Discovering Gunpowder Plot: The King's Book and the Dissemination of News

Abstract

For contemporaries, the Gunpowder Plot was ‘a mother… of all crimes’, and their sense of shock, and awe, in the face of so dreadful a treason was in no way diminished by the drama surrounding its discovery.2 The arrest of Guy Fawkes outside the cellars of Westminster, late on the night of 4 November 1605, caught King James I and his ministers completely off guard. A mass of documentary evidence for the fraught days following Fawkes's apprehension confirms that ignorance, embarrassment, even panic ran through the highest counsels in the land. While a deadly strike had clearly been frustrated, with just hours to spare, no one knew whether trouble might be expected from other conspirators in the capital, or indeed, from rebels and mischief-makers elsewhere in England. Military men rushed to court, and within a week a sizeable force had assembled there under the command of the Earl of Devonshire, prepared to face and to repel a phantom enemy.3 Open panic did of course subside, as administration and country alike began to measure and appreciate the danger, but anxiety was a long time dying. The extraordinary hysteria that swept London in the spring of 1606, on a rumour that the king had been assassinated, touched the court itself and serves as a reminder that, months after 5 November, many Englishmen in high positions still stood on their guard.4