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The Gunpowder Plot

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A great book for those wanting more information about an important historical event and, at the same time, gain a little insight into the old adage about one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Religious persecution, political intrigue, conflicting agendas, murder and mayhem--What else is new? Well written.

In 1605, a landed gentry comprising less than 2% of England's population ruled over the other 98% by denying them the vote. Thus Parliament consisted of elite representatives who were elites themselves. In addition to the despotic rule of an elitist Parliament, King James I dovetailed Parliament to create a tyrannical government that outlawed the Catholic faith along with many Protestant groups labelled as Dissenters and Nonconformists. But it was the Catholics that felt the ire of the Church of England and its parent - the State, which executed their priests and persecuted the faithful.

The gunpowder plot was direct action rightly organized by a group of provincial English Catholic victims led by Guy Fawkes to stop Parliament from waging ethnic cleansing and trampling on their freedom of speech and religion. The freedom fighters had then planned to wage a revolution in the Midlands against the British government.

But Guy Fawkes had warned a friend to stay away from Parliament on the night, and that friend alerted the authorities who captured the resistance fighters in the act of placing barrels of gunpowder in the basement. The Catholic insurgents were subsequently hanged, disembowelled (drawn), and quartered; then their 4 body parts and their head were put on stakes around town to terrify any remaining Catholics who entertained taking back Parliament from attempting to do so.

Williamson's 300-page account of the Gunpowder Plot summons up analogy to the later 1774 incident in which an English tea ship was burned in an American harbor. The Catholic insurgents of 1605 were right to take direct action against a government of elites who were in rebellion against the people. Parliament's acts against Catholics were seditious, plain and simple.

Therefore it is ironic that on Bonfire Night every year on Nov 5th that English people burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, rather than celebrating Guy Fawkes for trying to stop the elitist Parliament from its sedition against the rights of the English people. It is even stranger when Indian-British, such as Punjabis, Mirpuris, Gujeratis, and Bengalis from the religions of Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim join in burning the effigies. If any effigy should be burned on Bonfire Night, it should be of an elitist Parliament that no one would or should tolerate today. Guy Fawkes was an important figure in the early history of libertarian thought whose ideas continue to deserve countenance.