November 5

The Gunpowder Plot and the Wizard in the Tower

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

Shortly before midnight on November 4, 1605, a soldier calling himself John Johnson was arrested in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, standing watch over thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. Under interrogation, he would soon give up his real name, Guy Fawkes, but by the time the sun rose on November 5th, London was already lighting celebratory bonfires, the beginnings of a holiday England still hasn’t stopped observing. Every year since, bonfires have burned across Britain in memory of the Gunpowder Plot’s failure, and effigies of Fawkes have gone up in smoke with them.

But the strangest figure swept up in the Plot wasn’t one of the conspirators at all. He was an earl, a scholar, and, by popular reputation, a wizard, and he would die twenty-seven years later on the very same date…

Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, born at Tynemouth Castle in 1564, was one of the richest men in England and the heir to a family history that practically guaranteed suspicion. His uncle had been executed for treason in 1572, and his father had died a prisoner in the Tower of London under circumstances never satisfactorily explained. Raised Protestant but keeping close ties with England’s Catholic community, the Earl found little to satisfy his ambitions at court and gradually withdrew into study instead: mathematics, astronomy, cartography, medicine, and alchemy, assembled into one of the largest private libraries in the country. His contemporaries called him “the Wizard Earl,” and it’s worth being honest about what that nickname actually meant. In an England where the boundary between natural philosophy and magic barely existed, any nobleman who kept a laboratory full of glassware, instruments, and resident mathematicians was going to be called a wizard, whether he ever drew a circle or not. The Earl’s “magic” was, by most surviving evidence, the experimental science of his day, carried out in the same rooms and the same spirit as the alchemy that sat beside it on his shelves.

His trouble began with a cousin. Thomas Percy, one of the Plot’s ringleaders, was the Earl’s distant kinsman and trusted estate officer. (Popular accounts frequently call Thomas the Earl’s brother; he wasn’t, but the error has proven nearly as durable as the bonfires.) Fawkes, it quickly emerged, had been working under Thomas’s name, and the evidence surrounding the Earl only grew worse from there. Thomas had visited him at Syon House on November 4th, the day before the planned explosion, for a long private conversation that the Earl insisted concerned estate business. He had also appointed Thomas to the royal bodyguard without administering the required oath of loyalty. And Thomas himself could never clear him, since he was shot dead on November 8th during the plotters’ last stand at Holbeche House. Then investigators turned up something that, in Jacobean England, looked very much like sorcery in the service of treason: the Earl’s house mathematician, Thomas Harriot, was accused of having cast King James’s horoscope.

That accusation deserves a closer look, because it shows how seriously astrology was taken at the highest levels of government. Casting a monarch’s nativity wasn’t a parlor game. It was understood as a way of calculating when a king might die, and an Elizabethan statute had already made the practice a felony when aimed at the queen. Harriot spent at least three weeks in the Gatehouse prison while his house at Syon was searched, before being released when nothing incriminating turned up. The Earl was less fortunate. Although the surviving conspirators eventually testified that Thomas Percy had kept his patron entirely in the dark, James was unwilling to admit he’d held a great nobleman for months without cause. In June 1606, the Earl was convicted of contempt rather than treason, stripped of his offices, fined the staggering sum of £30,000, and sentenced to imprisonment at the king’s pleasure.

What he did with that imprisonment is the part of the story that belongs in a column like this one. The Earl took apartments in the Tower’s Martin Tower, refurbished them, kept a household of servants, spent heavily on books, and even had a bowling alley built in the Tower gardens. His neighbor was Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned there since 1603, and the two men dined together regularly. More remarkably, historian Lauren Kassell has documented that the pair employed an alchemist named Roger Cooke to build and run a still house inside the Tower from around 1606 to 1609. Cooke had begun his career as an assistant in the household of Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s great magus, who was then living out his final, impoverished years at Mortlake. For a few years, the former apprentice of England’s most famous magician was tending furnaces and distilling apparatus inside the most notorious prison in the kingdom, on behalf of two of its most celebrated inmates.

The Earl also kept three scholars on pension, Harriot, Walter Warner, and Robert Hues, often remembered as the Wizard Earl’s “Three Magi,” and their work continued at Syon while their patron sat in the Tower. Harriot in particular was doing genuinely extraordinary things. On July 26, 1609, he turned a telescope toward the Moon and sketched what he saw, months before Galileo published his own lunar observations, and he left behind thousands of manuscript pages of mathematics and optics. Raleigh’s enemies had long whispered that Harriot was an atheist and a conjurer, and twentieth-century scholars went further, building the theory of a secret circle of freethinkers around Raleigh, Northumberland, Harriot, and Christopher Marlowe, christened the “School of Night” after a single obscure line in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here again, honesty matters: the evidence that any such organized school existed is thin, and many historians now doubt it. The real connections among these men were documented friendships and patronage, which is interesting enough without the secret society.

None of this happened in a vacuum. The intended victim of the Plot was a king who had personally written Daemonologie, a treatise on witchcraft published in 1597, and who presided over the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which made the invocation of evil spirits a capital crime. In the months after the Plot, Shakespeare produced [Macbeth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth), a play of witches, prophecy, and regicide written for that same king, in which the drunken Porter jokes about an “equivocator,” a line widely read as a dig at Henry Garnet, the Jesuit executed in May 1606 for his knowledge of the Plot. Treason, astrology, and the occult were braided together in the Jacobean imagination, and the Wizard Earl was caught squarely in the middle of the braid.

James finally released him in 1621 as part of a wider amnesty for political prisoners, sixteen years after he first entered the Tower, by which time Raleigh had gone to the block in 1618 and Harriot had died of cancer that same summer of 1621. The Earl retired to Petworth House in Sussex with his library, which his estate inventory would later count in dozens of chests, and died there on November 5, 1632, twenty-seven years to the day after the Plot that cost him his freedom. His son later commissioned Anthony van Dyck to paint him posthumously, not as a courtier or a soldier, but as a philosopher, chin resting on his hand, deep in thought. It’s a fitting image for a man whose “wizardry” consisted of reading, measuring, distilling, and asking questions in an age that couldn’t always tell the difference between a scientist and a sorcerer, and that occasionally locked up both.

Remember, remember the fifth of November, and when the bonfires are lit tonight, spare a thought for the wizard in the Tower.

Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of an earl whose “wizardry” was carried out over furnaces and stills inside the Tower of London, we’re recommending a book that takes the laboratory side of alchemy as seriously as he did...

Practical Alchemy: A Guide To The Great Work

By Brian Cotnoir | Red Wheel / Weiser

Brian Cotnoir’s Practical Alchemy: A Guide to the Great Work, published by Weiser Books, is the 2021 revised edition of what was originally The Weiser Concise Guide to Alchemy, now with a foreword by Robert Allen Bartlett, author of Real Alchemy, and an introduction by James Wasserman. Cotnoir is an alchemist, artist, and award-winning filmmaker who contributed to Frater Albertus’s Parachemy and translated The Emerald Tablet, and he brings a working practitioner’s sensibility to a subject too often treated as either pure metaphor or quaint pre-chemistry. The book divides cleanly into theory and practice, first walking readers through alchemy’s history and its core concepts, then moving into actual laboratory operations: the herbal work of separating a plant’s Three Principles through fermentation, distillation, and calcination, along with the purification of salts and other foundational procedures.

What makes it the right companion for today’s post is precisely that hands-on emphasis. The still house Roger Cooke ran for Northumberland and Raleigh was a place of physical work, of heat, glass, patience, and repeated operations, and Cotnoir’s book restores that dimension to an art that modern readers often encounter only through Jungian psychology or symbolic interpretation. He doesn’t dismiss the spiritual side of the Great Work. Rather, he insists, much as the Earl’s own era assumed, that matter and spirit are worked on together, at the bench, through practice rather than speculation alone.

This is a practical primer rather than a history, and readers wanting the scholarly detail on the Wizard Earl, Harriot, and the Tower years should look to academic sources such as John W. Shirley’s biography of Harriot. Anyone attempting the experiments should also take the book’s safety guidance seriously, since real laboratory work involves real heat and real chemicals. But for readers who finished today’s post wondering what was actually happening inside that Tower still house, Cotnoir’s guide is one of the clearest and most trustworthy places to start doing the work yourself.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist