Synopses & Reviews
In England, November 5 is Guy Fawkes Day, when fireworks displays commemorate the shocking moment in 1605 when government authorities uncovered a secret plan to blow up the House of Parliament--and King James I along with it. A group of English Catholics, seeking to unseat the king and reintroduce Catholicism as the state religion, daringly placed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder in a cellar under the Palace of Westminster. Their aim was to ignite the gunpowder at the opening of the Parliamentary session. Though the charismatic Catholic, Robert Catesby, was the group's leader, it was the devout Guy Fawkes who emerged as its most famous member, as he was the one who was captured and who revealed under torture the names of his fellow plotters. In the aftermath of their arrests, conditions grew worse for English Catholics, as legal penalties against them were stiffened and public sentiment became rabidly intolerant.
In a narrative that reads like a gripping detective story, Antonia Fraser has untangled the web of religion, politics, and personalities that surrounded that fateful night of November 5. And, in examining the lengths to which individuals will go for their faith, she finds in this long-ago event a reflection of the religion-inspired terrorism that has produced gunpowder plots of our own time.
Synopsis
No one brings English history alive like Antonia Fraser. In her bestselling books -- including Mary Queen of Scots and The Six Wives of Henry VIII -- she has shown why she is one of the finest contemporary popular historians, someone who brilliantly portrays the dramas of the past in all their richness and revealing detail.
In England, November 5 is Guy Fawkes Day, when fireworks commemorate one of the most shocking moments in British history: the 1605 attempt to blow up the House of Parliament, and King James I along with it. In Faith and Treason, Antonia Fraser untangles the web of religion, politics, and personalities surrounding this infamous act of terrorism. Planned by a group of English Catholics in response to a history of severe penal laws against Catholicism, the Gunpowder Plot was a desperate -- and doomed -- conspiracy that led to torture, executions, and a high tide of anti-Catholic feeling in England that would alter the nation's Catholic community forever. Both detective story and social history, Faith and Treason is gripping and dramatic history.