Remember, remember… on this day in 1605 Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament was foiled

Today 420 years ago was supposed to see the State Opening of the Parliament for its second session. The 100-day first session had been frustrating and fruitless: a new king from a new dynasty, the Stuart ruler James I, had succeeded the childless Elizabeth I in 1603, but he was also James VI, King of Scots, and he wanted to unite his two kingdoms.

The Union of England and Scotland Act 1603 provided for a commission to negotiate a political union, but the English Parliament had no enthusiasm for anything short of absorption of its Scottish counterpart. It lacked support in Edinburgh too, since the Privy Council of Scotland could maintain its control with a largely absentee monarch.

There were more urgent matters. James was instinctively more tolerant of Catholicism than Elizabeth had been: the mother he barely knew, Mary Queen of Scots, had lost her throne and her head for her adherence to Rome and he had been baptised a Catholic. There were also rumours that his Queen, Anne of Denmark, had secretly converted to Catholicism in the 1590s.

This raised hopes among England’s 40,000 remaining Roman Catholics that James might lift some of the restrictions on them: the Religion Act 1592 determined prison sentences for those who failed to attend church, while the Popish Recusants Act 1592, branding........

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