Guy Fawkes and fellow conspirators planning the gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, circa 1605 Photo: GETTY
By Max Davidson
7:30AM GMT 05 Nov 2011
What if Guy Fawkes had pulled it off? Even four centuries after the Gunpowder Plot was foiled, the hypothesis grabs the imagination.
James I blown to smithereens at the opening of Parliament. Hundreds of MPs and peers murdered. The ruling class of England wiped out at a stroke. Pandemonium on the streets. A crater hundreds of yards wide in what is now Parliament Square.
As a terrorist atrocity, striking at the heart of a nation, it would have dwarfed 9/11. Guy Fawkes would not have been a harmless bumbler, recreated in pillowcases stuffed with leaves and chucked on bonfires, but a hate figure to rival Osama bin Laden.
Lovers of counter-factual history – the things that would have happened if events had taken a slightly different turn – have had a field day with the plot that was so dramatically thwarted in November 1605.
It was a Catholic plot aimed at engineering a transition to a Catholic monarchy; but Catholics constituted such a tiny proportion of the population that it had little realistic chance of success.
Even if the Houses of Parliament had been blown sky-high, the scale of the carnage would surely have provoked a backlash against Catholics by the Protestant majority, similar to the backlash against Muslims after 9/11. The England that emerged might have been a nastier, less tolerant society, which might in turn have made the development of a liberal constitutional monarchy less likely.
Depending how things had panned out after that – and during the Civil War, if there had been a Civil War – we might have had our own version of the French Revolution in the late 18th century, with a guillotine in Trafalgar Square and tricoteuses from Kent and Sussex doing cross-stitch in Whitehall. Instead of our dear Queen, we might be lumbered with Tony Blair as president. Chills the blood, doesn’t it?
One piquant aspect of this historical parlour game is that, if James I had been assassinated by Guy Fawkes, along with his eldest son Henry, the next in line would have been Charles I, who was only four and would have needed supervising 24/7 by a no-nonsense nanny with a good grasp of the English constitution.
Another likely consequence of James being assassinated is that Shakespeare would never have produced Macbeth, which was written to curry favour with James and probably first performed in 1606, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. The King James Bible, work on which started in 1604, would probably have survived a successful Gunpowder Plot, although it would be called the King Charles Bible, which doesn’t have the same ring. But can we be so sure about other achievements of James’s reign?
If there had been constitutional upheaval in the years following 1605, it is hard to believe that the colonisation of the New World – Jamestown, Virginia, the first major English settlement in America, was established in 1607 – would have proceeded at the same rate. The French might have stolen a march on us, the United States might have become Les États Unis and Americans might now eat croissants rather than Big Macs.
There would be no baseball World Series, just boules in the town square, and given the French love of wine, there would certainly have been no Prohibition, which would have put the kibosh on that Prohibition-era film classic Some Like It Hot – which would have robbed Marilyn Monroe of her most famous role, which might have meant Jack Kennedy having an affair with someone else, which could have impacted on the Cuban missile crisis...
So many what-ifs. So many might-have-beens. Would MPs have fiddled their expenses if, somewhere in their collective consciousness, there lingered a folk memory of Parliament being razed to the ground in a bonfire of the vanities? Would we take Parliament more – or less – seriously?
Perhaps the one stone-cold certainty is that, if the plot had succeeded, Bonfire Night would never have evolved in its present form. Generations of children would have been spared the indignity of sitting on street corners, in front of a padded sack with a pumpkin on top, squeaking ''Penny for the Guy’’. We would have had fewer over-the-top firework displays that cost millions and are over in minutes. And the Health and Safety Executive would have had to find something else to fuss about – which is perhaps scariest of all.
By Max Davidson
7:30AM GMT 05 Nov 2011
What if Guy Fawkes had pulled it off? Even four centuries after the Gunpowder Plot was foiled, the hypothesis grabs the imagination.
James I blown to smithereens at the opening of Parliament. Hundreds of MPs and peers murdered. The ruling class of England wiped out at a stroke. Pandemonium on the streets. A crater hundreds of yards wide in what is now Parliament Square.
As a terrorist atrocity, striking at the heart of a nation, it would have dwarfed 9/11. Guy Fawkes would not have been a harmless bumbler, recreated in pillowcases stuffed with leaves and chucked on bonfires, but a hate figure to rival Osama bin Laden.
Lovers of counter-factual history – the things that would have happened if events had taken a slightly different turn – have had a field day with the plot that was so dramatically thwarted in November 1605.
It was a Catholic plot aimed at engineering a transition to a Catholic monarchy; but Catholics constituted such a tiny proportion of the population that it had little realistic chance of success.
Even if the Houses of Parliament had been blown sky-high, the scale of the carnage would surely have provoked a backlash against Catholics by the Protestant majority, similar to the backlash against Muslims after 9/11. The England that emerged might have been a nastier, less tolerant society, which might in turn have made the development of a liberal constitutional monarchy less likely.
Depending how things had panned out after that – and during the Civil War, if there had been a Civil War – we might have had our own version of the French Revolution in the late 18th century, with a guillotine in Trafalgar Square and tricoteuses from Kent and Sussex doing cross-stitch in Whitehall. Instead of our dear Queen, we might be lumbered with Tony Blair as president. Chills the blood, doesn’t it?
One piquant aspect of this historical parlour game is that, if James I had been assassinated by Guy Fawkes, along with his eldest son Henry, the next in line would have been Charles I, who was only four and would have needed supervising 24/7 by a no-nonsense nanny with a good grasp of the English constitution.
Another likely consequence of James being assassinated is that Shakespeare would never have produced Macbeth, which was written to curry favour with James and probably first performed in 1606, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. The King James Bible, work on which started in 1604, would probably have survived a successful Gunpowder Plot, although it would be called the King Charles Bible, which doesn’t have the same ring. But can we be so sure about other achievements of James’s reign?
If there had been constitutional upheaval in the years following 1605, it is hard to believe that the colonisation of the New World – Jamestown, Virginia, the first major English settlement in America, was established in 1607 – would have proceeded at the same rate. The French might have stolen a march on us, the United States might have become Les États Unis and Americans might now eat croissants rather than Big Macs.
There would be no baseball World Series, just boules in the town square, and given the French love of wine, there would certainly have been no Prohibition, which would have put the kibosh on that Prohibition-era film classic Some Like It Hot – which would have robbed Marilyn Monroe of her most famous role, which might have meant Jack Kennedy having an affair with someone else, which could have impacted on the Cuban missile crisis...
So many what-ifs. So many might-have-beens. Would MPs have fiddled their expenses if, somewhere in their collective consciousness, there lingered a folk memory of Parliament being razed to the ground in a bonfire of the vanities? Would we take Parliament more – or less – seriously?
Perhaps the one stone-cold certainty is that, if the plot had succeeded, Bonfire Night would never have evolved in its present form. Generations of children would have been spared the indignity of sitting on street corners, in front of a padded sack with a pumpkin on top, squeaking ''Penny for the Guy’’. We would have had fewer over-the-top firework displays that cost millions and are over in minutes. And the Health and Safety Executive would have had to find something else to fuss about – which is perhaps scariest of all.
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