Every November, we light bonfires 🔥 and set off fireworks 🎆 to celebrate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot…a terrorist attack!
Guy Fawkes, 36 barrels of gunpowder, Parliament saved at the last minute — it’s become folklore.
However, when I examine it through the lens of my work, I see something different.
I see a textbook case of behavioural threat assessment.
Many of the warning signs I track today in modern cases were there in 1605.
The conspirators followed the same path, exhibited the same fixation, and revealed their intent in the same manner.
🧠 Human behaviour hasn’t changed in 400 years. The patterns are identical.
I’ve spent nearly 30 years assessing threats — from my time at Scotland Yard, to creating Parliament’s threat assessment capability after Jo Cox’s murder, and now protecting high-net-worth individuals and family offices.
If the Gunpowder Plot landed on my desk today, I’d recognise every red flag immediately, would you?
🏗️ What They Planned
Robert Catesby led a group of English Catholics who decided to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament.
🎯 The target: King James I and most of the political leadership — wipe them out in a single blast.
💣 The plan: Guy Fawkes, who had military training, would light the fuse and escape before the explosion.
They rented a cellar directly beneath Parliament, filled it with gunpowder, and spent months preparing.
It was methodical, coordinated, and deliberate.
And it collapsed because of something that still saves lives today: leakage ⚠️.
🚨 The Pre-Attack Warning Behaviours
1️⃣ Grievance
The conspirators felt betrayed. They expected King James to end Catholic persecution. He didn’t. Frustration turned to anger, anger hardened into grievance.
👉 Grievances don’t have to make sense to anyone else.
Once someone believes lawful routes won’t work, violence becomes the solution.
Grievance is always where it starts.
2️⃣ Fixation
Catesby and his circle became obsessed with restoring Catholic power. It wasn’t just important — it became everything.
🧩 They talked about it constantly, recruited others, and organised their lives around it.
When a person’s world narrows to a single issue, the risk rises sharply.
I tell clients to watch for this shift:
“This matters to me” ➜ “This is all that matters.”
That’s fixation.
3️⃣ Identification
The group stopped seeing themselves as English citizens 🇬🇧 — they became soldiers of a cause ✝️.
Fawkes embodied it: calm, trained, convinced his violent act served a higher purpose.
This is what we call identification — when someone’s cause becomes who they are.
Violence stops being an option they’re considering; it becomes part of their identity.
4️⃣ Pathway to Violence
Every plot follows the same structure. You can map it step by step:
📍 Stages:
-
Grievance → anger at persecution
-
Ideation → belief violence is the only way
-
Research & planning → renting the cellar, gathering gunpowder
-
Preparation → building networks, rehearsing, escape routes
-
Probing → testing access and routines
-
Attack → planned detonation, 5 November 1605
This wasn’t madness. It was rational, organised, and deliberate.
🧭 The same pathway appears in every lone-actor case today.
5️⃣ Leakage
Someone leaked. The Monteagle Letter — an anonymous warning about “a terrible blow this Parliament” — reached the authorities just in time.
No names. No details. Just enough to raise suspicion.
💌 Four hundred and twelve years later, I sat in my office in Parliament when another note landed on my desk.
A scrap of paper. Six lines.
An informant had overheard a neo-Nazi, Jack Renshaw, bragging in a pub about his plan to kidnap and kill Rosie Cooper MP, then murder a police officer and martyr himself.
Same principle. Different century.
A vague note. A warning. Someone acted.
I contacted the head of the Domestic Counter Terrorism Unit.
Renshaw was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life. Rosie Cooper is alive today because someone recognised leakage and acted.
🧩 Leakage is one of the most consistent pre-attack indicators.
It’s rarely a confession — usually a hint, a boast, a careless comment.
In 1605, it was a letter.
In 2017, a note.
Today, it might be a tweet, a message, or a behavioural shift noticed by a colleague.
💭 When someone is planning violence, it leaks out. Always.
Someone knows something — the only question is whether they act on it in time.
🔒 Why This Still Matters
I work with family offices, wealth managers, and security professionals protecting prominent individuals.
These patterns haven’t changed.
From Catesby (1605) to Anders Breivik (Norway, 2011) to Khalid Masood (Westminster, 2017) — the behavioural journey is the same:
⚙️ Grievance → Fixation → Identification → Pathway → Leakage
Different ideologies. Same human behaviours.
🧠 The Real Lesson
People stop attacks — not technology, not surveillance systems.
It’s the people who notice the small things and act on incomplete information who save lives.
The Monteagle Letter wasn’t signed.
My scrap of paper wasn’t detailed.
Both could’ve been dismissed.
Both stopped a killing.
If someone in 1605 could disrupt an attack with ink and parchment, we’ve got no excuse with all the tools and training available today.
✅ The knowledge exists.
✅ The patterns are visible.
✅ The methods work.
The question is simple:
Are we willing to recognise the signs and act before it’s too late?
