♪ Lucy Worsley: Midnight on the 4th of November, 1605.

[Wind blowing] ♪ In a cellar deep below Parliament, a man called Guy Fawkes prepares to light the fuse of a deadly attack planned by a small network of men... ♪ determined... [Crackling] to destroy the king and his government.

[Cawing] Unstopped, this one explosion... [Crack] could have changed the history of Britain entirely.

So what were the steps, the causes, and connections that led these men to attempt to blow up Parliament.

♪ [Explosion] [Cawing] ♪ In this series, I'm reinvestigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history.

Oh, yes, here we go.

Man: And now you're face to face with William the Conqueror.

Woman: They know that sex sells and that violence sells.

Worsley: These stories form part of our national mythology.

They harbor mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries.

It turns very dark here.

Woman: Clearly showing us-- Worsley: Refugees.

There are such graphic images of religious violence.

But with the passage of time, we have new ways to unlock their secrets using scientific advances and a modern perspective.

He was what we would now call a foreign fighter.

Worsley: I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses.

I'm going to reexamine old evidence and follow new clues...

The human hand.

to get closer to the truth.

It's like fake news.

Worsley: You're questioning whether we can actually take that seriously as a piece of evidence.

♪ [Explosion] ♪ Worsley: I'm deep beneath the streets of London on the trail of a group of men who many would now call domestic terrorists.

Ah, here it is.

These are the Gunpowder Plotters, the infamous Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators, who on the 5th of November, 1605, tried to blow up a packed parliament in the name of their Catholic faith.

I think that this image shows just how sanitized this story has become.

Every year, much of Britain still celebrates Guy Fawkes Night, his night, on the 5th of November.

The Gunpowder Plot has become a nice, family-friendly party night with bonfires and fireworks and an engraving that's safe enough to be shown on the Tube.

But this is not a safe story.

♪ Back in 1605 when Guy Fawkes was caught, the ports were closed, people panicked.

The state focused all its attention on tracking down and executing the group of would-be killers.

♪ [Chains rattling] ♪ I want to investigate how these men reached the extreme, how they connected with others and came to believe that the answer to their problems was wiping out the seat of power.

This was a dangerously radicalized network of men.

They were willing to risk everything to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people for their cause, but what made them unite and plan this really monumental act of violence?

♪ We tend to forget the names or even the existence of most of the plotters, yet even as children, they had connections to each other... so to uncover the roots of their radicalization, I'm starting this investigation by going back much earlier than most people do, to their childhoods.

♪ 3 of the future conspirators, John Wright and his brother Christopher Wright, as well as Guy Fawkes, all went to the same school, growing up in the city of York.

♪ [Bells tolling] ♪ Amazing.

♪ This is Saint Michael Le Belfrey Church, which has been active for nearly 500 years.

It's currently undergoing a major renovation, but I've been allowed to come in to take a look at the church records.

♪ This book contains the first written record of Guy Fawkes.

Here he is, the third one down.

It says, "Guy Fawkes, the son of Edward Fawkes, was christened," here in this church in 1570.

But there's something else I want to look at in this book to get a sense of Guy's early life.

Oh, yes!

Here it is.

A list of burials from 8 years later, 1578, and among the people who've died is...Edward Fawkes.

That's Guy's father, so Guy lost his father when he was still a child, and there's something else here, too.

It's quite tricky to read, but it says he was registrar and advocate of the consistory court of the cathedral, so that means he was a lawyer working in the church court.

That would have been dealing with cases like the annulment of people's marriages, that sort of thing, and it's interesting because it means that Guy's father was working for the church, and at the time, that meant the Protestant church.

♪ So Guy, who will ultimately die for a Catholic cause, is born a Protestant.

♪ In the late 16th century, faith had the power to dictate life on Earth and beyond.

Protestants and Catholics disagreed on the route to salvation.

Picking the wrong side meant the difference between heaven and hell.

♪ In the 1580s, Guy's mother remarried into a Catholic family.

Around this time, Guy became a convert.

When Guy converted to Catholicism, he must have felt that this was the only way to obey God and ultimately to go to heaven, but in the eyes of the state, he was utterly wrong.

The Protestant Queen Elizabeth was on the throne, and by the 1580s, when the young Guy was walking these streets, Catholicism was effectively banned.

Not going to Protestant church could mean fines or even prison.

Catholic priests were outlaws, and protecting priests meant real danger.

When Guy was in his teens, a local woman called Margaret Clitherow-- she was the wife of a butcher-- was accused of hiding priests in her house.

As a result of this, she was brought to the middle of York, and she was very publicly killed.

♪ I want to know what effect this event might have had on Guy Fawkes and the other York-based conspirators, the Wrights, who were from a known Catholic family, and there's a tantalizing clue in the city's Bar Convent.

♪ Worsley: Hannah, what is this completely extraordinary object?

So we are looking at the hand of Margaret Clitherow.

-The hand?

-The hand.

-The human hand?

-The human hand.

This is a relic taken at some point by her followers so they had something to remember her by, to keep safe.

Can you tell me a bit of Margaret's story?

She's somebody who converts to Catholicism in her 20s, and then she runs runs a sort of secret Catholic network, safe homes for priests.

She's imprisoned 3 times over a 7-year period, and then in 1585, the law changes, and it makes it a capital offense to harbor a priest, and then under that law, she is prosecuted, so she refuses to plead guilty or not guilty to protect people around her.

So the sentence that's actually passed on her is to be crushed until she enters a plea or until she dies.

To be--to be what?

-To be crushed?

-Crushed?

-Yes.

Yes.

-Ohh!

That is terrible.

Yeah.

It's a particularly brutal death.

There's a sharp stone put under her back, a door is laid on top of her, and then heavy weights are put on top of the door, so they're constantly added, so it gets heavier and heavier, and obviously, naturally, I think she lasts about 15 minutes.

It's a particularly horrific way to die, very public, quite undignified.

So she's stripped.

She's just in her kind of linen shift.

And people are watching this.

People are watching.

There's a huge crowd watching it.

Is it possible that Guy Fawkes was present at this public spectacle of execution?

It's very possible.

A lot of the Catholics in the city were there.

We know that there are accounts of there being a really large crowd.

So even if they weren't there necessarily in person at the execution, then we know they would have heard about the story.

So we've got the manuscript biography of her life, which was circulated amongst the Catholic community, and then we've got a little sort of picture, as well, which does a similar job.

So it's a little engraving of her execution, so the death is happening here at the background.

And they're putting the weights on.

-Putting the weights on.

-Gosh.

And again, you could pass this around the community.

You could share the story.

That's such a powerful image, isn't it?

"This is what those Protestants have done to us."

It must have been a hugely, viscerally distressing experience for everybody.

I think it must have had a massive impact.

The two other gunpowder plotters, John and Christopher Wright, they were possibly there, as well.

So the men that were to later on become the Gunpowder Plotters, you know, they're in their teens at this point, and then this story becomes a sort of what if that was my mother, or what if that was our family?

Changes their whole world to be labeled as a Catholic.

It's not just a case of where do they go to church on a Sunday.

It's a real sort of everyday struggle.

There's constant persecution.

I'm thinking if I were a Catholic this might well make me paranoid, but in a sense that paranoia is completely justified.

There are people out to kill them.

Yeah, absolutely.

It is a stark reminder of the realities of what they're doing.

♪ Worsley: The violent death of Margaret Clitherow must have had a seismic effect on the community here in York, where Guy Fawkes and some of the other future plotters were teenagers.

This was an impressionable age for them, and I can imagine that if you were recently converted to Catholicism or thinking about becoming a Catholic, then this must have had a real impact.

I'm not saying that watching somebody being killed for their religion justifies the killing of other people.

Absolutely not, but I think I can begin to glimpse the sort of effect it might have had on Guy Fawkes.

To him, religion must have started to feel like it was a matter of life and death.

[Bells tolling] We can never know exactly what the young Guy Fawkes thought about his home country and the ruling regime at this time... [Water sloshing] but we do know he decided to leave.

In his early 20s, Guy went to Europe to fight for Catholic Spain in its wars against the Protestant Dutch... ♪ but he was becoming a soldier.

He's not an extremist yet... ♪ and although Guy has today become the face of the Gunpowder Plot, it wasn't his idea.

To understand what drove this plan for radical violence, I'm going to have to follow a different line of inquiry to look at the man credited with coming up with the plot, the ringleader Robert Catesby.

♪ I've come to Ashby Manor in Northamptonshire, which belonged to the Catesby family.

Ashby is mentioned in letters between the conspirators as a base where they could meet, and hidden away here is the perfect room.

This is the gatehouse.

It's supposed to be a good place for plotting because it's at a distance from the main house over there.

That's so Robert Catesby's mum didn't need to know what was going on, and it's here they had some of the meetings to plan the gunpowder attack on Westminster.

♪ [Hushed] It happened here.

♪ The other conspirators later talked about Catesby as a charismatic man who drew them into the Gunpowder Plot... but this wasn't the first uprising Robert Catesby had been involved with.

[Priest speaking Latin] 4 years earlier in 1601, Catesby had joined an attempted coup known as the Essex Rebellion.

This wasn't a Catholic plot, but a power grab within the court of Elizabeth I, which attracted a range of disaffected groups.

♪ To try to understand Catesby's motivations, I'm meeting a historian who studied the evidence for his life.

We're sat here in one of the Catesby family's homes.

Can you tell me a bit about Robert's background?

Well, he's from a prominent gentry family, who are descended from one of the cronies of Richard III, but by the 1580s, Catesby's father is known as one of the kind of leading Catholic gentlemen in the area.

He is somebody who we call a recusant, who pays fines for not attending the Church of England services, and he's seen as potentially troublesome to the regime.

So like father, like son, there's a history of being a Catholic agitator.

Yeah.

Catesby's father William Catesby, as far as we know, did not get involved in any schemes that involved violent action, and he declared that he was a loyal subject of the Crown, just not of the church.

[Indistinct voices] So in that sense, Robert Catesby is of a generation that has decided that violent action is now necessary because they can't see that their situation and the situation of those who are suffering for their religion is going to become any better.

[Indistinct voices] For Catesby, the outlawing of his religion meant you're not really-- you can't participate in the state.

You're not anything we'd call a citizen, and for a member of the gentry, that means really, you can't live the kind of life to which you are born properly.

He seems to have been extremely ambitious but also possessed of this kind of desire for action.

We have records of him in conversation with Catholic priests saying, "I cannot wait.

"I cannot wait for Catholicism "to be restored by Providence.

I have to act now."

-He's an action man.

-He's an action man.

Alexandra, what happens to the people who were involved in the Earl of Essex's rebellion?

Well, Essex himself, with a handful of his really close conspirators are executed.

They're beheaded, but a much larger number of them are imprisoned and fined quite significantly.

This document says, "The names of those that are fined and reserved to Her Majesty's use," and here we see the name of Robert Catesby.

4,000 marks.

That's a pretty big fine.

It's difficult to make these kinds of calculations, but we think that's, at a very low estimate, at least £4 million today.

Gosh.

And what does it mean to be reserved to Her Majesty like that?

That means, theoretically, to be imprisoned or to be placed under some kind of close confinement -such as house arrest?

-Gosh.

He's certainly, from this point, on the radar of the Privy Council and the Crown as somebody who might be a potential threat.

Just before Elizabeth's death, he's one of a number of Catholic gentlemen who are placed under some kind of confinement and watch.

They're described as hunger starved for innovation.

That means that they're seen as seditious.

They want some kind of change, and he's seen as a kind of turbulent spirit, who might be dangerous.

♪ Worsley: It seems to me that Robert Catesby was a desperate man... so keen for change that it was already landing him in trouble.

Elizabethan rule had been hard on these Catholic families.

There was a mood of anger... ♪ but I want to examine why that anger then grew into extremism under a different monarch... ♪ because the Gunpowder Plot took place two years after the death of Elizabeth.

In 1603, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England.

♪ Catholics like Robert Catesby could find reasons to be optimistic.

♪ King James was Protestant, but his mother had been the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, and James' own wife had converted to Catholicism, suggesting his children could be brought up in the faith.

♪ James was the leader many Catholics had hoped for.

In fact, one of the plotters-- Thomas Percy was his name-- had even met up with James before he'd taken the English throne in order to discuss toleration for Catholics.

♪ So why would the plotters turn from being hopeful about the new king to wanting to kill him?

James' biographer believes that a book written by the king himself reveals a reason why the plotters might have felt betrayed.

So this is James' "Basilikon Doron," or "The Kingly Gift," and it's a sort of how to be a king that James had written to his son Prince Henry, and it was first written in 1599 when he was King of Scotland but then became a mammoth bestseller in England upon his accession to the English throne in 1603.

What kind of insights do we get from the book then?

We get some quite surprising insights into how James might have operated.

One of those is the idea of being economical with the truth.

Is that OK?

Well, for James it is at times.

So in this passage in the 1603 edition, he says that "it may be thought a point "of imbecility of spirit in a king to speak obscurely, much more untruly."

So that means you've got to be a straight talker -to be a good king.

-That's exactly right.

In the 1603 edition.

In the earliest forms of the text, however, in 1599, it's a little bit different.

No way.

What does he say?

So I've got here the older Scottish version from 1599.

"The king must not speak obscurely, "much more untruly, except some unhappy mutiny "or sudden rebellion were blazed up.

"Then indeed it is a lawful policy to bear "with that present fiery confusion by fair general speeches."

What a dirty devil!

So he's saying, if there's a crisis going on, it's OK not to tell the truth.

-Absolutely.

-To say things that are kind of meaningless just to-- just to smooth things over.

Yes.

That's right, and indeed, he goes on to say, "keeping you as far as you can from direct promises."

So give them the brush off.

So if that's his true thought-- and I can imagine him coming to England and saying all of these kind things about the Catholics-- -Mm.

-is that how they got the idea that he was going to tolerate them.

Uh, yes, on one level, I think that is true.

Before he is safely ensconced on the English throne, he is trying to appeal to different audiences who might be useful to him in bringing about a smooth course to succeed to Elizabeth's throne, almost like a politician seeking election, and when James came south in the spring of 1603, things did get lighter for Catholics.

Fines on Catholics for nonattendance at church were greatly alleviated, so James gives off these signals.

He's able to leave people thinking that they have been listened to.

In that sense, he's a slippery character at times, but that does then pose some problems because the hopes that they had in him turn out not to be quite what they had thought.

♪ Worsley: The king's attitude towards Catholics soon hardened.

In March 1604, James made a proclamation to Parliament, making it clear he was never going to tolerate Catholicism.

He ordered the deportation of Jesuit priests, accusing them of being a malevolent foreign influence.

The fines Queen Elizabeth had established for not going to church were soon reintroduced and backdated.

There was a sense of doors closing.

The options for toleration were shutting down.

♪ For an already frustrated man like Robert Catesby, all this must have felt like a real blow, perhaps even a provocation... ♪ but while these events were unfolding in England, Guy Fawkes was hundreds of miles away.

♪ So how far down the road to extremism was he?

♪ When King James came to the throne, Guy Fawkes had been in Europe for about a decade, fighting for Catholic Spain.

♪ His name appears on lists of soldiers, but there's very little detail... ♪ but to get a sense of how Guy was feeling about events in England... ♪ I tracked down some evidence in a Spanish historical archive in Simancas.

This is a document that's supposed to be written rather excitingly by Fawkes himself.

Now it's in Spanish--ahh!

And I can see what he's done.

He's changed his name to the more Spanish-sounding Guido.

He's become Guido Fawkes here.

It's from 1603, and Guido Fawkes is reporting news to the royal court in Spain.

♪ The subject is the new King James, and this English translation exposes the true nature of Guy's position.

It says here that James is a heretic and that he's determined to "tyrannize" the English Catholics.

That's a strong word.

Guy goes on to claim there's infighting in James' court.

It appears he's deliberately undermining the new king.

He's telling the Spanish that England is not a happy place, especially for Catholics.

♪ It's likely that by spreading these stories Guy was hoping Spain would step in and help.

♪ Spain had been at war with England since the mid 1580s.

[Men shouting] [Explosions] In 1588, the fleet of the Spanish Armada had attempted to invade England.

Ever since, English Catholics had lobbied Spain to try again or at least support a rebellion.

♪ And there's another document here that I think suggests just how desperate for change Guy was.

Hmm.

This is--this is amazing.

This is Guy imagining the future.

He's drafted a proclamation that's to be handed out to English people after an imaginary future foreign invasion, so he's literally making plans for there to be a new regime in England, and hidden inside what he's written is this fascinating point.

He says that God is going to be OK if you use violence, provided you've been oppressed and when no other remedy is offered.

So what he's saying is that when there's no other option, violence is justified in the eyes of God.

Guy's ready to fight back.

♪ Guy wasn't the only person hoping Spain would help the English Catholics.

Catesby and other plotters, too, appealed to the Spanish for aid.

It was their last big hope, but Spain was short of cash.

War was expensive, So in 1604, Spain and England signed a peace treaty.

This must have left the English Catholics feeling alone.

The cavalry were not coming, and perhaps this was the final twist in the screw that made Catesby and the other conspirators feel that it was down to them.

Nobody was going to help them.

They must take drastic action.

♪ Within a year of James' coronation, Catesby had begun to gather a small group of men to plot a major uprising.

John Wright had grown up in York and, like Catesby, had been part of the Essex Rebellion.

Thomas Wintour was Robert Catesby's cousin and a relative of one of the priests hidden by Margaret Clitherow.

♪ To get inside the heads of these plotters as they made their early plans, I've come to Hatfield House, built by Robert Cecil, the Secretary of State, who oversaw the Gunpowder Plot investigations.

♪ Among Cecil's papers here are the confessions of core conspirator Thomas Wintour.

These are key, key sources for what happened in the Gunpowder Plot.

A lot of the detail comes out here about what was happening in the room when the conspirators were actually having these dangerous conversations.

It's like being a fly on the wall.

Wintour talks here about the first time Robert Catesby told him he'd thought of a way to bring back the Catholic religion to England.

"In a word," Catesby says, "it was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder."

There it is.

"In that place have they... done...us all the mischief."

So he means "in that place, the Parliament, they have done the bad things to us Catholics," and--oh--this is-- it turns very dark here, And he says, "Perchance God "has designed that place for their punishment.

"For what they've done "to the members of the Catholic faith, these people in the Parliament have to die."

♪ In a single blast, they would take out the entire structure of power.

Targeting the opening day of Parliament meant the king and most of his family would be at Westminster.

So would members of the House of Lords and MPs, who all had a say in making the law, but there has to be more to the plot than this.

The explosion was supposed to cause huge confusion in London, and the plotters were going to go galloping up to the Midlands to rouse their supporters for a rebellion.

They were also going to kidnap the king's daughter, his little girl, and set her up as a Catholic puppet queen.

So this was supposed to be regime change, new monarch, new government.

Catesby was building his team and knew exactly who he needed.

Down here, we get for the first time the mention of a very significant name in connection with the plot.

Catesby tells Wintour to go abroad, to go to the Spanish Netherlands, and to bring back with him "some confident gentleman."

That means a gentleman he can trust, "such as you shall understand best able for this business and named unto me Mr.

Fawkes."

♪ So why was this Guy Fawkes the best man for the job?

♪ By the time Wintour went to recruit Guy Fawkes, Guy had been a soldier fighting in a holy war for most of his adult life.

♪ That must have given him a key practical skill.

♪ He was likely to have worked with gunpowder.

This wasn't a suicide mission.

The plan was to light the fuse and escape.

Guy Fawkes should have had the know-how to do just that... ♪ but I'm interested in how else Guy's experience abroad might have influenced him.

Now, even though there's a great mass of 17th century documentation about the Gunpowder Plot, it's still quite hard for me to grasp what pushed Guy over the edge, what turned him from being a rebel who wanted change into an absolute radical willing to kill?

♪ I'm intrigued.

if modern knowledge of extremism can help me understand the lengths to which Guy was willing to go, so I've enlisted the help of a journalist and author who's written extensively on terror, and particularly al Qaeda.

Jason, why do you think the plotters go abroad to recruit Guy Fawkes?

Because it's abroad that they'll find exactly the person they need.

The one thing that's really clear about more recent plots, those in the last few decades, is that spending time overseas and then coming back is absolutely crucial.

If they're overseas or, in fact, if they're just a long way from home, they can be kept in an environment where the radicalization process is really very intense.

There are no other influences getting in.

It's just the group, the ideology, the other people in that group.

Someone who's involved in terrorist training said to me once that the only way that he could take a teenager and turn them into the kind of extremist actor that he wanted was by taking them away from their home, and you put them in a kind of camp somewhere in a particular environment where you're surrounded by people who are committed to the same cause.

That will work.

I mean, he said to me, "If they go back to their mum every night, forget it.

That's not gonna happen."

If a if they're in an environment that's outside their own kind of domestic environment, then you can really see that the radicalization processes will happen quite fast.

Do you think it's significant that Guy Fawkes himself had been working as a soldier?

Oh, yeah, very much so.

In that real kind of hothouse environment, his commitment and his tolerance for violence, also, will be reinforced, get higher and higher and higher, so I think it's really important that he was what we would now call a foreign fighter.

He got skills, got psychologically hardened there, was exposed to some probably quite traumatic experiences, and then came back and is absolutely perfect to fit into this plot that is preexisting.

Jason, do you have any insight into what makes a person willing to go all the way and kill loads of people?

The whole thing about terrorism is it's not a science.

What you can say is that whoever does it... needs to believe that it is the only thing they can do in those circumstances.

They're very often seeing their community or the people they identify with as under threat.

Now, that might be wrong.

Often is, but that's what they see, and then that then justifies what they think they have to do.

-No alternative.

-There's no alternative.

It is now, it is urgent, and they have to be the ones who will do it.

♪ Worsley: In May 1604, the core plotters came together to take an oath of secrecy and make plans.

♪ While Catesby was known to the authorities, Guy Fawkes wasn't.

He was able to move around without suspicion.

♪ Thomas Percy also now joined.

He was the brother-in-law of John and Christopher Wright, but crucially, he was also a member of the King's Bodyguard.

With easy access to Westminster, he rented the cellar beneath the parliamentary complex, where the gunpowder would be hidden.

Preparations would take more than a year.

Meetings of Parliament were postponed, so the date slipped.

Plans were carefully made for the Midlands part of the rebellion.

Funds had to be raised.

♪ That meant the network of conspirators grew.

These were cousins, brothers, friends.

It was a cell of mostly wealthy men hoping for more power under a regime change.

On the 4th of November, 1605, the stage was finally set for attack.

[Bell tolls] The following day, the king was due to open parliament, but underneath the parliament-- in the old building, not this one-- Guy Fawkes was waiting with his 36 barrels of gunpowder... ♪ but now the plotters' network had widened, there was a leak.

An anonymous letter had been sent to a Catholic peer, warning him not to go to the opening of Parliament.

That letter was passed on to the authorities.

[Wind blowing] On the night of November the 4th, with conspirators poised for rebellion around London and in the Midlands, Guy Fawkes waited for his big moment, but the king had ordered two searches of the cellars beneath Parliament, and in the early hours of the fifth... [Strike, fuse sparking] [Cawing] Guy was discovered.

♪ The most radical part of their plot had collapsed, but some in the group believed the rest of the uprising might still succeed.

♪ Guy was brought to the Tower of London to be interrogated.

This was now a race against time.

On the one hand, the authorities wanted to know who is this man, who else might be involved, what else might be planned?

On the other hand, Guy Fawkes wanted to stall for as long as possible.

If this rebellion was going to succeed, then Catesby and the rest of them needed time to rouse up their supporters.

♪ Catesby had built a cell of men willing to go to extremes.

♪ He must have felt like their future now hinged on Guy's interrogation.

♪ I want to know exactly how committed Guy was to this plot.

Records from the time tell us what was said in the interrogation, but a modern perspective might help me delve into Guy's state of mind under pressure... ♪ so I'm meeting a psychologist who works as a registered intermediary in police interviews and has designed an app to evaluate interview technique.

♪ Laura, this is the actual room where Guy Fawkes was questioned.

You spend a lot of your time in investigative interview situations, don't you?

-Yes, I do.

-Bit different to this.

Very different.

This is a very grand room.

I guess the idea was these are really grand surroundings.

This represents the majesty of the king, and you're just a little worm.

Yeah, definitely.

You're meant to feel intimidated when you walk into an interrogation room.

And how does Guy Fawkes stand up to the questioning?

Yeah.

So what the app allows us to do is see when there are significant turning points in an interview or an interrogation, so this here maps out the interrogation on the second day with Guy Fawkes.

In the early stages, he's very happy to answer questions about facts that are probably known.

For example, "Whether did you convey yet in barrels or otherwise?"

How he carried the gunpowder, and then he says in barrels, so he's answering those questions.

He's given them that information, but it's clear to everybody it was in barrels because he was caught there.

He's merely confirming the details -that are already known... -Yeah.

but we do see a switch as the interrogation goes on.

What this app allows us to see is that he then closes down.

His responses drop down to the red.

So the first one is when they start demanding where he was in the nights leading up to the actual plot.

And they don't know that information.

And they don't know that information.

And what does he say?

He says he has forgotten.

He's forgotten?!

And you can see it all the way through the interrogation.

When they are asking him questions about facts they do not know, such as his location or the other conspirators, he does not give them any information.

So as the questions get more important, as it were, he's basically saying, "Up yours.

I'm not telling you anything."

Absolutely, and he seems-- when you read through this interrogation, he seems very much in control.

He's obviously an extremist, and there are two main schools of thought around why they engage with that type of behavior.

The first one is that there are mental health problems, they are delusional, and they are going through with these acts in a chaotic state of mind.

I don't necessarily see that in the interrogations with Guy Fawkes.

He actually appears to be quite the opposite, which leads us nicely on to the second school of thought that actually it's because they are very controlled.

They have this duty, and they won't stop at anything to do it.

and when Guy Fawkes is caught red-handed, when he's interrogated, you can see that he remains that composed state.

He's not given erratic information.

He's actually been very controlled and very careful with what he is providing to the interrogators.

I think he gives us a clue here into his source of strength because he says to the questioners, "You would have me betray my friends."

-Hmm.

-"My friends."

He's got friends.

He's part of something social.

He sees himself as part of a social group.

In his head, you know, he knows that he's been caught, but he's very much hoping that the plot will still go ahead, and so he's not giving away any information that will jeopardize that.

♪ Worsley: It seems to me that Guy's belief in the plot was extremely deep... ♪ but I've come to the National Archives to examine the evidence for what it might have taken to make him crack.

♪ Now, this completely astonishing document is in the king's own handwriting, so it's a little window into his mind, and it explains how the king wants the interrogation done.

He says, "If Guy Fawkes won't confess, then the gentler tortures"-- tortures-- "are to be first used unto him."

And then after that, the king actually goes into Latin because what he's saying is so dark and serious.

He says, "et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur."

That means the tortures are to be increased little by little until you get to the very worst.

♪ Torture was technically illegal, but the king would sanction it to bring down the plotters.

This document is a record of what Guy Fawkes said in his interrogation.

This is the 7th of November, and at the end of the session, they got him to sign his name, supposedly to show that it was an accurate reflection of his words, but when we fast forward two days, you can see he's finally cracked because at the end of this session where they've asked him to sign his name, he can hardly write, which suggests--and this is really brutally awful-- that during those two days he's been tortured so badly, whether using the thumbscrews or the rack or whatever, that he's lost the use of his hands.

♪ Despite all of his confidence and his ability to withstand interrogation that he showed earlier on, he's finally broken.

But the irony is Guy's naming of his accomplices was irrelevant.

[Groaning] ♪ While Guy was being questioned in the tower, the authorities were already hunting for known Catholics who had left London suddenly.

♪ On the 5th of November, hearing Guy Fawkes had been caught, Catesby sped here to the Midlands, still determined he could start a rebellion... ♪ but in reality, support was dwindling.

♪ Within days, the authorities had the plotters surrounded in a Catholic safe house in Staffordshire.

I've got an account here by Thomas Wintour, who was holed up in the house with them, and it's brilliant because he takes us right into the drama of the situation.

It says here that Wintour asked them, the others, "what they resolved to do," and they answered, "'We mean here to die.'"

Wintour's confession gives us the detail of Catesby's last minutes.

He says he and Catesby were standing "before the door they were to enter."

That's the authorities.

They're just about to burst in, and Catesby said, "'Stand by me, Tom, and we will die together.'"

♪ Catesby, Thomas Percy, and the two Wright brothers were shot and killed on the 8th of November.

It's hard not to feel emotional at the thought of these loyal friends dying together.

Catesby was willing to take a bullet, a lethal bullet, for his beliefs, but don't forget, he was very willing to kill other people for his beliefs, as well.

He was willing to take the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

♪ 4 men were dead, but the surviving plotters would face the consequences of their actions.

♪ The trial of Guy Fawkes and the other remaining conspirators was held here in Westminster Hall on January the 27th, 1606.

This is one of the few parliamentary buildings that remain from the time.

This whole vast hall was full of a crowd, who'd paid to get in.

There was a real squeeze on space.

Some members of Parliament complained that they hadn't been able to get decent seats.

Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators were up on a little platform, and there was even a rumor that the king himself was present, hidden away, secretly listening in.

♪ This was a show trial lasting just one day.

It was used to target the conspirators' priests, suggesting they'd encouraged the plot.

♪ Just a few days later, Guy Fawkes and some of the other plotters were taken to the yard outside the Palace of Westminster, and they were brutally executed.

♪ In 1605, Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators were united by a very specific desire for change... ♪ but now Guy's face has been transformed into a broader symbol of protest and rebellion with little connection to the original deadly plan.

♪ The radical violence at the heart of the plot seems forgotten, yet I think it's the journey to extremism that's worth remembering.

The Gunpowder Plot happened at a time of deep divisions and high stakes.

People had strong beliefs that sometimes led to extreme actions.

Time gives us perspective and the space to start to understand the motivations of both sides, but perhaps we should be mindful about what and who we choose to celebrate.

♪