Guy Fawkes and the Catholic Reactionary Plot

By Jason Scott – Guy Fawkes, caught beneath London’s Parliament with enough explosives to destroy the building and everyone in it, wasn’t the anarchist revolutionary that four centuries of mythology have created.

Fawkes and his fellow plotters were moved not by revolutionary fanaticism but by the quiet desperation of oppressed Catholics who saw no other way.

The Making of a Yorkshire Catholic

Guy Fawkes was born into a comfortable Protestant family in 1570 at Stonegate, York. To all outward appearances, the Fawkes were a law-abiding Protestant family. Then Edward Fawkes, Guy’s father, died. Guy was just eight years old.

His mother remarried, this time to a Catholic, Denis Bainbridge. The young Guy was drawn strongly to his stepfather’s religion, and although he knew of the dangers, he converted to Catholicism. Fr Henry Garnet, who knew Fawkes well, would later describe him as “a man of great piety, of exemplary temperance, of mild and cheerful demeanour, an enemy of broils and disputes, a faithful friend, and remarkable for his punctual attendance upon religious observances.”

At the age of 21, the passionate young man set off to Europe to fight for Catholic Spain against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Eighty Years’ War, becoming proficient in tunnelling as well as handling explosives.

The Soldier’s Return

When Fawkes returned to England in 1604, he brought with him a decade of military experience and a continental perspective on English affairs. He found Catholic England in worse condition than when it was when he had left. James I, despite early hopes among Catholics, on account of his mother being Mary, Queen of Scots, had restored the full machinery of anti-Catholic persecution that Elizabeth had perfected.

The man who stepped off the boat at Dover was no longer the comfortable Yorkshire gentleman who had departed eleven years earlier. Continental service had transformed him into something new: a Catholic militant who understood both the necessity of desperate measures in the face of persecution and the technical skills to implement them.

The Gentleman Conspirator

In early 1604, Fawkes encountered Robert Catesby, a Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire whose family had suffered decades of persecution under the anti-Catholic laws. Catesby had a proposition that was both audacious and desperate: if the Protestant establishment couldn’t be reformed, it had to be eliminated entirely.

Catesby had already recruited a small circle of Catholic gentlemen, including Thomas Winter, John Wright and Thomas Percy, all of whom shared his vision of a Catholic restoration. Fawkes, with his military expertise and commitment to the cause, was the final piece of the puzzle. Under the alias “John Johnson”, he joined the plot that would later be known as the Gunpowder Plot.

The plan was as simple as it was shocking: to blow up the Palace of Westminster during the state opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605, killing King James I, his family, and much of the Protestant aristocracy. With the government in chaos, the conspirators hoped to spark a Catholic uprising and install a Catholic monarch, possibly James’s young daughter, Elizabeth.

Fawkes’s role was critical. His expertise in explosives made him the ideal candidate to oversee the procurement and placement of the gunpowder. More importantly, his years abroad meant he was unknown to London authorities. While the other conspirators were English gentlemen whose Catholic sympathies were suspected, Fawkes could move freely in the capital.

Using his alias, Fawkes rented a house next to Parliament and began the methodical work of accumulating explosives. The plotters leased a cellar directly beneath the House of Lords, where Fawkes carefully stored 36 barrels of gunpowder — enough to reduce the building to rubble.

The Fatal Betrayal

For months, the plot proceeded without detection. Fawkes, in his role as John Johnson, became a familiar figure around Parliament, a quiet servant who paid his rent promptly and caused no trouble. His neighbours saw a cheerful, reliable man who went about his business without drawing attention.

The conspiracy might have succeeded but for a single anonymous letter. On October 26, 1605, Lord Monteagle, brother-in-law of plotter Francis Tresham, received a mysterious warning at his home in Hoxton. The letter, delivered by an unknown messenger, urged him to skip Parliament’s opening session: “They shall receive a terrible blow this parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them.”

While it is impossible to know for certain who actually sent the note, Catesby suspected Tresham. Catesby threatened to kill Tresham, but Tresham managed to convince his leader of his innocence, though he was never quite able to convince historians.

Some conspirators fled to the Midlands, where they hoped to raise a Catholic rebellion. Others, including Fawkes, insisted on proceeding with the original plan.

Monteagle, unsure of the letter’s intent but alarmed by its tone, delivered it to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, the king’s spymaster, who was already on edge about Catholic conspiracies. Cecil briefed King James, who, fearing assassination, ordered a search of the Palace of Westminster. On the night of November 4, 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet led a patrol through the undercroft beneath the House of Lords. There, they found Fawkes, still posing as John Johnson, standing guard over a suspiciously large pile of firewood. A closer look revealed the 36 barrels of gunpowder, along with fuses and a pocket watch, betraying Fawkes’s plan to time the explosion with precision.

Fawkes was arrested on the spot and taken to the Tower of London. Initially defiant, he gave only his alias and claimed to be acting alone. But under relentless torture — ordered by King James and including the rack — he broke, revealing the full scope of the plot and the names of his co-conspirators over several agonising days. The revelation sent shockwaves through the government. Catesby, Tresham, and others fled to the Midlands, hoping to rally Catholic support for a rebellion. Their hopes were dashed.

The surviving plotters, including Fawkes, faced trial in January 1606. Sir Edward Coke, the attorney general, prosecuted them for high treason, presenting the gunpowder barrels and Fawkes’s confessions as irrefutable evidence. The trial was a formality; the outcome was never in doubt. On January 31, 1606, Fawkes, along with Thomas Winter, Ambrose Rookwood, and Robert Keyes, were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. At the scaffold in Westminster’s Old Palace Yard, Fawkes, weakened by torture but resolute, climbed the ladder and leapt, breaking his neck and sparing himself the gruesome dismemberment that followed for the others.

The government wasted no time in capitalising on the plot’s failure. New anti-Catholic laws tightened the screws on an already oppressed community, with heavier fines, property seizures, and restrictions on Catholic worship. Fr Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest with tangential ties to the plotters, was arrested and executed, his involvement exaggerated to justify broader persecution. The Gunpowder Plot became a propaganda triumph for the Protestant regime, cementing Catholics as a perpetual threat in the public imagination.

The Fawkes Myth

The Gunpowder Plot failed spectacularly, but Guy Fawkes’s name endured, twisted by time into a symbol of rebellion. Every November 5, his effigy is burned on bonfires across Britain during Guy Fawkes Night, a ritual celebrating the plot’s defeat.

As we seek to understand this complex historical figure, it’s important to note that Fawkes was not an anarchist or revolutionary in the modern sense. He was a Catholic soldier, driven by faith and the crushing weight of persecution to an act of desperation. One may argue about his methods, especially from our moral perspective today, but his goal was not to tear down society but to restore what he saw as the true faith. As fireworks light the sky each November, the real Guy Fawkes — a man of conviction, caught in a brutal religious divide — deserves more than a caricature. He was neither a villainous traitor nor a heroic freedom fighter, but a product of his time, pushed to extremes by a world that offered no middle ground.