Robert Catesby

It's February 8th, 1601 in London, more than four years before Guy Fawkes is arrested in a cellar beneath the Houses of Parliament.

Robert Catesby rests his hand on the hilt of his sword as he marches through a crowd of armed men.

As the 28-year-old son of a wealthy landowner, at his age Robert should be seeking a position at the court of Queen Elizabeth.

But Robert has a major disadvantage that prevents him from being accepted into royal favor.

Robert is a Catholic, and religion is a divisive issue in England at this time.

Nearly 50 years ago, King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and appointed himself as the head of a new Church of England.

In the decades since, the country has been torn apart by religious conflict, and those who wish for it to embrace a new Protestant faith vie for dominance.

For the last 21 years, Queen Elizabeth has ruled England as a Protestant, and she's enacted laws limiting Catholics' ability to worship freely.

Yes, absolutely.

So the Vauxes are cousins to Robert Catesby.

They call him Robin.

They're very close to him, very dear.

And they were arrested for it and they were imprisoned for it.

So there's this bond that goes back at least till 1581 with these fathers.

So what you get with the second generation, with Francis Tresham, with Robin Catesby and the Vaux family, especially Robert Catesby, is this sense of frustration.

They've seen their fathers broken by imprisonment, by fines.

It was King James I, but he was ruling a country that was very divided.

A group of 13 men, led by a man named Robert Catesby, were incredibly unhappy with how the king was treating people.

Wait, Robert Catesby? I thought Guy Fawkes was the leader.

Everyone always talks about Guy Fawkes.

Most people think that, but Catesby was the mastermind who came up with the plot in May 1604.

What fake name did Guy Fawkes give when he was arrested? Great job! Let's see how you did.

The first answer is King James I.

For question two, the mastermind was Robert Catesby.

However, James continued enforcing religious restrictions, leaving Catholics increasingly disillusioned.

So Robert Catesby, a wealthy Catholic, began organising a plot to overthrow the Protestant establishment.

Conspiracy theorists argue that the government also benefited from this atmosphere of religious hostility as exposing a Catholic assassination plot would provide the perfect justification for imposing even harsher restrictions, which they did do after this.

So it did, in that respect, it kind of worked.

Yeah, well, that's why people would believe the conspiracy theory that it was all planned.

But the thing to pick up from that, I think, is how annoyed would you be if you were Robert Catesby or any of his family that you're not celebrated in any way? And that was probably the first time his name has been mentioned for 420 years.

i did not know any of this

like oh

But actually, it's led by others.

And I think probably the most well-known is Robert Catesby, but we don't call it Catesby Night.

So Guy Fawkes has sort of got this legend, hasn't he, about him? Yeah, absolutely.

Well,

Catholics were also restricted from voting, holding public office, or owning land.

Now, the plot had been hatched by Robert Catesby two and a half years prior, but it took some time to come to fruition.

One and a half tons of gunpowder were smuggled into the subterranean room below the House of Lords and concealed by wood and coal.

Now, the idea was to murder the king and the parliamentarians in the hope that they could fill that leadership void and then take control of England.

And he's a great speaker.

He manages to be funny, to be cutting and to be optimistic, you know, and all in the space of a couple of minutes.

He's quite something.

Yeah, and I was wondering if great Democrat supporter Springsteen and his good friend Barack Obama might be turning on their computers and maybe singing a few victory songs between their houses or something.

What you're saying about apologies and people owning it, in my time in corporate office and seeing people that have had failures that have either cost millions or affected hundreds or those kind of scenarios, I think owning it really does work.

People are scared to put themselves on the line but It's normally obvious anyway.

If you say to your couple or your staff member, hey, I did that wrong, it's caused this issue, and here's what I'm going to do to fix it, we're not going to be doing that again.

If you see something going on, here's the reporting structure, you want to turn around and point fingers.

Exactly.

At the start of his reign, or actually even before then, because when people knew that it was maybe going to James, the Catholic plotters, I believe it was Robert Catesby, actually went to speak to James.

And James told them he would be fair to them.

He wouldn't persecute them anymore.

So James is king in 1603 and then shows his true colours that he's not going to look after the Catholics.

So they start plotting what we will call the gunpowder plot.

Robert Catesby is actually the leader of the plot.

It's not Guy Fawkes like we kind of think it is.