Today is Guy Fawkes Day, a day where the U.K. celebrates the foiling
of a plot to kill King James I in 1605. The country celebrates this by
lighting fireworks and, in a morbid twist, burning an effigy of poor
Guy.
It's easy to forget that this celebration has rather grim roots. Guy
Fawkes was part of a Catholic plot to kill a Protestant King and his
English Lords — and, unfortunately for him, it failed. He was almost
certainly tortured severely, before being executed in a brutal manner.
Fawkes was the one guy in the plot unlucky enough to have been
discovered late on November 5 with dozens of barrels of gunpowder hidden
under wood, after a tip-off to a Catholic politician led to an
inspection of the cellars under parliament. He was swiftly taken into
custody at the Tower of London and interrogated until he eventually gave
up his co-conspirators.
While we'll never know precisely what happened to Fawkes in those
eight days, it seems pretty likely it was bad: There is speculation that
Fawkes was tortured using a rack during his stay in the Tower of London.
For a visual on the effects of torture, look at the document below.
You can see Fawkes' signature, before the interrogation (he signs as
Guido Fawkes, a name he had taken on later in life):
As the BBC puts it, "his signature on his confession was that of a shattered and broken man, the ill-formed letters telling the story of a someone who was barely able to hold a quill. "
Even once the torture was over, Fawkes still had to meet a grisly end. After his confession, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, with his remains sent to the four corners of the kingdom — as a warning to future plotters.
No comments:
Post a Comment