Despite the fact that Puritans saw King James as a temporising Protestants, Catholics in the realm viewed him as a heretic. They did not want another Protestant king. Despite Elizabeth’s protestant reign, Jesuit influence had nurtured a strong cohort of concealed recusant Catholics. When James I ascended the throne, they saw this change in guard as an opportunity to act. 

The leader of the scheme, which would ever-after being known as The Gunpowder Plot, was Robert Catesby. The plot was simple, blow-up Westminster when the Parliament was in session with the king and members of both houses inside. To accomplish this Catesby and his associates rented a ground floor vault directly beneath the House of Lord. They they ferried barrels of gunpowder from Catebys’ house in Lambeth by river to Westminster. Guy Fawkes, a former explosives expert who had worked with the Spanish navy was engaged to detonate the cache. 

Fortunately, the plot was uncovered by Lord Monteagle, a member of the House of Lords, who received an anonymous tip-off on the night of November 4th, begging him to absent himself from parliament the next day. Moneagle alerted the authorities and in the early hours of November 5th, 1605, Fakes was discovered beneath the parliament. He was fully dressed, ready to ride at a moment's notice, with a watch, a match and 36 barrels of gunpowder crammed into the tiny vault directly beneath the House of Lords. 

All the plotters and their associates were arrested in a series of raid throughout England. Cateby and Fawkes were executed. It was a dark day for England, the first of its kind. To Cateby and his associates restoring Catholicism to England was a matter of eternal importance. They saw themselves as patriots, waging a holy war on the crown to facilitate a return to orthodox religion. It was radical but necessary.

While the king and his lords lived to see another day the reign of James, I was fraught with political friction between himself and his parliament.