What if Guy Fawkes had succeeded?

"My lords and members of the house of c...." before the King can finish his introduction to the state opening of parliament he is interrupted by the rumble of explosions under his throne. By the time he realises what is happening, it's too late - the House of Lords is engulfed in a fireball that kills the King, his heir Henry and much of the protestant establishment.

As the capital descended into chaos, two children are about to have their lives turned upside down as they are used as pawns in the civil war that is to follow. Charles Stuart, aged 5 was deemed too young and sickly to join his father and older brother in London for the state opening - instead he was left in Oxford where the royals had retreated to escape the threat of plague. It's Tuesday 6th November by the time news arrives in Oxford of the disaster at Westminster, Charles is too young to understand what is going on but he does notice his mother's distress and how everyone is now bowing to him. King James I of England and VI of Scotland was paranoid about assassination attempts and his chief adviser had been investigating several potential plots. In order to secure a protestant succession if one of these attempts succeeded James' wife Queen Anne of Denmark also stayed in Oxford to act as regent for the young King Charles.

The situation escalated quicker for James' eldest daughter Elizabeth; the nine year old princess was at Coombe Abbey, Warwickshire when an armed party led by gunpowder plotter Everard Digby took her into their 'protection'. From there she was delivered to Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland who informed her that she was now Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland and II of England. To coincide with this power grab the Catholic plotters had planned a series of uprisings throughout the midlands to secure key infrastructure and generate public support for their new puppet Queen.

As Birmingham, Warwick and Coventry burn in Catholic uprisings, Queen Anne is made aware of how the plotters who have just murdered her husband and son are now using her daughter to usurp the throne and drag England back to Rome. In this crucial moment Queen Anne makes a fatal error in judgment. When James died on 5th November 1605 he had only been King of England for 2 years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I - he had been King James VI of Scotland since 1567 and therefore his power base was securer in north of the border. Queen Anne judged that her son would be safer among his Scottish subjects and his court moved to Edinburgh mid-November; this left a power vacuum which Percy and the other conspirators capitalised on.

On Monday 12th November with fires in the rubble of parliament still smouldering Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey with all the regalia of state. A week later Charles was crowned at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh; both had been proclaimed monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland. Over the following decade the British isles would descend into a bloody civil war which turned brother against sister, mother against daughter and the peoples of these islands against each other - it would be the bloodiest conflict in British history.

The above account is obviously fiction, King James didn't die on 5th November 1605 and the gunpowder plot failed. We are all familiar with the story of Guy Fawkes and how he was discovered with the barrels of gunpowder in the cellars under parliament. What is often forgotten as we remember remember the 5th of November is what Fawkes and his fellow conspirators hoped to achieve by blowing up parliament and the King - the consequences if they had succeeded is one of the great 'what ifs' of history.