Chronicle of English history
A description of the unfolding of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605John Stow (1524/5-1605) was one of the most prolific historians of the 16th century. In his long career he produced 21 editions of his historical chronicles along with two of his Survey of London, which has remained in print ever since. Earlier editions of his accounts of English history were notable for their exhaustive detail; the item featured here is a later abridgement, issued with an eye to the popular market.
Stow’s contemporaneity with Shakespeare makes him important as both a repository of detail concerning the culture of the times and a potential source for the plays themselves.
The pages reproduced here describe the unfolding of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605, the most spectacular of the various attempts on the monarch’s life in the period. Catholic conspirators, led by Robert Catesby (1573-1605) but best represented in folk memory by Guy Fawkes (1570-1606), attempted to blow up the House of Lords in Westminster during the opening of Parliament attended by James I.
Having hidden around 30 barrels of gunpowder and shot in the building’s undercroft, the conspirators were betrayed by an anonymous letter warning prominent Catholic noblemen not to attend Parliament, which found its way to the attention of the king. The undercroft was searched and the explosives discovered, along with Fawkes himself. After torture and trial for treason, those conspirators still living were executed – Catesby died resisting arrest and his corpse was exhumed and beheaded.
Stow’s narrative tells of the secreting of the barrels and the incriminating letter to Lord Monteagle. Shakespeare worked references to the Gunpowder Plot into the text of Macbeth, including an allusion to Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest connected to the conspiracy who was popularly known as ‘the great equivocator’: Macbeth’s Porter, discoursing on the entrants to the gates of hell, declaims
Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator.
In this exhibition
- ‘To try their fortune there': from the town to the city
- 'A plot against my life, my crown': religion and politics
- The Geneva Bible
- An Elizabethan prayer book
- Chronicle of English history
- An anti-Spanish propaganda pamphlet
- 'Though thou write with a goose-pen': the tools of writing
- 'All this I speak in print': the London book trade
- 'A fine volley of words': language in Shakespeare's time
- 'What revels are at hand?': Shakespeare's literary contemporaries
- 'Dressing old words new': Shakespeare's literary sources
- 'Give physick to the sick, ease to the pained': medicine in Shakespeare's time
- 'Not of an age, but for all time': Shakespeare and King's College London
- Select bibliography