More than six centuries after Edward III first enshrined the crime of treason in English law, the letter that thwarted one of the most infamous acts in the nation’s history is to go on public display.
The anonymous “Monteagle letter”, of 26 October 1605, warned the peer Lord Monteagle not to attend the opening of parliament on 5 November, “for they shall recyeve a terrible blowe this parleament and yet they shall not seie who hurts them”.
Parliament did not blow; the tipoff led to the discovery of Guy Fawkes with 36 barrels of gunpowder hidden in a storeroom in the palace of Westminster.
The original letter will be on public show, for the first time it is believed, alongside other documents relating to the audacious plot and its aftermath as part of a free exhibition at the National Archives in Kew, London, which also includes documents from other moments that shaped the UK’s history.
One of Guy Fawkes’ seven confessions, extracted it is believed after torture, is also displayed along with the official personal sanctioning by King James I of torture, where the king stated: “The gentler Tortures are to be first used unto him et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur (and so by degrees proceeding to the worst)”.
An original copy of the 1606 Thanksgiving Act, after Londoners were encouraged to celebrate the king’s escape with his life by lighting bonfires and which decreed that thereafter 5 November – Bonfire Night – should be celebrated annually, is also displayed for the first time. It remained law until 1859.
The Gunpowder Plot papers were kept until the 19th century in the Bag of Secrets, a leather bag under lock and key that contained some of the most important treason documents of the land, which is also on display.
Dr Daniel Gosling, a legal records specialist, said: “It was the biggest treason attempt in British history, on a scale that hasn’t been seen before. This one, if successful, would have killed the king, his closest family, all of his counsel, members of parliament. So it would destroy not only the royal family but the government, and the physical building of government.”
The exhibition Treason: People, Power and Plots, opening, appropriately, on 5 November and running until 6 April 2023, begins with the Treason Act of 1352, though lawyers use 1351 as the date of the act, with historians using 1352 because of the medieval calendar.
At the heart of the exhibition is the original huge ornate parchment and ink statue roll, written in Anglo-Norman French, which contains the act, and is shown for the first time. It includes the clause of attempting to kill or even imagining the death of the monarch or eldest heir to the throne, or levying war against the monarch – elements that remain today.
The law was constantly added to. In 1441, the noblewomen Eleanor Cobham, the Duchess of Gloucester, known as the “royal witch”, was found guilty of astrology, magic and necromancy – now also categorised as treason – having been accused of summoning spirits and demons to predict when King Henry VI would die.
Documents relate the charges against her, including the death by burning at the stake of Margery Jourdemayne, the “Witch of Eye Next Westminster” – the woman from whom Eleanor supposedly bought her magical potions. Eleanor, who as a noblewoman could not be tried for treason, escaped with life imprisonment on religious charges and was forced to perform a barefoot “walk of shame” through London.
One parchment roll, issued by Henry VII, is the 1485 attainder of Richard III for treason – even though Richard had already been killed at the Battle of Bosworth. Henry VII, who had undoubtedly himself committed treason, backdated his reign by one day to allow him to charge his now dead rival with treason instead.
The detailed charges against Anne Boleyn, accused of incest with her brother and of treason for plotting the death of Henry VIII, are included. Rarely seen in public, they, too, were kept in the Bag of Secrets. Boleyn escaped being burnt, the normal punishment for a woman, with Henry VIII in an act of “leniency” instead permitting her to be beheaded by sword at the Tower of London.
It was under Henry VIII’s reign that the Treason Act also came to include poisoning. Richard Roose, cook to the Bishop of Rochester, who poisoned the porridge he served – though the bishop did not eat it, others did – was convicted of treason against the bishop, and boiled alive at London’s Smithfield market. Poison was removed from the act after Henry VIII’s death.
In one spectacular reversal of the treason laws, the trial documents relating to Charles I’s conviction and execution for treason, show treason being defined as against the people, rather than the monarch, though that reverted on the accession of Charles II.
Documents relating to Irish independence include Wolfe Tone’s trial speech in 1798, and an eve of execution letter from Robert Emmett to his brother, begging him to care for the woman he had planned to marry, Sarah Curran. Others relate to the 1916 Easter Rising.
The last person to be hanged for treason in the UK was the American-born William Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, who was executed for treason for his Nazi propaganda broadcasts “Germany calling” during the second world war. The exhibition includes the renewal application for his fraudulent British passport, and the pocket watch, cufflinks, signet ring and cypher – his personal possessions confiscated under the treason law.
Over the centuries, the charge of treason was “warped, adapted and expanded”, said Dr Euan Rogers, principal medieval specialist. “But the core of the 1352 act remains today.”
• Treason: People, Power & Plot runs from 5 November 2022 to 6 April 2023 at the National Archives, Kew
