The Horrifying Death Of Guy Fawkes
It’s just after midnight on November 5th, 1605. We’re in a dilapidated basement somewhere beneath the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. And for Guido Fawkes, the pressure is rising. The plot has been nearly 2 years in the making, and now the hour is almost at hand. But the noose is tightening, and the king’s men are searching the Palace of Westminster.
Terrified that the whole thing is about to unravel, Fawkes returns to the dreary desolation of the cellar. He checks that the barrels of gunpowder are still in place. To his relief, everything is where it should be. The whole thing might just work after all. He turns to leave, escaping from the claustrophobic cellar and out into the wind and rain of an autumn evening in London. But there will be no escape.
As he makes his getaway, Guy Fawkes stumbles into the waiting arms of Thomas Knyvet and his men. He’s captured. The barrels of gunpowder are quickly discovered. It’s all over. Only of course, it’s not all over, because for Guy Fawkes, the terror has not yet even begun. Over the following days, he will be broken and brutalized as the king’s torturers subject him to nightmarish interrogations.
And within 3 months, Fawkes’ life will be extinguished altogether. And what remains of his body will be systematically destroyed. This is the story of the horrifying end of Guy Fawkes, the man who very nearly blew up Parliament, killed the king, and changed the course of British history. Somewhere out there in an alternate universe, London looks quite different.
Crossing the Thames from east to west on Westminster Bridge, there is no looming Palace of Westminster. There is no House of Commons, and there is no Big Ben in its tower. In their place is, well, since this is an alternate universe we’re talking about, it could be literally anything. Perhaps an art gallery or a museum, more likely a big Tesco.
In our universe, however, this is not the case. The Palace of Westminster is very much still there, still in the place it has been in one form or another since 1016. And it’s one of the most iconic structures in the entire country. And the reason it’s still there, instead of that big Tesco’s, is because on November 5th, 1605, Guido Fawkes and his co-conspirators failed in their plan to blow the thing up.
It’s this failure that gives us the verse that is ingrained in the minds of basically every schoolchild in Britain. Remember, remember, the 5th of November. Gunpowder, treason, and plot. Had Guy Fawkes been successful, the repercussions would have been enormous. At the physical level, the explosion would have wiped out a large portion of central London.
Researchers from the University of Wales in Aberystwyth believe that everything within a radius of 40 m would have been completely destroyed. The shockwaves would have damaged buildings up to 900 m away, and casualties would have been enormous. At the political level, Fawkes and his fellow plotters wanted to get rid of the Protestant King James and install his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, instead.
Elizabeth could then be raised as a Catholic. In practice, this would have caused some serious friction in Britain and would likely have resulted in an all-out conflict. So, we would have had a dead king and most likely a civil war 40 years ahead of schedule. Of course, Guido Guy Fawkes was not acting alone.
He was one of at least 13 main conspirators, each of whom was dead keen to overthrow the Protestant King James. The 35-year-old from York was not the leader of this outfit, nor was he the mastermind. And yet he is the one that most of us immediately associate with the Gunpowder Plot. And there’s a very good reason for this.
Fawkes had been a soldier for 10 years and had fought for the Spanish Habsburg Empire in the Dutch Revolt. He knew all about handling explosives, and so he was the one in charge of the gunpowder. Another good reason for his fame is that Fawkes was the one who was caught red-handed. The plotters’ plan itself went something like this.
They would lease a cellar or undercroft beneath the Palace of Westminster, stuff it full of gunpowder, and then leave Guy Fawkes to light the fuse and escape. From here, they would stage a rebellion in the Midlands, capture Princess Elizabeth, and begin founding their new Catholic regime. The idea that a bunch of random blokes could simply rent a cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament sounds wild today.
The early 17th century really was a very different time. Around the Palace of Westminster, there were shops, taverns, private lodgings, and all manner of other spaces. The public did not have access to the inner chambers, but they could still get pretty close to the action. This generally wasn’t a problem as most people just went about their business.
But in October 1605, something very different was going on. By late October, the plotters had installed 36 barrels of gunpowder in their cellar directly underneath the House of Lords. They must have been quite confident at this point. It looked like there would be a high chance of success. And yet, the plot had grown too broad.
There were simply too many people involved, and the previously tight ship had begun to leak. On October 26th, 1605, in Hoxton, London, a servant of Lord Monteagle encountered a stranger in the road. The stranger gave the servant a letter and told him to hand it to his master. The letter read the following:
“My Lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore, I would advise you to devise some excuse to shift your attendance at this Parliament. Retire yourself into your country, where you may expect the event in safety.”
The letter continued:
“For there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament. And yet, they shall not see who hurts them.”
Lord Monteagle was a member of the House of Lords and was himself a Catholic. The anonymous letter came from someone who knew about the plot and clearly wanted to save Catholic lives. Monteagle was instructed to burn the letter, but instead, he went to the king. King James was apparently struck by the letter’s use of the word blow, which to him suggested some stratagem of fire and powder.
James had every right to be concerned. His own father, Lord Darnley, had been killed after the assassins planted gunpowder in the Lord’s lodgings at Kirk o’ Field in 1567. It’s believed that the first search took place on Monday, November the 4th. The fact that the plotters had hidden a huge amount of gunpowder directly beneath the House of Lords, and that it still wasn’t found immediately, shows us just how complex the Palace of Westminster really was.
Although it might just be a testament to the chaotic scene inside the undercroft, it’s also possible the guards entered this on November 4th and even found Guy Fawkes himself there. Fawkes told them he was looking after a pile of firewood for his master, and the guards accepted this weird excuse and left him to it.
Over the following hours, though, the guards could not shake the image of this strange man guarding a pile of firewood for seemingly no reason in a dank basement. Something odd was going on. The guards would return to the undercroft and conduct a more thorough search. In the early hours of November 4th, the guards returned led by Thomas Knyvet.
This time, they encountered Guy Fawkes as he was leaving. Fawkes held an iron lantern, which wasn’t unusual, but he also carried slow matches, touchwood, and a pocket watch with which to time his fuses. The firewood was thrown aside, and underneath the guards found the gunpowder. There were no excuses, and Fawkes was quickly arrested.
In the words of Sir Edward Hoby:
“On the 5th of November, we began our Parliament, to which the king should have come in person, who refrained through a practice, but that morning discovered. The plot was to have blown up the king at such a time as he should have been sat on his royal throne, accompanied with all his children, nobility, and commoners, and assisted with all bishops, judges, and doctors. The blast would have ruined the whole state and kingdom of England.”
On arrest, Guy Fawkes had given his name as John Johnson and maintained his innocence, even though he’d basically been caught in the act. He certainly would have expected some rough interrogation, but he might not have expected that he would be tortured.
Torturing at this time was actually forbidden unless the king himself called for it. But as the king had come this close to being blasted to smithereens, he certainly did call for it. And a letter from the king, dated November 6th, says:
“The gentler tortures are to be first used unto him.”
Et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur. This section in Latin translates to:
“And thus, by steps, extended to the bottom depths.”
In other words, the torturers had the green light to use whatever tortures they wished on Guy Fawkes. Start with something soft and then get harder and harder and harder. It’s likely that Guy Fawkes was first hung by his wrists from manacles attached to the wall in a dreary dungeon beneath the Tower of London. This would have been a pretty awful experience in itself.
The soft tissue of the shoulder would have borne much of the strain and would have become stretched and deformed around the joint. The nerves in Fawkes’ wrists would have become paralyzed. This is possibly the story behind the famous image of Fawkes’ two signatures side by side, one written before the torture began, and one written afterwards.
However, it’s likely that the real damage to Fawkes’ hands and to his sanity came a bit later. After the hours of suspension, the muscles of the chest wall begin to necrotize due to a lack of oxygen. This would have made even taking a breath quite difficult for Fawkes as he hung in his drafty chamber.
It would also have damaged his internal organs as the structure of the abdomen began to break down. But, it seems that Guy Fawkes was a tough customer. He began his torture on November 6th and did not sign any confessions, at least not for the first couple of days. By November 7th, however, he had begun to crack.
Sir Edward Hoby would say:
“Since Johnson’s being in the Tower, he beginneth to speak English.”
Later that day, Fawkes gave his captors his real name. He was not John Johnson at all, but rather Guido Fawkes. His jailers, however, needed more than just these tidbits of information. It’s likely that they decided to step things up a notch at this point.
Remember that King James had specifically advised them to extend their tortures by steps to the bottom depths. And so, Fawkes was strapped into a rack and lay prostrated beneath his tormentors as they got to work. This work involved tightening the rollers at each machine and with each turn, the arms and legs would be pulled incrementally in opposite directions, putting enormous pressure on the joints of the hips, knees, and elbows.
Fawkes’ shoulders would already have been damaged by his time spent in the manacles and would have been subjected to yet more agony here. These fragile shoulders would have been points of weakness in Fawkes’ brutalized frame. They may have been the first to succumb to the torment. As the rollers were tightened, a series of cracks, pops, and snaps echoed across the walls of the chamber, intermingling with the anguished yells from Guy Fawkes himself.
Periodically, the tormentors would ease the strain, not to give Fawkes relief, but instead to prolong his torment and give him the opportunity to confess. We don’t know exactly how Guy Fawkes would have felt during his torture, but an English rhyme from the previous century gives us a general idea of the pain involved.
The poem goes like this:
“Tis something to lie on a country day, away from the city amid the hay, but another to hark to the cogs’ great clack, as they inch by inch do lengthen thy back. Speak then, my friend, utter thy plead, ere thy body breaketh and inward bleed.”
The agony would have been simply unimaginable and surely no one would have been able to withstand it for long. Surprisingly, though, it seems that some people did. In 1546, the English writer and Protestant preacher Anne Askew was delivered to the rack and told to name her fellow Protestants. She refused to give up any names and was subjected to horrifying stretching as a result.
The stretching went on for quite a while until it was decided that Anne’s interrogation was done and she would simply be executed. Anne had to be carried to her place of execution. Her mangled legs and dislocated hips would not bear her weight anymore. For Anne, the execution offered no sweet release, though, because she was burned at the stake.
It seems Guy Fawkes did crumble under the pressure of the rack and in time, he did give his tortures the information they wanted. On November 8th, he began to offer up the names of his fellow conspirators. He told them of their plan to put Princess Elizabeth into the seat of power and the following day, he offered up another name, that of Francis Tresham. Fawkes had been utterly broken and as a result had given the torturers exactly what they asked of him. Now, he would await his fate.
On January 27th, 1606, Fawkes and seven of his co-conspirators went to trial. He pleaded not guilty even though he’d been caught in the act and had confessed on the rack. All eight defendants were found guilty. Attorney General Sir Edward Coke then read out a complex and harrowingly specific death sentence, which involved cutting off the genitals and burning them before the prisoners’ eyes, as well as the removal of their bowels and hearts.
The prisoners would then have their heads chopped off and their bodies sliced into quarters. These body parts would be displayed to the public, where they would, in Coke’s words,
“become prey for the fowls of the air.”
Coke was keen to cause as much shame and anguish to the condemned men as possible. He informed them that they would be put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both.
So, on January 31st, 1606, Guy Fawkes and three of his co-conspirators were carried from the Tower of London on wattled hurdles and taken to Westminster. In the Old Palace Yard, in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, they were put to death. The other three, Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, and Robert Keyes were executed first.
The first stage of the execution was partial hanging. The length of the rope was carefully calculated to keep three prisoners alive and even conscious during their suffering. Michel Speer, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bristol, tells us what would have happened to the prisoner’s body.
Professor Speer talks of fracturing and bruising to the hyoid bone that protects the larynx and of visible hemorrhages in the eyes and face as the jugular vein is compressed and blood pools in the head. In Speer’s own words:
“Because the larynx and trachea are partially obstructed, this makes breathing labored. Strain on the cervical spine and surrounding muscles in the neck can lead to tearing, muscle spasms, or dislocation of the vertebrae, causing severe pain.”
Next, the men were cut down, still alive and still aware of what was going on. The second phase of the execution was drawing, in which the men were disemboweled. As Professor Speer tells us, this would have been agonizingly painful. The abdominal cavity possesses a high concentration of pain receptors, particularly around the membranous lining of the abdomen.
When punctured, these pain receptors would have sent intense pain signals to the brain, overwhelming the body’s capacity for pain management. The three men would have now entered a state of extreme shock. The massive blood loss may even have killed the condemned men at this point or at least rendered them unconscious.
Professor Speer believes it’s unlikely that any of the three men were still alive for the last stage of the execution, which is the quartering. During quartering, the limbs would be removed. They would then be boiled with spices to preserve them and would be sent to the four corners of the United Kingdom.
Guy Fawkes had just watched all of this happen to his friends and co-conspirators and now it was his turn. But, it seems that he had a plan which would help him escape further torment at the hands of his captors. After asking for forgiveness from the king and from the state, Fawkes made his way to the scaffold. An account from the time tells us what happened next.
“His body being weak from the torture and sickness, he was scarce able to go up the ladder. Yet, with much ado, by the help of the hangman, went high enough to break his neck by the fall.”
So, Fawkes had cheated his executioners. He jumped from a height that was enough to kill him, sparing himself the agony of drawing and quartering. Again, Professor Speer is best positioned to tell us what happened here. This probably caused him to suffer a bilateral fracture of his second cervical vertebra, assisted by his own body weight, an injury known as the hangman’s fracture.
Months of unimaginable agony were at an end. With one last act of ingenuity, Fawkes had given himself a mercifully quick death. It was all finally over. Fawkes’ body, however, was not spared the hooks and scalpels of the drawers and quarterers, and these processes still happened with Fawkes’ various body parts being displayed around the country as a warning to anyone who might try to follow in his footsteps.
But, fortunately for Guy, he was no longer in a position to have much of an opinion on this barbarity. Since that day, Guido Fawkes has passed into a peculiar sort of immortality. Every November 5th, there or thereabouts, effigies of Guy Fawkes are burned on bonfires in the United Kingdom.
This is supposed to represent the joyful day of deliverance when King James was saved from fiery Armageddon, but nowadays, it’s largely just an excuse to let off a few fireworks and to set things on fire. Guy himself has been transmuted into a general figure of public anger and hatred.
On Bonfire Night, the Guy is supposed to take pride of place in the center of the fire, but often, the Guy is in fact an effigy of someone else. Effigies of the Boer leader Paul Kruger were burned during the Anglo-Boer War, while Hitler and Mussolini were popular choices during the Second World War.
More recently, Margaret Thatcher, Osama bin Laden, even Liz Truss have found their way onto November’s bonfires, even though the latter’s 10 years Prime Minister was too short even to include a bonfire night. I might be wrong here, but I think there was more time between Guy Fawkes’ imprisonment and his execution than Liz Truss ever had in office anyway. I might be wrong, though.
Nonetheless, the face of Guy, with his famous haircut and his old style hat, has become a symbol of rebellion and civil disobedience. The 2005 film V for Vendetta has helped to popularize this image and members of the hacker group Anonymous also sometimes wear Guy Fawkes masks in this style.
In the words of historian Lewis Cole:
“Fawkes has become a major icon in modern political culture, a potentially powerful instrument for the articulation of post-modern anarchism.”
And the funny thing is that none of this would be true if Guido and the other plotters had actually been successful. If they had, they would be just another chapter in the tumultuous history of Britain during the Stuart period. Instead, Fawkes has achieved quasi-immortality thanks to his glorious failure. Although it’s worth remembering that that immortality did not come cheaply because before he could obtain it, he first had to go some of the worst torments imaginable.
