Guy Fawkes is the most famous failure in English history. He did not plan the Gunpowder Plot, did not lead it, and did not light anything — but he was the man found in the cellar, and it is his name the country remembers.
Who he was
Born in York in 1570 and raised Protestant, Fawkes converted to Catholicism as a young man and went to fight for Catholic Spain in the Low Countries, where he spent a decade and acquired a reputation for coolness and a working knowledge of explosives. He also took the name Guido, which is how he signed his confession.
The plot
The conspiracy was led by Robert Catesby, and its aim was to blow up the House of Lords at the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605, killing James I, his ministers and much of the aristocracy at once, then installing his young daughter as a Catholic puppet queen.
Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were moved into a cellar rented directly beneath the Lords. Fawkes’ job, as the group’s munitions man, was to light the fuse and escape by river.
How it failed
An anonymous letter reached Lord Monteagle warning him to stay away, and it was passed to the government. A search of the cellars in the early hours of 5 November found Fawkes with a lantern, matches and touchwood, standing beside the barrels. Who wrote the letter has never been established.
What happened to him
He was interrogated in the Tower of London, with James I personally authorising torture. He held out for two days before naming his fellow conspirators — an unusually long resistance, and the deterioration of his signature on successive confessions is one of the more affecting documents in the National Archives.
He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. On the scaffold on 31 January 1606 he jumped or fell from the ladder, breaking his neck and dying before the rest of the sentence could be carried out.
The afterlife
Parliament made 5 November an annual day of thanksgiving, and it has been marked ever since with bonfires and effigies — the guy on top of the fire is Fawkes. Until 1859 attendance at church on the day was compulsory by law.
His reputation has shifted strangely. The 1980s graphic novel V for Vendetta reimagined him as a symbol of resistance to tyranny, and the stylised mask from its film adaptation has since been adopted by protest movements from Anonymous to Occupy worldwide — an outcome that would astonish everyone involved in 1605.