The Gunpowder Plot Was a Real-Life Thriller (And Guy Fawkes Wasn’t the Mastermind)

About this episode

It’s November 5th, and I’ve told the Gunpowder Plot before, but never like this. This time I’m telling it as the thriller it really was. Secret oaths sworn in a London inn. A soldier who renamed himself Guido and spent months guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords. An anonymous letter delivered in the dark, a midnight raid, and a gallop across the Midlands on stolen horses. And a final standoff where the conspirators managed to set their own gunpowder on fire. I could not believe some of this when I read it. We’ll also meet Robert Catesby, the charismatic man who actually dreamed up the whole thing. I want to understand how a group of men who’d lost so much talked themselves into something this terrible, and why the people they thought they were saving shut their doors on them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices