The man caught guarding Parliament's gunpowder in 1605 was never its ringleader; four centuries later his face, borrowed from a comic book, fronts protests on Wall Street.

Every English schoolchild learns that Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament. He was not the man who planned it.

Who was found in the cellar?

Parliament was due to open on Tuesday 5 November 1605, and the king was to attend in state. On 26 October an anonymous letter reached William Parker, 4th Baron Monteagle, warning him to stay away that day. The letter is the reason the cellars were searched, and the search came late on 4 November.

Searchers went into the undercroft beneath the House of Lords. Hidden under firewood and coal they found thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, and a man standing guard beside them. He gave his name as John Johnson.

He was arrested shortly after midnight. The arrest came on the morning the opening was set for, with the powder still in place and the man still beside it.

Who was he, really?

He was born in 1570 into an English Catholic family. He went abroad and fought for Spain in the Netherlands, where he took the Italian form of his name, Guido.

He was an explosives man, not a politician. Robert Catesby led the conspiracy and gathered its members, and Fawkes was the one trusted to guard the powder and light it. The name that belongs at the top of this story is Catesby's, not his. The accounts describe Fawkes as a soldier with experience in the Low Countries, and the conspirators gave him charge of the explosives.

Catesby's circle was small and mostly known to one another. Thomas Wintour brought Fawkes into it in April 1604, and Wintour's brother Robert joined with several others, including Thomas Percy, Christopher Wright, and Ambrose Rookwood. He died on 31 January 1606, nearly three months after the arrest. The path there ran through the Tower of London, where he was questioned under torture. According to the account in Wikipedia's entry on the plot, he gave his real name under torture and confessed in the days that followed, and the names of his confederates came after that. The Tower records show the stages of that questioning; they do not show what he felt, or whether he chose each word. Read them as evidence of what the interrogators pressed for and what they got, not as a transcript of his mind. The trial of the surviving conspirators came in late January 1606, when eight men were convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The executions took place on 31 January.

Was the king really the target?

According to the official account, the target was King James I. The plotters meant to blow up the chamber while the king sat on his throne with his children and his nobles present. World History Encyclopedia puts the aim plainly, that Parliament would be destroyed on 5 November and the king killed in it.

The honesty beat is that most of the record comes from the government that searched the cellars and questioned the men afterward. A plot to kill a king is the story the Crown told first (and it is the one that lasted), so treat the target as well documented but not independently confirmed.

Thirty-six, or thirty-five?

Most accounts give thirty-six barrels, and that is the figure printed in the standard summaries of the search. World History Encyclopedia gives thirty-five, which makes it the only source I checked that does. I could not resolve the gap from the sources I reached, so the honest reading is that the count is known to within one barrel.

The alias matters more than the count. John Johnson was the name he gave, and World History Encyclopedia identifies him as the servant of the conspirator Thomas Percy. Anyone who searches the names will find both, and the two together are a better guide to what was going on than either alone.

Why does the face still turn up?

David Lloyd drew the mask for V for Vendetta, a comic written by Alan Moore and published from 1982 to 1989. Lloyd gave the face a smile, red cheeks, an upturned mustache and a thin pointed beard. The 2006 film adaptation, directed by James McTeigue, carried the design far beyond the comic's readers. Protesters in Wisconsin used it in 2011 as well, so the mask reached American streets by more than one route.

Lloyd pitched the mask as a rehabilitation of Fawkes, a way to let the character celebrate the attempt. Anonymous began wearing it at protests against the Church of Scientology in 2008. By 2011 it had reached Occupy Wall Street, and Julian Assange was photographed in one at Occupy London that October.

The mask borrows a real man's face and drops his plot. I think that is a fair trade for a symbol, but it does mean the people on Wall Street were wearing a comic book more than they were wearing a cellar. The bonfires of 5 November still burn effigies of him, which is the older version of the same joke. Nobody who wears the mask has to say what he tried to do. It is an easy costume to put on, and it asks nothing of the person wearing it.

The face will probably outlast the man, which is the usual fate of a symbol. The next person who puts on that smile will be choosing a drawing, not a conspiracy, and the cellar will stay where it has always been: under the House of Lords, with the firewood still in front of it.

Sources

• Wikipedia contributors, Gunpowder Plot (n.d.)
• Wikipedia contributors, Guy Fawkes (n.d.)
• Wikipedia contributors, Guy Fawkes mask (n.d.)
• World History Encyclopedia, Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes & the Plan to Blow up Parliament (n.d.)