Sunday 23 November 2014

5/11 - Synthetic Terror : Cornpowder, Treason & Plot


"So what we have is a group of double agents, and we’ll just talk about a couple of them :

Guy Fawkes is really not the most important, he is the one who has been demonized, but the important ones are two guys called Catesby and Winter, and they meet in the early months of 1604, and they begin discussing some kind of a plot to take revenge on James I.

Now you have to look at these people, where did these guys come from, Catesby and Winter, the original nucleus of the plot. They had all been involved in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex. In other words, these people all could have been executed by the Cecils as a result of this attempted coup by Essex against them which failed.
So you have to look at these two guys as essentially being part of the federal witness protection program. These were stooges, these were people that the government could essentially chop their heads off any time they wanted. They were fined and reserved to her Majesty’s use was the word used at the time.

So you got two police informants, essentially, meeting to create a plot. Now what did they talk about. They talk about first of all, renting a room in a basement across from the House of Lords and digging a tunnel. And they start trying to dig this tunnel, but it turns out they can’t do it, because they have to go through a wall, they also have to get a guy called Sir Dudley Carlton to come in, who is later on one of Cecil’s big diplomats, to help them rent this room.

So it’s like you’re going to have Henry Kissinger come in and help you rent the room – the safehouse – that you’ re going to try to use to tunnel under the House of Lords.

Eventually they find that they can’t tunnel so what they simply do is go and rent the basement under the House of Lords, and they stock this up with what looks to be gunpowder. We’re gonna see in a minute that it’s not.

They eventually recruit some other plotters, they recruit a guy called Thomas Percy, okay – Thomas Percy is one of the leading plotters. So we’ve got Catesby, we’ve got Winter, we’ve got Percy.

Here’s a story about Percy. One of the people at the time in the Autumn of 1605 is going home at 2 in the morning and he meets Percy the plotter, and he’s coming out of Cecil’s house. 

Get it? 

The main plotter is reporting to Robert Cecil about what’s going on.

So he’s a double agent.

It looks also like this guy Catesby is a double agent, and we’ve got Sir Dudley Carlton who has helped them who is one of Cecil’s main diplomats, who helps them rent the first basement that they try to tunnel from. Now there are other people, we can’t go into all of them, but you’ve got this group of ex-cons in effect, in the witness protection program, you’ve got double agents, you’ve also got a couple of fanatics. You’ve probably got Guy Fawkes as a fanatic, a dupe, a patsy in that sense.

Now a couple of weeks before November 5th when the Parliament is supposed to meet, this Catholic nobleman Lord Mounteagle comes forward and he says to Cecil, “I just got a letter that says I shouldn’t go to the opening of Parliament because it might be dangerous,” and he shows him the letter. This is called the famous Mounteagle Letter. So Cecil waits four or five days until he can meet the King. Cecil shows it to the King, and says, “Your Majesty, I got this strange letter from Lord Mounteagle, what could it mean, that we shouldn’t go to the opening of Parliament? I really can’t figure this out.”

And James said, “My God, they’re going to blow up the Parliament.” Now it turns out that James I, when he was in Scotland he was very unpopular, there were numerous attempts to kill him. And one of the attempts to kill him was allegedly a gunpowder plot. They tried to blow up James and his father, so he’s used to this. Now, what you have here of course is, Cecil wrote the letter himself, whether with his own hand, or through some agent, he had agents who could duplicate handwriting, so he gets the letter sent to Mounteagle, Mounteagle delivers it back to Cecil, Cecil takes it to the King, and he lets the King think that the King is a genius, that he is the Solomon of England, that he’s the only one who could figure out such a deep dark mystery. Alright, so then they wait a few more days, and they send somebody over and they discover that it’s – Guy Fawkes.

I have a collection of prints here which are very interesting, and they all show the same thing: Guy Fawkes with his lantern is about to go into the basement of the House of Lords to prepare the last details of the gunpowder train that he is going to use to blow up the House of Lords. He is then set upon by this night watch of loyal servants to His Majesty the King. - Tarpley



Anti-catholic satire copied with some variations from BMSat 41, in three parts below the irradiated name of Jehovah in Hebrew: on the left, the Spanish Armada shown as a horseshoe formation of ships; in the centre, a tent in which the destruction of England is plotted by the Pope, a cardinal, the Devil, a Spanish grandee and a Jesuit seated at a table with three monks in attendance; to right, Guy Fawkes, accompanied by the devil in the form of a dragon, approaches the Palace of Westminster where the cellar is stacked with barrels of gunpowder. 

1689 Etching


Nocturnal scene with God's hand appearing among clouds at right to point toward Guy Fawkes, who approaches cellar full of barrels holding lantern. c.1623? Etching

Tarpley : "It’s worthwhile to note that the Vatican had been informed by some of these English Jesuits that a plot was in the works, and it was essentially Garnet that was writing to Rome to say look, I’m trying to stop these guys, but I don’t know what to do. So he gets a message back from Claudio Acquaviva, of the Jesuit Order, the Jesuit General in Rome, who says, The pope, and I join with it, I command you to stop any violent activity, because this will get us nowhere. In other words these people were not fools, they could see what would happen. Even if the plot had succeeded there is very little way that the plotters ever could have taken over England, it would have been other…"

S. In the last couple decades a story came out supposedly supporting the British view that Guy Fawkes indeed was part of a plot, they alleged that they belatedly almost 400 years later found something. Do you know anything about that?

Tarpley : "I’ll tell you what was found. Here’s what was found. 

The big question was, for many years, what happened to this gunpowder, where did the gunpowder go, thirty hogsheads, thirty big barrels...?

So what you find now is in the London Daily Telegraph, May 4th 1978, they found in the public record office, a receipt of the war office dated November 7th, 1605, two days after the discovery of the so-called plot, they found first of all that it was not gunpowder, but corn-powder; corn-powder was an inferior version of gun-powder, it had bigger grains, it didn’t give you that much bang for the buck. It’s a little bit like these home made fertilizer bombs, something more like that.

And the receipt says, corn-powder, decayed, meaning inert, it wouldn’t go off. So Cecil had the brains, if he was going to have this stage managed plot, he made sure that the props were not live gunpowder but decayed corn-powder, in other words these patsies and dupes were rolling barrels of inert gunpowder, corn-powder, that wouldn’t go off into the basement, because Cecil didn’t really want to blow up [Parliament] "

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