The accession of James I of England in March 1603 had disappointed the English Catholic recusant minority. James — a Protestant raised Calvinist — had been expected by his Catholic correspondents during the 1590s and early 1600s to grant some toleration to English Catholics. Within 18 months of his coronation he had instead reaffirmed the existing recusancy penalties: heavy fines for Catholics who refused to attend Anglican services, imprisonment for second offences, and the death penalty for ordained Catholic clergy who entered England.
In May 1604 a small group of English Catholic gentry led by Robert Catesby — a Warwickshire landowner whose Catholic father had served imprisonment for recusancy — began planning an assassination of the king and the senior English Protestant political class at the next State Opening of Parliament.
The plot
The conception was uncommonly ambitious. The plotters intended to blow up the House of Lords chamber during the State Opening — the one annual occasion at which the king, the heir apparent, the queen, the Privy Council, the bishops, the senior English aristocracy, and the elected Commons were all simultaneously assembled in one room. The death of the entire senior Protestant political establishment in a single explosion would create a power vacuum that the Catholic plotters intended to fill by installing James’s 9-year-old daughter Princess Elizabeth (held at Coombe Abbey near Coventry) as Catholic-regent monarch under the political direction of a senior Catholic noble.
The technical execution required gunpowder. Guy Fawkes — a Yorkshire-born English convert to Catholicism who had served as an explosives demolition specialist in the Spanish Army of Flanders for ten years — was recruited as the demolition expert in spring 1604. He returned to England under the alias “John Johnson.”
The plotters rented a cellar directly under the House of Lords in March 1605 from a Westminster tenant named John Whynniard. Over the spring and summer of 1605 they moved 36 barrels of gunpowder — approximately 2,500 pounds, enough to demolish the entire House of Lords building and portions of the adjacent buildings — into the cellar under cover of darkness. By autumn the gunpowder was in place. Fawkes was the man assigned to light the fuse.
The State Opening was scheduled for 5 November 1605 at 11 a.m.
The Monteagle Letter
On 26 October 1605, ten days before the State Opening, a Catholic Member of Parliament named William Parker, Baron Monteagle, received an anonymous letter at his Hoxton house warning him to absent himself from the State Opening:
My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift off your attendance of this Parliament… they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them.
The author of the letter has never been securely identified. The leading candidates are Catesby’s brother-in-law Francis Tresham (who had been recruited late into the plot and who was Monteagle’s first cousin) and an unidentified plotter who had developed cold feet. Tresham died in the Tower of London in December 1605 of an apparent urinary tract infection before he could be tortured into a definite identification.
Monteagle gave the letter to the king’s chief minister Robert Cecil within hours of receiving it. Cecil and James I discussed it on 1 November 1605 and agreed that the Lords cellars should be searched.
Midnight 4-5 November
A first search of the Lords cellars on the afternoon of 4 November 1605, led by the Lord Chamberlain Earl of Suffolk, found Guy Fawkes (under his “John Johnson” alias) in the gunpowder cellar with a pile of firewood. He told Suffolk that the firewood belonged to his master and that he was the master’s caretaker. Suffolk left.
A second search at midnight on 4-5 November, led by Sir Thomas Knyvet on the king’s direct instruction, found Fawkes still in the cellar wearing a cloak, a hat, and spurs (he had been preparing to flee). Knyvet’s men found, under the firewood, the 36 barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes was arrested. The State Opening was eleven hours away.
Holbeche House
Fawkes was carried to the Tower of London and interrogated under torture from 5 November onwards. His initial deposition — which named only himself — collapsed within three days under the rack. By 9 November he had named the entire conspiracy.
Robert Catesby and the other senior plotters had fled north from London on 5 November when news of Fawkes’s arrest reached them. They were cornered at Holbeche House in Staffordshire on 8 November 1605. A keg of gunpowder being dried in front of the house’s open fire ignited prematurely, blinding several of the plotters. The royalist sheriff’s posse stormed the house. Catesby was killed by a single musket ball; the surviving plotters were captured.
The eight surviving conspirators — Fawkes, Thomas Wintour, Robert Wintour, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby, Robert Keyes, and Thomas Bates — were tried at Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606 before a special commission. The trial took approximately one day. All eight were convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
The executions took place over two days. Digby, Robert Wintour, Grant, and Bates were executed at St Paul’s Churchyard on 30 January 1606. Fawkes, Thomas Wintour, Rookwood, and Keyes were executed at Old Palace Yard, Westminster (directly in front of the House of Lords they had intended to demolish) on 31 January 1606.
Fawkes, going last, broke his own neck by leaping from the gallows ladder before the hangman could complete the slow-strangulation phase that preceded the disembowelling. He died instantly. The subsequent quartering was on his corpse rather than on a living man.
5 November
The Observance of 5th November Act of 1606 made 5 November an annual statutory day of thanksgiving in England — the only statutory liturgical celebration ever added to the Church of England calendar by Parliament. The act was repealed in 1859 but the public observance has continued without statutory backing.
The annual searching of the Westminster cellars by the Yeomen of the Guard before each State Opening of Parliament is a continuous ceremonial practice since 1605. The 2025 State Opening on 10 December was preceded by the same ceremonial search.
The 36 barrels of gunpowder were forfeited to the Crown and used in the routine 1606 munitions inventory of the Tower of London. They had been ten years old by November 1605 and might not, modern Royal Armouries ballistic analysis has suggested, have produced the full explosive effect the plotters had anticipated. The blast would still have killed everyone in the House of Lords chamber. It would simply have left the rear cellars partially intact.