The gunpowder plot - Antonia Fraser

The Gunpower Plot of 1605 is one of the most commemorated events in English history. Yet this astonishing episode remains shrouded in mystery and the subject of passionate argument. The central aim of Antonia Fraser's rich and immensely readable book is to explain why there should have been a plot at all, and to understand why the courageous, idealistic, but terrifyingly misguided conspirators risked their lives for what they believed to be the cause of God and their country. Antonia Fraser has recreated the drama of the Gunpowder plot in a narrative which reads like a gripping detective story. With sympathy and objectivity she untangles the intricate relationship between religion and politics in the early seventeeth century. Above all, she brings the distant events surrounding that fateful night of 5 Novemember 1605 to dramatic life in ways which have an eerie resemblance to our own times, when the relationship of terrorism to idealism is still under dispute.