CROWN V COLONY — Remember, Remember: How Guy Fawkes Tried to Blow Up Parliament and Became a Legend Anyway

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, It's Friday, July third, and this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher, and welcome to the grand finale of Crown Versus Colony, our Independence Day Week, putting the United Kingdom's worst on the stand. Now, we have been through some genuinely dark territory this week. A phantom in the fog, a house of horrors, a man who killed for company, and yesterday the state hanging an innocent boy. So today, on the eve of the fourth of July, I am going to do you a favor. We're going to end with a story that's got everything.

0:44 A secret plot, barrels of gunpowder, a king, a betrayal, a midnight raid, and a man who failed so completely and so famously that four hundred years later his face is the symbol of rebellion all over the planet. And here's the part I love, the part that makes this the only possible way to close out an Independence Day Week. This is the story of the original strike against the British Crown. Tomorrow America celebrates breaking away from that same crown with fireworks. Tonight, let me tell you about the man who tried to do it with thirty six barrels of gunpowder and lost. This is Guy Fox. Just before midnight on the night of November fourth, sixteen o five, a search party moved through the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament in London. The King's men had a tip that something was wrong, and down in a rented undercroft directly below the House of Lords, they found a tall man in a cloak and a wide brimmed hat, booted and spurred as if ready to ride, standing guard over a great heap of firewood and coal. They asked who he was. He gave his name calmly as John Johnson's servant.

1:55 They started moving the firewood, and underneath it they found barrels, thirty six of them packed with gunpowder, around a ton and a half of it, enough to blow the House of Lords and everyone in it clean off the face of the earth. The man in the hat had a slow match and a watch on him the tools to set it off. His real name, of course, was not John Johnson. It was Guy Fawx, and in about twelve hours the King, the Queen, the heir to the throne, the lords, the bishops, and the members of the Commons would all have been sitting directly above those barrels. This is how close it came. Let me clear up the biggest myth in this whole story right away, because it's a good one. Guy Fox was not the mastermind of the gunpowder plot. He wasn't the leader, He wasn't the brains, He wasn't even particularly senior in the group. History made him the face of it for one simple reason. He's the one who got caught red handed sitting on the bomb.

2:55 He was the demolition man, the hired muscle for the explosives, and because his was the name on everyone's lips the morning after, he's the one who got immortalized. So who was he? Guy Fawkes was a Yorkshireman born in York around fifteen seventy, which made him about thirty five years old at the time of the plot. Ray's Protestant, he converted to Catholicism as a young man and went off to fight as a soldier for Catholic Spain in its Long War in the Low Countries. He spent roughly a decade as a mercenary, and crucially he learned about gunpowder and siege warfare. He even started going by a more continental version of his name Guido. He was tough, he was experienced, he was a true believer and useful for a conspiracy. He'd been out of the country so long that nobody in London knew his face. He was the perfect man to leave alone in a cellar with a fuse.

3:49 The actual leader, the man whose plot this really was, was named Robert Catesby, Charismatic, handsome, magnetic, a devout Catholic from a family that had suffered for its faith. Katsby was the one who dreamed it up and pulled the others in. There were thirteen conspirators in all, with names like Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, the Wright brothers. But it was Katsby's idea and Katsby's fire box just got the fame, or, depending how you look at it, the blame. Now here's where I have to be careful and fair, because this is not a simple villain story. To understand the gunpowder plot, you have to understand what it was like to be a Catholic in England in sixteen oh five. And the honest answer is it was dangerous. After England broke from the Catholic Church, Catholics were treated as enemies of the state.

4:50 You could be fined into ruin just for not attending the Protestant church. Catholic priests were hunted and some were executed in horrific ways simply for saying Mas. These men and their families had lived under that boot for decades, and when King James came to the throne, they'd hope for relief, for tolerance. They didn't get it. So I want to be straight with you. The desperation behind this plot was real. The persecution was real. I'm not gonna pretend these were cartoon bad guys cackling for no reason. But, and this is a big butt, look at what they actually planned to do. They weren't planning to assassinate one tyrant. They were planning to wait until the state opening of Parliament the one day, the King, his queen, his young son and heir, the entire house of lords, the bishops, and the elected commons were all packed into one building and then detonate a ton and a half of gunpowder underneath all of them at once. That is not a targeted strike. That is mass slaughter. Everyone in that building and plenty of people near it. Guilty innocent, didn't matter.

5:58 And the follow up plan was to grab the king's nine year old daughter, Princess Elizabeth and install her as a puppet Catholic queen. So here's where I landed. Real oppression, real grievance, and a response that, by any honest measure, was an act of terrorism that would have murdered hundreds of people, most of whom had done nothing. You can hold both of those truths at the same time, you should thirty six barrels. The mechanics of it were patient and methodical. The conspirators managed to rent a storage undercroft, a kind of cellar that sat directly beneath the House of Lord's chamber. It was perfect, and over the course of sixteen oh five they smuggled in barrel after barrel of gunpowder and buried the whole arsenal under a careful camouflage of firewood and coal, so that anyone glancing in would just see a tenant's winter fuel supply thirty six barrels, roughly a ton and a half of gunpowder. Modern experts who've studied it agree that if it had gone off, it would not just have leveled the House of Lords, it would have devastated the surrounding area and killed people's streets away. And the plan was beautifully, horribly simple. On the day Parliament opened, Guy Fawx, the explosives man, the soldier who knew what he was doing, would be down in that cellar. He would light the slow match, he'd have time to get clear, and the heart of the English government would simply cease to exist in a single thunderclap.

7:29 All they needed was for the day to arrive without anyone looking under the firewood. And then, as so often happens, somebody talked or somebody wrote. In late October, an anonymous letter arrived for a Catholic nobleman, Lord Monteagle, warning him in vague but unmistakable terms, to stay away from the opening of Parliament, because the letter said they shall receive a terrible blow, and yet shall not see who hurts them. Montago did the loyal thing. He took the letter straight to the King's spymaster, Robert Cecil. To this day nobody knows for certain who wrote that letter, and that mystery has fed four centuries of conspiracy theories, including the juicy one that the king's own spy master knew about the plot all along, and let it ripen so he could crush the Catholics with maximum drama. That's never been proven, and I'll flag it as a theory, not a fact.

8:28 But the letter was real and it was enough. The authorities searched the cellars, They found the firewood, they found Guy Fawx, and they found the barrels. Fox was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, and King James personally authorized his torture, instructing that they start gentle and work their way up to the worst of it. They put him on the rack. And here's a haunting little piece of history. We still have Fox's signature from before the torture, bold and clear, and his signature from after, a broken, trembling scrawl that can barely hold itself together. You can see a man's spirit get crushed in the space between two signatures. Meanwhile, the other conspirators had scattered north, hoping to raise a Catholic uprising that never came. They made a last desperate stand at a place called Holbesha House.

9:17 The sheriff's men closed in and in the fight, the leader, Robert Catesby, the man whose plot it really was, was shot and killed. The others were captured or killed. The gunpowder plot was finished. It had never even come close to lighting. When we come back, the gruesome end of Guy Fowx, the one small mercy he managed to steal from his executioners, and how a man who failed at absolutely everything became the most famous symbol of defiance on earth. And then I'm gonna send you into the fourth of July. Stay with me, Welcome back to Daily Crime and John.

10:01 On the twenty seventh of January sixteen oh six, the surviving conspirators were put on trial for high treason in Westminster Hall. There was never any real suspense. They were guilty under the law and everyone knew it. And they were sentenced to the punishment England reserved for traders, which was about as barbaric as the human imagination gets. To be hanged, drawn and quartered. I'll spare you the full anatomy of it. It was designed to be the most agonizing, degrading death the state could deliver, and to be done in public as a warning. The executions took place over two days at the end of January. Guy Fox was among the last, on the thirty first in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, right across from the very Parliament he'd tried to destroy. And weak as he was from the rack, Fox managed one final act of defiance as he climbed the ladder to the noose. He either jumped or fell, and the drop broke his neck. He was dead before the executioners could do the rest of it.

11:00 Even broken on the rack, the soldier found a way to cheat them out of the worst of his own execution. That's the one thing in this whole grim business he actually won. And then history did the strangest thing with him. Parliament declared the fifth of November a national day of thanksgiving for the King's deliverance, and the English started lighting bonfires to celebrate. Over the centuries, that became Bonfire Night, with fireworks and effigies and generations of British children chanting, remember remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot while they burned little models of Guy Fawkes on the fire. He became the villain of a holiday. And then in our own time, it flipped again. That blank, smiling Guy Fawkes mask got picked up by a comic, then a film, then protest movements around the world, until it became the global face of rebellion against authority itself. There's an old joke that Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions. He failed at everything he set out to do. He killed nobody, he blew up nothing, and four hundred years later he is more famous than almost any king who ever sat on that throne. That is one of the strangest afterlives in the history of crime.

12:20 So that's the bow on the whole week, Crown versus Colony, five days, five faces of the United Kingdom's worst. We started in the Whitechapel fog with five murdered women the world tried to forget. We walked through the West House of Horrors, and we sat with the lonely man and the men nobody went looking for. We watched the State hang Derek Bentley and take forty five years to admit it. And we end here with the man who tried to blow up that very state and became a legend for losing. And here's my sendoff, because tomorrow's the fourth. Notice what these last two days have in common a rebellion against the British Crown that failed and got a holiday of fireworks, and a rebellion against the British crown that succeeded three thousand miles away and got its own holiday of fireworks, same crown, same fire in the sky. One set of rebels lost their heads, and the other set founded a country.

13:18 History is a coin toss with the stakes turned all the way up. So tomorrow, when the skylights up, maybe spare a thought for how thin the line is between trader and founding father. It usually just comes down to who wins. Happy Forth, everybody, a few honest notes on a case that's over four hundred years old. Much of what we know about the Gunpowder Plot comes from confessions taken under torture and from accounts produced by the very government the plotters tried to destroy, so some details should be treated with caution and are debated by historians. The exact amount of gunpowder is usually given as thirty six barrels, roughly a ton and a half, but some sources cite different figures. Guy Fox was the explosives man, not the ringleader.

14:06 The plot was led by Robert catesby the author of the anonymous Montacal Letter, has never been definitively identified, and the theory that the King's spymaster engineered or knowingly allowed the plot is just that, a theory, not established fact. The conspirators were tried and convicted of high treason and executed in sixteen oh six. We've reported the established record and flagged what remains uncertain, and that, my friends, is Crown Versus Colony. Thank you for spending Independence Day week with me on this little trip across the Atlantic. We'll be back to our regular docket of American crime and courtrooms after the holiday, with whatever the week brings. If you enjoyed this week even half as much as I did putting it together, here's how you can pay it forward.

14:55 Share the series. If you've got a friend who loves history or true crime, send them the whole Crown Versus Colony run and let them binge it over the long weekend. That's five episodes to get lost in. Word of mouth is genuinely how this show grows, and it costs you nothing. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment for me down below. Tell me which of the five cases this week got under your skin the most. The Ripper, the Wes, Nilsen, Bentley or Fox. I read them, and I want to know wherever else you're listening on YouTube or anywhere a rating helps new people find us. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been daily Crime and Justice, and this has been Crown versus Colony. Have a safe and happy Fourth of July. Light something up, hug somebody you love, and remember how thin the line really is. Do better.