Guy Fawkes - A Biography Part 2

About Easter time, when Wintour was about to return to England, Stanley presented Fawkes to him. It seems that Wintour had already informed Fawkes of the conspirators' intentions, because in Fawkes' confession he states that "I confesse that a practise in general was first broken unto me against his Majesty for reliefe of the Catholique cause, and not invented or propounded by myself. And this was first propounded unto me about Easter last was twelve month, beyond the Seas, in the Low Countries of the Archduke's obeyance, by Thomas Wintour, who came thereupon with me into England".

So the drive behind this entire scheme was religious, namely, the relief of the Catholic cause in England, a country that had accepted the reformed faith.  This Catholic conspiracy against the Protestant establishment was something at which that false religion was good at doing.

In May of 1604, Guy Fawkes met with Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, John Wright and Thomas Wintour at an inn called the “Duck and Drake” in the fashionable Strand district of London, and agreed under oath along with Percy to join the other three in the gunpowder conspiracy. This oath was then sanctified by the performing of mass and the administering of the sacraments by the Jesuit priest John Gerard in an adjoining room.

The Catholic Church was up to its ears in this murderous plan, and gave its approval to the conspirators.  What better reinforcement could pious Catholics have than for their church to support them in their murderous campaign.

Fawkes assumed the identity of John Johnson, a servant of Percy and was entrusted to the care of the tenement which Percy had rented. Around Michaelmas, Fawkes was asked to begin preparations for work on the mine, but these plans were delayed until early December as the Commissioners of the Union between England and Scotland were meeting in the same house. Eventually the work in the mine proved slow and difficult for men unused to such physical labours, and further accomplices were sworn into the plot.

The date agreed for this awful massacre was 5^th November 1605, the day of the opening of parliament, when King James I of England (James VI of Scotland) would be present.  About March 1605, the conspirators hired a cellar under the House of Lords beneath Parliament, once again through Thomas Percy, and Fawkes assisted in hiding kegs full of gunpowder in the cellars beneath the chamber where the king and the rest of the political elite would assemble.  Enough powder was stored to completely destroy the building and kill everyone present.  He was then despatched to Flanders to presumably communicate the details of the plot to Stanley and Owen.