November 4, 1605. The king's men are conducting a search. They're making their way through the storerooms and cellars and vaults that cluster around and beneath the Palace of Westminster. They've gotten a tip in the form of a mysterious, anonymous letter that something bad is going to happen at the House of Lords tomorrow. And shortly before midnight, they find a ton of firewood, a suspicious man, and 36 barrels of gunpowder. What brought a group of conspirators together in a plot to kill the king? And in the 400 years since, how has an annual celebration of the failed plot, and the story of one of the plotters—Guy Fawkes—come to stand for something else entirely?

Special thanks to our guests: James Sharpe, author of Remember Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day, and Mark Nicholls, author of Investigating Gunpowder Plot.

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