November 6, 2010: Guy Fawkes & Company – Questions Remain About The Gunpowder Plot.
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| Guy Fawkes: Why is this man smiling? |
“History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.” Konrad Adenauer. Yesterday, I wrote of Britain’s Guy Fawkes Night, the thankfully failed plot to literally destroy in one explosive blast the central figures of the English government, King James I of England, the Commons, and Lords.
If, the night before the planned attack, Fawkes had not been discovered attending to the explosives in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, would the 36 kegs of gunpowder have packed enough destructive power to accomplish the audacious scheme? In 2005, on the 400th anniversary of the plot, an enterprising group sought to answer that question in a British docudrama, The Gunpowder Plot: Exploding the Legend. The video below summarizes the result.
Astonishing that. Yet others have questioned the experimenters’ assumptions. In fact, Professor Ronald Hutton, a professor of history at the University of Bristol maintains:
The other reason why the plot was a guaranteed failure was simply that the powder would not have blown. When it was moved to the Tower of London magazine after Guy Fawkes was caught, it was discovered to be `decayed’; that is, it had done what gunpowder always did when left to sit for too long, and separated into its component chemical parts, rendering it harmless. If Guy had plunged in the torch with Parliament all ready above him, all that would have happened would have been a damp splutter. [For more of Professor Hutton’s interesting and credible speculations, go here.]
Yet, it happened as it happened. And the day is commemorated with fireworks, bonfires, and of course, Guy Fawkes effigies burned and scorned, like this:
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| Oliver! Oliver! Never before has a boy wanted more! Oliver! Oliver! |
“A brave bad man” Somewhat ironically, the toddler son of James I at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, later to be crowned King Charles I, became the target of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan “brave bad man” who became Lord Protector of England after engineering his trial and public beheading. The cause, partially, at least, was the usual one for the era – Protestant and Catholic mutual antipathy. . .
In the end, during 1658, Oliver Cromwell died, ending his “reign” as the Lord Protector, and was given a funeral befitting a great leader. Three years later, though, upon the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne under King Charles II, son of the beheaded Charles I, Cromwell’s body was disinterred and “executed” as a traitor at Tyburn Hill in London (although some question whether it was Cromwell’s remains that arrived at Tyburn). As a warning for all, Cromwell’s disinterred head was placed on a pike outside Westminster Abbey, and displayed for 20 years.
