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'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' animated film 1937
A fairy tale tunnel and seven 'hellish miners' in a single bed
The Government seems to have invented a fairy tale that seven Catholic gentlemen spent three months trying to dig a tunnel under Parliament. It’s plainly an invention.
Cecil’s intelligencers were able to track down witnesses willing to testify that certain individuals among the plotters had stayed and met at other houses in London. But, even though there were bakers, wine-merchants, a coal-merchant and a tavern in the same block as the plotters’ house, and even though, at the time, Westminster was little more than a very large, single-street village, - and crawling, as we shall see, with Cecil’s informants - not one person before, during or after the conspiracy ever reported seeing any of the conspirators there except Guy Fawkes.
Thomas Wintour’s ‘confession’ explains that they came in late at night – there were now seven of them including Guy Fawkes - ‘and were never seen.’ Fawkes’s ‘confession’ says he stood guard. Apparently, they all slept in the little upstairs room of their house next to Parliament. Sharing its single bed. ‘All we seven lay in the house, and had shot and powder, being resolved to die in that place, before we should yield or be taken.’
And yet nobody noticed the tunnel opening under the little entry to the wall of the Parliament House, or the earth, or any of the foundation stones dug up during ninety man-weeks of labour. The plotters then emptied the earth at night, spreading it over the garden, ‘covering it with greenery and grass.’ So we have a combo of 'Snow White' and a POW escape-film!
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In the Anglo-Spanish war 1585-1604 some English Catholics fought with the Spanish eg Battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600, painted here by Sebastiaen Vrancx
Not digging a tunnel? Then what were the so-called ‘plotters’ doing?
The Government account claims that the plotters spent the winter of 1604 and the spring of 1605 digging a tunnel under the Houses of Parliament.
There is flimsy but genuine evidence that seems to agree that some, at least, of the little group of Catholic gentlemen who were eventually accused of the Gunpowder Plot, spent much of 1605 in the Netherlands, fighting for the Catholic Spanish (against the Protestant English), or at least intending to do so.
Some of them who were talking about going to join the Spanish army might in reality have been planning to raise horses and gunpowder for a Catholic rising in England. A rising is a small-scale rebellion, headed by a few nobles to express discontent. A protest much like Just Stop the Oil now.
Whatever they were doing, there is no precedent in history of ‘plots’ and ‘risings’ for some hare-brained scheme to wait around under Parliament with a pile of rotting gunpowder on the unlikely chance that the King and all his councillors might one day all show up at the same time and blow them to smithereens.
After all what would be the point of killing the monarchy, the Lords and the members of Parliament?
#gunpowderplot #treason #historypodcast #mythbusting #torture #TowerofLondon #WestminsterParliament #RobertCecil #GuyFawkes #Guido
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When something doesn't fit, look around for something that does...
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