Episodios

  • #31 'Remember, remember, the fifth of November' - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #31 'Remember, remember, the fifth of November' - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Aug 13 2025
    At the time, London gossip accused the king’s chief minister Robert Cecil of fabricating the entire plot to blow up everyone who mattered and leave the country ungovernable. When Cecil died seven years later, he was remembered as lying and self-serving. ‘The King’s misuser, the Parliament’s abuser, Hath left his plotting… is now a rotting.’ On the first anniversary, 5 November 1606, people were forced to celebrate by going to church and lighting bonfires. Anti-Catholic sentiment has kept the anniversary alive. But if the Gunpowder plot was the invention of a vicious, torturing and intolerant regime, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating it any more? (R)

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    22 m
  • #30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Aug 6 2025
    The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing. (R)

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    33 m
  • #29 The King's Fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #29 The King's Fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Jul 29 2025
    As his father had done, Cecil built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose father had narrowly escaped death from a gunpowder blast, this was it. (R)

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    32 m
  • #28 'A formidable network of secret agents' - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #28 'A formidable network of secret agents' - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Jul 23 2025
    We dig deeper into the animosity between the king and Cecil whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father and son had spies everywhere and openly boasted of their policy of entrapment. (R)

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    32 m
  • #27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Jul 16 2025
    To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almost a year, before spying a handy cellar next door for the gunpowder barrels. Yes. Of course. (R)

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    34 m
  • #26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Jul 9 2025
    The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the money he so badly needs. Job done. (R)

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    30 m
  • #25 'Here lieth the Toad' - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #25 'Here lieth the Toad' - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Jul 2 2025
    We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. (R)

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    35 m
  • #24 'There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality' - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

    #24 'There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality' - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
    Jun 25 2025
    We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told. (R)

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    33 m