Why guy fawkes was guilty

Dangerous and risky but the conspirators were motivated men and it could have happened. The conspirators used false names so hiring out property near to the Houses of Parliament would not have been that difficult. Thomas Percy had contacts in Parliament and these were almost certainly used to get the house there and later the cellar where the gunpowder was actually put. The soldier who shot Percy and Catesby was in a firefight in which he may have been shot and killed himself.

Why risk your own life against such desperate people? Was the 10p a day for life merely a generous reward for services to a grateful king? Also, if Fawkes and company had been set-up by, why did he not say so at his execution when he could have said something? Possibly he was not in a fit enough state to say anything; also who would have believed him as he had been castigated as the evil conspirator to kill the king? It may be that the conspirators simply acted alone and then got caught.

The confession of Fawkes does not mention at all any claim that he was a dupe of the government. This core group then secures the services of a number of men, unaware that the plot is a set-up, to take the fall.

Mark Nicholls, fellow in history at St John's College, Cambridge, notes that theories "that the government either knew of the conspiracy from an early stage, or that it actually manipulated the agents through one or more agents provocateurs" are "as old as the treason itself".

Writing as Guy Fawkes's biographer in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Dr Nicholls says such theories "draw unwarranted conclusions from the surviving evidence" and "fail to advance any credible motive for such chicanery". Start with the motive. Those who believe the Crown was involved argue that the king's agents were eager to cause an anti-Catholic frenzy that would allow them to pass a raft of repressive measures and shore up support for the king - who was only recently arrived from Scotland.

Robert Cecil was a well-known anti-Catholic propagandist. His father, William, had performed a similar function for Elizabeth I. Leanda de Lisle, author of the book After Elizabeth: How James King of Scots Won the Crown of England in , says that the Cecils "provoked conspiracies and were involved in a particular propaganda line against Catholics from the s".

Did Robert Cecil tell the conspirators they would be immune from execution? Was he the source of the letter to Lord Monteagle? Dr Nicholls is sceptical: "If this was a fashioned plot, it was extraordinarily ham-fisted. He argues that those who would charge shadowy state forces with malicious intent ignore a central truth - that the revelation of the plot was "hugely embarrassing".

James had promised to leave Catholics alone, provided they practised in private and affirmed their loyalty to the Crown publicly. The fact that a group of Catholics had conspired to kill the king - and a goodly portion of the country's senior political leadership - was hardly the advertisement for the unity of the new joint kingdom that its monarch desired. Nor did the fact that they almost succeeded inspire confidence. Would a government inside-job have wanted to display the vulnerability of the king?

And far from seeking to immediately repress the Catholic population, in proroguing Parliament on the 9 November James - with calculated magnanimity - told his nobles to go back to their lands and reassure the people that it was a minority of Catholics who were responsible. Where the modern conspiracy theorists go wrong, according to Dr Nicholls, is in their view that English Catholicism in the early 17th-Century was a homogenous group. In fact, it was a "divided, suffering community", most of whom were appalled by the actions of a few gentlemen, and feared being persecuted as a result.

According to Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, the plot "cemented into place what had been a major theme of anti-Catholic propaganda" in the previous decades: namely, that they could not be loyal. But as a group, English Catholics escaped violent reprisal. Instead, the occasion was turned into the annual celebration of "anti-popery" and Protestant fervour that has lasted - in some form - to the present day.

And the letter to Lord Monteagle? Probably Francis Tresham, the Catholic noble brought into the plot late and uneasy about regicide. Guy Fawkes later told the authorities that Tresham - whom he had never met - had, according to fellow conspirators, been "exceedingly earnest" in previous discussions to warn Monteagle to stay away from Parliament.

What about the logistics? One of the most common arguments for Crown involvement is that only the state possessed gunpowder - especially in the quantities required to blow up a large building. This myth is "nonsense", says Dr Nicholls. The fact is almost every gentleman in early 17th-Century Britain would have had a stock of gunpowder. As dusk falls in the evening, villagers and city dwellers across Britain light bonfires, set off fireworks, and burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes, celebrating his failure to blow up Parliament and James I.

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