GUNPOWDER PLOT ON CLOAK AND DAGGER RADIO

Interview with Webster Griffin Tarpley on Cloak and Dagger Talk Radio, www.cloakanddagger.de, on the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ Day, Saturday, Nov. 5th 2005.

Lenny: Welcome back to Cloak and Dagger, I’m your host Lenny Bloom, along with your co-host Sherman Skolnick, The Great American Judge buster, and we’re here to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day.
Remember remember the 5th of November, and of course we’re here to expose the state secrets, the shadow government, the ruling elite.
For this special occasion, this great 400th anniversary, we are joined by one of the great experts in history and one of the top historians world wide, the author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror and the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, None other than Webster, the Illustrious Webster Tarpley. Webster, It’s an honor to have you here with us today.

Webster: Thank you so much, Lenny, Happy Guy Fawkes Day.

L. This is a briefing and Sherman and I are going to hold our questions for when we get a moment to get them in there, but we expect you to dig in deep and early.
So Webster, Go ahead and fill us in on what is Guy Fawkes Day that they’ve been celebrating and talking about for 400 years.

W. Yes in England, Guy Fawkes Day still remains one of the biggest holidays of the year, if you’ve ever been there, they have bonfires, it’s sometimes called Bonfire Day, they have huge effigies of Guy Fawkes, sometimes effigies of the Roman Pope that are dragged around the streets and burned. Up until the 1950’s it was illegal not to celebrate this holiday, it was a compulsory holiday, and it was also enshrined, as we’ll see, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, in other words, the state religion of which the Queen is the head, had a special church service for November 5th that focused around Gunpowder Treason and the miraculous deliverance of King James from this plot. Now let me just sum up for people who are not so familiar with this in various parts of the world what is involved.
On the morning of November 5th the British parliament was supposed to meet, and that would be the King, the Lords and the Commons all meeting in the same building, the House of Lords, which is not today’s House of Lords but an older building. And on that morning it was announced that an inspection party the night before, just after midnight on November 5th, in the wee small hours had discovered Guy Fawkes with a lantern, with a supply of matches and with kindling, and also a significant supply of gunpowder in his pocket, he’d been preparing to set off about 30 big barrels of gunpowder that had supposedly been concealed in the basement of the House of Lords, and the plot was: blow up the King along with the House of Commons and the top leaders of the Church of England and everybody else including all different people in the morning when this thing met.
Now according to the story, Guy Fawkes was discovered by a patrol that had been sent out by the government acting on a tip which I’ll tell you about, and Guy Fawkes was immediately taken prisoner, he was taken to the Tower of London, he was immediately put under very severe torture.
Some of his confederates were arrested immediately, they were taken to the Tower of London. They were tortured. Another group of the plotters allegedly went out toward the area where Shakespeare’s home was, out in Stratford on Avon out in Warwickshire.
And they tried to stir up a rebellion, it was actually a plan, they figured when the King had been blown up they would be able to start a rebellion, and these people were cut down pretty much immediately. And a couple of the most important of the plotters – really more important than Guy Fawkes – a guy called Percy and a guy called Catesby were cut down in the process and killed on the spot.
It turned out that all of these plotters were Catholics and this was the big thing. The Government was very interested in the fact that they were Catholics, and before too long the government did everything it did to tie these Catholics to the Jesuit Order allegedly acting on orders of the Pope in Rome and the General of the Jesuit Order to blow up the British Parliament and kill the King, kill the Lords, kills the members of the House of Commons. They were all executed within a month or two – Guy Fawkes, Winter, a bunch of others, and the Jesuit teacher Garnet who was the Jesuit provincial leader of the province of England, he was also picked up, tortured, put on trial, they had a show trial for him and he was also executed.
This became then the basis of the entire English government for approximately 200 years, from the late 1660’s until the middle of the 19th century this thing was in the Anglican prayer book, and a kind of article of the state religion, and of course it’s legendary, it’s a pervasive thing.
So this occurred on November 5th 1605, so we now have the 400th anniversary of those events. Now the finding I would start with is the entire official story is a complete lie from top to bottom. And this looks forward to events like the Gulf of Tonkin, like 9/11, carried out really by the same faction because this is the Anglo-Venetian Whig faction, the Anglo-American financier faction that has dominated the world for the past several hundred years.
This Gunpowder Plot was one of their birth pangs you might say.
Now in our own age we have 9/11 which seems to be part of the death rattle of this same Anglo-American financier faction. But we can understand them a whole lot better if we look into the history of these events. Now let me say just a couple of words about the situation of the time. The big question you had in England among other things was the religious question, and the religious question was that Henry VIII had decided to go Protestant, his son Edward had gone on with this, essentially forcing everybody to change their Catholic religion that they had held for many many centuries, and doing this with police state methods.
England in the early 1600’s was a police state – it was probably the most pervasive police state anywhere in Europe, except perhaps Venice was the other contender, where spies were absolutely everywhere.
The fact was that a very large minority of the population 40 45%, some would even say half of the population, especially in the north, especially in the west, especially as you got away from London, had remained Catholic. A large part of the nobility was Catholic, Shakespeare was a Catholic, Shakespeare’s patrons, the Earl of Southampton, all Catholics, there was a very very large Catholic underground, and the government was determined to crush this, and they were using police state methods.
Now just in terms of the general situation in Europe, you had a fight going on between France and Spain, which had been going on for a long time. Above all, I would point to the fact that you had the Venetians which were the superpower of intelligence, no discussion of secret intelligence operations during this period can be complete without looking at the Venetians.
What the Venetians were interested in places like England was they wanted people to be at war with Spain. You look where Venice was. Venice was sandwiched between Milan, which was controlled by the Spanish, the Papal States in the South and Austria in the north, and all of those were Catholic powers, and most of them were controlled by the Hapsburgs.
So what the Venetians were always trying to do was to run around Europe and try to get people involved in wars with Spain.
There had been a traditional alliance between England and Venice going back to the early 1500’s and the War of the League of Cambrai. So the Venetians had intelligence operations in Britain, and they tried to use them to keep England hostile to Spain, and to keep England if possible at war with Spain. And one of the ways you can do this is to play the religious card, and have a militant Protestant government in London that is going to be hostile to Spain and later on hostile to France. Now this means that all of this mythology about Good Queen Beth and the Golden Age of the Tudors, this is essentially a big lie, that has to go out the window. This is one of the most deep-seated forms of propaganda and prejudice in the English-speaking world, so this is what we got to cut through in order to get to the facts.

L. What king was involved?

W. Well, we’re talking about King James I, he had been the King of Scotland. He had come to the throne in 1603, and he was new on the job. I’ll tell you a couple of things about him, but before we talk about the Kings and Queen.
Queen Elizabeth had been in power until 1603. And she had died, right, she had no children, she never got married, so there was a big fight with the Venetians intervening to see who would get to be the King, and the Venetians were in favor of James VI of Scotland, so they brought him in and made him James I of England. The idea was that the Venetians wanted the English to be free of the Scots. Normally whenever the English invaded France, the Scots invaded England. The Venetians didn’t want that. They wanted the English to be able to devote all of their attention to making war on Spain, because that was what Venice required in order to relieve the pressure coming from the Spanish in Milan.
Now the key to all of this stuff is the Cecil family. You can’t understand any of this without knowing something about Lord William Cecil the older one, and Lord Robert Cecil, who was the younger one. Whether you had Elizabeth on the throne until 1603 or James who was there from 1603 until 1625, a tremendous amount of the real power was in the hands of these Cecils. These people were pro-Venetian and they were intelligent game masters. They were master manipulators, they were devious in a way that for most people is unbelievable even today. They make people like Lavrenty Beria or Himmler or J Edgar Hoover, they make these people look like rank amateurs.
Let’s look at the Cecil family for a second – The elder one, you have to bear with me now, because you know every English nobleman is a moving target, because he has the name he starts with, he generally has another name in the middle of his life, and if reaches the top of his career, he has a third name in many cases.
William Cecil is the elder one, he’s basically around during the time of Elizabeth.
He helps to bring Elizabeth in and he becomes Lord Burghley. So William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
If you know any Shakespeare you know who this guy is.
Remember Shakespeare was a Catholic activist, he hates the Cecil family, he goes to tremendous lengths, risking his own neck to put propaganda attacks on the Cecil family into his play.
If you know Hamlet you know Pollonius, the guy who gets stabbed by Hamlet, that’s William Cecil. That’s Lord Burghley. He’s a lecher, he’s a windbag, but he’s devious, he uses his family as an asset, uses his daughter, this kind of stuff.

L. Webster, so they didn’t discriminate against Shakespeare, because they made him famous, you said he was a Catholic.

W. This was an underground operation. He had powerful Catholic backers, that were too powerful for them to just get rid of.
But he was eventually driven out of playwriting, he was driven off the stage around 1610. He was simply driven out of business by this Cecil intelligence establishment.
So the older Cecil is William and his basic maxim was, and he wrote it up, this is all documented:
Whenever the Catholics become too popular, the government has to fix some odious design upon them, which would never fail to be believed by the generality of the common people. And then you can put the penal laws into execution. So their basic method is that of provocation.
Now the one we’re going to be concerned with more today is the Robert Cecil, the younger one, he’s the one who does the Gunpowder Plot, he’s the mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot. He starts off as Robert Cecil, he becomes Vicomte Cranborn in the middle of his career, and then when he really makes it to the top thanks to the Gunpowder Plot, he becomes Lord Salisbury.
The Cecil block is a permanent feature of English politics – and it’s there today, the Conservative Party is the Cecil block to a large extent. There was a Lord Salisbury who was prime minister in the late 19th century. These people are very much around.
Lord Balfour, right – Balfour declaration, he’s a Cecil.
Francis Bacon, Cecil’s cousin, he’s also very important, a little bit later than where we are now.

L. Clarify for the listeners and for me, the Cecils plotted against the Catholics to blame them falsely for the Gunpowder Plot.

W. Absolutely, that’s the whole thing. To set up a fake plot, stock it full of Catholics, fanatics, dupes, and their own double agents, and then pin that on the Vatican, pin it on the Pope, pin it on the Jesuits. And use that to get decades of absolute hysteria. And of course, allow them to cement their police state in the middle of a population that had very little use for them, in other words, they were something of a foreign body. Again the mythology on this stuff is miles deep – that England was this stout Protestant power with Good Queen Beth – this was a horrible nightmare of religious persecution
The Venetian ambassador at one point says to Lord Cecil, You know, I can understand that you’ve outlawed the Catholics, but do you have to persecute them so much? You persecute the Catholics more than any minority religion is persecuted anywhere in Europe, and that’s approximately accurate.
Now Cecil had a reputation of being plentiful in plots. Another portrait in Shakespeare, now we’re talking about Robert Cecil, the younger Cecil – this is Richard III, Shakespeare’s Richard III, that is another figure of Robert Cecil. Of course, Shakespeare always has plausible deniability. They say, You’re attacking Robert Cecil. – No, I’m just writing Richard III.
What did he say. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, by drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.
That’s Shakespeare putting Robert Cecil on the stage.
Now the third figure in this group we have Cecil the Elder, Cecil the Younger, prime ministers in effect, and Sir Francis Walsingham. This is a guy with a Venetian pedigree a mile long, this is the one who is absolutely linked to Venice.
During the reign of bloody Mary – who was a Catholic persecutor, we had her too – in the 1550’s we had five years when the Catholics got back in power and killed two or three hundred people in their own reign of terror, because this was mutual to a significant degree.
Sir Francis Walsingham was driven out of the country. Where did he go? He went to Padua, meaning Venice, where he became president of the foreign students’ society.
So Sir Francis Walsingham is the founder of the British secret intelligence service – the MI-6 today. So this goes from the 1570’s and 1580’s all the way down to the present time, this is another reminder why the British intelligence is the most powerful and the most formidable in the world, because they have centuries old networks that other people can only dream of. Walsingham recruited John Dee, a famous kook, and also Christopher Marlowe, the playwright, and it looks like Christopher Marlowe was liquidated, he was murdered when he began to pull away from Walsingham. Walsingham has got Venice written all over him.
Now under Elizabeth, the elder Cecil always had plots, we won’t go into these plots, but the Gunpowder Plot was just one of a long, long series. The Ridolfi plot, the Babbington plot, the Throckmorton plot. The Throckmorton plot is the most important because it leads to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and then the Spanish Armada.
Now there was a rebellion against the Cecils led by the Earl of Essex in 1601 but it failed, and he was executed, so at this point you got the Cecils in power, and when James comes in, they had a couple more plots, the Main and the Bye. The pattern of these plots is always you have agents provocateurs sent out by the Cecils, they gather up a bunch of patsies, get them involved in conspiracies. The Cecils observe the conspiracy as it goes along, The Cecils then make sure that they can implicate key important people, the political enemies of the Cecils, in the plot. Then they discover the plot at the last minute, and then they execute their political enemies. So this is the setting.
Now when James I first came into power, he promised that he would give toleration for the Catholics, because he didn’t have the beef with the Vatican that Elizabeth had had. But once he got into power James decided that he was happier fining the Catholics and expropriating them to get money, so there was a tremendous backlash of hatred and resentment against James among the Catholics, but it was not enough to cause this entire thing [the Gunpowder Plot].
So what we have is a group of double agents, and we’ll just talk about a couple of them.
Guy Fawkes is really not the most important, he is the one who has been demonized, but the important ones are two guys called Catesby and Winter, and they meet in the early months of 1604, and they begin discussing some kind of a plot to take revenge on James I.
Now you have to look at these people, where did these guys come from, Catesby and Winter, the original nucleus of the plot. They had all been involved in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex. In other words, these people all could have been executed by the Cecils as a result of this attempted coup by Essex against them which failed.
So you have to look at these two guys as essentially being part of the federal witness protection program. These were stooges, these were people that the government could essentially chop their heads off any time they wanted. They were fined and reserved to her Majesty’s use was the word used at the time.
So you got two police informants, essentially, meeting to create a plot. Now what did they talk about. They talk about first of all, renting a room in a basement across from the House of Lords and digging a tunnel. And they start trying to dig this tunnel, but it turns out they can’t do it, because they have to go through a wall, they also have to get a guy called Sir Dudley Carlton to come in, who is later on one of Cecil’s big diplomats, to help them rent this room.
So it’s like you’re going to have Henry Kissinger come in and help you rent the room – the safehouse – that you’ re going to try to use to tunnel under the House of Lords.
Eventually they find that they can’t tunnel so what they simply do is go and rent the basement under the House of Lords, and they stock this up with what looks to be gunpowder. We’re gonna see in a minute that it’s not.
They eventually recruit some other plotters, they recruit a guy called Thomas Percy, okay – Thomas Percy is one of the leading plotters. So we’ve got Catesby, we’ve got Winter, we’ve got Percy.
Here’s a story about Percy. One of the people at the time in the Autumn of 1605 is going home at 2 in the morning and he meets Percy the plotter, and he’s coming out of Cecil’s house. Get it? The main plotter is reporting to Robert Cecil about what’s going on. So he’s a double agent.
It looks also like this guy Catesby is a double agent, and we’ve got Sir Dudley Carlton who has helped them who is one of Cecil’s main diplomats, who helps them rent the first basement that they try to tunnel from. Now there are other people, we can’t go into all of them, but you’ve got this group of ex-cons in effect, in the witness protection program, you’ve got double agents, you’ve also got a couple of fanatics. You’ve probably got Guy Fawkes as a fanatic, a dupe, a patsy in that sense.
Now a couple of weeks before November 5th when the Parliament is supposed to meet, this Catholic nobleman Lord Mounteagle comes forward and he says to Cecil, “I just got a letter that says I shouldn’t go to the opening of Parliament because it might be dangerous,” and he shows him the letter. This is called the famous Mounteagle Letter. So Cecil waits four or five days until he can meet the King. Cecil shows it to the King, and says, “Your Majesty, I got this strange letter from Lord Mounteagle, what could it mean, that we shouldn’t go to the opening of Parliament? I really can’t figure this out.”
And James said, “My God, they’re going to blow up the Parliament.” Now it turns out that James I, when he was in Scotland he was very unpopular, there were numerous attempts to kill him. And one of the attempts to kill him was allegedly a gunpowder plot. They tried to blow up James and his father, so he’s used to this. Now, what you have here of course is, Cecil wrote the letter himself, whether with his own hand, or through some agent, he had agents who could duplicate handwriting, so he gets the letter sent to Mounteagle, Mounteagle delivers it back to Cecil, Cecil takes it to the King, and he lets the King think that the King is a genius, that he is the Solomon of England, that he’s the only one who could figure out such a deep dark mystery. Alright, so then they wait a few more days, and they send somebody over and they discover that it’s – Guy Fawkes.
I have a collection of prints here which are very interesting, and they all show the same thing: Guy Fawkes with his lantern is about to go into the basement of the House of Lords to prepare the last details of the gunpowder train that he is going to use to blow up the House of Lords. He is then set upon by this night watch of loyal servants to His Majesty the King.
So if you think about 9/11 in terms of memes, in terms of the elements of the myth, you got to have the House of Lords, you got to have Guy Fawkes – Guy Fawkes is carrying a lantern, the lantern is preserved in a museum, and then he’s taken; and often there’s a light coming down from the holy spirit, or some magical agency – a light that cuts through the darkness like a spotlight that gets onto Guy Fawkes, that helps these guys find who he is.
And this theme, these memes were repeated again and again and again in the prints of the time.
Now the problem is then, these other guys Catesby and Winter run off towards Stratford on Avon pretty much, and they get killed. So it looks like some of these people were liquidated, in other words these were double agents working for Cecil, but Cecil doesn’t hesitate to kill some of his own double agents. He gets rid of them so that they’ll never testify.
And instead what goes on is you have the torture of Guy Fawkes, he’s put on the rack, and then you have the torture of Winter. And if you look at the signature of Guy Fawkes, you can see his signature before he was tortured and after he was tortured, and you can see what they did to this guy.
The Thomas Winter confession is written in a different handwriting, and the official confession has the guy’s name spelled wrong, so they didn’t exactly do a perfect job.

L. Webster, now you’re discussing the details, I’m looking at the story on Encyclopedia Britannica online – that’s a pro-British printing service that’s been printing encyclopedias for many years. So your position. is Britannica most likely is lying about the whole thing, is that right?

W. Well you have to look at what they say, but obviously, it is very polarized, the official British stuff. There is a book from the 1990’s which defends pretty much the official version of the Gunpowder Plot, the Cecil version, and it’s written by a guy who works at the British Army Museum. So it’s the British establishment continuing to defend its own story.

Sherman. There’s two other historic things that relate to this. Number one, most historic reports about Queen Elizabeth I state that the only reason she wasn’t assassinated was that where there were numerous plots against her was that she had such a wonderful intelligence service.

W. Sherman, that leaves out the fact that most of these plots were organized by Cecil himself, Cecil the Elder.

S. That was designed to put the suspicion somewhere else, right?

L. That was designed to prove to Elizabeth every day that without Burghley, she’d be lost, that she needed Cecil the Elder more than life itself, so she dare not dump him.

S. Look at this statement I’m going to read to you from Britannica and tell me what you think about it.
Quote, “The plot bitterly intensified Protestant suspicions of Catholics and led to the rigorous enforcement of the recusancy law, which fined those who refused to attend Anglican services.” So in other words, they used this to persecute Catholics and force people to go to Protestant services, is that the long and short of it?

W. What it meant was that you get decades and decades, you could get a century more of religious oppression, and a pretext for a police state. Remember, in France at this time, under Henry IV, if you were a French Protestant, a Huguenot, you were tolerated, because there was the Edict of Nantes, in the 1590’s, which said that Protestants have certain rights, and they can’t be just crushed.
But in England, if you were a Catholic, you had no rights, you could be fined, you could be executed, if you even tried to leave the country, they’d confiscate your stuff. If you sent your kid to a Jesuit school in Belgium, which is what Shakespeare’s father did, Shakespeare’s father sent Shakespeare to a Jesuit school in Belgium. If that had become known, if that had been established by Cecil’s spies, Shakespeare’s father could have been expropriated of every penny that he had, every farthing. So again –

S. Wait, the effort over the years, to claim that Shakespeare didn’t write most of the things he put his name on, that it was written by Francis Bacon, is that an effort to discredit Shakespeare?

W. What it simply reflects is the British hatred of Shakespeare, because he is not what they say. He is not the guy who celebrates Queen Elizabeth. I’ll give you an example. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Every poet who wanted to make progress at the court, to make money, wrote a great praise of the Queen. From Shakespeare, zero, he absolutely will not take part in it.
Now just to finish up some of the details on this. The show trials were run by this guy Coke – he was the attorney general, he was the Ashcroft or the Gonzales, he’s a torturer. So what he does, he gets a confession from Guy Fawkes that says, “We plotters had a mass that was conducted by Father Garnet, but we never told Garnet about the details of our plot.”
What Coke wrote on the papers, and you can see these papers today in the public record office, Coke writes in Latin, Huc usque, in other words, Stop here and leave the rest out – when you make your harangue at the trial, don’t tell the part about we never told Father Garnet anything about any plot.

S. Can I add something about Justice Coke?

W. Sure.

S. A lot of the law in the United States is based on his decisions which are called the Coke Reports. And when they want to reach way back to support something that they haven’t got a good American precedent on, the US Supreme Court occasionally over the last two centuries would refer to him. Coke Reports.

W. It’s a travesty, it’s an absolute travesty

S. Let me see if I understand it. You’re saying that he was a counter-plotter of some kind.

W. No, he was the Andrei Vyshinsky, remember Andrei Vyshinsky ran the show trials for Stalin. Coke is the guy who ran the show trials first of all of Fawkes and Winter, and then they were all executed, and then they have a second round of show trials for Garnet, and then they kill him.
It’s worthwhile to note that the Vatican had been informed by some of these English Jesuits that a plot was in the works, and it was essentially Garnet that was writing to Rome to say look, I’m trying to stop these guys, but I don’t know what to do. So he gets a message back from Claudio Acquaviva, of the Jesuit Order, the Jesuit General in Rome, who says, The pope, and I join with it, I command you to stop any violent activity, because this will get us nowhere. In other words these people were not fools, they could see what would happen. Even if the plot had succeeded there is very little way that the plotters ever could have taken over England, it would have been other…

S. In the last couple decades a story came out supposedly supporting the British view that Guy Fawkes indeed was part of a plot, they alleged that they belatedly almost 400 years later found something. Do you know anything about that?

W. I’ll tell you what was found. Here’s what was found. The big question was, for many years, what happened to this gunpowder, where did the gunpowder go, thirty hogsheads, thirty big barrels. So what you find now is in the London Daily Telegraph, May 4th 1978, they found in the public record office, a receipt of the war office dated November 7th, 1605, two days after the discovery of the so-called plot, they found first of all that it was not gunpowder, but corn-powder, corn-powder was an inferior version of gun-powder, it had bigger grains, it didn’t give you that much bang for the buck. It’s a little bit like these home made fertilizer bombs, something more like that.
And the receipt says, corn-powder, decayed, meaning inert, it wouldn’t go off. So Cecil had the brains, if he was going to have this stage managed plot, he made sure that the props were not live gunpowder but decayed corn-powder, in other words these patsies and dupes were rolling barrels of inert gunpowder, corn-powder, that wouldn’t go off into the basement, because Cecil didn’t really want to blow up –

S. You know what’s interesting is that in 1993 the FBI using informants, they told them that it was an inert powder that they wanted these characters to use, these Islamists, in the basement of the World Trade Center, but they fooled them and they put real gunpowder, and it caused quite a bit of black smoke, and several people were killed. It went up into the building in 1993, this seems to me it’s sort of like a take off in some way about this Gunpowder Plot.

W. That’s it exactly Sherman, that’s very good, what is so uncanny about the Gunpowder Plot is that the whole repertoire of things that you find in this stage-managed terrorism, the state-sponsored terrorism of our time, you see the whole repertoire of tricks is already there in 1605, conducted by these Englishmen, who in their turn have been trained by the all-time experts and superpower, the Venetians. So we’ve got a bunch of Anglo-Venetian operatives running around. Let me just say, Why do I say Venetians? First of all let me say that back in the 1580’s you had this Throckmorton plot which led to the killing of Mary Stuart, Mary Queen of Scots, and therefore led to war with Spain and the Spanish Armada. That was carried out by a Venetian agent, Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno, the philosopher and playwright, quite a famous guy in his own right, was working for Venice and came over and became the secretary of the French ambassador in London, and did underground operations to get this Throckmorton plot going. He worked closely with Walsingham, and so therefore there’s a Venetian angle there that you can see. Venetians operating in London under Elizabeth, and then we’ve also got the famous playwright Ben Johnson, right, the main rival of Shakespeare, I think a rather unsavory character to be sure.
A couple of days after the plot, Cecil gave Ben Johnson the task of getting in touch with a certain priest. This is very mysterious stuff, never explained. Cecil goes to Ben Johnson and says, I want you to contact a certain priest. So Johnson writes back to Cecil saying Yeah, I tried it, I took the most obvious course, I went to the chaplain of the Venetian ambassador, but we couldn’t get the priest to come out of hiding. So it means somehow the Venetian ambassador is sitting in the middle of Robert Cecil’s plotting; therefore it’s an Anglo-Venetian plot, and this is not idle speculation, this can be documented. And the role of Ben Johnson in the whole thing is very strange because he would have met some of these conspirators in taverns that they frequented, and Shakespeare also.

S. What do you make of the stories – I’m not saying that I accept them, I’m just repeating them – that currently Queen Elizabeth II is sort of a closet Catholic – is there anything to that?

W. I don’t know, I think she’s a pagan, I think she worships power like the rest of them.
Let me just say, the other very important piece of proof we have, is a report of intelligence from one of Cecil’s spies, this guy’s name is Henry Rice, and in April 1604, a year and a half before the big event in November 1605, Henry Rice sends a report to Cecil, saying, I have a subagent working for me, the subagents name is Davies, he is engaged in working a Catholic treason plot, the goal of which is to incriminate priests, in other words, we got a sting operation going, we want to set these priests in, so we can execute them and get the publicity that we want. And he says, I can give you up to 60 priests. So the answer comes back from Cecil’s office, We don’t need 60, we need fewer, but they should be top-level Jesuits and top-level seminary priests. And then they say to Davies, Well, what’s the treason you’re working. And Davies, like a good agent, like Salem in the 1993 case that Sherman just referred to, Davies writes back, I will not declare the treason until you give me a pardon, I need a written pardon for what I’m doing so that I’m covered. So it’s official, the pardon was granted on the 25th of April 1604. So here it is, Cecil is running the plot a year and a half before the thing comes to the surface.

S. The other interesting thing is, in your book 9/11 Synthetic terror, inside the front cover, you refer to this Gunpowder Plot, so in other words, 400 years later they still have so-called rulers or whatever you want to call George W Bush, doing this provocateur trick of blaming high-level politics or whatever you want to call it on some group that they want to demonize.

W. Absolutely.

S. In the case of 911 they want to demonize Islam, so they said that 19 Moslems did it and many believe that the Moslems were simply patsies.

W. Exactly.

S. So we’re on a parallel track while there was a high-level plot that piggybacked onto 3 or more mock drills that same morning of September 11, 2001, and I think your book goes into that. So in a way your book is a latter-day explanation of how a plot can be faked.

W. Exactly, and I think the importance of this, the methods of this faction – we’re talking again about the English Venetian faction, which in our own day is the Anglo- American financier faction, the city of London, Wall Street, and Washington, the methods are largely the same methods and you can see that from this example from 4 centuries ago, and then again, if you look at somebody like Shakespeare, you’ll see that he was opposed to all this. For example the play Othello would seem to be Othello as a figure for King James who is torn between Iago representing Cecil and Venice, on the one hand, and Cassio, the Florentine, representing actual Renaissance values. And you see the way Iago tricks Othello, he isolates him, he gets rid of Cassio, he gets rid of Desdemona, he distorts everything, he tells stories about the handkerchief and all of this other stuff. That’s one figure of it.
Measure for Measure, Lord Angelo, right? The hypocrite who takes over the government and he wants to enforce the morality laws, but he also demands that women yield to him, right, Angelo is another figure of Robert Cecil. And then in…

S. How did Shakespeare in England get away with this?

W. He did it because it’s all in a coded language. In other words, none of it is [explicit], he’s got plausible deniability at every point.
And for a certain time he has backers, for a certain time he’s actually writing these plays for Elizabeth, he’s writing them for James to try to influence them, and ultimately he’s writing it for James’ son Prince Henry who unfortunately died, and then he’s driven out of business. So you could also see this – the Shakespeare play that is most dedicated to the Gunpowder Plot is Macbeth, right, the killing of a Scottish king. But there, the thing with Macbeth is, what we have as Macbeth is the shortest of all Shakespeare plays. It looks like important parts have been cut out. King Lear comes from the same period, and it also seems to be a similar kind of argument.

S. You know what’s interesting, Webster, you have just supplied a piece of legal history. And frankly, your interpretation of history would see to it that you could never be a law professor because they’d run you out, because too much of American law is common law based on England, what they call the Lord Chief Judge Coke Reports.
From what you said, I gather that Lord Coke is a tremendous faker, and whitewasher and cover-up type.

W. He was the Ashcroft and Gonzales because he was presiding over this torture, and the harangue that he made, the speech that he made at the trial was full of lies. About a 100 years ago there was a debate about the historical interpretation of the Gunpowder Plot, and one of the main Oxford historians Gardiner came forward saying, “How can you say that all of these wonderful noblemen of England who signed as witnesses to the confession of Fawkes and confession of Winter – how can you say that they would sign onto something that was full of lies?”
And the answer came back from one of the Jesuits at the time: Because that is what they did at the trial. Because this guy Coke got up and in his speech he made wild fabrications, distortions, omissions – it was basically you know the Kean-Hamilton Commission. And none of these noblemen, who had been witnesses to the actual torture allegedly, stood up and said but wait a minute, read the rest of it, like read the part that Gerard was there but you never told Gerard about the plot.

S. In the very period that you talk about the Court of Star Chamber – this infamous creature which continued in operation up until 1642 – and if you were to go to a big law school building, like the University of Chicago Law School, you know what’s interesting – they honor the judges of the Court of Star Chamber – which if you didn’t testify to their liking, they had no 5th amendment, you know what I mean – and they would chop your hand off. And there in the law school is a golden-framed picture of Lord Jeffreys, about the period that you’re talking about, and what I’m saying is, that there is a great defect in American law, and you just pointed it out, because they base too much of their background on what they call the Coke Reports. You know what I mean, if they want to reach back to some precedent in common law, they refer to that. And you just torpedoed –

W. Judge Jeffreys of the Bloody Assizes is a little bit later, I think by that time we’re in the 1660’s, it’s the Rebellion of Monmouth, who’s one of the bastard sons of the King.

S. Well, history claims that the Court of Star Chamber ended in 1642, believe it or don’t believe it. But what I’m getting at is the Coke Reports, I’ve always been suspicious of it, and you sort of supply the detail that more Americans should know about – hopefully those that are going to listen to this program, because we don’t have iconoclasts to point out the harsh truth and reality of situations, you know what I mean, they go along with the common lie, the Big Lie. In other words you don’t wish to go along with the Big Lie about the Gunpowder Plot, right.

W. Because what we’re identifying here is a permanent weakness of the English- speaking culture everywhere, because if you’ve had this fabrication, this orchestrated, manipulated, stage-managed stunt of the Gunpowder Plot, and you’ve had that made into a religion, that got into the Anglican book of common prayer, and it says in there, and this was up until 1859-1860, every 5th of November, the priest has got to preach on the Gunpowder Plot, you’ve got to read the Act of Parliament, you’ve got to go through this whole prayer routine about Gunpowder Treason and Guy Fawkes and the rest of it – it becomes a civic religion. Now when you look at 9/11, there’s an attempt to make 9/11 into a civic religion, an ersatz religion, a fake religion, and force people to believe it.

S. Yeah, but Webster, you know because you’re a profound historian, you properly pronounce words in foreign languages, so evidently you know a lot about these foreign languages – did anybody in the papacy from 1605 to whatever date you know about, did they ever try to roll back what you feel is the Big Lie, did they try to educate people and inform people that this Gunpowder Plot was a fake, or did they leave it alone?

W. The entire English Catholic community repudiated the Gunpowder Plot. As a matter of fact they even repudiated it before it happened. There was a woman called Fortesquieu, who lived in a famous building in London called Blackfriar’s Gatehouse, that was a safehouse for priests. Later it was bought and endowed by Shakespeare as a safehouse for priests.

S. Is that connected with Blackfriars Bridge?

W. Well, it’s the same neighborhood. Blackfriars was the old Dominican monastery, Black friars, white friars.

S. But what about my question.

W. Well wait, let me just get through this. The plotters tried to come to this safehouse for priests and say, let us in here and let us use this as a base of operations. And Ellen Fortesquieu said no, you guys are a bunch of low-lives, one of you is a bigamist – Percy. You’re not really Catholics, you’re a bunch of sleazy adventurers. I don’t trust you, I’m not letting you in. So later on also after the plot, the whole English Catholic community said we weren’t a part of it, we had nothing to do with it. Now the problem was Paul V, Borghese, this was a very doctrinaire, pedantic pope, he repudiated it in private correspondence, but the big problem with the papacy was they needed to come out with an encyclical letter saying the Gunpowder Plot is a fraud: here’s how it was done, we didn’t do it, Cecil did it. And for various reasons Paul V Borghese couldn’t pull himself or didn’t pull himself together to do this. And this was another betrayal of English Catholics. So this is one of the things that Shakespeare was bitter about.

L. And the date here once again for people who are trying to follow this now, what date was it when all this transpired.

W. The big date was November 5th 1605.

L. So this is many years after the act of supremacy, the act of submission, Henry VIII, that separated the Church in 1534. So my question to you is this: since attempts to obtain a divorce through pressure on the papacy failed, Cromwell turned to parliament using its powers to decide the issue. The result was this serious series of acts cutting back the papal power and influence in England. What if any actions other than legislative do you feel the papacy took that are not recorded – were there actions they took that are not recorded in history against the Church of England? Or were they all legislative in your view.

W. This is a very complicated question. Let me just say, when you go back to Henry VIII, which you’ve done, right, and the seizure of the monasteries, this is virtually a massive robbery, saying, all the property of the holy orders, and the monks, and the nuns, this is all going to be robbed by Henry VIII to create a new nobility that would be bound to him, because they would be expropriated if the Catholics came back.
The guy that you’ve mentioned is Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cromwell is the guy who convinced Henry VIII to do the seizure of the Church properties, right. That guy is a Venetian agent. Thomas Cromwell is somebody who had worked in Venetian counting houses and he of course is a fairly close relative of Oliver Cromwell, later on. Oliver Cromwell, being the dictator, the military dictator of Britain, generally between about 1650 and 1660, right – the Lord Protector.
You also had, just to keep the historical accounting, you had this Bloody Mary period that I mentioned in the 1550’s. Here you have Queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII coming in and reimposing Catholicism, and in this case the Venetian agent on the scene is Cardinal Pole, Cardinal Pole is from the Plantagenet family, the older royal house of England that had been kicked out a hundred years before. Cardinal Pole is a Plantagenet who had been groomed in Venice for many years by Gasparo Contarini. In the period that we’ve been talking about here on the Gunpowder Plot, Paolo Sarpi is the head of Venetian intelligence. We go back 100 years, to the early 1500’s, Gasparo Contarini was the head of Venetian intelligence.
And these are the master manipulators, the master game orchestrators in Europe, and nobody could come near them in their ability to manipulate. So what you always have is at key moments which you’ve got to see is the constant thing is, the Venetians don’t care which side is which. They are always in there to cause religious strife and above all make sure that you get an anti-Spanish government out of the entire process.

S. But Webster, what about, is there a simple answer to my question, from that time 1605 to now has there been a record of any papacy, any pope, who wanted to straighten out the historic record of the Gunpowder Plot that the Catholics were not involved.

W. Well, the popes have not done this themselves. I’ll point to two people, two leading Jesuits that people can read, because these books are available
The first Jesuit is about 100 years ago, you have the guy called Father Gerard. He was a good polemicist and wrote some well-documented stuff on the Gunpowder Plot. He got into a fight with this guy Gardiner that I mentioned, so it’s the Jesuits against Oxford, the two lines. So Father Gerard 100 years ago.
Currently the dean of skeptics of the Gunpowder Plot is Francis Edwards who’s alive and well and living in London. He’s a Jesuit, and he wrote a book about it 1969. He’s written articles about it. He’s written a study of all of those Elizabethan plots that I’ve talked about, he’s written about the early Jacobean plots in the early reign of King James, The Main and the Bye as they’re called.
And Francis Edwards is working on a masterful sort of magnum opus study of the Gunpowder Plot which is not going to be available this year but it’ll be available sometime in the future. But if you want to read something about it, Francis Edwards, he’s got some articles in the early 1990’s, but above all his 1969 book on the plot, I think it’s got Guy Fawkes in the title. So if you want to google Francis Edwards and Guy Fawkes, then you’ll see. So essentially what the papacy has done, they don’t speak directly, they delegate it to various Jesuit scholars who do the work for them.

S. If I remember history correctly, some time after this, Parliament shut down for 35 years. Was that a consequence of the alleged Gunpowder Plot, or something unrelated?

W. I think it’s a consequence of Oliver Cromwell whose hobby was dissolving Parliament. So you know these famous quotes from Cromwell saying, You are no Parliament, Go with God but go, get out of here, you’re dissolved, scram, beat it.

S. Was that a consequence of the so-called Gunpowder Plot?

W. This is a little bit distant, because we’re going from 1605 to the 1640’s and 1650’s. But I would like to stay this, If you have a state religion that is based on this fantastic lying story, and you incorporate that into the book of common prayer – For some people, if you believe in religion, this is blasphemy!
How can you incorporate an event like this into your Book of Common Prayer? In other words, the words of Coke are not the Word of God. The word of James I or of Robert Cecil cannot be the Word of God. This is nuts.
So what you do with this is you politicize religion to such an extent that then in the 1640’s you get this backlash which is led by Puritans, yeah, Congregationalists for sure, but then, the Diggers, the Seekers, the Ranters, the Muggletonians, the Fifth Monarchists, the Gindletonians, this wild zoo of sects that came up in England in the 1640’s and 1650’s. The diggers are Communists, the Revellers are Communists in their own way, the Ranters want free love, the alehouse is the center of religion.
What you got is a qualitative decay of religion when you try to incorporate these events into religion. This is sort of what’s going on today, if you look at the Christian fundamentalists you’ll probably find that they observe 9/11 as some kind of religious apocalyptic event.

S. The other thing is a broad question. Maybe you could make a simple answer. Could this be an excuse why over all the years England never had a written or organic law like the US Constitution.

W. Yes, very good.

S. They had a common law which was accepted from the time of Lord Coke, but they never wrote anything down – is that a consequence of all this?

W. I think it has a lot to do with it. The problem that Sherman is addressing for those who don’t know is that in England there’s no written constitution – we have a written constitution, they have none. You’ll say, Where’s the constitution, and they’ll say, it’s the King, the Lords, and the Commons. Yeah, but –

L. No, no, no, that’s not totally true. As a Canadian, I can tell you that their constitution is very much in the oral tradition of common law and tort law. It’s an oral constitution.

W. Yeah, I know, but what’s an oral constitution?

L. Americans who are visually biased will have a problem understanding that, but there’s a strong oral constitution because the oral constitution is the heart of our written constitution here in Canada.

W. The English constitution is like the Tao, it’s everywhere and it’s nowhere. You say, where is it, I want to read it. They’ll say, Well, it’s a body of precedents that define the relation among king, lords and commons. Fine, so let me see at least an unofficial collection of those precedents. Well, they say, You can’t even have that. And the reason why, is a lot of those precedents are secret precedents that you’re not allowed to know. And as Sherman has pointed out, you have the Star Chamber, you have these secret courts, they have them all the time, we have them here, too, in the US. Probably it will turn out that a lot of the relations among king, lords and commons, when the archives are finally opened after the revolution, that they are determined by those secret decisions back in the Star Chamber, and back in the Bloody Assizes, which Sherman has been talking about. So that you have a constitution which has no – It’s anything you want it to be. The other thing about it is, in the English system, there’s absolutely no distinction between a constitutional amendment and a statute law. In other words, as soon as you have a Parliament, you have a Prime Minister with a majority, they can pass anything they want by majority vote, and that changes the constitution – and that’s wild. There’s no distinction between constitutional amendment and just a statute law that they ram through from time to time.

S. I’m interested in the subject because I once years ago wrote an appeal brief about secret courts.

L. Sherman, we’re running out of time, let’s get back to the Gunpowder Plot and sum it up.

S. Yes, sum it up, Webster.

W. Who can we quote, we can quote perhaps from Godfrey Goodman, let’s see if we find him, Godfrey Goodman was the Anglican bishop of Gloucester, and he was contemporary of these events, and his finding is, Cecil knew about Catholic resentment of James I, and “because he would show his service to the state, he first contrived and then discovered a treason, and the more odious and hateful the treason was the more his service would be greater, and the more acceptable.” Another one, Short View of English History, “Some have affirmed that this design was first hammered out in the forge of Cecil, who had originally intended to produce this plot in the time of Elizabeth, and to this end, by his secret emissaries, he enticed some hot-headed men of the Catholic persuasion, who, ignorant whence the design first came, heartily engaged in this execrable treason plot.” So, he acted in the double spirit of his predecessor Walsingham and basically everybody in this plot had his role assigned by Cecil. Some were conscious double agents who thought they were going to be spared, but they were liquidated, and a lot of them were just fanatics, dupes and patsies, and it’s a clear example of state-sponsored, false-flag terrorism 400 years ago.

L. Thanks so much for updating us on that, it’s just tremendous to have you.

W. Happy Guy Fawkes Day to all.


For a Spanish translation of this transcript, see http://www.mov-condor.com.ar/ven-lond/Tarpley-Cons-polv.htm.
The Condor website also has a very interesting collection of other materials on the "Nuked World Odor," see http://www.mov-condor.com.ar/libros.htm.

Excerpts on Guy Fawkes from Webster Tarpley's 9/11 Synthetic Terror

Holiday E-Greetings for Peace at Www.PeaceWish.Com, including Guy Fawkes Day.

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