HBO has acquired the rights to the British miniseries “Gunpowder,” starring one of its stars, Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow on the pay cabler’s hit fantasy drama “Game of Thrones.” “Gunpowder” premieres on Monday, Dec. 18, at 10 p.m. ET/PT, and the next two episodes air at the same time on subsequent nights.
Unlike “Game,” “Gunpowder” is set in the real world, depicting the “Gunpowder Plot,” a failed attempt by a cadre of British Catholics to blow up King James I and the House of Lords in London on Nov. 5, 1605.
For some viewers, it got a bit too real.
When “Gunpowder” premiered on BBC One on Oct. 21, the U.K. audience reeled from its graphic, unsparing depiction of violence committed against British Catholics during the reign of James I, successor to Elizabeth I (who did the same thing).
From the U.K. Telegraph:
The BBC has defended gory scenes in its Saturday night gunpowder plot drama because it is “grounded in historical fact”.
The first episode of the three-part series Gunpowder saw a young priest hung, drawn and quartered alive. Another gruesome scene saw a woman crushed beneath a door laden with weights.
The Saturday night drama, watched by 4.8 million viewers, aired just an hour after family-favourite Strictly Come Dancing.
One viewer said on social media: “Thank you Gunpowder. I did not want to throw up but I did.
“I know that sort of violence happened but did not need to see it graphically.”
But the truth is, not very many contemporary people, even Catholics, know about the level of persecution and torture employed by the British crown against its Catholic subjects after the ascension to the throne of Elizabeth I — whose father, Henry VIII, broke with Rome when the pope wouldn’t sanction his divorce (and then went on to behead two of his six eventual wives).
We briefly got a taste of it in TNT’s short-lived summer drama “Will,” whose plot turned on the peril William Shakespeare would have faced as a secret Catholic in Elizabethan London.
That was fiction, inspired by fact, but for Harington, “Gunpowder” hits close to home. He’s been involved with developing the story from the beginning, along with Northern Irish writer Ronan Bennett. Among Harington’s ancestors is the man he plays, Catholic Robert Catesby, the mastermind (not the more famous Guy Fawkes) behind the foiled plot.
Said Harington in the U.K. Telegraph:
He said ahead of the programme: “My mother’s maiden name is Catesby. My middle name is Catesby, so way back when we were thinking about doing this piece, I kind of knew I wanted to be in it and I knew it would hopefully help get it made, but I didn’t know if I wanted to be Fawkes or Catesby or which of the plotters.
“So I wasn’t aiming to play my ancestor – it just so happened that Catesby was the one that fitted.
“You go that far back and everyone is related to everyone, really.”
The effects of the plot reverberate even today.
From Catholic.com:
Used as grist for the English Protestant government propaganda machine, the Gunpowder Plot acquired an importance far greater than the ill-fated conspiracy itself. The Gunpowder Plot became the father of a thousand anti-Catholic urban legends and was instrumental in creating the culture of anti-Catholicism in England that still permeates popular American culture (see “Catholic Conspiracy Theories,” This Rock, January 2007). And most Americans don’t know a thing about it.
Bennett, also a novelist with a PhD. from King’s College London, has his own history with the British government. He was wrongfully convicted at the age of 18 in 1974 for an Irish Republican Army bank robbery during which a police inspector died. He was released within a year because of a lack of evidence, having spent much time reading while languishing in Long Kesh prison camp near Belfast. He was later arrested in London in 1978 on conspiracy charges and held more than a year before being acquitted after acting in his own defense.
Although Harington comes from Catholic stock centuries back, by all reports he is Anglican. Bennett was raised in a Catholic family, but I haven’t yet found an interview where he discusses his current religious practice, if any.
After the death of Elizabeth I, Catholics had some hope that the crackdown on their faith might ease — and James I encouraged that idea. But faced with Elizabeth’s anti-Catholic ministers, and concluding he no longer needed Catholic support to keep his throne, he backed off that. So, the fines, imprisonment, torture and executions continued.
One of the other characters in “Gunpowder” is Father Henry Garnet (Peter Mullen), a Jesuit who was eventually executed because of the plot. He did not believe in a violent Catholic uprising against the British crown, and he repeatedly tried to dissuade Catesby and the other plotters.
From the U.K. Daily Mail. reviewing “Gunpowder”:
[Catesby’s] actions were not just treason but a sin.
“I will blow them all to hell!” he told Father Garnet, attempting to make his confession.
“I see pride in you,” the priest said simply. “Do you repent? No? Then there can be no absolution.”
Because he would not break the seal of the confessional and reveal what he heard there about the plot, Garnet was hung, drawn and quartered on May 3, 1606.
In 2007, a 17th-Century book named “A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuit and his Confederats” came up for auction in the U.K. — reported to be bound in Garnet’s own skin (and believed by many to have a ghostly impression of his face on the cover).
An “unnamed buyer” paid over 5,000 British pounds for it.
It’ll be interesting to see the reaction of American Catholics when this particular bit of British history lands on our shores just before Christmas.
Images: Courtesy BBC One.
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