A quick refresher for fellow Americans who don’t remember the fifth of November: Guy Fox piled a bunch of gunpowder in the basement of Parliament and was about to blow it up as the King was addressing them. He was caught just before setting off his explosives.
So what would have happened if the Parliament guards checked the left door in the basement before checking the right?
First there’s the question of how effective would Fox’s bomb be? He might kill some of the members of Parliament but how likely would a clean sweep be? How sturdy is the floor of the House of Lords; could it have absorbed most of the blast?
And then assuming that he manages to kill most of them what happens? Civil war?
Actually he was arrested some days before the gathering was scheduled to take place (it was postponed several times). Sounds more exciting that way, though.
This was the 9/11 of its day and the government’s response was predictably savage.
The actual site is now thought to be under a parking lot inside the Palace of Westminster.
The conspirators had what they thought to be a pliable figurehead monarch designated for the post.
From what I can recall Fawkes was a rather minor part of the Gunpowder Plot. he came into it late, he didn’t really plan it, and about the only thing he has going for him was that he was the trigger man.
Things get very bad for Catholics on the British Isles.
My recollection is that the conspirators were counting on a general uprising among hidden Catholics and foreign support from Catholic powers on the continent. Which wasn’t very realistic - while they didn’t want to admit it, Protestantism had set in in England and there were not as many hidden Catholics as the conspirators wanted to believe. So the Protestant majority probably would have used a successful attack as an excuse for a reign of terror against Catholics. France and Spain might have send some agents and raided some ports but there wouldn’t have been a real Catholic alternative regime for them to support.
Politically, I think it would have led to a stronger monarchy. A king is easier to replace then a parliament. Henry would have become king with his father’s death. He was young (11) but he probably would have been granted some emergency powers to deal with the crisis. Parliament meanwhile would have lost its leadership and general membership and whatever version of it was restored would have been weaker. Pym and Cromwell would have had a lesser power base. Assuming Henry didn’t die his historical early death he would have had a long reign ahead of him.
There probably would have been civil war in England, but it wasn’t a war that the Catholics were going to win: they were well out-numbered by Protestants.
The discussion I’ve seen came down on the idea that every Catholic in England (who only made up 5% of the population) would have been massacred. It wasn’t a very well-thought-out plan.
(Among other things, they wanted to kidnap the king’s nine-year-old daughter, the future Elizabeth the Winter Queen of Bohemia, and install her on the throne, controlled by Catholic advisors.)
Except odds are that Henry, Prince of Wales would have been in the Lords when his father was giving his address - teaching him how the family trade works, and so on - as part of the overall ceremonial aspect. So I would think that Henry might well have died as well, leading to an even younger Charles becoming king, at the age of 4.
Not necessarily. If there was a regency for Charles, odds are it would have been a group of nobles. If they tried to overreach, they could have triggered much the same reaction from the Commons that James did in his later years.
As well, Pym didn’t enter Parliament until 1614, and once in Parliament, was a vehement anti-Catholic. He could easily have used the Gunpowder Plot to achieve even greater power within the Commons. Also, the tensions didn’t start to boil over until the 1620’s - so you’ve got a period of 15-20 years for the Commons to re-generate its membership. I don’t think there were very many MPs from 1604 who were still active 20 years later in the Commons.
+1 for all the catholics would have been massacred.
I don’t think they thought it through at all well. The plan for what would have come after a successful assassination seemed so poorly thought out that I think there may be merit in the ‘it was all a set up’ conspiracy theory.
Obviously individual MPs would be around and holding office. But I was talking about the powers of Parliament as an institution. There was a power struggle throughout the seventeenth century between the monarchists and the parliamentarians. If King James and Parliament were both eliminated in 1605, there would have been a sudden vacuum in English politics. And, in my opinion, the monarchists would have been in a better position to fill it. They would have been able to restore their base more quickly (put a crown on Henry or Charles and the monarchy is restored) and in the aftermath of a terrorist attack they would have been handed emergency powers to deal with the crisis (centralized executives usually prosper during times of crisis).
So Parliament wouldn’t have spent the 1620’s and 1630’s fighting to establish itself as the crown’s superior - it would have been trying to re-establish itself back up to its pre-1605 level as the crown’s equal.
I love those guys and it’s hard to admit that a British show had a higher budget than an American one, even one on basic cable, but they don’t have the budget to do it the same way once, much less twice.
