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Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, It's Friday, July third, and
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this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher, and
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welcome to the grand finale of Crown Versus Colony, our
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Independence Day Week, putting the United Kingdom's worst on the stand. Now,
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we have been through some genuinely dark territory this week.
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A phantom in the fog, a house of horrors, a
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man who killed for company, and yesterday the state hanging
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an innocent boy. So today, on the eve of the
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fourth of July, I am going to do you a favor.
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We're going to end with a story that's got everything.
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A secret plot, barrels of gunpowder, a king, a betrayal,
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a midnight raid, and a man who failed so completely
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and so famously that four hundred years later his face
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is the symbol of rebellion all over the planet. And
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here's the part I love, the part that makes this
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the only possible way to close out an Independence Day Week.
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This is the story of the original strike against the
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British Crown. Tomorrow America celebrates breaking away from that same
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crown with fireworks. Tonight, let me tell you about the
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man who tried to do it with thirty six barrels
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of gunpowder and lost. This is Guy Fox. Just before
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midnight on the night of November fourth, sixteen o five,
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a search party moved through the cellars beneath the Houses
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of Parliament in London. The King's men had a tip
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that something was wrong, and down in a rented undercroft
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directly below the House of Lords, they found a tall
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man in a cloak and a wide brimmed hat, booted
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and spurred as if ready to ride, standing guard over
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a great heap of firewood and coal. They asked who
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he was. He gave his name calmly as John Johnson's servant.
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They started moving the firewood, and underneath it they found barrels,
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thirty six of them packed with gunpowder, around a ton
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and a half of it, enough to blow the House
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of Lords and everyone in it clean off the face
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of the earth. The man in the hat had a
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slow match and a watch on him the tools to
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set it off. His real name, of course, was not
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John Johnson. It was Guy Fawx, and in about twelve
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hours the King, the Queen, the heir to the throne,
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the lords, the bishops, and the members of the Commons
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would all have been sitting directly above those barrels. This
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is how close it came. Let me clear up the
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biggest myth in this whole story right away, because it's
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a good one. Guy Fox was not the mastermind of
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the gunpowder plot. He wasn't the leader, He wasn't the brains,
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He wasn't even particularly senior in the group. History made
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him the face of it for one simple reason. He's
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the one who got caught red handed sitting on the bomb.
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He was the demolition man, the hired muscle for the explosives,
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and because his was the name on everyone's lips the
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morning after, he's the one who got immortalized. So who
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was he? Guy Fawkes was a Yorkshireman born in York
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around fifteen seventy, which made him about thirty five years
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old at the time of the plot. Ray's Protestant, he
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converted to Catholicism as a young man and went off
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to fight as a soldier for Catholic Spain in its
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Long War in the Low Countries. He spent roughly a
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decade as a mercenary, and crucially he learned about gunpowder
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and siege warfare. He even started going by a more
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continental version of his name Guido. He was tough, he
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was experienced, he was a true believer and useful for
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a conspiracy. He'd been out of the country so long
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that nobody in London knew his face. He was the
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perfect man to leave alone in a cellar with a fuse.
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The actual leader, the man whose plot this really was,
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was named Robert Catesby, Charismatic, handsome, magnetic, a devout Catholic
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from a family that had suffered for its faith. Katsby
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was the one who dreamed it up and pulled the
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others in. There were thirteen conspirators in all, with names
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like Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, the Wright brothers. But it
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was Katsby's idea and Katsby's fire box just got the fame, or,
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depending how you look at it, the blame. Now here's
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where I have to be careful and fair, because this
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is not a simple villain story. To understand the gunpowder plot,
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you have to understand what it was like to be
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a Catholic in England in sixteen oh five. And the
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honest answer is it was dangerous. After England broke from
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the Catholic Church, Catholics were treated as enemies of the state.
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You could be fined into ruin just for not attending
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the Protestant church. Catholic priests were hunted and some were
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executed in horrific ways simply for saying Mas. These men
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and their families had lived under that boot for decades,
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and when King James came to the throne, they'd hope
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for relief, for tolerance. They didn't get it. So I
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want to be straight with you. The desperation behind this
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plot was real. The persecution was real. I'm not gonna
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pretend these were cartoon bad guys cackling for no reason. But,
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and this is a big butt, look at what they
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actually planned to do. They weren't planning to assassinate one tyrant.
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They were planning to wait until the state opening of
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Parliament the one day, the King, his queen, his young
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son and heir, the entire house of lords, the bishops,
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and the elected commons were all packed into one building
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and then detonate a ton and a half of gunpowder
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underneath all of them at once. That is not a
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targeted strike. That is mass slaughter. Everyone in that building
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and plenty of people near it. Guilty innocent, didn't matter.
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And the follow up plan was to grab the king's
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nine year old daughter, Princess Elizabeth and install her as
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a puppet Catholic queen. So here's where I landed. Real oppression,
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real grievance, and a response that, by any honest measure,
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was an act of terrorism that would have murdered hundreds
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of people, most of whom had done nothing. You can
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hold both of those truths at the same time, you
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should thirty six barrels. The mechanics of it were patient
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and methodical. The conspirators managed to rent a storage undercroft,
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a kind of cellar that sat directly beneath the House
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of Lord's chamber. It was perfect, and over the course
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of sixteen oh five they smuggled in barrel after barrel
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of gunpowder and buried the whole arsenal under a careful
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camouflage of firewood and coal, so that anyone glancing in
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would just see a tenant's winter fuel supply thirty six barrels,
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roughly a ton and a half of gunpowder. Modern experts
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who've studied it agree that if it had gone off,
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it would not just have leveled the House of Lords,
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it would have devastated the surrounding area and killed people's
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streets away. And the plan was beautifully, horribly simple. On
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the day Parliament opened, Guy Fawx, the explosives man, the
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soldier who knew what he was doing, would be down
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in that cellar. He would light the slow match, he'd
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have time to get clear, and the heart of the
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English government would simply cease to exist in a single thunderclap.
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All they needed was for the day to arrive without
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anyone looking under the firewood. And then, as so often happens,
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somebody talked or somebody wrote. In late October, an anonymous
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letter arrived for a Catholic nobleman, Lord Monteagle, warning him
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in vague but unmistakable terms, to stay away from the
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opening of Parliament, because the letter said they shall receive
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a terrible blow, and yet shall not see who hurts them.
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Montago did the loyal thing. He took the letter straight
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to the King's spymaster, Robert Cecil. To this day nobody
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knows for certain who wrote that letter, and that mystery
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has fed four centuries of conspiracy theories, including the juicy
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one that the king's own spy master knew about the
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plot all along, and let it ripen so he could
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crush the Catholics with maximum drama. That's never been proven,
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and I'll flag it as a theory, not a fact.
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But the letter was real and it was enough. The
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authorities searched the cellars, They found the firewood, they found
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Guy Fawx, and they found the barrels. Fox was arrested
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and taken to the Tower of London, and King James
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personally authorized his torture, instructing that they start gentle and
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work their way up to the worst of it. They
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put him on the rack. And here's a haunting little
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piece of history. We still have Fox's signature from before
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the torture, bold and clear, and his signature from after,
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a broken, trembling scrawl that can barely hold itself together.
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You can see a man's spirit get crushed in the
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space between two signatures. Meanwhile, the other conspirators had scattered north,
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hoping to raise a Catholic uprising that never came. They
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made a last desperate stand at a place called Holbesha House.
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The sheriff's men closed in and in the fight, the leader,
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Robert Catesby, the man whose plot it really was, was
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shot and killed. The others were captured or killed. The
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gunpowder plot was finished. It had never even come close
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to lighting. When we come back, the gruesome end of
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Guy Fowx, the one small mercy he managed to steal
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from his executioners, and how a man who failed at
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absolutely everything became the most famous symbol of defiance on earth.
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And then I'm gonna send you into the fourth of July.
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Stay with me, Welcome back to Daily Crime and John.
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On the twenty seventh of January sixteen oh six, the
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surviving conspirators were put on trial for high treason in
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Westminster Hall. There was never any real suspense. They were
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guilty under the law and everyone knew it. And they
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were sentenced to the punishment England reserved for traders, which
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was about as barbaric as the human imagination gets. To
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be hanged, drawn and quartered. I'll spare you the full
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anatomy of it. It was designed to be the most agonizing,
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degrading death the state could deliver, and to be done
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in public as a warning. The executions took place over
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two days at the end of January. Guy Fox was
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among the last, on the thirty first in the Old
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Palace Yard at Westminster, right across from the very Parliament
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he'd tried to destroy. And weak as he was from
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the rack, Fox managed one final act of defiance as
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he climbed the ladder to the noose. He either jumped
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or fell, and the drop broke his neck. He was
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dead before the executioners could do the rest of it.
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Even broken on the rack, the soldier found a way
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to cheat them out of the worst of his own execution.
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That's the one thing in this whole grim business he
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actually won. And then history did the strangest thing with him.
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Parliament declared the fifth of November a national day of
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thanksgiving for the King's deliverance, and the English started lighting
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bonfires to celebrate. Over the centuries, that became Bonfire Night,
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with fireworks and effigies and generations of British children chanting,
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remember remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot
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while they burned little models of Guy Fawkes on the fire.
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He became the villain of a holiday. And then in
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our own time, it flipped again. That blank, smiling Guy
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Fawkes mask got picked up by a comic, then a film,
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then protest movements around the world, until it became the
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global face of rebellion against authority itself. There's an old
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joke that Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever
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enter Parliament with honest intentions. He failed at everything he
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set out to do. He killed nobody, he blew up nothing,
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and four hundred years later he is more famous than
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almost any king who ever sat on that throne. That
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is one of the strangest afterlives in the history of crime.
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So that's the bow on the whole week, Crown versus Colony,
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five days, five faces of the United Kingdom's worst. We
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started in the Whitechapel fog with five murdered women the
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world tried to forget. We walked through the West House
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of Horrors, and we sat with the lonely man and
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the men nobody went looking for. We watched the State
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hang Derek Bentley and take forty five years to admit it.
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And we end here with the man who tried to
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blow up that very state and became a legend for losing.
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And here's my sendoff, because tomorrow's the fourth. Notice what
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these last two days have in common a rebellion against
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the British Crown that failed and got a holiday of fireworks,
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and a rebellion against the British crown that succeeded three
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thousand miles away and got its own holiday of fireworks,
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same crown, same fire in the sky. One set of
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rebels lost their heads, and the other set founded a country.
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History is a coin toss with the stakes turned all
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the way up. So tomorrow, when the skylights up, maybe
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spare a thought for how thin the line is between
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trader and founding father. It usually just comes down to
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who wins. Happy Forth, everybody, a few honest notes on
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a case that's over four hundred years old. Much of
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what we know about the Gunpowder Plot comes from confessions
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taken under torture and from accounts produced by the very
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government the plotters tried to destroy, so some details should
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be treated with caution and are debated by historians. The
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exact amount of gunpowder is usually given as thirty six barrels,
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roughly a ton and a half, but some sources cite
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different figures. Guy Fox was the explosives man, not the ringleader.
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The plot was led by Robert catesby the author of
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the anonymous Montacal Letter, has never been definitively identified, and
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the theory that the King's spymaster engineered or knowingly allowed
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the plot is just that, a theory, not established fact.
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The conspirators were tried and convicted of high treason and
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executed in sixteen oh six. We've reported the established record
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and flagged what remains uncertain, and that, my friends, is
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Crown Versus Colony. Thank you for spending Independence Day week
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with me on this little trip across the Atlantic. We'll
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be back to our regular docket of American crime and
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courtrooms after the holiday, with whatever the week brings. If
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you enjoyed this week even half as much as I
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did putting it together, here's how you can pay it forward.
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Share the series. If you've got a friend who loves