Catesby's Holy War

One Autumn morning, a group of fanatical terrorists set in motion an earth shattering strike against the very foundations of the most powerful nation in the world. They were aiming, at a stroke, to wipe out the government and executive of the nation, thereby creating a vacuum from which their new world order would emerge, Robert Catesby was the Bin Laden of his time, a charismatic but wild young man from a privileged background, who had become embittered by earlier brushes with authority, and eventually decided that extreme forms of violence were both justified and the only way to achieve his ends. Impressed by the force of his personality, Catesby gathered around him a small band of malcontents, and the group saw themselves as religious warriors, fighting for the return of the Catholic faith, or "The true religion" as they called it. To that end they assembled over three tons of gunpowder, packed in 36 barrels, and gradually secreted it in a cellar under the House of Lords, where had the plot succeeded, a "ground zero" would have extended for more than a mile, and killed thousands, including the King and all the aristocracy, who would be attending the opening of Parliament. Catesby's Holy War, or the Gunpowder Plot, as it is now known, has a number of tragic parallels with September 11th and London 7th July, and can be described as a view of the same battleground, from a different hilltop.