...the fifth of November
(From The Times Literary Supplement)
"The Gunpowder Plot officially revealed on November 5, 1605, was certainly the greatest single act of terrorism ever planned against the English State, and arguably the most dramatic in world history. Had it succeeded, it would have killed most of the royal family and the aristocracy, and hundreds of the leading men of most counties and major towns: effectively the majority of the political nation of the time. It would also have completely destroyed the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey and St Margaret’s, and many more people would probably have perished in the fire that would have raged through the district after the explosion. These consequences are not the broad suppositions of historians’ but precise ballistic tabulations made by the Centre for Explosion Studies at Aberystwyth in 2003. Such a scale of destruction had been meted out to polities before, for example when the Mongols annihilated the states of Central Asia and Iran. The difference in this case was one of technology: that what had formerly required the resources of a huge army, and months of slaughter and demolition, would have been accomplished on this occasion by the striking of a single match. The plot represented the application of a new and horrific kind of weapon to traditional political aims. In that sense the appropriate modern parallel is not with September 11, but with Hiroshima."
Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot...