Strategy and Motivation in the Gunpowder Plot

Abstract

This article seeks to develop our understanding of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot by asking a number of elementary questions. Were the plotters terrorists in any meaningful sense? Were they religious fanatics, as the Jacobean state understandably chose to portray them after the event? Was their plan built on a misguided fantasy of widespread support for a Catholic insurrection, or does the Plot perhaps have a practical coherence that lies obscured by the drama of the projected strike against Westminster? How does evidence for coherent planning square with the strong desire for revenge, running through so much of the surviving testimony? Through answers to these questions, we begin to see the Gunpowder plotters as men engaged in a calculated and demonstrably pragmatic attempt to engineer a change in regime. Their planning was robust, and to the point, while the emotional power of revenge was channelled creatively by the ringleaders. The article concludes that the odds against success were long, but not impossible.

Gods, Informers, and the Erotics of Surveillance: The Critique of Surveillance in King Lear

“…In addition to the 1603 Main and Bye Plots was the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, which may stand on par with the events of September 11, 2001, in scope, audacity, cultural impact, and counter-surveillance response. Twelve English Catholics secretly moved roughly a ton of gunpowder into the vault in the basement of Westminster Palace, where Parliament met, planning to blow up the building on the day of the Opening of Parliament, November 5, when the King, his family, and all religious and political elites would be present (Nicholls 1991(Nicholls , 2007. This would have unleashed a cataclysmic blaze upon London, the most populous city in Europe at the time.…”

“…To hunt Edgar, Gloucester marshals a spy apparatus that resembles Tudor-Stuart England's, "All ports I'll bar.… his picture / I will send far and near that all the kingdom / May have note of him," with "picture" being a printed image of his face (6.80-83). Failed assassination attempts often triggered massive counter-surveillance responses: the gates of London were locked, ports closed, and images of conspirators printed on broadsides (Nicholls 1991). Gloucester, the character known for sexual indiscretion and for getting fooled by a qui-tam informant, links the appetitive visuality associated with qui-tam to national defense, and in this way, Lear intimates that surveillance threatened what it was intended to protect.…”

Jamestown’s Relics: Sacred Presence in the English New World

“…The famous gunpowder plot of 1605, alternatively known as the "Jesuit Treason," attempted not only to kill James I, but also to spur a country revolt in the Midlands around the claims of the Catholic Princess Elizabeth. Although those involved in the plot to destroy the King and members of both houses of Parliament in one fell fireball explosion possessed diverse motives, scholarly consensus is clear that, in the words of Mark Nicholls, "every Gunpowder plotter hankered, to some degree, after a restoration of Catholicism…" 17 The instability persisted into the later part of the seventeenth century (long after Archer's death at Jamestown), with the English Civil War, the Puritan reign of Oliver Cromwell, and the ascent of the openly Catholic James II to the throne from 1685-1688. While the infamous iconoclasm of the English reformation extended to the relics of the saints, it was not as destructive as one might think.…”