#30 'A tall and desperate fellow'

On the 4 November 1605, what we are told by the official account is ‘a small party of men’ goes to look in the storeroom under the House of Lords. Outside it they arrest Guy Fawkes, apparently with a match, a tinder box and enough powder to lay a fuse that will burn for half an hour so he can get away. Why exactly he was standing around in the middle of the night, when Parliament wasn’t due to meet until the morning, is never explained.
 
Now, according to the official government account, this small party of men, while holding Guy Fawkes, set about inspecting the storeroom. What they find is a pile of wood. In fact, among the government documents are two accounts that say there were thousands of pieces of wood. Fawkes’s ‘confession’ produced under torture - which we have to regard as just another government account - says that iron bars and stones had also been piled on top, apparently to make a better explosion. It is simply not credible that an experienced mercenary soldier like Guy Fawkes would build a bomb such as this.

You see, gunpowder goes off. Meaning, it goes damp and rotten. It’s an unstable mixture that doesn’t stay usable for long. Under the pile of wood, iron bars and stones, the 36 barrels - or was it 32 - would rapidly have decayed and become useless. The bomb would have to be built and rebuilt every time there was a possibility that the king just might be going to show up. The decayed barrels would have somehow to be got out from under the pile of wood and iron and stones and shipped away. In a street full of shops and taverns, at the heart of a borough crawling, as we’ve seen, with Cecil’s informers, the whole idea is, as historian Godfrey Anstruther put it long ago, ‘picturesque but not convincing.’

#30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

#31 Remember, remember the 5 of November

One of Cecil’s victims in 1605 was Nicholas Owen, the brilliant designer and creator of many of the refuges in which Catholic priests had hidden from Cecil’s intelligencers. Owen had been badly disfigured by torture in the 1590s. After the Gunpowder plot he was put back on the rack and tortured to death. He died on 1 March 1606. He was 44. On 25 October 1970 he was recognised as a Saint of the Catholic Church.

Robert Cecil died on 24 May 1612. He was 48. It was immediately clear that very few thought of him as the man who had saved King and Parliament from destruction. Instead, the news of his death was greeted with a flood of jeering, mocking pamphlets. ‘Fresh libels come out every day,’ wrote one Londoner. ‘Oppression, lechery, blood and pride, he lived in - and like Herod - died.’ He was never forgiven for having engineered the death of another of his enemies, the dashing Earl of Essex in 1601. Cecil was damned it seems by almost everyone as rapacious, scheming and immoral, ‘a monster of mischief.’

What is important for us that it seems that virtually nobody at the time had trusted Cecil. Nobody remembered the Gunpowder Plot or looked back to the official account of it, in which Cecil had played a central part. When he died, Cecil was remembered as lying and self-serving.
 
We’ve been trying to suggest that it’s therefore odd that historians, with all the extensive documentation of corruption and abuses that surround him, should trust him now - and above all the account we believe he constructed of the Gunpowder Plot. ­

#31 Remember, remember, the 5 of November - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

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