Every November 5 Britain burns Guy Fawkes in effigy, but the architect of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot was Robert Catesby, a tall, charismatic swordsman from an old Catholic family living under recusancy fines of 20 pounds a month and death penalties for sheltering priests. Wounded and captured in the failed Essex rebellion of 1601, he paid Elizabeth I a fine of 4,000 marks and sold his Chastleton estate. In 1603 he sent Thomas Wintour to seek a Spanish invasion from Philip III, who declined. James I's early hints of tolerance gave way in 1604 to the expulsion of priests and renewed fines.
In February 1604 at Lambeth, Catesby proposed to Wintour and John Wright blowing up the House of Lords at the state opening of Parliament and installing nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth as a Catholic queen. Wintour recruited the soldier and explosives expert Guy Fawkes in Flanders, and 36 barrels went into an undercroft beneath the Lords. The Monteagle letter of October 26, 1605 reached Robert Cecil, and Fawkes was caught on November 4 with matches and a watch. The fugitives fled to Holbeche House, where drying gunpowder exploded before a fire, and on November 8 a single musket ball killed Catesby and Thomas Percy.
Ambrose Rookwood was recruited for his horses and Sir Everard Digby pledged 1,500 pounds.
When his servant Thomas Bates grew suspicious, Catesby brought him into the plot.
Jesuit Henry Garnet showed Catesby a papal letter forbidding English Catholics to rebel.
Catesby refused to abort even after his cousin Francis Tresham begged him to flee abroad.
The government exhumed Catesby's body and set his head on a spike outside Parliament, and the Popish Recusants Act followed.
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