Original subtitles

Midnight on the 4th of November, 1605.

FOOTSTEPS APPROACH

In a cellar deep below Parliament,

Guy Fawkes prepares to light the fuse

of a radical attack,

planned by a small network of men...

..determined...

FUSE FIZZES

..to destroy the King and his government.

CROWS CAW

Unstopped, this one explosion...

..could have changed the history of Britain entirely.

So what were the steps,

the causes and connections

that led these men to attempt to blow up Parliament?

EXPLOSION

In this series,

I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters

in British history.

Oh, yes, here we go.

And now you're face-to-face with William the Conqueror.

They know that sex sells and that violence sells.

These stories form part of our national mythology.

They harbour mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries.

It turns very dark here.

It sounds like a network of informers, doesn't it?

They're such graphic images of religious violence.

But with the passage of time,

we have new ways to unlock their secrets,

using scientific advances and a modern perspective.

He was what we would now call a foreign fighter.

I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses,

I'm going to re-examine old evidence and follow new clues...

The human hand.

..to get closer to the truth.

It's like fake news.

You're questioning whether we can actually take that seriously

as a piece of evidence.

I'm deep beneath the streets of London

on the trail of a group of men who many would now call terrorists.

Ah, here it is.

These are the Gunpowder Plotters,

the infamous Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators,

who, on the 5th of November, 1605,

tried to blow up a packed Parliament

in the name of their Catholic faith.

I think that this image shows just how sanitised

this story has become.

Every year, much of Britain still celebrates Guy Fawkes Night,

his night, on the 5th of November.

The Gunpowder Plot has become

a nice, family friendly party night,

with bonfires and fireworks,

and an engraving that's safe enough to be shown on the Tube.

But this is not a safe story.

Back in 1605,

when Guy Fawkes was caught, the ports were closed,

people panicked.

The state focused all its attention on tracking down and executing

the group of would-be killers.

CHAINS RATTLE

DEEP GROWL

I want to investigate how these men reached the extreme.

How they connected with others

and came to believe that the answer to their problems

was wiping out the seat of power.

This was a dangerously radicalised network of men.

They were willing to risk everything

to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people for their cause.

But what made them unite and plan

this really monumental act of violence?

We tend to forget the names or even the existence

of most of the plotters.

Yet, even as children, they had connections to each other.

So, to uncover the roots of their radicalisation,

I'm starting this investigation

by going back much earlier than most people do - to their childhoods.

Three of the future conspirators,

John Wright and his brother, Christopher Wright,

as well as Guy Fawkes, all went to the same school,

growing up in the City of York.

BELL TOLLS

Amazing.

This is St Michael Le Belfrey church,

which has been active for nearly 500 years.

It's currently undergoing a major renovation,

but I've been allowed to come in to take a look at the church records.

This book contains

the first written record of Guy Fawkes.

Here he is, the third one down.

It says, "Guy Fawkes, the son of Edward Fawkes,

"was christened here in this church

"in 1570."

But there's something else I want to look at in this book

to get a sense of Guy's early life.

Oh, yes.

Here it is.

A list of burials from eight years later, 1578.

And among the people who've died is...

..Edward Fawkes.

That's Guy's father.

So Guy lost his father when he was still a child.

And there's something else here, too.

It's quite tricky to read, but it says he was

"registrar and advocate

"of the consistory court of the cathedral".

So that means he was a lawyer working in the church court.

That would have been dealing with cases like

the annulment of people's marriages, that sort of thing.

And it's interesting because it means that Guy's father was working

for the Church and, at the time,

that meant the Protestant Church.

So Guy, who will ultimately die for a Catholic cause,

is born a Protestant.

In the late 16th century, faith had the power

to dictate life on earth and beyond.

Protestants and Catholics disagreed on the route to salvation.

Picking the wrong side meant the difference between heaven and hell.

In the 1580s, Guy's mother remarried into a Catholic family.

Around this time, Guy became a convert.

When Guy converted to Catholicism,

he must have felt that this was the only way to obey God

and ultimately to go to heaven.

But in the eyes of the state, he was utterly wrong.

The Protestant Queen Elizabeth was on the throne

and, by the 1580s, when the young Guy was walking these streets,

Catholicism was effectively banned.

Not going to Protestant church could mean fines or even prison.

Catholic priests were outlaws,

and protecting priests meant real danger.

When Guy was in his teens, a local woman called Margaret Clitherow,

she was the wife of a butcher,

was accused of hiding priests in her house.

As a result of this, she was brought to the middle of York

and she was very publicly killed.

I want to know what effect this event might have had on Guy Fawkes

and the other York-based conspirators, the Wrights,

who were from a known Catholic family.

And there's a tantalising clue in the city's Bar Convent.

Hannah, what is this completely extraordinary object?

So we are looking at the hand of Margaret Clitherow.

The hand. The hand. The human hand. The human hand.

This is a relic taken at some point by her followers

so they had something to remember her by, to keep safe.

Can you tell me a bit of Margaret's story?

She's somebody who converts to Catholicism in her 20s,

and then she runs a sort of secret Catholic network,

safe homes for priests.

She's imprisoned three times over a seven-year period.

And then, in 1585, the law changes

and it makes it a capital offence to harbour a priest.

And then, under that law, she is prosecuted,

so she refuses to plead guilty or not guilty

to protect people around her.

So the sentence that's actually passed on her is to be crushed

until she enters a plea... To be... ..or until she dies.

To be what? To be crushed. Crushed?! Yes.

LUCY EXHALES

Yes.

That's terrible. Yeah, it's a particularly brutal death.

There's a sharp stone put under her back,

a door is laid on top of her,

and then heavy weights are put on top of the door.

So they're kind of constantly added, so it gets heavier and heavier.

And obviously, naturally, I think she lasts about 15 minutes.

It's a particularly horrific way to die,

and very public, quite undignified.

So she's stripped, she's just in her kind of linen shift.

And people are watching this? People are watching.

There's a huge crowd watching it.

Is it possible that Guy Fawkes was present

at this public spectacle of execution?

It's very possible. A lot of the Catholics in the city were there.

We know that there are accounts of there being a really large crowd.

So, even if they weren't there necessarily in person

at the execution, then we know they would have heard about the story.

So we've got a manuscript biography of her life,

which was circulated amongst the Catholic community.

And then we've got a little sort of picture as well,

which does a similar job.

So it's a little engraving of her execution,

so the death is happening here at the background.

And they're putting the weights on.

Putting the weights on. Gosh.

And, again, you could pass this around the community.

You could share the story.

That's such a powerful image, isn't it? Mm.

"This is what those Protestants have done to us!" Yeah.

It must have been a hugely,

viscerally distressing experience for everybody.

I think it must have had a massive impact.

The two other Gunpowder Plotters, John and Christopher Wright,

they were possibly there as well.

So the men that were to later on become the Gunpowder Plotters,

they're in their teens at this point.

And then this story becomes a sort of, "What if that was MY mother?"

Or, "What if that was OUR family?"

It changes their whole world to be labelled as a Catholic.

It's not just a case of where do they go to church on a Sunday.

It's a real sort of everyday struggle.

There's constant persecution.

I'm thinking, if I were a Catholic, this might well make me paranoid,

but in a sense that paranoia is completely justified.

There are people out to kill them. Yeah, absolutely.

It is a stark reminder of the realities of what they're doing.

The violent death of Margaret Clitherow

must have had a seismic effect on the community here in York,

where Guy Fawkes and some of the other future plotters

were teenagers. This was an impressionable age for them.

And I can imagine that, if you were recently converted to Catholicism

or thinking about becoming a Catholic,

then this must have had a real impact.

I'm not saying that watching somebody being killed

for their religion justifies the killing of other people.

Absolutely not.

But I think I can begin to glimpse the sort of effect

it might have had on Guy Fawkes.

To him, religion must have started to feel

like it was a matter of life and death.

We can never know exactly what the young Guy Fawkes thought

about his home country and the ruling regime at this time.

But I have managed to find a hint.

This is the last trace of Guy Fawkes I've been able to find here in York.

It's a copy of a document

that calls him "Guy Fawkes of the City of York, gentleman".

But it's a copy of a document

where he's selling his land that he owned here,

so he's selling up and moving on.

In his early 20s, Guy headed to Europe to fight for Catholic Spain

in its wars against the Protestant Dutch.

Now, I just don't know whether he was a restless young man

looking for adventure,

or whether - as a Catholic -

he felt that there was no future for him in England.

But either way, this seems like a moment of decision in his life,

a clean break with the past.

He's going abroad to fight for his faith.

Guy was making a big change.

But he became a soldier - he's not an extremist...yet.

And although Guy has today become the face of the Gunpowder Plot,

it wasn't his idea.

To understand what drove this plan for radical violence,

I'm going to have to follow a different line of inquiry,

to look at the man credited with coming up with the plot -

the ringleader, Robert Catesby.

I've come to Ashby Manor in Northamptonshire,

which belonged to the Catesby family.

Ashby is mentioned in letters between the conspirators

as a base where they could meet.

And hidden away here is the perfect room.

This is the gatehouse.

It's supposed to be a good place for plotting

because it's at a distance from the main house over there.

That's so Robert Catesby's mum

didn't need to know what was going on.

And it's here they had some of the meetings

to plan the gunpowder attack on Westminster.

It happened here.

The other conspirators later talked about Catesby as a charismatic man

who drew them into the Gunpowder Plot.

But this wasn't the first uprising

Robert Catesby had been involved with.

Four years earlier, in 1601,

Catesby had joined an attempted coup known as the Essex Rebellion.

This wasn't a Catholic plot

but a power grab within the court of Elizabeth I,

which attracted a range of disaffected groups.

To try to understand Catesby's motivations,

I'm meeting a historian who studied the evidence for his life.

We're sat here in one of the Catesby family's homes.

Can you tell me a bit about Robert's background?

Well, he's from a prominent gentry family

who are descended from one of the cronies of Richard III.

But, by the 1580s, Catesby's father is known

as one of the kind of leading Catholic gentlemen in the area.

He is somebody who we call a recusant,

who pays fines for not attending the Church of England services,

and he's seen as potentially troublesome to the regime.

So like father, like son,

there's a history of being a Catholic, um, agitator?

Yeah. Catesby's father, William Catesby, as far as we know,

did not get involved in any schemes that involved violent action.

And he declared that he was a loyal subject of the Crown,

just not of the Church.

So, in that sense, Robert Catesby is of a generation

that has decided that violent action is now necessary

because they can't see that their situation

and the situation of those who are suffering for their religion

is going to become any better.

For Catesby, the outlawing of his religion meant you're not...

..really, you can't participate in the state,

you're not anything we'd call a citizen.

And for a member of the gentry, that means, really,

you can't live the kind of life to which you are born properly.

He seems to have been extremely ambitious,

but also possessed of this kind of desire for action.

We have records of him in conversation with Catholic priests

saying, "I cannot wait...

"..I cannot wait for Catholicism to be restored by Providence.

"I have to act now."

Hmm. He's an action man. He's an action man.

Alexandra, what happens to the people who were involved

in the Earl of Essex's rebellion?

Well, Essex himself, with a handful of his really close conspirators,

are executed. They're beheaded.

But a much larger number of them are imprisoned

and fined quite significantly.

This document says the names of those that are fined

and reserved to Her Majesty's use.

And here we see the name of Robert Catesby.

4,000 marks. That's a pretty big fine.

It's difficult to make these kinds of calculations,

but we think that's, at a very low estimate, at least £4 million today.

Gosh! And what does it mean to be "reserved to Her Majesty" like that?

That means, theoretically, to be imprisoned

or to be placed under some kind of close confinement...

Gosh. ..such as house arrest.

He's certainly, from this point, on the radar of the Privy Council

and the Crown as somebody who might be a potential threat.

Just before Elizabeth's death,

he's one of a number of Catholic gentlemen

who are placed under some kind of confinement and watch.

They're described as hunger-starved for innovation.

That means that they're seen as seditious,

they want some kind of change.

And he's seen as a kind of turbulent spirit who might be dangerous.

It seems to me that Robert Catesby was a desperate man,

so keen for change that it was already landing him in trouble.

Elizabethan rule had been hard on these Catholic families.

There was a mood of anger.

But I want to examine why that anger then grew into extremism

under a different monarch.

Because the Gunpowder Plot took place

two years after the death of Elizabeth.

In 1603, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England.

Catholics like Robert Catesby could find reasons to be optimistic.

King James was Protestant,

but his mother had been the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.

And James's own wife had converted to Catholicism,

suggesting his children could be brought up in the faith.

James was the leader many Catholics had hoped for.

In fact, one of the plotters, Thomas Percy was his name,

had even met up with James before he'd taken the English throne

in order to discuss toleration for Catholics.

So why would the plotters turn from being hopeful about the new king

to wanting to kill him?

James's biographer believes that a book written by the King himself

reveals a reason why the plotters might have felt betrayed.

So this is James's Basilikon Doron, or the Kingly Gift.

And it's a sort of how to be a king that James had written

to his son, Prince Henry.

And it was first written in 1599, when he was King of Scotland,

but then became a mammoth bestseller in England

upon his accession to the English throne in 1603.

What kind of insights do we get from the book, then?

We get some quite surprising insights

into how James might have operated.

One of those is the idea of being economical with the truth.

Is that OK?

Well, for James, it is, at times.

So, in this passage in the 1603 edition,

he says that "it may be thought a point of imbecility of spirit

"in a king to speak obscurely, much more untruly".

So that means you've got to be a straight talker to be a good king.

That's exactly right - in the 1603 edition.

In the earliest forms of the text, however, in 1599... Oh?

..it's a little bit different.

No way! What does he say?

So I've got here the older Scottish version from 1599.

The King must not "speak obscurely, much more untruly...

"..EXCEPT some unhappy mutiny or sudden rebellion were blazed up.

"Then, indeed, it is a lawful policy

"to bear with that present fiery confusion by fair general speeches."

What a dirty devil!

So he's saying, if there's a crisis going on,

it's OK not to tell the truth? Absolutely.

To say things that are kind of meaningless,

just to smooth things over? Yes. That's right.

And, indeed, he goes on to say

"keeping you as far as you can from direct promises". Hmm.

So give them the brush off.

So, if that's his true thought,

and I can imagine him coming to England and saying

all of these kind things about the Catholics... Hmm.

..is that how they got the idea that he was going to tolerate them?

Yes. On one level, I think that is true.

Before he is safely ensconced on the English throne,

he is trying to appeal to different audiences who might be useful to him

in bringing about a smooth course to succeed to Elizabeth's throne,

almost like a politician seeking election.

And when James came south in the spring of 1603,

things did get lighter for Catholics.

Fines on Catholics for non-attendance at church

were greatly alleviated.

So James gives off these signals.

He's able to leave people thinking that they have been listened to.

In that sense, he's a slippery character at times.

But that does then pose some problems

because the hopes that they had in him

turn out not to be quite what they had thought.

The King's attitude towards Catholics soon hardened.

In March 1604, James made a proclamation to Parliament,

making it clear he was never going to tolerate Catholicism.

He ordered the deportation of Jesuit priests,

accusing them of being a malevolent foreign influence.

They've got to go before the 19th day of March.

That's just a few weeks away.

This is a real crackdown.

The fines Queen Elizabeth had established

for not going to church were soon reintroduced and backdated.

There was a sense of doors closing.

The options for toleration were shutting down.

For an already frustrated man, like Robert Catesby,

all this must have felt like a real blow, perhaps even a provocation.

But while these events were unfolding in England,

Guy Fawkes was hundreds of miles away.

So how far down the road to extremism was he?

When King James came to the throne,

Guy Fawkes had been in Europe for about a decade,

fighting for Catholic Spain.

His name appears on lists of soldiers,

but there's very little detail.

But to get a sense of how Guy was feeling about events in England...

..I've tracked down some evidence

in a Spanish historical archive in Simancas.

This is a document that's supposed to be written,

rather excitingly, by Fawkes himself.

Now, it's in Spanish...

..and I can see what he's done.

He's changed his name to the more Spanish sounding Guido.

He's become Guido Fawkes here.

It's from 1603,

and Guido Fawkes is reporting news to the Royal Court in Spain.

The subject is the new King James.

And this English translation exposes the true nature of Guy's position.

It says here that James is a heretic

and that he's determined to "tyrannise" the English Catholics.

That's a strong word.

Guy goes on to claim there's infighting in James's court.

It appears he's deliberately undermining the new king.

He's telling the Spanish that England is not a happy place,

especially for Catholics.

It's likely that, by spreading these stories,

Guy was hoping Spain would step in and help.

Spain had been at war with England since the mid-1580s.

In 1588, the fleet of the Spanish Armada

had attempted to invade England.

Ever since, English Catholics had lobbied Spain to try again

or at least support a rebellion.

And there's another document here

that I think suggests just how desperate for change Guy was.

Hmm. This is... This is amazing.

This is Guy imagining the future.

He's drafted a proclamation that's to be handed out to English people

after an imaginary future foreign invasion.

So he's literally making plans for there to be a new regime in England.

And hidden inside what he's written is this fascinating point.

He says that God is going to be OK if you use violence,

provided you've been oppressed and when no other remedy is offered.

So what he's saying is that, when there's no other option,

violence is justified in the eyes of God.

Guy's ready to fight back.

Guy wasn't the only person

hoping Spain would help the English Catholics.

Catesby, and other plotters, too, appealed to the Spanish for aid.

It was their last big hope.

But Spain was short of cash.

War was expensive.

So, in 1604, Spain and England signed a peace treaty.

This must have left the English Catholics feeling alone.

The cavalry were not coming,

and perhaps this was the final twist in the screw

that made Catesby and the other conspirators

feel that it was down to them.

Nobody was going to help them.

They must take drastic action.

Within a year of James's coronation,

Catesby had begun to gather a small group of men

to plot a major uprising.

John Wright had grown up in York

and, like Catesby, had been part of the Essex Rebellion.

Thomas Wintour was Robert Catesby's cousin

and a relative of one of the priests

hidden by Margaret Clitherow.

To get inside the heads of these plotters

as they made their early plans, I've come to Hatfield House,

built by Robert Cecil,

the Secretary of State who oversaw the Gunpowder Plot investigations.

Among Cecil's papers here

are the confessions of core conspirator Thomas Wintour.

But these incredible original documents also present problems.

As a historian, the first question I have to ask myself

is, what's the nature of the evidence I'm looking at?

Who's writing it?

How do they know what they're writing about?

What's their motive?

And these confessions of Thomas Wintour are confusing.

They survive in different versions,

written in the hands of different secretaries.

But there are consistencies between them.

And these are key, key sources

for what happened in the Gunpowder Plot.

A lot of the detail comes out here

about what was happening in the room when the conspirators

were actually having these dangerous conversations.

It's like being a fly on the wall.

Wintour talks here about the first time Robert Catesby told him

he'd thought of a way to bring back the Catholic religion to England.

"In a word," Catesby says,

"it was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder."

There it is.

"In that place have they done us all the mischief."

So he means in that place - the Parliament -

they have done the bad things to us Catholics.

And, oh, this is...

It turns very dark here.

And he says, "Perchance God has designed that place

"for their punishment."

For what they've done to the members of the Catholic faith,

these people in the Parliament have to die.

In a single blast, they would take out the entire structure of power.

Targeting the opening day of Parliament

meant the King and most of his family would be at Westminster.

So would members of the House of Lords

and MPs, who all had a say in making the law.

But there was to be more to the plot than this.

The explosion was supposed to cause huge confusion in London,

and the plotters were going to go galloping up to the Midlands

to rouse their supporters for a rebellion.

They were also going to kidnap the King's daughter,

his little girl, and set her up as a Catholic puppet queen.

So this was supposed to be regime change, new monarch, new government.

Catesby was building his team and knew exactly who he needed.

Down here, we get for the first time

the mention of a very significant name in connection with the plot.

Catesby tells Wintour to go abroad,

to go to the Spanish Netherlands,

and to bring back with him "some confident gentleman..."

That means a gentleman he can trust.

"..such as you shall understand best able for this business

"and named unto me Mr Fawkes."

So why was this Guy Fawkes the best man for the job?

By the time Wintour went to recruit Guy Fawkes,

Guy had been a soldier fighting in a holy war for most of his adult life.

That must have given him a key practical skill.

He was likely to have worked with gunpowder.

This wasn't a suicide mission.

The plan was to light the fuse and escape.

Guy Fawkes should have had the know-how to do just that.

But I'm interested in how else Guy's experience abroad

might have influenced him.

Now, even though there's a great mass of 17th century documentation

about the Gunpowder Plot,

it's still quite hard for me to grasp what pushed Guy over the edge,

what turned him from being a rebel who wanted change

into an absolute radical willing to kill.

I'm intrigued if modern knowledge of extremism

can help me understand the lengths to which Guy was willing to go.

So I've enlisted the help of a journalist and author

who's written extensively on terror, and particularly al-Qaeda.

Jason, why do you think the plotters go abroad to recruit Guy Fawkes?

Because it's abroad that they'll find exactly the person they need.

The one thing that's really clear about more recent plots,

those in the last few decades, is that spending time overseas

and then coming back is absolutely crucial.

If they're overseas or, in fact, if they're just a long way from home,

they can be kept in an environment where the radicalisation process

is really very intense.

There are no other influences getting in.

It's just the group, the ideology, the other people in that group.

Someone who was involved in terrorist training

have said to me once that the only way that he could take a teenager

and turn them into the kind of extremist actor that he wanted

was by taking them away from their home,

and you put them in a kind of camp somewhere,

in a particular environment where you're surrounded by people

who are committed to the same cause. That will work.

I mean, he said to me, if they go back to their mum every night -

forget it. That's not going to happen.

If they're in an environment that's outside their own

kind of domestic environment, then you can really see

that the radicalisation processes will happen quite fast.

Do you think it's significant that Guy Fawkes himself

had been working as a soldier?

Oh, yeah, very much so.

In that real kind of hothouse environment,

his commitment and his tolerance for violence, also,

will be reinforced, get higher and higher and higher.

So I think it's really important

that he was what we would now call a foreign fighter.

He'd got skills, got psychologically hardened there,

was exposed to some probably quite traumatic experiences,

and then came back and is absolutely perfect to fit into

this plot that is pre-existing.

Jason, do you have any insight into what makes a person

willing to go all the way and kill loads of people?

The whole thing about terrorism is it's not a science.

What you can say is that whoever does it...

..needs to believe that it is the only thing they can do

in those circumstances.

They're very often seeing their community,

or the people they identify with, as under threat.

Now, that might be wrong - often is -

but that's what they see.

And that then justifies what they think they have to do.

No alternative? There's no alternative.

It is now, it is urgent,

and they have to be the ones who will do it.

In May 1604,

the core plotters came together to take an oath of secrecy

and make plans.

While Catesby was known to the authorities,

Guy Fawkes wasn't.

He was able to move around without suspicion.

Thomas Percy also now joined.

He was the brother-in-law of John and Christopher Wright

but, crucially, he was also a member of the King's Bodyguard.

With easy access to Westminster,

he rented the cellar beneath the parliamentary complex,

where the gunpowder would be hidden.

Preparations would take more than a year.

Meetings of Parliament were postponed, so the date slipped.

Plans were carefully made for the Midlands part of the rebellion.

Funds had to be raised.

That meant the network of conspirators grew.

These were cousins, brothers, friends.

It was a cell of mostly wealthy men

hoping for more power under a regime change.

On the 4th of November, 1605,

the stage was finally set for attack.

The following day, the King was due to open Parliament,

but underneath the Parliament - in the old building, not this one -

Guy Fawkes was waiting with his 36 barrels of gunpowder.

But now the plotters' network had widened, there was a leak.

An anonymous letter had been sent to a Catholic peer

warning him not to go to the opening of Parliament.

That letter was passed on to the authorities.

On the night of November the 4th,

with conspirators poised for rebellion around London

and in the Midlands, Guy Fawkes waited for his big moment.

But the King had ordered two searches of the cellars

beneath Parliament, and in the early hours of the 5th...

..Guy was discovered.

The most radical part of their plot had collapsed.

But some in the group believed the rest of the uprising

might still succeed.

Guy was brought to the Tower of London to be interrogated.

This was now a race against time.

On the one hand, the authorities wanted to know, who is this man?

Who else might be involved? What else might be planned?

On the other hand, Guy Fawkes wanted to stall for as long as possible.

If this rebellion was going to succeed,

then Catesby and the rest of them needed time

to rouse up their supporters.

Catesby had built a cell of men willing to go to extremes.

He must have felt like their future now hinged on Guy's interrogation.

I want to know exactly how committed Guy was to this plot.

Records from the time tell us what was said in the interrogation,

but a modern perspective might help me delve

into Guy's state of mind under pressure.

So I'm meeting a psychologist

who works as a registered intermediary in police interviews

and has designed an app to evaluate interview technique.

Laura, this is the actual room where Guy Fawkes was questioned.

You spend a lot of your time

in investigative interview situations, don't you?

Yes, I do. Bit different to this.

Very different. This is a very grand room.

I guess the idea was these are really grand surroundings.

This represents the majesty of the King,

and you're just a little worm. Yeah, definitely.

You're meant to feel intimidated

when you walk into an interrogation room.

And how does Guy Fawkes stand up to the questioning?

Yeah, so what the app allows us to do is see when there are significant

turning points in an interview or an interrogation.

So this here maps out the interrogation

on the second day with Guy Fawkes.

In the early stages, he's very happy to answer questions

about facts that are probably known.

For example, "Whether did you convey yet in barrels or otherwise?" -

how he carried the gunpowder.

And then he says in barrels. So he's answering those questions.

He's given them that information.

But it's clear to everybody it was in barrels

because he was caught there.

He's merely confirming the details that are already known. Yeah.

But we do see a switch as the interrogation goes on.

What this app allows us to see is that he then closes down.

His responses drop down to the red.

So the first one is when they start demanding where he was

in the nights leading up to the actual plot.

And they don't know that information.

And they don't know that information.

And what does he say? He says he has forgotten.

He's forgotten! And you can see it

all the way through the interrogation.

When they are asking him questions about facts they do not know,

such as his location or the other conspirators,

he does not give them any information.

So, as the questions get more important, as it were,

he's basically saying, "Up yours. I'm not telling you anything."

Absolutely. And he seems, when you read through this interrogation,

he seems very much in control.

He's obviously an extremist.

And there are two main schools of thought

around why they engage with that type of behaviour.

The first one is that there are mental health problems,

they are delusional, and they are going through with these acts

in a chaotic state of mind.

I don't necessarily see that in the interrogations with Guy Fawkes.

He actually appears to be quite the opposite.

Which leads us nicely on to the second school of thought -

that actually it's because they are very controlled.

They have this duty and they won't stop at anything to do it.

And when Guy Fawkes is caught red-handed, when he's interrogated,

you can see that he remains that composed state.

He's not giving erratic information.

He's actually being very controlled

and very careful with what he is providing to the interrogators.

I think he gives us a clue here into his source of strength

because he says to the questioners,

"You would have me betray my friends." Hmm.

"My friends." He's got friends. He's part of something social. Yeah.

He sees himself as part of a social group.

In his head, you know, he knows that he's been caught,

but he's very much hoping that the plot will still go ahead.

And so he's not giving away any information

that will jeopardise that.

It seems to me that Guy's belief in the plot was extremely deep.

But I've come to the National Archives to examine the evidence

for what it might have taken to make him crack.

Now, this completely astonishing document

is in the King's own handwriting.

So it's a little window into his mind,

and it explains how the King wants the interrogation done.

He says, if Guy Fawkes won't confess,

then "the gentler tortures..."

Tortures!

"..are to be first used unto him."

And then, after that, the King actually goes into Latin

because what he's saying is so dark and serious.

He says, "Et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur."

That means the tortures are to be increased

little by little until you get to the very worst.

Torture was technically illegal,

but the King would sanction it to bring down the plotters.

This document is a record of what Guy Fawkes said

in his interrogation.

This is the 7th of November.

And at the end of the session, they got him to sign his name,

supposedly to show that it was an accurate reflection of his words.

But when we fast forward two days,

you can see he's finally cracked...

..because at the end of this session

where they've asked him to sign his name,

he can hardly write,

which suggests - and this is really brutally awful -

that during those two days he's been tortured so badly,

whether using the thumbscrews or the rack or whatever,

that he's lost the use of his hands.

Despite all of his confidence

and his ability to withstand interrogation

that he showed earlier on, he's finally broken.

But the irony is Guy's naming of his accomplices was irrelevant.

While Guy was being questioned in the Tower,

the authorities were already hunting for known Catholics

who had left London suddenly.

On the 5th of November, hearing Guy Fawkes had been caught,

Catesby sped here to the Midlands,

still determined he could start a rebellion.

But in reality, support was dwindling.

Within days, the authorities had the plotters surrounded

in a Catholic safe house in Staffordshire.

I've got an account here by Thomas Wintour,

who was holed up in the house with them,

and it's brilliant because he takes us right into the drama

of the situation.

It says here that Wintour asked them - the others -

"what they resolved to do"

and they answered, "We mean here to die."

Wintour's confession gives us the detail of Catesby's last minutes.

He says he and Catesby were standing

"before the door they were to enter".

That's the authorities. They're just about to burst in.

And Catesby said,

"Stand by me, Tom, and we will die together."

Catesby, Thomas Percy and the two Wright brothers

were shot and killed on the 8th of November.

It's hard not to feel emotional

at the thought of these loyal friends dying together.

Catesby was willing to take a bullet - a lethal bullet -

for his beliefs.

But don't forget, he was very willing to kill other people

for his beliefs as well.

He was willing to take the lives of hundreds,

if not thousands, of people.

Four men were dead,

but the surviving plotters

would face the consequences of their actions.

The trial of Guy Fawkes and the other remaining conspirators

was held here in Westminster Hall on January the 27th, 1606.

This is one of the few parliamentary buildings that remain from the time.

This whole vast hall was full of a crowd who'd paid to get in.

There was a real squeeze on space.

Some members of Parliament complained

that they hadn't been able to get decent seats.

Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators

were up on a little platform,

and there was even a rumour that the King himself was present,

hidden away, secretly listening in.

This was a show trial lasting just one day.

It was used to target the conspirators' priests,

suggesting they'd encouraged the plot.

Just a few days later, Guy Fawkes and some of the other plotters

were taken to the yard outside the Palace of Westminster

and they were brutally executed.

The plotters were gone,

but King James would not allow the story to be forgotten.

In fact, in the archives, high above the Palace of Westminster,

is the document which wrote the remembrance of the 5th of November

into law.

Here it is. Oh, yes!

This Act says that, every year on the 5th of November,

everybody in the whole country is to go to church to give thanks.

It's, like, literally remember, remember the 5th of November.

What are they to give thanks for?

Let's have a look.

The hero of the story seems to be the amazing king himself.

It was the King himself who was able to understand

the "dark phrases" of a letter -

that was the tip-off letter.

It was the King who thereby

"miraculously was able to discover the hidden treason".

So, basically, the Act says everybody must give thanks to God

for the King because he saved the country.

Whether or not he really saved the nation,

King James made it clear that God was on his side -

the Protestant side -

and he helped to ensure that people in Britain

would celebrate the 5th of November for centuries.

In 1605, Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators

were united by a very specific desire for change.

But now Guy's face has been transformed into a broader symbol

of protest and rebellion,

with little connection to the original deadly plan.

The radical violence at the heart of the plot seems forgotten.

Yet I think it's the journey to extremism that's worth remembering.

The Gunpowder Plot happened at a time of deep divisions

and high stakes.

People had strong beliefs that sometimes led to extreme actions.

Time gives us perspective

and the space to start to understand the motivations of both sides.

But perhaps we should be mindful

about what and who we choose to celebrate.

Next time...

In 1066, one battle didn't win the war.

How did William the Conqueror manage to take over an entire country?

I think it must have been a really terrifying time for them.

William has got blood on his hands for this.