The Gunpowder Plot: Westminster's cellars and the night of Guy Fawkes

Place card

Place: the Palace of Westminster, the lost storeroom beside the House of Lords, and Old Palace Yard, where Guy Fawkes was arrested and later executed.

Address: Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London SW1A 0AA.

Nearest station: Westminster.

Period: the conspiracy developed in 1604–1605; the Monteagle Letter is dated 26 October 1605; Fawkes was arrested during the night of 4–5 November; the trial took place on 27 January 1606 and the executions on 30 and 31 January; official and popular memory has continued from 1606 to the present.

Themes: religious persecution, political violence, an attack upon the state, intelligence, torture, propaganda, collective punishment, urban memory, ritual, and the transformation of a person into a mask.

Access: the original 1605 storeroom no longer exists and is not a room on an ordinary visitor route. The modern Palace of Westminster can be visited on an official ticketed tour; routes and room access change because Parliament is a working building with active security. Personal photography is permitted only in designated areas, including Westminster Hall and St Stephen's Hall, and tripods are prohibited. A reel, podcast recording, or any filming intended for wider publication requires advance agreement from Parliament.

The setting

Do not picture the Gothic towers of the present Houses of Parliament. Picture a cramped early-seventeenth-century palace: old walls, timber galleries, lodgings, stores, stables and ceremonial rooms accumulated across centuries. It is the night of 4–5 November 1605. Below the Lords is not a secret cavern but a rented storeroom at ground level beside the chamber. Firewood fills it. Beneath the firewood stand thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.

A man in boots and a cloak waits beside the pile. He calls himself John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy. Searchers find the means to make fire upon him. During a second inspection, the royal official Sir Thomas Knyvett and his party move the fuel and expose the barrels. If the fuse burns after the State Opening begins, James I, the Queen, the heir, lords, bishops, judges, ministers and members of Parliament will be gathered above. One explosion is intended to destroy not simply a king but much of the country's political structure.

The prisoner will be interrogated in the Tower. At first his composure will impress James himself. The King will then authorise torture. The name “Guido Fawkes” on one of the later statements will collapse into an almost illegible signature. Within weeks the state will exhibit him and his companions as monsters. Centuries later, a face that does not resemble his authenticated likeness will become a global mask of resistance to state power.

The central mystery is not why Guy Fawkes acted: Robert Catesby led the conspiracy. The harder question is how a persecuted group made mass killing its route to justice—and how a government saved by an anonymous letter turned the intercepted crime into an annual ritual of loyalty.

The story

Near the end of Elizabeth I's reign, English Catholic life existed beneath severe suspicion. After the break with Rome, loyalty to the Pope could be represented as disloyalty to the Crown. Catholic priests operated in secret; households concealed them in purpose-built hiding places; refusal to attend Church of England worship—recusancy—brought financial penalties. The government feared invasion by Catholic powers and plots against the monarch. Catholics experienced searches, informers, imprisonment and execution.

Most English Catholics adapted, paid fines, concealed their faith or sought compromise; only a small network chose violence. Its radicalisation nevertheless developed within a state that treated spiritual allegiance as a political danger.

Elizabeth died in 1603. James VI of Scotland inherited the English crown as James I. Some Catholics expected relief. James could speak in the language of moderation, and his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been Catholic. Hope collided with political caution and the renewed collection of recusancy fines. To the future plotters, this was more than disappointment. It seemed to prove that a lawful route to change was closed.

The principal organiser was Robert Catesby, a charismatic Catholic gentleman who had participated in the Earl of Essex's failed rising in 1601. In the spring of 1604 he proposed to Thomas Wintour and John Wright that they destroy King and Parliament in a single attack. Wintour travelled to the Spanish Netherlands seeking assistance. There he recruited a soldier from York named Guy Fawkes.

Fawkes was born in 1570. His father was Protestant, but after his father's death his mother married into a family with strong Catholic connections. Fawkes converted, left England and served in the forces of Catholic Spain against the Protestant Dutch. He was not a senior commander, but he acquired a reputation for military competence, knowledge of gunpowder and personal steadiness. Abroad he used the Italian form of his name, Guido. Catesby needed exactly such a man: less familiar in London and capable of preparing the charge.

In May 1604 Catesby, Wintour, Wright, Thomas Percy and Fawkes swore secrecy and then heard Mass. Robert Keyes, Thomas Bates, Christopher Wright, John Grant, Robert Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, Sir Everard Digby and Francis Tresham later joined them. These thirteen men formed a network of kinship, friendship, property and religion, not a great underground army.

Thomas Percy leased a house close to the House of Lords. Parliamentary histories describe an attempt to dig a tunnel, but no material trace has been found and its existence, route and scale remain disputed. The firmer fact is that a storeroom beneath or beside the Lords became available to Percy. Once he controlled it, no tunnel was needed.

The word “cellar” misleads. The storeroom stood at ground-floor level within the palace's changing elevations, below the Lords but not in today's subterranean corridors. Soane's remodelling removed it in 1822; most of the old palace burned in 1834; Barry and Pugin's Gothic Revival complex followed. A brass plaque now marks an approximate point, not a preserved “Guy Fawkes room.”

The conspirators brought in gunpowder in several stages. The official count settled at thirty-six barrels. They concealed these beneath firewood and other fuel. Using the alias John Johnson, supposedly Percy's servant, Fawkes would remain beside the store. On the day of the State Opening he was to light the fuse and escape across the Thames. The others were preparing a second operation in the Midlands.

The explosion was one stage of an attempted regime change. While London stood paralysed, allies would raise a rebellion, seize nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth at Coombe Abbey near Coventry and proclaim her queen. The elder heir, Henry, was expected at the opening; five-year-old Charles was difficult to reach. Fawkes's examination records a proposed proclamation in Elizabeth's name. A kidnapped child would become the manageable emblem of a new order.

That wider plan destroys the romantic image of a solitary rebel. The operation accepted the deaths of Catholic peers as well as Protestant leaders, servants, guards and visitors, followed by a child's abduction and an armed attempt to compel the country. Religious persecution explains the environment. It does not justify indiscriminate killing. The plotters decided that other people's bodies were an acceptable price for liberation, and that reasoning contains the central mechanism of political terror.

The State Opening was postponed more than once, including because of plague. The eventual date, 5 November 1605, granted the group more time but increased the danger of disclosure. As the moment approached, the question of Catholic friends who might die with the Protestant establishment became urgent.

On 26 October, an anonymous letter was delivered to a servant of William Parker, Lord Monteagle, a Catholic peer. It advised him to invent an excuse to avoid Parliament and promised a “terrible blow” whose victims would not see who had hurt them. The writer instructed Monteagle to burn the warning. He gave it to the authorities instead.

The original survives at The National Archives as SP 14/216. Its hand is disguised and it has neither signature nor date in the text. The writer remains unknown. Francis Tresham, Monteagle's brother-in-law and one of the last men recruited, has long been suspected. Other intermediaries are possible, and historians have wondered whether Monteagle or government figures knew more than the official narrative admitted. None of these possibilities converts an identity into fact. A film should retain the question mark rather than present a portrait of “the proven betrayer.”

The Privy Council did not rush immediately into the storeroom. James interpreted the invisible “blow” as gunpowder, and ministers waited for evidence rather than acting on a rumour. The delay later nourished conspiracy theory, but catching an operative with the charge could expose the network and make an unanswerable public case. Timing a discovery is not the same as inventing the conspiracy.

During a first inspection on 4 November, searchers saw Fawkes by a large stack of firewood. He called himself John Johnson and said the fuel belonged to his employer, Thomas Percy. The explanation was provisionally accepted. Yet Percy's identity—a Catholic connected to the powerful Earl of Northumberland—deepened suspicion. Later that evening or around midnight, Sir Thomas Knyvett and Edmund Doubleday returned with a party.

In Parliament's account, Fawkes gripped Doubleday's fingers so violently that the official nearly drew his dagger. Doubleday then knocked him down and tied him with the prisoner's own garters. Searchers found the means of ignition and a watch or timing device. Beneath the wood appeared the barrels. The Commons Journal recorded the following morning that “Johnson,” servant to Percy, had been apprehended with thirty-six barrels beneath the Upper House.

Once the powder was exposed, Fawkes did not maintain the performance of an innocent caretaker. He admitted an intention to destroy the King and assembly, but refused to identify his companions. His courage impressed the government. James described something like Roman resolution in him. Admiration did not prevent coercion. On 6 November the King gave written permission for interrogators to begin with “the gentler tortures” and proceed to worse methods if he would not confess.

We cannot reconstruct every instrument or interval, but the signatures provide a physical trace. An earlier name is firm; the signature dated 9 November disintegrates into trembling marks. Evidence extracted under torture can contain truth, suggestions, error and whatever a prisoner thinks will stop the pain.

By 7–9 November Fawkes's statements revealed more names and details. Meanwhile the Plot was collapsing outside the interrogation room. After learning of the arrest, Catesby, Percy and others rode from London toward the Midlands, attempting to activate the rising. Support did not come. They collected weapons and horses, moved through rain, and saw government proclamations begin to name them.

At Holbeche House in Staffordshire they tried to dry wet gunpowder close to a fire. A spark produced a flash which injured several fugitives—a grim miniature of the explosion that had failed in Westminster. On 8 November the sheriff's force surrounded the house. Catesby, Percy and the Wright brothers were killed. The survivors, including a wounded Thomas Wintour, were captured. His confession of 23 November became one of the principal narratives of the conspiracy, although it too is the testimony of a prisoner held by the victors.

Eight surviving defendants were tried in Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606. The hall, which visitors can enter today, is physically connected to the proceedings in a way the vanished storeroom is not. The prosecution framed the conspiracy as supreme treason against king, state and divine order. Conviction was never realistically in doubt. The prisoners received the punishment for high treason: hanging, drawing and quartering, a public destruction of the body designed to punish the person and discipline the audience.

On 30 January Digby, Robert Wintour, Grant and Bates were executed at St Paul's Churchyard. On 31 January Keyes, Rookwood, Thomas Wintour and Fawkes were brought to Old Palace Yard beside Westminster Hall. Tradition says that Fawkes fell or jumped from the ladder and broke his neck, escaping the main physical stages of the sentence. Accounts of the final seconds vary. It is safer to say that he died during the hanging before the subsequent dismemberment than to turn a possible jump into a fully documented last act of defiance.

Consequences extended beyond the thirteen conspirators. Jesuit superior Henry Garnet denied advance participation, but had learned of the design through confession and did not disclose it; intercepted prison correspondence contributed to his execution in May 1606. New law imposed an oath, restrictions and penalties on Catholics who refused established worship. Government policy was not an indiscriminate massacre, but “measured” did not mean equal: discrimination and suspicion gained new justification.

Parliament passed the Thanksgiving Act in January 1606. The fifth of November became an annual day of church services and sermons celebrating the survival of King and Protestant state. Over time the official religious ritual mixed with bells, bonfires, fireworks and the burning of effigies. A “guy” came to mean the stuffed figure and then, in English, a person. Fawkes was easier to remember than the complicated conspiracy: one recognisable villain beside the barrels in place of Catesby, a network, religious policy and the planned seizure of a princess.

Celebration could be aggressively anti-Catholic: crowds burned papal images and politicians revived the Plot during later crises. Bonfire Night carries popular spectacle, gratitude for preventing mass killing, and confessional hostility at once.

By the mid-seventeenth century, critics claimed that Robert Cecil's government had organised or knowingly allowed the Plot to discredit Catholics. Ministers did manage published confessions, shape an advantageous narrative and exploit the event; the letter writer remains unknown, the search was timed and interrogations used torture. It does not follow that the barrels and operational plans were fabricated. Independent documents, property arrangements, journeys, multiple statements and the fugitives' armed deaths support a real conspiracy. Scholars debate intelligence and feasibility, not a simple total invention.

Before the State Opening today, the Yeomen of the Guard continue a ceremonial search of the basements. Modern services, not men carrying lanterns through the building, provide actual security. The ritual is often presented as an amusing survival: the Palace still checks for Guy Fawkes. Its deeper meaning is more interesting. Each year the state performs a memory of its own vulnerability and rescue.

Fawkes also escaped official control. The V for Vendetta mask is a stylised face, not a reliable portrait, and movements of different beliefs have adopted it. A man who pursued Catholic regime change through mass killing became a universal icon of resistance: a new legend, not the continuation of his programme.

People to remember

Robert Catesby was the principal initiator. Calling the operation only “Guy Fawkes's plan” repeats an official and popular habit of replacing a network with one face.

Guy, or Guido, Fawkes was a soldier with explosives knowledge. He willingly prepared an attack intended to kill an unknown number of people and resisted early questioning, but his later testimony cannot be separated from torture.

Lord Monteagle passed the letter to the authorities and received the reputation—and financial rewards—of Parliament's saviour. The extent of his knowledge before the letter arrived remains disputed.

The unknown letter writer saved people whom the conspirators had already accepted as casualties. An absent name is part of the historical record, not a licence to manufacture certainty.

Princess Elizabeth, nine years old, was to be seized and installed as the new regime's queen. Her place in the plan proves that the operation did not end with the explosion.

Catholics who had no part in the Plot lived with the consequences of a small network's choice. They cannot be reduced to the stereotype of the fanatic.

Servants, guards, officials, workers and Westminster residents rarely enter lists of potential dead. The intended blast would not have distinguished a national leader from a person maintaining the ceremony around him.

Fact, interpretation and legend

Documented fact: Monteagle received an anonymous warning dated 26 October 1605; the original survives at The National Archives.

Documented fact: during the second search on the night of 4 November, Fawkes was detained beside thirty-six barrels hidden beneath firewood.

Essential correction: Fawkes was an operative and technical specialist; Catesby led the conception of the conspiracy.

Possible, not proven: Francis Tresham wrote the Monteagle Letter. Its authorship is unresolved.

Disputed: the conspirators began a substantial tunnel. Early accounts contain the story, but it has no archaeological confirmation.

Documented fact with a limitation: James authorised torture, and Fawkes's changing signatures record physical collapse. Claims derived from coercive examination need corroboration.

False: a visitor today enters the original “Guy Fawkes cellar.” The room was at ground level, disappeared during alterations in 1822, and the present palace was built largely after the 1834 fire.

Reasonable interpretation: the government timed the search and politically managed the story of discovery. That is not proof that ministers invented the entire conspiracy.

Modern legend: the Fawkes mask represents his own democratic programme. The historical Plot pursued a confessional regime change and the seizure of a child, not modern secular democracy.

The place today

Begin in Parliament Square with a wide view of the Palace. Say immediately that this is not the building of 1605. Westminster Hall survives, but the chambers and storeroom belonged to the old complex. That sentence removes the visual error before an audience accepts Gothic Revival architecture as the Plot's stage.

Move toward the publicly accessible view of Old Palace Yard without obstructing entrances, staff or security. Fawkes and three companions were executed here on 31 January 1606. Do not stage a hanging and do not use a masked performer as comic set dressing. Film the relationship between Westminster Hall, the yard and the towers instead: trial, punishment and later memory occupy one urban frame.

Westminster Hall is the best interior for the trial and one of the few zones permitting personal photographs. Published content is not automatically personal use: agree filming, microphones and sound recording in advance. Tripods are prohibited and cameras are restricted elsewhere.

Do not promise a “secret Guy Fawkes basement.” Official tours move through a working legislature and can change. The brass marker is not a freely accessible preserved room. To explain the space, use a licensed plan of the old palace, an archival image or a clean diagram showing “Lords chamber—storeroom—river.”

For location sound, record bells, footsteps in the stone hall, wind from the Thames and traffic around the square. Reserve fireworks for the section about public memory rather than placing an explosion beneath every mention of powder. Silence after the torture order is more effective than a blast effect.

Research bibliography

S0121. UK Parliament, Basement tour transcripts: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot — the two searches, arrest, torture, executions, lost storeroom and annual ceremonial search.

S0122. UK Parliament, Guy Fawkes — biography, military experience, John Johnson alias, technical role, interrogation and execution.

S0123. UK Parliament, People behind the Gunpowder Plot — Catesby as organiser, participants' roles and Monteagle Letter hypotheses.

S0124. House of Commons Information Office, The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 — religious context, lease, disputed tunnel, powder and political aftermath.

S0125. The National Archives, The Monteagle Letter — the original warning of 26 October 1605 and its unresolved authorship.

S0126. The National Archives, Gunpowder Plot: original documents teaching pack — document-based chronology, 36 barrels, arrests, trial and consequences.

S0127. The National Archives, Treason: People, Power & Plot — confessions, proclamations and Fawkes's torture-damaged signature.

S0128. The National Archives, Thomas Wintour's confession — flight, Holbeche House and the armed group's end.

S0129. The National Archives, Examination of Guido Fawkes — the plan to seize Princess Elizabeth and proclaim her queen.

S0130. The National Archives, Law for recusants, 1606 — post-Plot oaths and restrictions imposed on Catholics.

S0131. Mark Nicholls, Strategy and Motivation in the Gunpowder Plot, The Historical Journal — the Plot as a calculated regime-change operation rather than one-dimensional madness.

S0132. A. W. R. E. Okines, Why Was There So Little Government Reaction to Gunpowder Plot?, Journal of Ecclesiastical History — actual government policy and a test of conspiratorial explanations.

S0133. UK Parliament, Tours of the Palace of Westminster — current 2026 tour, booking and access information.

S0134. UK Parliament, Photography, filming and mobile phone use — current restrictions on photographs, sound, equipment and recording for publication.

S0135. UK Parliament, Who captured Guy Fawkes? — Sir Thomas Knyvett, Edmund Doubleday and the 1631 account of the struggle during the arrest.