confession - a rather bold "Thomas Winter" - wasn't his own.  He spelled his name "Wintour".

Note that Adam Kemp referred to "Thomas Winter".  He's using the name used by the Jacobean government, not the individual whose name it actually was.  Which means that his "total retelling" will, in all probability, be exactly the same version of events as that which was cooked up at the time by government ministers.  It won't be a "total retelling" at all.  Just another re-tread.

He goes on: "They would have got everyone under one roof, the royal family and the entire governing elite and bishops.  There is truly nothing that can come close.  It really was big,"

Yes, it was.  It would have been enormous.  If it had happened.  And yet, truth be told, there never was even the slightest risk that the king and his lords would be blown to smithereens.  Not a chance in hell.

Let's start with the gunpowder.  It was sourced from the Tower of London, where the government (which had the monopoly on gunpowder) kept its supply under the supervision of Sir George Carew.  Carew, a government insider, had just become Baron Carew of Clopton.  He somehow managed to let Clopton House, his estate just outside Stratford-upon-Avon, to the gunpowder plotters.  Nobody seems to have thought that was odd.  But the government resolutely blocked an investigation into how the gunpowder had been removed from the Tower.

How much gunpowder was there?  Good question.  A credible source said one barrel.  Guy Fawkes confessed to secreting twenty barrels in the Parliament building.  Sir Robert Cecil, who knew more about the plot than anybody, wrote of there having been 34 barrels.  The figure eventually settled on was 36 barrels.

So nobody was quite sure how much gunpowder had been involved, and no explanation was ever given for its mysterious disappearance from the government's store.  A large quantity of gunpowder was returned to the Tower a couple of days after Fawkes's arrest and was registered as "decayed".  Its constituent elements had separated.  It would never have blown up anything, let alone the royal family and entire governing elite.  There wouldn't even have been a puff!

Reliable witnesses saw the real ringleaders - Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy - emerging from Sir Robert Cecil's house in the early hours of the morning, just days before the plot was discovered.  That's like the perpetrators of the 7/7 London bombings being spotted sneaking out of 10 Downing Street a few days before they detonated their rucksacks on crowded tubes and buses (except, of course, that the gunpowder plotters explosives were "decayed" and weren't going to blow up).  Thomas Percy himself was a government insider, in the king's service at the time.  His job was to make sure that the plot proceeded and to implicate his kinsman, the Earl of Northumberland, whom Sir Robert Cecil has sworn to destroy.

Catesby, on the other hand, spent much of the year leading up to the plot's discovery trying to trick Father Henry Garnet into condoning the plot.  The government repeatedly delayed the opening of Parliament so that Catesby would have more time to incriminate Garnet.  Catesby was aided in his attempts to entrap Garnet by William Parker, Lord Monteagle.  Monteagle was eventually credited with exposing the plot and rewarded handsomely - every mention of him in the plotters' confessions was redacted.  Both Catesby and Percy, who had engineered the plot, were killed, rather than taken alive, on the instructions of Sir Robert Cecil.

The simple fact is that the Gunpowder Plot never really was.  True, some of its members were ardent Catholics who joined what they believed would be a blow for freedom.  But the main players were government stooges (William Shakespeare - who was alarmingly close to the events - made this clear in his plays, Macbeth and Coriolanus).  In other words, the Gunpowder Plot was pretty much the same as every other plot of its time.  These supposed "plots" were "discovered" on a more-or-less annual basis, and they all followed the same pattern - a good example being the Babington Plot of 1586.  A Catholic patsy was lured into a fake conspiracy by government agents, who then "discovered" the plot which they themselves had manufactured.  There was massive publicity, and the Protestant extremists at the heart of the government got to enact the policies which they'd been hankering to put into place: the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots - a Catholic contender for the English throne - or the execution of Father Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuits in England.

The constant repetition of the government's lies about the Gunpowder Plot is an offense to history.  It amounts to a 400-year propaganda campaign, and it speaks volumes that British historians would rather regurgitate the falsehoods about Catholic militancy than investigate the truth about Protestant duplicity.

The Gunpowder Plot is more than just an iconic incident-that-didn't-happen.  It led to the English Civil War; John Pym and John Milton were obsessed with it.  Like so many others in those paranoid times, they had swallowed the lies spouted by the likes of Sir Robert Cecil (for his own personal gain).  So successful were the propagandists in broadcasting the cooked-up story of the Gunpowder Plot, it fuelled the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the fanatics for decades.  Arguably, it continues to fuel our irrational fears of some nefarious, fanatical "enemy within" which is "out to get us" because it "hates our freedom".  That sort of nonsense has been doing the rounds since the Gunpowder Plot, and it's precisely why the plot was invented.  Fear is a useful tool of government.

Historians repeat the Gunpowder Plot lie for a simple reason.  Englishness has always been difficult to define.  It's easier to explain what being "English" means in terms of what it is not - Catholic, Jewish, Irish, Scottish, French, etc. - than in terms of what it is.  That is why the English lay claim to a "tolerance" and a sense of "fair play" which they so seldom exhibit.  If they were honest with themselves, they'd have to say that the simplest way to be "English" is to hate, fear and abuse anyone who isn't.  But that problem created its own national myth, embroidered by generations of Whig historians anxious to justify every atrocity and outrage of our past as a necessary part of our Manifest Destiny.  The State had to persecute Catholics because the Catholics wanted to blow up the State (even though they never did; never actually came close).  To be English is to be Protestant.  The Catholics were, ipso facto, the enemy - like those football supporters who died at Hillsborough.  They were "not on our side", so they could be slandered.

It really is time to put the lie of the Gunpowder Plot to bed.  And I doubt very much indeed that the BBC's Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot will even try to do that.  No.  Just going by the title alone, it seems most likely that it'll be yet another repetition of the old, old lie, designed to excuse the most vicious persecution of English citizens who happened to be Catholic. 

Such a slavish acceptance and repetition of past propaganda isn't history, though.  It's telling fairy tales for political purposes.

Remember, Remember

There are three kinds of history.

The first is popular history.  This is what people can just about remember - the easily-digested, overly-simplistic view of history which was so beautifully spoofed by Sellar and Yeatman in their hilarious "Memorable History of England", 1066 And All That.

According to the popular account, a fiendish proto-terrorist named Guy Fawkes had planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday, 5 November 1605, but was caught at the last minute.  He was found lurking in an underground cellar, poised to light the fuse.  His motive?  Well, he was a Catholic.

The problem with popular history is that it is almost invariably wrong.  Fortunately - for those who are interested - there is also real history.  Usually written by academics (some of whom enjoy a sort of celebrity status), real history is considerably more detailed, and often more interesting, than the Disney-esque popular version.

Real history teaches us, for example, that Guy Fawkes was not the key player in the Gunpowder Plot.  The ringleader was Robert Catesby, originally of Lapworth in Warwickshire.  Catesby had recruited several diehard Catholics with his proposal to blow up the Houses of Parliament (along with King James and Henry, Prince of Wales, and most of the government) as an act of revenge.  Numerous swingeing anti-Catholic laws had been passed by the Parliaments of Elizabeth I.  When she died in 1603, it was fervently hoped - and widely believed - that her successor, King James VI of Scotland, would be more tolerant.  James, however, demanded more anti-Catholic legislation, and so Catesby and his secretive band resolved to destroy him and to set up his young daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, as a puppet monarch.

There was no underground cellar.  Fawkes was caught, at a little after midnight on Tuesday, 5 November 1605, in a ground floor vault.  As a professional soldier, he had been chosen to guard the vault and to light the fuse when the time came.  But even though it is his image (or a fanciful idea thereof - he actually had reddish-brown hair) which smiles inscrutably at us from a million "Anonymous" masks, he was a fairly minor player in the great conspiracy.

Still, real history has its problems, in that it too often repeats what was previously said.  And there is a third kind of history.  I think of it as "secret" history.

If popular history tells us what everyone thinks happened, and real history tells us what did happen, then the secret history explores what was actually going on.

So, did a small band of Catholic fanatics plan to blow up the Parliament building during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605?  The answer is, yes and no.

Yes, in that several of the conspirators do seem to have willingly joined the plot with the aim of putting a violent end to the State's violence against them and their co-religionists.  We cannot explain the involvement of individuals such as John Grant of Snitterfield, near Stratford-upon-Avon, and his brothers-in-law, Robert and Thomas Wintour of Huddington in Worcestershire, unless we are prepared to accept that they really did plan to blow up the ultra-Protestant bigots of King James's Parliament.

And no, in that no explosion would have happened.  We do not know how much gunpowder had been stockpiled under the Peers' Chamber (the authorities came up with differing accounts), but we do know that the gunpowder which was returned from the Parliament Building to the Tower of London on 7 November was registered as "decayed".  Basically, its chemical ingredients had separated - a natural process, and one which meant that no amount of encouragement would have caused that gunpowder to go bang.

Besides which, the man responsible for the government's monopoly of gunpowder, and the supply kept in the Tower of London, was Sir George Carew, who had recently become Baron Carew of Clopton.  His new seat - Clopton House, one mile from Stratford-upon-Avon - was promptly let to one of the gunpowder plotters, the very man indeed who had been asked by Robert Catesby to acquire a large amount of gunpowder.  Doesn't that sound a bit odd?

What about the fact that William Parker, who had recently become the 4th Baron Mounteagle, had offered his services as a reformed Catholic to King James, and was then engaged on the king's Parliamentary business ... as well as spending time with Robert Catesby, trying to get the Jesuit Superior of the Province of England to condone mass murder.  Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior, was the ultimate victim of the foiled plot.  In fact, he could be described as the intended target - if the entire plot is looked at, not as a Catholic conspiracy, but as a government-backed false flag operation or 'black op' designed to compromise and damage the Jesuit mission in England.

And further to enrich Robert Cecil, the man who really ran the government.  He was a close friend of Sir George Carew's, and he made sure that all embarrassing references to William Parker, Lord Mounteagle, in the plotter's confessions were removed (Mounteagle was also handsomely rewarded for his dubious activities).  Cecil was also said - by reliable witnesses - to have allowed both Robert Catesby (the plot's supposed mastermind) and Thomas Percy (the plotter who invariably got things moving) into his house in the wee small hours via a back entrance.  The clear implication, and it is a credible one, being that Catesby and Percy, those twin pillars of the "powder treason", were Cecil's agents.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I explore Will Shakespeare's connections with the plot and the plotters, indicating that Shakespeare (as his own writings prove) was more aware than most of what had really been going on.  The devious Robert Cecil had recruited several lapsed Catholics or Catholic patsies - Catesby, Percy and Mounteagle being just three - and used them to entrap others, including the superior of the underground Jesuit mission.

There never would have been an explosion, because the plot was always going to be "exposed" in the nick of time.  Cecil and his agents had been aware of the plot (and, if Shakespeare is to be believed, had been actively directing the key plotters) for many months.  The whole thing was a set-up.

When Parliament finally reconvened, after the gunpowder scare, if passed an Act demanding the regular annual celebration of the king's deliverance from his enemies' malice on 5 November.  The Bonfire Night festivities - which are celebrated at this time every year - are, in fact, part of a 400-year old propaganda coup.  We are meant to celebrate the failure of a few jihadists to destroy parliamentary democracy, monarchical rule and the Church of England.  But as the plot was, in reality, more of a State intelligence operation than a terrorist conspiracy, what we are really commemorating is a cruel and cynical ploy to justify the horrendous persecution of Catholics.

That's what I mean by secret history.  You might think that you're celebrating Guy Fawkes' failed attempt to blow up Parliament.  You might be slightly better informed, and realise that there were several people involved, and that a surprising number of individuals (including priests) were brutally executed as a result of the "plot".

But if you read Who Killed William Shakespeare? you're more likely to realise that we were had.  The Gunpowder Plot was propaganda, pure and simple.  It was violent, bloody, and its effects were awful (if you happened to be Catholic).  But there was no threat at all to the king and his lords.

So what, you might ask, are we really celebrating when we remember, remember (as we were told to by the very Parliament which passed the merciless anti-Catholic laws) the "gunpowder treason and plot"?  A conspiracy that never really existed?  The public butchering of priests?

Guy Fawkes was a brave man, whether you approve of his beliefs or not.  And the men who set him up, betrayed him, tortured him and then executed him were among the worst liars this country has ever produced.

Enjoy the bonfires and the fireworks.  And if you must burn anyone in effigy, please make it Robert Cecil - the real villain of the piece.

Shakespeare in Terror

How interesting!!

On the Leeds City Council website, an advertisement for a production of "Shakespeare in Terror" this November.

It's a new play, written by Helen Shay, and here's what the blurb has to say:

You've seen him in love, but what about terror?

A quick soliloquy with a skull is not always the answer, as our hapless bard - dumbstruck by writer's block - discovers in a chance meeting with a certain 'Guido Fawkes', arguably the first home-grown terrorist.  Historically possible, this brief encounter raises questions of whether words do speak louder than action - or even gunpowder.  Laced with dark magic and even darker lust (not to mention three untraditionally-glamorous witchy 'midnight hags'), this comedy-drama brings an extra bang to the firework season.

I like it!  If I could, I'd go and see it.  It sounds like a lot of fun.

And, maybe, more than fun.  Because most of my work on Who Killed William Shakespeare? started with The Scottish Play and the Gunpowder Plot.

I don't know whether or not Will Shakespeare ever met Guy Fawkes.  It doesn't really matter: Shakespeare was familiar with some of the other gunpowder plotters.  Fawkes was a professional soldier, and his role seems to have been as an adviser and someone who could light the fuse.  He wasn't the main plotter - not by any stretch of the imagination.

However, for one reason or another, Fawkes became the "face" of the Gunpowder Plot.  And he's more popular than ever.  Take the Guy Fawkes mask made famous in the V for Vendetta movie and now the public face of the Anonymous movement.  Fawkes didn't actually look like that - he wasn't quite so inscrutable, in an Asiatic sort of way, and his hair was auburn, not black - but he is, for better or for worse, the face of discontent and incipient revolution.

Shakespeare's connections with the Gunpowder Plot became the springboard for my book.  Frankly, I believe that most of the Plot was made up by the government - in particular, the utterly loathsome and creepy Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury (so it's satisfying to see that Cecil plays a role in the forthcoming comedy-drama Shakespeare in Terror).  It is not quite true to call Guy Fawkes "the first home-grown terrorist", because he came at the end of a twenty-year period of plots and conspiracies against the English State, most of which were made up by the English State and its agents simply to discredit Catholics and to justify the horrific persecution of said Catholics.

The tendency amongst historians has been to treat the Gunpowder Plot as if it were genuine, and to accept the government line that a small bunch of fanatics, led by the diabolical Fawkes, really did plan to blow the parliament sky high, using far more gunpowder than was actually necessary.  But study the records and you'll find that (a) there was no agreement at the time as to how much gunpowder was involved, and (b) the gunpowder itself was "decayed" (i.e. useless).

So, in fact, the Gunpowder Plot is very similar to the Shakespeare story.  What we're told, and what really happened, are two different things.  The historians who are happy to repeat the propaganda put out by Robert Cecil and his ilk are just as eager to misrepresent Shakespeare.  It's all part of the rich tapestry of English history - rich, and wrong.

For a better idea of what the Gunpowder Plot was all about, and how it affected Will Shakespeare (particularly his Timon of Athens, Macbeth and Coriolanus), please read Who Killed William Shakespeare?

And if you're in the Leeds area, maybe check out Shakespeare in Terror - and let me know what you think of it.  Those "untraditionally-glamourous witchy 'midnight hags'" sound good!

Except, of course, that in Shakespeare's Macbeth, the witches have beards.  They are men.  Three very powerful men, in fact.

It's all in the book.

Of Dire Combustion and Confused Events

How many barrels of gunpowder would it take not to blow up Parliament?

It's an interesting question, and one which historians who assume that there was a genuine Gunpowder Plot tend to ignore.

Here's what we know: just after midnight, on the morning of Tuesday, 5 November 1605, a tall, auburn-haired Yorkshireman was arrested in, or near, a ground-floor cellar underneath the Parliament building in Westminster.  Within hours, the authorities were anxiously hunting several men who were believed to have been complicit in a conspiracy to massacre the Lords, Bishops and members of the royal family during the State opening of Parliament later that day.

The fact is that Parliament hadn't been dissolved, so there was no actual need for an official, royal opening ceremony.  But that is by the bye.  Guy Fawkes was caught, and within a few days the rest of his co-conspirators had been captured or killed.

But how much gunpowder had been stored in the infamous vault?  The received wisdom is that 36 barrels of gunpowder were found.  So there's your answer: 36.

Except that the figure of 36 was only settled on by the government after various other figures had been bandied about.

Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, was King James's Secretary of State.  He led the investigation into the 'powder treason'.  According to Cecil, who would have known as much about the conspiracy as anybody, there were 'two Hogsheads and some 32 small barrels' of gunpowder recovered from the scene.  That's two less than the official account.

Guy Fawkes ought to have known how many barrels there were.  He was a professional soldier and munitions expert who had been guarding the vault and whose task it was to light the fuse.  In a statement dated 20 January 1606, Fawkes confessed to having secreted 'twenty whole barrels of gunpowder' in the vault.

That's not as many as the government would claim.  So was Fawkes lying?  Unlikely: he was the sort to take an oath seriously.  Besides, why would he have lied?  What good would it have done him?  He was going to die anyway.

Could it be that even Guy Fawkes had no idea how many barrels of gunpowder there were - or how many the government wanted there to have been?

After all, a well-placed source had remarked, a week after the 'plot' was discovered, that 'it is now confidently reported that there was no such matter, nor anything near it more than a barrel of powder found near the court'.

So, in fact, nobody seemed quite sure how much gunpowder was stockpiled, ready to blow Parliament to kingdom come.  Historians who confidently aver that militant Catholic fanatics had acquired 36 barrels of gunpowder are merely repeating the government propaganda of the day.

Gunpowder had been proclaimed a government monopoly in 1601.  It was stored in the Tower of London.  A quantity of gunpowder was indeed returned to 'His Majesty's Store' from the 'vault of the Parliament House' on 7 November 1605 - two days after Fawkes was arrested.  More than 800 kilogrammes was received and officially registered as 'decayed'.

In other words, the constituent elements of the gunpowder which was returned to the Tower of London had separated.  Which meant that the gunpowder was absolutely harmless.  It would never have exploded.

One man later kicked up a bit of a stink, threatening the government with legal action if they refused to let him investigate the disappearance of so much gunpowder (close to a metric ton!) from the Tower.  He was eventually given leave to look into the matter - with one proviso: his inquiry was not to extent beyond 1604.  It would seem, then, that the government was keen to avoid anyone looking too closely at how the Gunpowder Plotters had got hold of their gunpowder.

The individual who demanded an investigation was the nephew of William Parker, Lord Monteagle.  It was Monteagle who received a mysterious, cryptic letter warning him of the plot, which he took straight to Sir Robert Cecil.  Officially, that's how the government got to know about the plot, and thanks to Monteagle the authorities were able to seize Fawkes in the nick of time.  Monteagle duly became a national hero.

But Monteagle knew all about the plot already.  He had spent much of the previous summer hanging out with Robert Catesby, the plotters' ringleader, and trying to trick the Superior of the Jesuits in England, Father Henry Garnet, into authorising the plot.  Monteagle's name was judiciously removed from the confessions made by the plotters.  They had thought that he was on their side, and had no idea that he was really working for Sir Robert Cecil.

Now, here's where the fun really starts.  The government's store of gunpowder, held in the Tower of London, was the responsibility of the Lieutenant-General of Ordnance, a man called Sir George Carew.

Carew had married Joyce Clopton of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1580.  On 4 June 1605, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Carew of Clopton.  Clopton House, a mile outside Stratford, became his.  But he did not take up residence immediately.  Rather, he left a local agent - Robert Wilson of Stratford - in charge.  Wilson let Clopton House to a wealthy young horse-breeder from Suffolk, whose name was Ambrose Rookwood.  Rookwood had been recruited by the chief plotter, Robert Catesby, in the autumn of 1604 and asked to procure a quantity of gunpowder.

That summer - 1605 - Rookwood moved into Clopton House, along with John Grant of Snitterfield and Robert Wintour of Huddington.  Clopton House was rapidly converted into a well-armed stronghold by these three gunpowder plotters.  The magistrates of Stratford raided Clopton House at dawn on the morning of 6 November, but by then the plotters were gone.

So, the chain of events went something like this: Catesby contacted Ambrose Rookwood in autumn 1604, asking him to get hold of some gunpowder.  The man responsible for the government's monopoly of gunpowder was Sir George Carew, a close friend of Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary of State.

The government later refused to allow an investigation into the disappearance of gunpowder from Sir George Carew's care after 1604.

In June 1605, Sir George Carew inherited Clopton House, just outside Stratford-upon-Avon.  Within weeks, Ambrose Rookwood moved into Clopton along with two other plotters.

(Somebody else who was nearby was William Shakespeare, who bought 'one half of all tithes of corn and grain arising within the towns, villages and fields of Old Stratford, Bishopton and Welcombe' in July 1605.  He therefore owned certain rights to the fields immediately around Clopton House at the very time when the house was becoming a gunpowder plotters' hideout.)

The point, of course, is that the questions of how much gunpowder the plotters had actually acquired, how they acquired it and whether it would have exploded cannot really be definitively answered.  But we can propose some probable answers, based on the information that does exist:

1) the plotters did acquire some gunpowder, but almost certainly nothing like the 36 barrels claimed by most historians;

2) they got this powder from Sir George Carew, Lieutenant-General of Ordnance, who was working closely with Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary of State (and fanatical hater of Jesuits), and whose house near Stratford-upon-Avon was then leased to the plotters;

3) the gunpowder was 'decayed', and so the Lords, Bishops and royals were never at any real risk at all.

William Shakespeare knew that the official account of the Gunpowder Plot was sheer propaganda put out by Sir Robert Cecil and aimed at discrediting the Catholics and, particularly, the Jesuits.  That's why he wrote Coriolanus.

But, sadly, too many historians are only too happy to repeat the propaganda and ignore the anomalies and discrepancies in the government's accounts, as well as what Shakespeare (who knew some of the plotters) had to say about it all.