Dunchurch and the surrounding Dunsmore—at this time tamed somewhat from its ancient wildness and tickled into productiveness and smiling fertility by plough and harrow—were associated, close upon three hundred years ago, with a conspiracy that might well, had it been successful, have added such a page to England’s story whose likeness for horror and ferocity it would perhaps be impossible to match. Dunchurch, in short, has a scenic part in the “Gunpowder Treason and Plot,” that came near to blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, on the famous Fifth of November, 1605. “To blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains” was Guy Fawkes’ savagely humorous explanation of the plot, when asked its object by a Scottish nobleman; but its real aim was the avenging of Roman Catholic wrongs and disabilities upon James I., and the Protestants. We have already seen the home of Robert Catesby, the true and original begetter of the plot: and here, at Dunchurch, was to be assembled a great gathering of Roman Catholic noblemen and gentlemen, to take part in a rising to follow upon the success of the blow to be struck in London. Those were times when assemblages of any kind were looked upon with suspicion, and so it was given out that the great preparations being made along the road from London, in providing relays of horses at every stage, were in connection with an elaborate hunting-party on Dunsmore, to which the squire of Ashby St. Ledgers had bidden the whole countryside. Never doubting the success of their design to blow Parliament sky-high, Catesby with three of his fellow-conspirators, Percy, and John and Christopher Wright, left London for Dunchurch on the eve of the fatal Fifth. Fawkes, fanatically courageous, was in his cellar, under the Parliament House: the sinister figure that close upon three hundred anniversary “Guy Fawkes Days” and innumerable ludicrous “guys” have not wholly succeeded in robbing of its dramatic force. There he lurked: booted and spurred, slouch-hatted and cloaked; slow-matches in his pocket, and a dark-lantern behind the door.