EP 01 - Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

- Episode 01-

‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reason’

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#24 ‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality’

Friday 4 November 2022

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BLOWING UP THE GUNPOWDER PLOT

A contemporary engraving of eight of the thirteen conspirators, by Crispijn van de Passe

A fake invented by the government?

On 5 November 1605 Guy Fawkes was found in the cellar of the House of Lords in Westminster with 36 barrels of gunpowder, three matches and a tinderbox in his pocket. He was going to blow up King James I and his entire Parliament.

Or so we are usually told. The problem is that there’s not a single shred of reliable historical evidence that any of it may ever have happened.

Professional historians tend to laugh at the Gunpowder Plot and anyone who even suggests it wasn’t exactly as reported. But that’s no way for historians to behave.

Right from the very beginning, as soon as the news broke, there were plenty of well-informed people who said that it was a sham, a fake invented by the government. That, in itself, is worth knowing more about.

And besides, the Gunpowder Plot wasn’t the only plot with significant elements of faked evidence. Stuart historians tend to stick to the reigns of James I and the Stuart kings who came after him. Tudor historians tend to stop at the end of Elizabeth’s time in 1603. But if you ignore this artificial boundary and look at the period from 1570 to 1605 you at once see a pattern of this kind of plot.

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Cartoon by MAC: 'After this can we talk about my expenses?'

Just one of an astonishing number of semi-fabricated plots

Historians always overlook the astonishing number of plots in the 35 years between 1571 and 1605.

The Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot, the Parry Plot, the Babington Plot, the Lopez Plot, the Essex Plot, the Main Plot, the Bye Plot, the Essex rising and no doubt others besides. Few historians these days believe that any of these other plots was entirely what it seems.

Every one of them was a complicated, shifting, difficult-to-decypher muddle of genuine treason, naïve confusion and government entrapment. Crucial evidence kept going mysteriously missing or being inexplicably discovered.

Much of the evidence was procured through torture and would have no standing at all in a modern court. It should raise our historical eyebrows too.

We argue that the Gunpowder Plot falls exactly into this pattern of plots that were often part real and part entrapment. It is also a good story to discuss because it offers us an exceptional insight into the Court of James I. It also falls into a pattern of plots that were often part real and part entrapment.

#24 'There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality'
Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
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The key to understanding most history books on the 16th and 17th centuries written before, say, 1970 was that they were written from a Protestant point of view

Engraving of conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot being hanged, drawn and quartered in London, by Claes (Nicolaes) Jansz Visscher

But the overwhelming difficulty with the Gunpowder plot is with the evidence.

As with every historical investigation, you have to start by understanding what kind of documents you have been left with. And with this one, it is a serious challenge.

Almost everything you read in modern accounts of the Gunpowder Plot is based in large part on what has come to be known as The King’s Book. It was published in December 1605 by the king’s printer.

The King’s Book is the government’s own narrative of the way it uncovered the plot, chiefly written by Robert Cecil the Chief Minister, along with the signed confessions of two plotters, Guy Fawkes and Thomas Wintour. It is the story the Jacobean government wanted you to believe.

The confessions of Guy Fawkes and Thomas Wintour, which are the key documents in accounts of the Gunpowder Plot, were wrung out of these two men, imprisoned in the Tower of London, by the Lieutenant of the Tower, William Waad, who had by then, a very long and grisly reputation for fabricating evidence on the government’s behalf, and especially against Catholics.

If these documents had come from Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s, or from Hitler’s SS interrogations at the same time, or from an East German Stasi prison in the 1970s, or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Guantanamo Bay or any of the other torturing regimes in the present century, they would be dismissed out of hand.

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'Procession of a Guy' - do our children know the murderous origins of 5 November?

State show trials on a par with Stalin

The trials of the so-called ‘Powder-men’ in Westminster Hall were state showpieces on a par with anything staged by Stalin, or Hitler or any of those other murderous regimes. They were watched by an audience that had paid high prices and, secretly, by the King himself.

Sir Everard Digby was the only one of the accused to plead guilty, and he only did so in the hope he’d be executed by beheading rather than by hanging, being cut down and then being disembowelled and dismembered alive. He was turned down.

All the others blankly denied their confessions in court, which, according to a later chronicler, ‘excited some surprise.’

So what about other corroborating evidence? David Jardine, an antiquarian who printed the records of the trial in 1835, found that the plot was followed by an intense 6-month investigation. More than 500 statements were taken. As modern historian Mark Nicholls agrees, the odd thing about these statements, many of them made under torture or the threat of it in the Tower, is that barely a single one of them even mentions gunpowder and none of them add a single significant detail about it.

Jardine complained, when he started to write his account of the trial, ‘there is no state trial since the date of Henry VIII so barren of facts … and so totally devoid of reality.’

It was the only trial he could find where the sole surviving account was the Government’s officially printed version, which, he wrote, ‘was published, not for the purpose of conveying accurate information, but of suppressing and colouring the truth, and of circulating such a version of the story, as suited the objects of the government.’

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