HistoryExtra's new podcast series, Uprising: The Civil Wars, produced by HistFest, sees historian Rebecca Rideal chart this extraordinary story, from the first battles in Scotland to all out-war in England and Wales. Speaking to historical experts, she explores a story of shifting loyalties and devastating conflict. In this special bonus episode, Rebecca and one of those experts, Dr Jonathan Healey, spoke to Emily Briffett about why this era of history is so fascinating, and the causes and consequences of the conflict.

Over the course of the century, religious tensions pulled the country’s civilians apart; civil war raged across England, Scotland and Ireland while kings were executed and governments toppled.

“This is a particularly chaotic period of history,” says Dr Martha McGill, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “[As well as] periods of civil warfare, you’ve got outbreaks of plague, you’ve got famine.

“There are an awful lot of uncertainties to life. People died unexpectedly and their children died young, very commonly. Faced with all of these challenges, people look for reassurance.”

Many found comfort in prayer and scripture. But some instead turned to prophecy and divination.

While this might seem to have echoes of witchcraft to our modern minds, trying to read the future wasn’t necessarily blasphemous in the early modern period. Instead, it was understood as an attempt to glimpse God’s plan.

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But how, exactly, did these early modern Britons try to see the future? What methods did they use? And why did they believe those methods worked?

The rise of prophecy and popular astrology

The 17th century saw an explosion of printed almanacs and prophetic guides. Astrology offered ordinary people a structured way to interpret uncertainty, and a means of predicting everything from the outcomes of harvests to broader political events.

Among the most famous of the figures leading these emerging practices was William Lilly, an astrologer whose annual Merlinus Anglicus almanacs sold in the tens of thousands. During the English Civil War, Lilly became notorious for predicting political upheavals, including ominous ‘fiery visitations’ that many later linked to the Great Fire of London.

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Others wrote competing almanacs and despite initially drawing the ire of church leaders and intellectuals, they proved immensely popular. Such prophecies provided a sense that a pre-ordained fate, rather than chaos, governed the world.

But this was all part of an evolving Christian lens.

The search for signs

The Protestant Reformation had stripped away many rituals of the medieval Church, leaving a spiritual vacuum that people filled with other methods of finding meaning.

“People look for some kind of guidance,” McGill explains, “some way of seeing, ‘Well, is it a good idea to get on this ship and go try and seek my fortune on it?’”

And for many, fortune-telling deepened their connection to Christianity, rather than conflicting with their fate. “Many practices relied on the belief that God has made a plan for the universe, and that is writ everywhere in the natural world,” McGill explains. “The elements reflect His will in some respect.”

That conviction transformed the natural world into a language that could be read to uncover the future. People watched how nutshells burned in the fire, or how oil floated on water, or how smoke rose from a hearth. Each offered signs for what the future might hold.

Prophecies from snails, moles and wolves

Animals, God’s living creations, also offered keen clues.

“You could search in a snail’s shell very carefully,” McGill says, “and if you were lucky, you might find a little purple stone that supposedly lived within the body of snails. If you then placed that stone under your tongue, you might be able to prophesise and tell of future things.”

Others resorted to darker – and bloodier – rites. “You could try getting a mole, cutting it open, and eating its heart while it’s still palpitating,” McGill continues. “This is thought to give you insight into the future.”

Other methods included sleeping with a wolf’s tooth under one’s pillow, inhaling vapours of violet or linseed, or burning the blood of a dove. These all were said to be ways of reading God’s natural language, summoning visions or revealing hidden truths.

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In practice, looking to the future was at the edge of a fraught moral frontier. In the Christian context of the early modern period, interpreting God’s signs in nature was acceptable, but conjuring spirits or invoking magic wasn’t. But where that line was drawn in practice was unclear.

England’s witch trials of the late 1500s and 1600s often drew on the same fears that surrounded fortune-telling, homing in on the idea that someone might possess secret, forbidden knowledge.

For McGill, these customs reveal how ordinary people in a violent century sought to make sense of their world, with the promise of foresight (however tenuous) providing some measure of control.

Dr Martha McGill was speaking to Ellie Cawthorne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Tracy Borman is the author of The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025).

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But it wasn’t Henry VIII’s famous separations from Catherine of Aragon or Anne of Cleves that were the source of the trouble. It was his divorce from Rome.

Only a generation earlier, England had been a staunchly Catholic country. That had changed when Henry VIII, seeking to wrest power away from the papacy, had broken from Rome in the 1530s. Following his death, Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I, had tried to reverse that, burning Protestants and restoring the pope’s authority.

But, when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she reinstated her father’s Protestantism through the Elizabethan Religious Settlement: a middle way that was designed to bring the realm back. It only partly worked.

To Protestant hardliners, Elizabeth’s church was still too Catholic. To Catholics, she was a heretic and an illegitimate queen. Abroad, Philip II of Spain and the papacy viewed her as an enemy of the faith, and in 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated her – releasing her subjects from allegiance to the English Crown.

From that moment on, the Catholic institutions across Europe became Elizabeth’s greatest enemies. And Catholics in England now lived under intense suspicion.

The myth of the Tudor ‘secret service’

As fears of foreign invasion and internal rebellion grew, Elizabeth’s court increasingly viewed intelligence as a potent weapon to be wielded against the Catholic threat, and it fell to two men to spearhead its use: Sir Francis Walsingham, her shrewd and zealous secretary of state; and Robert Cecil, the brilliant son of Elizabeth’s long-time advisor William Cecil, Lord Burghley.

“Both of these men, Robert Cecil and Francis Walsingham, have got a reputation of being the M figure out of MI5 – the head of a vast and highly organised secret service,” says Professor John Cooper, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast’s four-part series on the Gunpowder Plot.

But how much are their reputations as England’s pioneering spymasters deserved?

“I don’t think that the intelligence networks, either of Francis Walsingham or Robert Cecil, were ever as vast as people believe them to be,” says Cooper. “But that’s part of the illusion they create. They deliberately create that sense that everywhere is infiltrated with spies.”

Building the network

Under Walsingham, Elizabeth’s government professionalised the business of espionage.

“He puts a lot of secretly accounted-for money into paying informers,” Cooper explains, “and also paying people to be something like modern-style professional intelligence agents.

“The most dangerous thing about their spies is how they go into deep cover.”

Through these networks, he exposed plots like the 1586 Babington Plot, which aimed to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. Coded messages were intercepted and double agents were deployed to great effect. The unravelling of that conspiracy sealed Mary’s fate, and confirmed the crown’s conviction that Catholicism and treason were inextricable.

Spies in the pews

By the 1580s, attending or hosting a Catholic mass was illegal.

Despite the suppression, Catholics still found covert ways to worship in secret gatherings. And it was these kinds of meetings that were ripe for infiltration.

“One of the most extraordinary things about Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network is the extent to which he secretly penetrated the English Catholic community,” says Cooper.

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“As a Catholic celebrating and attending the mass in late Elizabethan England, you were never quite sure who the other people in the room were; whether one of them might actually be a secret plant – a counterfeit Catholic as it were, in the pay of Francis Walsingham.”

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The information that was gathered had direct consequences. Priests who had returned from exile to minister in secret were hunted, often betrayed by those they thought allies. Many were captured, tortured and executed.

Walsingham’s reach extended abroad too. “[He] managed to place young men in the English Catholic training colleges in Europe,” Cooper says. “These men are supposed to be training to be Catholic priests alongside their fellow students, but they're actually reporting back this stream of intelligence to Walsingham on which of the priests are going to be coming on this secret Catholic mission to England.”

For every priest who landed on the English coast, there was a real chance his name was already known in London and marked down for monitoring.

As much as the intelligence gathered was intended to have direct results, there was another outcome too. Walshingham’s goal was to spread a climate of fear, and the impact was the creation of a kind of panopticon. Catholics knew that spies were watching, but they didn’t know where, or when. “They know that they have to be suspicious,” Cooper says.

Robert Cecil’s inheritance

After Walsingham’s death in 1590, the work continued.

“Robert Cecil, after Walsingham’s death, picks up a lot of these individual agents and these contacts, and continued to maintain these intelligence networks,” says Cooper.

Those networks proved their worth to Cecil in 1605, when informants helped uncover the Gunpowder Plot – arguably the clearest demonstration of how deeply the state’s surveillance culture had taken root.

But even under Cecil’s control, espionage networks had become amorphous and difficult to control. “In fact,” Cooper says, “there were rival intelligence networks operating at the court of Elizabeth I and James VI and I. It isn't all one organised secret intelligence service, because knowledge is power, information is power.

“Everybody is competing to try and be the person who is reporting to the government, because it increases your power at the royal court.”

In this way, factions used informants to outmanoeuvre rivals and advance their own ambitions, too.

While the Elizabethan spy networks might not have been as extensive as later rumour suggests, those rumours alone speak to its influence, and its impact was certainly profound. “They deliberately create that sense that if you're a Catholic, you need to be fearful,” says Cooper.

This created a pervasive feeling that someone, somewhere, was always watching, working to stabilise the Protestant state in what was a moment of significant fragility, and exposing genuine plots along the way.

John Cooper was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Want to know more about the Gunpowder Plot? Danny Bird has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine archive to help you explore the religious tensions, political intrigue and lasting impact of this infamous act of treason. Go beyond the podcast.

John Cooper is the author of The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a Royal Chapel Became the House of Commons (Apollo, 2024).

• Buy it now from Amazon

That man was Guy Fawkes, and within hours from him being found, he was due to light a fuse that would have upended English history.

The discovery of Fawkes foiled the conspiracy and exposed a broader network of Catholic conspirators whose aim was to blow up King James VI and I, along with his government, during the ceremonial opening of parliament. The Gunpowder Plot, as it came to be known, had failed.

But what if Fawkes had succeeded? As Professor John Cooper explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, the explosion would have changed the course of British history overnight.

The explosion that would have destroyed Westminster

Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder had been smuggled into the undercroft beneath the House of Lords; more than enough to obliterate the heart of English government.

“If it had all ignited,” explains Cooper, “it would have created an almighty explosion, certainly sufficient to destroy most of the Palace of Westminster.”

“The House of Lords would have been blown to pieces,” he continues. “The House of Commons across the courtyard would also have gone. Westminster Hall would also have been very badly damaged.”

Calculations suggest that the blast radius might have even reached parts of Westminster Abbey. “So we're talking about an almighty explosion,” Cooper notes.

A kingdom without a king

But it wasn’t just the buildings. It was the hundreds of prominent people inside who were the real target, including King James VI and I.

“It would have killed the people seated in the House of Lords: the peerage, the Privy Council, bishops and senior judges,” says Cooper. “It would have killed the king, and the heir, and the government, and all of the judges, as well as most of the nobility, most of the House of Commons, all in one go. It would have completely decapitated English society in one fell swoop.”

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The result would have been unprecedented chaos. The blast would also have filled the air with deadly gases, so even survivors of the initial explosion might have suffocated in the fumes that followed.

With the royal succession destroyed and the machinery of parliament obliterated, there would have been no clear centre of power left in England. So, what would have happened next?

How government might have collapsed

“It’s actually very difficult to imagine what would have happened if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded,” Cooper says. “It could have gone one of two ways. The local systems of the shrievalty, the sheriffs, and the lord-lieutenancy were sufficiently robust that government would have continued at a county level until some sort of solution was found. That's one possibility.”

Those sheriffs and lord-lieutenants, appointed by the Crown, were responsible for enforcing justice, collecting taxes and raising local militia. While many would have been killed, those who escaped the blast might have tried to maintain order until a new monarch was named.

But as Cooper notes, there’s another possibility: “Or the whole system would have folded in on itself, and actually a lot of those sheriffs and lord-lieutenants would have been at Westminster for the opening of Parliament.” If they too perished, the country’s administrative network would have vanished.

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It was highly possible that England could have descended into panic and chaos, collapsing into crisis with no precedent since the Wars of the Roses.

And that wouldn’t have been the end of it.

Cooper says that religious violence almost certainly would have exploded throughout the country.

A spark for religious civil war

“I think there was a very strong chance that a religious civil war would have followed on from the Gunpowder Plot,” Cooper argues.
The Gunpowder Plot grew out of decades of religious tension. Since Henry VIII’s break from Rome in the 1530s, English Catholics had faced persecution and heavy fines for refusing to attend Protestant services. Under Elizabeth I, Catholic priests were executed as traitors. James VI and I initially adopted a softer stance but largely maintained continuity with the precedent set by his predecessor.

The conspirators, led by Robert Catesby and including Fawkes, believed that killing the king would open the way for a Catholic restoration. But by 1605, England had changed from its recent Catholic past.

“That long reign of Elizabeth had really changed the religious and social fabric of England,” Cooper explains. “Protestantism was deeply embedded in the English establishments – among parliamentarians, amongst lawyers and in the universities – but also among a lot of ordinary people. There was a lot of popular Protestantism that also at its edges connected with anti-Catholic sentiment.”

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Had the plot succeeded, Protestant England would have seen it as evidence of a Catholic conspiracy to destroy the nation. Retaliation would have been inevitable, with local uprisings, reprisals and massacres on both sides. England could have slipped into the kind of sectarian warfare that was already consuming parts of continental Europe during the Thirty Years’ War.

The puppet monarchy that never was

But what were the plotters themselves hoping for beyond wanton chaos? Despite their revolutionary and regicidal intentions, they certainly weren’t republicans.

“The principle of monarchy was very strong,” says Cooper. “The Catholic plotters were not trying to set up some kind of republic. Their thinking is entirely monarchical. They're trying to put in a substitute Catholic puppet monarchy, but it's still a monarchy.”

Their intention was to replace the Protestant dynasty, not abolish kingship itself. In the confusion after the explosion, they hoped to kidnap Princess Elizabeth, the king’s daughter, and crown her as a Catholic monarch under their control. Instead, the failure of the plot reinforced Protestant unity and the divine authority of the crown.

Looking back, Cooper calls the conspiracy “a fantastically audacious operation […] There’s something horribly spectacular about the level of vision, the level of hubris and the violence that the Gunpowder Plotters were prepared to consider.”

John Cooper was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Want to know more about the Gunpowder Plot? Danny Bird has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine archive to help you explore the religious tensions, political intrigue and lasting impact of this infamous act of treason. Go beyond the podcast.

John Cooper is the author of The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a Royal Chapel Became the House of Commons (Apollo, 2024).

• Buy it now from Amazon

Want to know more about the Gunpowder Plot? Danny Bird has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine archive to help you explore the religious tensions, political intrigue and lasting impact of this infamous act of treason. Go beyond the podcast.

John Cooper is the author of The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a Royal Chapel Became the House of Commons (Apollo, 2024).

• Buy it now from Amazon

Want to know more about the Gunpowder Plot? Danny Bird has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine archive to help you explore the religious tensions, political intrigue and lasting impact of this infamous act of treason. Go beyond the podcast.

John Cooper is the author of The Lost Chapel of Westminster: How a Royal Chapel Became the House of Commons (Apollo, 2024).

• Buy it now from Amazon