The truth behind one of the oldest fictions in history can finally be told. The Catholics were in danger of wresting influence from Robert Cecil who had managed to remove Queen Elizabeth's favourites and put himself at the forefront of political power. King James, easily influenced, especially by a pretty face, male or female, needed to be restrained, especially with his profligate spending. Cecil had three goals, therefore: remove the Catholic nobility; limit Puritan influence and endear himself to the king by becoming even more favoured than the pretty boys at court, the most influential of them had saved James's life. The Puritans were dealt with by the king at 'The Hampton Court Conference' and that left the Catholics and the pretty boys. If he could only hatch a plot to discredit the Catholics and save the king at the same time, he would remove any potential opposition and earn the king's undying gratitude, put him above all others in the king's estimation. So he did!

Every child has heard of Guy Fawkes and will most likely have watched a 'guy' being burnt on a bonfire and fireworks lighting up the night sky on Bonfire Night. This book answers the questions of history that lie behind the celebrations of 5 November. Who was Guy Fawkes and how to did he come to be below the chamber of the House of Lords in the first hour of 5 November 1605? What desperation drove those involved to plan a horrific massacre of the Protestant royal family and government? Alan Hayne's probing analysis offers the clearest, most balanced view yet of often conflicting evidence, as he disentangles the threads of disharmony, intrigue, betrayal, terror and retribution. In this updated edition he gathers together startling evidence to uncover the depth and extent of the plot, and how close the plotters came to de-stabilising the government in one of the most notorious terrorist plots of British history. This enthralling book will grip the general reader, while the scope of its detailed research will require historians of the period to consider again the commanding importance of the plot throughout the seventeenth century.

This book examines the Catholic elaboration on the relationship between state and Church in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Among the several factors which have contributed to the complex process of state-formation in early modern Europe, religious affiliation has certainly been one of the most important, if not the most important. Within the European context of the consolidation of both the nation-state entities and the state-Churches, Catholicism in England in the 16th and 17th centuries presents peculiar elements which are crucial to understanding the problems at stake, from both a political and a religious point of view. Catholics in early modern England were certainly a minority, but a minority of an interestingly doubled kind. On the one hand, they were a "sect" among many others. On the other hand, Catholicism was a "universal", catholic religion, in a country in which the sovereign was the head - or governor - of both political and ecclesiastical establishments. In this context, this monograph casts light on the mechanisms through which a distinctive religious minority was able to adapt itself within a singular political context. In the most general terms, this book contributes to the significant question of how different religious affiliations could (or might) be integrated within one national reality, and how political allegiance and religious belief began to be perceived as two different identities within one context. Current scholarship on the religious history of early modern England has considerably changed the way in which historians think about English Protestantism. Recent works have offered a more nuanced and accurate picture of the English Protestant Church, which is now seen not as a monolithic institution, but rather as complex and fluid. This book seeks to offer certain elements of a complementary view of the English Catholic Church as an organism within which the debate over how to combine the catholic feature of the Church of Ro

"This book takes a fresh look at the most famous treason case in English history, a complex tale of treachery, suspicion, rebellion and retribution. [The author] shows how, starting with the most slender of leads, the Jacobean government built up a full picture of the conspiracy and tracked down the guilty men and brought them to justice. The story does not end with the bloody executions of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators in 1606. For the first time in a book on the Gunpowder treason, [the author] investigates in depth the role in the plot played by the ninth earl of Northumberland, seen by many as the plotters' logical choice for a protector of the realm after blast, who was imprisoned in the Tower for sixteen years on suspicion of complicity. By examining the earl's political career in the years around 1605, the author shows how the government investigations, though shedding much light on the plot, never revealed the whole truth. [The author] cuts through the distortions of centuries of political and religious propaganda to explain the real motives of the Gunpowder plotters. [The author] disposes of the 'conspiracy theory, ' which holds that the king's chief minister, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, framed the conspirators for his own political purposes, and ... sheds considerable light on the workings of early Jacobean government, particularly the privy council. [This book] should appeal to anyone interested in English history, as well as historians and students of seventeenth-century England"--

The establishment of the Anglican Church and the strengthening of the English monarchy during the 16th and early 17th centuries together served as the foundation of the modern British state. This text provides an overview of a crucial phase in English history.

In England, November 5 is Guy Fawkes Day, when fireworks displays commemorate the shocking moment in 1605 when government authorities uncovered a secret plan to blow up the House of Parliament--and King James I along with it. A group of English Catholics, seeking to unseat the king and reintroduce Catholicism as the state religion, daringly placed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder in a cellar under the Palace of Westminster. Their aim was to ignite the gunpowder at the opening of the Parliamentary session. Though the charismatic Catholic, Robert Catesby, was the group's leader, it was the devout Guy Fawkes who emerged as its most famous member, as he was the one who was captured and who revealed under torture the names of his fellow plotters. In the aftermath of their arrests, conditions grew worse for English Catholics, as legal penalties against them were stiffened and public sentiment became rabidly intolerant. In a narrative that reads like a gripping detective story, Antonia Fraser has untangled the web of religion, politics, and personalities that surrounded that fateful night of November 5. And, in examining the lengths to which individuals will go for their faith, she finds in this long-ago event a reflection of the religion-inspired terrorism that has produced gunpowder plots of our own time.

On the night of November 4th 1605, the English authorities uncovered an alleged plot by a group of discontented Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the lords, princes, queen and king in attendance. The failure of the plot is celebrated to this day and is known as Guy Fawkes Day. In Poets, Players and Preachers, Anne James explores the literary responses to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in poetry, drama, and sermons. This book is the first full-length study of the literary repercussions of the conspiracy. By analyzing the genres of poems, plays, and sermons produced between 1605 and 1688, the author argues that not only did the continuous reinterpretation of the conspiracy serve religious and political purposes but that such literary reinterpretations produced generic changes.