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Historical person
1570–1606
Guy Fawkes was an English Catholic conspirator involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. He was discovered guarding explosives beneath the House of Lords in a plan intended to kill James I and much of the political establishment.
Guy Fawkes was born in York and died in Westminster. Fawkes had military experience in the Spanish Netherlands before joining the Catholic conspiracy led by Robert Catesby; discovered guarding gunpowder beneath the House of Lords on 5 November 1605, he was tortured, tried and sentenced to death.
David Field’s Death by Gunpowder begins after the plot has failed, with Fawkes under interrogation in the Tower and his disclosures sending implicated men scrambling to escape. John Pilkington’s Marbeck and the Gunpowder Plot follows a government spy through the surveillance of the Catholic network from which the conspiracy emerges. Peter Tonkin’s Shadow of Treason approaches the plot from the intelligence side and focuses attention on Fawkes as the soldier with the explosives expertise the conspirators require. Antonia Fraser’s The Gunpowder Plot reconstructs Fawkes alongside Catesby and the other plotters from planning to arrest and punishment. Her The Life and Times of King James VI of Scotland, I of England places him within the larger Jacobean problem of religious division, royal security and the state’s response to Catholic conspiracy.
Series
The Queen’s Intelligencer series fictionalises the career of Robert Poley, a real Elizabethan agent associated with the Babington Plot and the death of Christopher Marlowe. In publication order, Poley infiltrates the Essex circle, manages the 1603 succession, follows the Gunpowder conspirators, works against a poison network during the…
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The Marbeck Mysteries follow Martin Marbeck, an English intelligencer working through the last years of Elizabeth I and the first years of James I. His assignments move from the unresolved war with Spain to the succession crisis of 1603, the peace negotiations of 1604 and the Gunpowder Plot…
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The Bailiff Mountsorrel Tudor Mysteries follow county bailiff Edward Mountsorrel and town bailiff Francis Barton as they enforce the law in Nottinghamshire during the final years of Elizabeth I and the opening of James VI and I’s reign. Local murders and disappearances repeatedly lead into wider conflicts over…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
