Terrorism in the early modern world was rather different from terrorism today. In the first place, there wasn’t any dynamite or automatic weaponry. It was harder to kill. In the second place, the idea of killing people indiscriminately, without regard to their identity, didn’t seem to occur to anyone yet. But still, there was lots of violence using terrorist tactics.
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Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662) was the charismatic daughter of King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) and Anna of Denmark. She married the Calvinist Frederick V, Elector Palatine, at age 16, and lived happily in Heidelberg, Germany, for six years before being crowned Queen of Bohemia at 23 and moving to Prague.
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The conspirators in what we now know as the Gunpowder Plot failed in their aspiration to blow up the House of Lords on the occasion of the state opening of parliament in the hope of killing the King and a multitude of peers. Why do we continue to remember the plot? The bonfires no longer articulate anti-Roman Catholicism, though this attitude formally survived until 2013 in the prohibition against the monarch or the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic.
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The fifth of November is not just an excuse to marvel at sparklers, fireworks, and effigies; it is part of a national tradition that is based on one of the most famous moments in British political history. The Gunpowder Plot itself was actually foiled on the night of Monday 4 November, 1605. However, throughout the following day, Londoners were asked to light bonfires in order to celebrate the failure of the assassination attempt on King James I of England. Henceforth, the fifth of November has become known as ‘Bonfire Night’ or even ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ – named after the most posthumously famous of the thirteen conspirators. Guy Fawkes became the symbol for the conspirators after being caught during the failed treason attempt. For centuries after 1605, boys creating a cloaked effigy – based on Guy Fawkes’ disguised appearance in the Vaults at the House of Lords – have been asking for “a penny for the Guy”.
Below is a timeline that describes the events leading up to the failed Gunpowder Plot and the execution of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators. If you would like to learn more about Bonfire Night, you can explore the characters behind the Gunpowder Plot, the traditions associated with it, or simply learn how to throw the best Guy Fawkes Night party.
Feature image credit: Guy Fawkes, by Crispijn van de Passe der Ältere. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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By Ian Donaldson
‘Of all styles he loved most to be named honest, and hath of that an hundred letters so naming him’, wrote Ben Jonson’s Scottish friend, William Drummond, after Jonson had visited him at his castle at Hawthornden on the River Esk, seven miles south of Edinburgh, in 1618. ‘Honest’ seems a reasonable word to use in relation to Jonson’s character. Those closest to him complained at times that he was vain, egotistical, boastful, a bit of a bully, and that he drank too much, but never accused him of deceit. But it’s possible none the less to sense a certain strain within this reported self-description. If you’re an honest man, why would you need a hundred letters testifying to this fact? Why would you want not merely to be honest, but to be named as honest?
One possible explanation could be that you were required to appear in a court of law or before some other tribunal where your integrity, challenged by others, needed to be formally vouched for. Throughout his career Jonson was indeed in constant trouble with the authorities, and obliged repeatedly to assert that his satirical writings weren’t seditious, that they weren’t aimed at particular persons, and weren’t likely to endanger the security of the state. One of his first theatrical ventures, a now-lost comedy called The Isle of Dogs, written in collaboration with Thomas Nashe and performed at the Swan theatre in 1597, landed him and two fellow-players in Marshalsea prison on charges of sedition and ‘lewd and mutinous behaviour’, and provoked an edict from the Privy Council declaring that all theatrical activity in London should be henceforth suspended — as for several months it was — and that all London playhouses be ‘plucked down’: as happily, in the end, they were not. Had the edict been fully carried out, the world would never have seen such works as Hamlet and King Lear and Macbeth and The Tempest, Volpone and The Alchemist, The Changeling and The Revenger’s Tragedy: plays from the richest theatrical period England has ever known.
A year later Jonson was back in jail again on a charge of manslaughter, having killed in a sword-fight one of the players with whom he’d been imprisoned the previous summer. Expecting soon to be hanged, he rashly converted to Catholicism, but was released after pleading benefit of clergy: an archaic legal device which allowed for a stay of execution if you could prove you were literate by reading the first verse of Psalm 51 (or if you were cunning, by committing that verse to memory). In the years that followed, Jonson was in renewed trouble with the authorities. He was hauled before the Privy Council on charges of ‘popery and treason’ for his tragedy of Sejanus; summoned to the Consistory Courts for recusancy (failing to receive the Anglican communion); and clapped in jail once more for his comedy Eastward Ho!, written in collaboration with his friends George Chapman and John Marston, that contained some glancing satire on the powerful Scottish members of James’s court. ‘The report was they should then had their ears cut and noses’, Jonson later told his friend William Drummond, but once again he and his collaborators managed to escape the expected punishment. Throughout the latter part of his career, Jonson – now England’s most celebrated writer — was quizzed by the civil and religious authorities about a number of his plays, and brought before the Attorney-General on suspicion of having written verses in praise of John Felton, the assassin of Charles I’s favourite courtier, the deeply unpopular George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. All of these charges Jonson managed successfully to deflect and to deny.
The Gunpowder Plot
Never was Jonson’s reputation more endangered than in relation to a business in which he was
