The Night London Shook: Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot and Its Place in Irish History

On a November night in London in 1605, the ground shook, metaphorically at least, as one of history’s most famous events — or, depending on your viewpoint, one of history’s most notorious crimes — was foiled before it could take place.

More than 400 years on, the Gunpowder Plot has been memorialized forever as “Guy Fawkes Night”, after one of the participants, a rebel English Catholic who was executed in January 1606 for his role in events.

But how about links between this historic event and Ireland, either of the time or in later centuries?

To consider Irish, and especially Irish Catholic, connections to the Gunpowder Plot and the wider socio-political context of London of the early 17th-century, let us explore two key areas: firstly, whether there are any specific links between the Gunpowder Plotters and Catholics of Ireland and Europe; and secondly, the broader Irish-English, and Protestant-Catholic, tensions of the time, which have lasted all the many generations ever since.

What was the Gunpowder Plot?

The Gunpowder Plot was an attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate the Protestant King James I, orchestrated by a group of English Catholics led by Robert Catesby and famously involving Guy Fawkes.

King James was a Protestant monarch unsympathetic, even intolerant, to the plight of Catholics around Britain and further afield.

The plan was to bring an end to years of religious persecution under James by killing him and installing his nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth as a Catholic head of state. 

The plotters ambitions were foiled, however, when a Catholic member of Parliament, the 4th Baron Monteagle William Parker, received an anonymous letter passionately warning him not to attend parliament for his own safety. Centuries before Hollywood, the events are like something out of an espionage thriller, with Parker handed the letter by a servant while dining with friends in Hoxton in London. The letter had warned Parker to burn it after he read its contents, but Parker, busy entertaining his party, asked the servant to read its contents aloud for all to hear.

Even more galling for the plotters — and the persecuted Catholics on whose behalf they were trying to rebel — the letter has long been believed to have been written by one of their own, a Francis Tresham, who had taken part in the Earl of Essex Robert Devereux’s failed rebellion against the crown in 1601 and later took part in missions to Spain to gather support for his comrades.

Tresham had joined the plot in the weeks before November 5th but voiced his concerns when he learned of its details. He adamantly denied that he was the author of the letter, although the fact that the letter’s recipient, Baron Monteagle, was Tresham’s brother-in-law has long led historians and hobbyists to point the finger Tresham’s way. Arrested a week after the foiled plot, Tresham was imprisoned in the Tower of London and died there before his fellow plotters were executed, supposedly of natural causes.

In any event, on November 5th and following the back-channeled letter which revealed the plan, Fawkes was discovered guarding 38 barrels of gunpowder in the cellar of the House of Lords. He was arrested and tortured on the orders of the king, having initially failed to give up the names of his co-conspirators.

When word spread of his arrest, most of Fawkes’s fellow plotters managed to flee London but without a great degree of longevity — they were either killed in shootouts or captured and later executed, while the plot’s leader, Catesby, was decapitated and his head placed on a spike displayed outside the Houses of Parliament. Long before Netflix horror films, this was what grim entertainment looked like for the London masses of the time.

The legacy of the Gunpowder Plot lives on in Britain through Bonfire Night or the so-called “Guy Fawkes Night” celebrations, which take place on November 4th each year. 

Guy Fawkes Image: Portrait of Guy Fawkes © St Peter's Foundation

Were there links between the Gunpowder Plot and Ireland?

The conspirators’ motives were all primarily English, but some of the plotters did envisage an alliance with Catholics from Ireland and Spain, which were both regarded as natural allies against England’s Protestant regime.

This was, after all, less than 20 years after the famous Spanish Armada, where a fleet of Spanish ships set sail under the orders of Philip II of Spain intent on invading England, dethroning Queen Elizabeth and re-establishing a Catholic monarch. Unfortunately for the Spaniards, they were routed north after a battle off modern-day Belgium and fled around the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Many of the 100+ ships were wrecked around the coast of Ireland, with grave losses, most notably the La Girona, which was dashed on the rocks of County Antrim in the north and almost all of the 1300 people on board perished.

Catholics had already been under fire in Britain since the time of Henry VIII, and the recent bloody Nine Years’ War (1594-1603) conflict, in which Irish clans and chieftains had some good early success before the Siege of Kinsale in 1602 inflicted a decisive defeat on the home crew. Indeed, at one point it is estimated that there were almost 20,000 English army soldiers actively fighting in Ireland during the war.

With this background, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators will have harbored hope that a successful assassination might bring about a broader Catholic rebellion in England and gain support from further afield, including Ireland and Spain. 

However, victory for the English in the Nine Years’ War, followed by the foiling of the Plot which strengthened Elizabeth I’s successor as monarch, King James I, proved to be a significant moment in British-Irish history. 

Unable to visualize any possibility of victory, the Irish chieftains licked their wounds or fled the country entirely — the so-called Flight of the Earls took place in 1607 — and the power vacuum they left behind laid the foundations for the Ulster Plantation, in which Protestants from England and Scotland claimed or were given lands all across Ulster.

That episode, in which many of the native Irish were stripped of their land and authority, led directly to centuries of sectarian animosity and left an indelible mark on the island of Ireland, and specifically its two separate political entities, the Republic and Northern Ireland, to this day. 


A late 17th- or early 18th-century report of the plot

Was there an Irish presence in early 17th-century London?

Anyone who has seen Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 film starring Joseph Fiennes as the Bard and Gwyneth Paltrow as his fictional lover Viola de Lesseps, will have a good grounding of the day to day life of London of the early 1600s.

It was a city teeming with political intrigue, religious tension, and the emerging theatrical culture, in which Shakespeare and his plays had a central part.

Despite the tensions between Catholics and Protestants, Irish people were visible in the London of the time, even if their presence was generally a modest one.

There were Irish merchants and students in the city, and the sight and sound of Irish soldiers representing England in its many wars and battles would have been quite a familiar one.

English Catholics who associated with Irish expatriates in London of the time often faced suspicion due to the perceived threat that Irish Catholics posed to the English Protestant state. That threat wasn’t exactly a hollow one, either — news of rebellions in Ireland filtered through to London on a regular basis, with the Silken Thomas Rebellion in Kildare of 1534, the two Desmond Rebellions in Munster between 1569 and 1583 and the aforementioned Nine Years’ War all fairly fresh in the collective memory.

Is England’s Gunpowder Plot an important part of Irish history?

Though the Gunpowder Plot ultimately failed, its impact endured and had a major impact on relations between Ireland and England.

Those Catholic-Protestant tensions never really went away, culminating most notably in the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, almost a century after Fawkes and the barrels were discovered.

At the Battle of the Boyne, the victory of Protestant William of Orange over the Catholic king James II in Ireland signaled a lasting blow to Catholic hopes of freedom and autonomy. The Penal Laws which followed further underscored the depth of the divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland and established a savagely hash legal framework that discriminated against Irish Catholics for generations.

This status as second class citizens was only eased by the Catholic Emancipation led by Daniel O’Connell in the 19th century before being finally erased — albeit only south of the new Irish border — following Irish independence in 1921.

So while the Gunpowder Plot might be a very English historical moment, and November 5th, or “Guy Fawkes Night”, a very English lasting cultural event, it was also a staging post in the long and bloody history between Ireland and England, its nearest, but often not so dearest, neighbor.

The Lyrics of the Famous Guy Fawkes Rhyme

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament
Three score barrels of powder below
Poor old England to overthrow
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match
Holler boys, holler boys, let the bells ring
Holler boys, holler boys
God save the King!