Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church history.

Last time we were together, we were talking about Thanksgiving.

And we're going to dip back into history to talk about another proclamation of Thanksgiving

that came from the hand of King James.

And this has to do with events on

November the 5th. When our kids were little, we bought them some of these books that were in a series

entitled Brilliant Brits, with biographies of some British figures. One of the volumes was

actually entitled Not So Brilliant Brits, and it was on Guy Fox.

Guy Fox is at the center of this story. He was born in 1570 into a Protestant home, but in his

teenage years, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Shortly thereafter, he went to Spain and fought

with Catholic forces against the Dutch,

and then he was recruited because of his military experience by Robert Katesby

and joined a group of conspirators, Catholic conspirators, papists, as the English would have

called them then, who wanted to blow up Parliament. They rented a

basement underneath Parliament, loaded in 36 barrels of gunpowder, and the plan was on November

5 they would blow up Parliament. On that day, King James, the Queen, the Prince, the Lord's, House of Commons members,

archbishop, bishops would all be gathered there, and there was enough gunpowder to probably level

the entire parliament building. Well, somebody sent an anonymous letter, tipping off one of the

lords. It made its way to the king. The king figured

out something was up. They sent the troops to go and inspect. And sure enough, on the evening

of November 4th, Guy Fawkes was arrested as he was guarding those gunpowder barrels in the

basement under Parliament. The next year, the King issued a proclamation.

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