January 22, 1570 - Guy Fawkes
His role in the Gunpowder Plot was operational rather than ideological — he was entrusted with the stockpiled explosives beneath the House of Lords precisely because of his military experience and nerve, not because he had conceived the plan. The conspiracy aimed at nothing less than decapitating the English Protestant government by destroying Parliament during the State Opening, with the king inside. Caught before the fuse was lit, Fawkes was tortured into naming his co-conspirators, and his execution followed. The date of his arrest, November 5th, has been marked in Britain ever since — giving him a strange, enduring visibility that most failed conspirators never achieve.
From Wikipedia
Guy Fawkes (; 13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606), also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. He was born and educated in York; his father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a recusant Catholic.
Fawkes converted to Catholicism and left for mainland Europe, where he fought for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years' War against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Low Countries. He travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England without success. He later met Thomas Wintour, with whom he returned to England. Wintour introduced him to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. The plotters leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords; Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder that they stockpiled there. The authorities were prompted by an anonymous letter to search Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and they found Fawkes guarding the explosives.
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