In honor of Guy Fawkes’ day, some folks at the University of Aberstwyth have done the math on the Gunpowder Plot:

Using explosion physics the team deduced that streets up to one-third of a mile from the centre of the palace of Westminster would have suffered severe structural damage and windows would have shattered within a radius of two-thirds of a mile from the centre of the blast.

Pretty impressive, for Shakespearean technology.

The BBC has done the politics. Not good news for the English Catholics Fawkes was trying to help.

Protestants who were hearing of the atrocity in the capital and the uprising, aware that Catholics were responsible for both . . . would have taken up arms in a panic, turned upon the Catholics in their respective areas, and imprisoned or slaughtered them, in an English equivalent to the wave of hate and fear that had driven the French Catholics to massacre the Protestants there on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. . . .

[Charles I] would have revered the memory of his murdered parents, and almost certainly have acquired an abiding hatred of Catholicism, and tended instead to the evangelical wing of Anglicanism. This would have made him much more popular in both England and Scotland than the Anglo-Catholic policies that he adopted instead. . . .

In short, had Guy Fawkes succeeded, the British state would have turned into a Protestant absolute monarchy as Sweden, Denmark, Saxony and Prussia all did in the course of the 17th century; but much stronger than any of those. As such, it would in turn have paid the price of this achievement, as its powerful monarchy collapsed in revolution in modern times.

Now there’s an alternate history novel waiting to be written.