On 20 May , the conspirators met and decided on their plan. In March they rented a ground floor cellar, which was directly beneath the House of Lords.
Over the coming months, they filled this with 36 barrels of gunpowder. Guy Fawkes, who had years of munitions experience after serving in the Spanish Army, stayed behind to light the fuse. However, Westminster was searched and the gunpowder was discovered before it could be ignited by Fawkes.
He was arrested and tortured, before he and seven other conspirators were hung, drawn and quartered for high treason. The others fled to the Midlands, where they were either captured or died fighting. The Plotters were kind of okay with a spot of government oppression, actually: they just thought that the oppressed Catholics should be the ones doing it. To that end, they decided to blow up the House of Lords during the state opening of parliament.
This would knock out the king and most of his ministers, and open the way for nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth to become puppet queen of a new Catholic regime, backed by the mighty Spanish Empire. Incidentally, the fact they wanted to supplant the regime, not destroy it, makes Guido Fawkes a painfully good name for that libertarian blog.
The only reason Fawkes himself is the one who became most associated with the plot is because he was the poor mug who got lumbered with the job of guarding the barrels. When the plot was discovered, he was the one forced to explain how it was he came to be shiftily loitering next to 20 barrels of gunpowder, holding a packet of matches. They wanted to replace an oppressive Protestant regime with an oppressive Catholic one, and were willing to commit mass slaughter to do it.
In other words, Guy Fawkes was a religious terrorist, and not even one of the most important ones. Today, the annual ritual is more festive and fun than religious and monarchical. Even Fawkes himself has taken on new meaning, becoming best known around the world not as a would-be religious extremist and terrorist, but as a populist hero.
His life has been romanticized in film , his likeness has been preserved in masks , and his legacy has morphed into an almost mythical tale of anti-government rebellion, anarchy, and subversion. How we remember Fawkes, as both a person and a symbol, presents a case study for how the meaning of historical events can be bent to serve the religious, political, and cultural needs of the present. But it also presents a fundamental question about how much is too much historical alteration.
The Guy Fawkes celebrations are, paradoxically, rooted in his failure. Though born into a Protestant family in York, in the north of England, Fawkes converted to Catholicism in his teens. At the time, Catholics suffered severe repression across the country and were barred from voting, holding public office, and owning land.
The religious persecution prompted Fawkes to leave England for the Netherlands, where he served in the army for Catholic-ruled Spain. As he rose in the ranks, Fawkes became notorious for both his skill as a soldier and his handling of explosives—a talent that caught the eye of a fellow English Catholic, Robert Catesby.
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