Was Guy Fawkes set up?

Please to remember

Fifth of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

Tonight is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night in England. It is the day when English fathers try their best to set off fireworks in back gardens, to celebrate the foiling of the Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament during the State Opening in 1605, a story which my generation knows from the admirable Ladybird Adventures from History series. Bonfires are lit and 'guys' (from Guy Fawkes, the leader of the plot) are burnt.

Actually, this is not quite true - more and more, because of omnipresent health and safety concerns, private fireworks are discouraged by the anxious British state. Its anti-Catholic meaning also sits uncomfortably with the syncretic and relativist spirit of our age. Hallowe'en, its religious meaning forgotten, is much more congenial to opinion formers, but even children going knocking on neighbours' doors has its dangers. One sometimes feels that the British government would really like its subjects to stay at home in the evenings and watch propaganda on television.


I once met Fr. Francis Edwards, a lovely old Jesuit, who wrote a book suggesting, on circumstantial evidence, that the Gunpowder Plot was laid by Cecil, not by the Catholics, and that half of the 'plotters' were employed by Cecil and promised that they would be set free unharmed. Instead, they were all hanged, drawn and quartered. Fr. Edwards' ideas are summarised here.



This part is chilling:

Cecil promised the conspirators they would be allowed to escape or pardoned and then broke his promise. How could he convince Catesby and co they would not be executed? There was the precedent of the “Main Plot” three years previously. The conspirators in that had reached the scaffold and were kneeling in the straw and about to put their heads on the block when a royal messenger with the king’s pardon dramatically revealed himself. Cecil could have assured the gunpowder conspirators that the same thing would happen to them.

....The other conspirators were lodged in the Tower in exceptionally comfortable conditions, which was odd, because they were supposed to be murderers and traitors of the worst kind. They had plentiful food and drink and were allowed an unlimited supply of tobacco, which was then a luxury. At their trial in Westminster Hall they looked nonchalant and unconcerned. They attempted neither to justify their conspiracy nor to beg for mercy. Such conduct is compatible with the notion that they regarded the trial as just a formality and thought they were secure from execution. Their high living must have increased their sense of security. One can imagine them going to the scaffold with the same unconcern. Until almost the last, they would have assumed they were all right.

The Church of England hierarchy in those times were men of a different stamp from the bishops of our own day, who read The Guardian in the Athenaeum and talk about global warming:

A special committee, including Anglican bishops, was set up to try to devise an especially horrible and painful form of execution to fit the nature of the crime. But the members are unable to think up anything suitable and settle for the conventional hanging, drawing and quartering.

As Evelyn Waugh said, talking about the horrible martyrdom of St. Edmund Campion, the Church of England still had some way to go before it became the institution described in the novels of Anthony Trollope.