-(1).png)
For Brits today, the Gunpowder plot mainly means jolly children’s songs, bonfires, effigies, fireworks and a good piss up, but there would have been nothing jolly about the scale of the devastation, if it had succeeded.
Modern reconstructions of what that amount of gunpowder would have done point to massive destruction:
ITV Gunpowder plot reconstruction. Source: Wikimedia Commons
What Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators attempted was a brutal terrorist strike, which would have demolished the Houses of Parliament, killing hundreds of people: Parliament in full session and King James with it. But what would have been the effects on the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, who was an MP at the time and nearly the same age as Guy Fawkes? (Fawkes was born in April 1570; Cotton in January 1571)
The Cotton library was in Westminster for much of its existence. Cotton, a successful landowner from Huntingdonshire, purchased a house in Westminster, which was next to the Houses of the Parliament. Smith, in his biography (1696), describes how Cotton let both Lords and Commons stroll in his garden during breaks.
Even the site of the notorious library fire of 1731, Ashburnham house was in Westminster. I talked about this with a friend of mine in the Leeds International Medieval Congress last summer, and he remarked that Ashburnham House sounds like a country estate, but it was not. It was also in Westminster. Pupils from the Westminster boarding school found pieces of manuscripts lying all around and kept them as souvenirs, which were returned only years later. Before the founding of the British Museum, Cotton’s damaged manuscripts were housed in Westminster School.
So, is there a chance that instead of being partly damaged in a library fire, the whole Cotton library could have been blown sky high on 5 November 1605?
The answer is not really. The dates do not match. Cotton only bought his house in Westminster in the 1620s, when Guy Fawkes had already been in his grave for fifteen years (assuming the four pieces he was quartered into ever found their way into the same grave, or any grave).
Still, Cotton was an MP in 1605. Because Fawkes was planning to blow up the parliament in session, there is a good chance he would have also blown up Robert Cotton, assuming he was present at the opening of Parliament on that fateful day...
If Sir Robert had died in the Gunpowder plot, what would most likely have likely happened to his manuscripts is that his relatives would have sold them in an auction – his son, Thomas Cotton, later complained that his father had wasted the family fortune on manuscripts. They would have been acquired by some other collector, or several collectors, and we would know them by a completely different name, not as Cotton manuscripts. Auctions were a pretty common practice. In fact, Sir Robert himself had much success in acquiring manuscripts from collections that were sold at auction after their collectors had passed away.
If Guy Fawkes had blown up Robert Cotton, his library would have survived, and we would still have the Battle of Maldon, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, an intact Beowulf and many others...
Remember, Remember the fifth of November
Sources:
Prescott, Andrew. 1997. “‘Their Present Miserable State of Cremation’: the Restoration of the Cotton Library” Sir Robert Cotton as a Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy, ed. By C. J. Wright. London: British Library Publications.
Sharpe, Kevin. 1979 [2002]. Sir Robert Cotton 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Thomas. 1696 [1984]. Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library (Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum bibliothecae Cottonianae). Reprinted from Sir Robert Harley’s copy, annotated by Humfrey Wanley, together with documents relating to the fire of 1731. Ed. C. G. C. Tite. Suffolk, 1696[1984].