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Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. *giggles* Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V. * 1812 Overture Corcovado, Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars The Count of Monte Cristo Julie London, Cry Me A River Street Fighting Man, Rolling Stones * "I shall die here... Every inch of me shall perish... ...every inch but one. An inch, it is small and it is fragile, and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away; we must never let them take it from us. I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that eventhough I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you... I love you. With all my heart... ...I love you." * Guy Fawkes Guy Fawkes is the person most associated with the Gunpowder Plot to blow up James I ,the Houses of Lords and Commons when James opened Parliament on November 5th 1605. But who was Guy Fawkes?

Fawkes was born in York in on April 13th, 1570. His father was called Edward and his mother was called Edith.

Fawkes was brought up as a protestant and was baptised in the Church of St. Michael Belfry. He went to the Free School of St Peter's near the great cathedral of York Minster.

His father died when Fawkes was eight in 1578 and his mother lived as a widow for nine years. She re-married in 1587 and both she and Guy went to live in the village of Scotton, about 20 miles from York. Here Guy was heavily influenced by his step-father and it was his step-father who was very important in Guy's conversion to Catholicism.

Fawkes left England in 1593 aged 23 as a converted catholic and fought for Catholic Spain in its war against the Dutch. In this war, Fawkes learned all about the use of explosives - especially the art of mining and sapping which were used to blow up buildings and in siege warfare. Fawkes fought for the Archduke Albert of Austria and was described as

Fawkes and others visited Philip III of Spain in 1603 to encourage an attempt an another armada - the invasion of England. In his confession, Fawkes claimed that he was approached by Thomas Wintour in the Easter of 1604 to join the plotters.

He was out of the country for 15 years so when he returned to join the plotters in May 1604, no-one would have known him. This anonymity was important for the task he was to get himself involved with.

A Dutch artist's impression of Guy Fawkes

In London, Fawkes became "John Johnson" and acted as the servant of Thomas Percy.

It was Fawkes who supervised the attempt to build a tunnel from the rented house at the Palace of Westminster; he also stayed with the barrels of gunpowder right up to the end. He was caught with both matches and fuse. He, above anyone, would have known how much fuse was needed to make the time to explosion short enough to avoid possible detection but long enough for him to get away from the blast. he was instructed by Catesby to flee to Flanders once the explosion had occurred.

There is no doubt that Fawkes was brave while kept in the Tower of London. James I himself had ordered that the torturers use the lesser tortures first, but graduate to the more unpleasant ones later.

He endured much torture before giving away the names of other conspirators. His ruined and broken body can be seen in his signature on his confession.

Fawkes was given some sort of trial and found guilty of treason with the other conspirators. He was taken from the Tower of London to the Old Palace Yard and executed on January 31st 1606. * Elizabethan England - The Age of Treason

History is alive in each one of us. The aggregation of all that we collectively, and individually have been, is our History.

In the flow of time there are moments when individuality is enhanced. Those moments throw up the remarkable, the defining moments, the very course by which we define our cultural development. Often they are moments when the flow of time seems to enter a narrow gorge, before opening out into a torrent of change. England in the 1590’s and early 1600’s is just such a moment.

It is a time that has given us stability, and chaos in one. A time that has given us great advances in physics, chemistry, medicine and the very physical definition of the world in which we live. It is a time that has given us the words of Shakespeare and Marlowe, and a time that has given us personalities who have long since been woven into the tapestry of who we are - Ralegh, Essex, Drake, Donne and Bacon. But it was also a time that brought conflict and violent religious turmoil. It was a time when Elizabeth and James I succeeded in galvanizing the very faith of a nation, against a backlash of insurgency, recusancy and calls for religious freedom. It was thus a time that not only nurtured treason, but provoked it, fueled it, and all too often manufactured it.

The seeds of discontent at the treatment of Catholics in England, which ultimately led to the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, were first sown in the late 1520s during the reign of Henry VIII. Henry had been declared Defender of the Faith by the pope and had written tracts against Protestantism. However, dissatisfied with the Pope's refusal to grant him a divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon, Henry broke away from the See of Rome, extinguished all papal power in England, and executed his investiture as the head of the Church of England. This was followed by the methodical Dissolution of the Monasteries, under the supervision of Thomas Cromwell, which aided the English war chest and was instrumental in eroding the English power of the Catholic Church. Henry's Church of England was initially not Protestant, but remained closer to his traditional belief of Catholicism.

In the turbulent years that followed Henry’s death, England swayed back and forth on a theological pendulum. Henry's successor, his son Edward VI, steered the Anglican Church down the path of Protestantism, whereas his sister "Bloody" Mary I attempted to violently restore England to Catholicism through severe Protestant persecution, until Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558, when the tide was again reversed.

Fearful of a now encroaching Catholic Europe, Elizabeth embarked upon a systematic course of repression and persecution of Catholics within her own country, in an attempt to ensure that there was no discontented populace which could assist a foreign invasion, or which could be seen as a beacon if a foreign invasion occurred. When the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, Elizabeth had all but extinguished the hopes for an end to persecution of those Catholics in England who saw Spain as their great ally. The previous year she had had her rival, the deposed and imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots, executed in order to prevent underground Catholic cells rallying to Mary’s cause and attempting to depose Elizabeth. Such activities as this had been only too evident in the Babington Plot of 1586 which uncovered Mary's coveting of the English crown and which was subsequently a main reason for her eventual execution. Mary's claim to the English throne came through her grandmother Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII's eldest sister, who had married James IV of Scotland.

When Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, there was disagreement about her right to follow Mary I. Elizabeth's mother Anne Boleyn, was according to some, not legally married, because Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon was not legal as it would not be ratified by the Pope (the reason Henry broke away from the Catholic Church). So, upon Anne Boleyn's execution for treason, Elizabeth was separately declared a bastard, then removed from the succession by an act of the Privy Council. However, Henry placed her back in the succession, but never legitimized her.

Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, the Catholic strongholds in the north of England, who had been instrumental in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536/37 and the Norfolk and Northern Uprising of 1569, began sending envoys to both Phillip II of Spain and James VI of Scotland (the son of Mary Queen of Scots). It had become illegal to talk of the succession, yet James was commonly seen as Elizabeth's heir by both Protestants and Catholics, by virtue of closeness of blood to Henry VIII.

The Essex Rebellion of 1601 brought the names of many of those who were at the forefront of the Catholic cause to the attention of the Government, including that of Robert Catesby, who was later to become the leader of the Gunpowder Plot. The Catholics, relieved at the prospect that the son of a Catholic monarch had seemingly been guranteed the throne after Elizabeth's death, had acquired from James the promise of toleration in the event that he did succeed Elizabeth. However, their embassies to Spain, dubbed the Spanish Treason, had been met with a lukewarm response by the Spanish Government, and in fact England and Spain signed a peace treaty soon after the last of these embassies had returned home.

When James eventually succeeded Elizabeth in 1603 as James I, there was initial celebration by the Catholic leaders, who under Elizabeth had been persecuted to such an extreme that any sign of Catholic sympathy risked the severest of penalties, including death. James, however, was not to be their saviour. No sooner had the Hampton Court Conference ended -- with no compromise being given to either the Puritan faction or the Catholics -- than James re-introduced the harsh penalties for recusancy.

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The individual biographies of the conspirators provide detailed accounts of the formulation and failure of the Gunpowder Plot. Please also resd through the Archives section to read transcripts of letters, interrogations and confessions.