The Gunpowder Plot

On This Day in History Shit Went Down: November 5, 1605

Guy Fawkes wasn’t the leader of the plot to blow the ever-loving shit out of the House of Lords and send them all off to meet their version of the Lord. Guy was the explosives guy. He was doing it because his version of the Lord wasn’t being tolerated, so have a few dozen barrels of kaboom-powder, you Protestant fucks.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: November 5, 1605--

In 1603, James I became king of England, succeeding the childless Elizabeth I. James’s mom was Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had executed in 1587 for trying to have her assassinated. That’s called regicide, FYI. Anyway, Mary had been a devout Catholic, and English Catholics, who had been treated like shit by Elizabeth, were hopeful the new king would be more tolerant of them as an homage to his mom, or something, but James was all nah fuck you guys.

The leader of the Gunpowder Plot was a prominent English Catholic named Robert Catesby, and he was pissed at James for not being nicer to Catholics, so he decided to blow some shit up. Charismatic and influential, he brought several other conspirators into the plot, including Fawkes, who had ten years of military experience and knew how to make things go boom.

The plan was to blow up the House of Lords on November 5, 1605, during the State Opening of Parliament, which would be followed by a popular revolt in middle England and then they’d install James’s nine-year-old daughter as a puppet queen and tell her Catholics = good even though we regicided your dad so be nice.

It didn’t work out.

One of the conspirators didn’t want one of the lords, Monteagle, to die, so he sent him a vague letter that basically said yo, skip this parliament cuz bad shit’s gonna happen. That prompted a search of the House of Lords and lo and behold who is this mustachioed mofo guarding these thirty-six barrels of aristocrat-explode waiting to a light a fuse? Guy Fawkes was arrested, the plot thwarted.

Fawkes was tortured for a few days to get him to reveal the nature of the plot and the names of his co-conspirators. On November 8, Catesby went down in a blaze of glorious gunfire, refusing to be taken alive. Fawkes and other conspirators were executed the following January in typical messy, painful, seventeenth-century English fashion. As a fuck-you to Catesby, the authorities dug him up and put his head on a spike outside the House of Lords.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.