If Britain's 'Gunpowder Plot'Had Succeeded

The 1605 gunpowder plot to assassinate King James I and destroy the English parliament might seem to be a pretty unlikely sort of conspiracy: the action of a handful of desperate men with next to no chance of success. Catholics were under constant surveillance from the security services, their houses raided and their priests imprisoned and executed. The ringleader Robert Catesby, played by Kit Harington in the BBC drama Gunpowder, was already a marked man for his involvement in the Essex rebellion in 1601 [a rebellion led by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, against the regime of Elizabeth I]. A lot depended on Guy Fawkes, who was outside the inner core of the plotters and was a convert rather than a cradle Catholic. How could such a small band, with its own internal tensions and suspicions, hope to bring down the government when so many previous conspiracies had failed?