December 24, 2025 • 51 mins
Margaret continues her talk with Chelsey Weber-Smith about the saint who built hidden compartments to hide priests during the persecution of Catholics in England.
Sources:
https://ewtn.co.uk/article-st-nicholas-owen-builder-of-secret-hiding-places-for-priests/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/articles/2005/11/02/hindlip_gunpowder_plot_feature.shtml
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/harvington-hall
https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/12/05/nicholas-owen-little-john-paid-highest-price-ingenious-camouflaged-places-hide/
https://fellowshipandfairydust.com/2022/02/18/st-nicholas-owen/
https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/year-8/mary-i-reading/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
https://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/why-was-anne-boleyn-executed/
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/beyond-the-pale.html
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/9/1055
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26845784?read-now=1&seq=4#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.advocate.com/history/king-james-bible-queer
https://www.worldhistory.org/Gunpowder_Plot/
https://www.catholicpamphlets.net/files/pamphlets/mary%20tudor%20and%20the%20protestants.pdf
https://catholic.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/saints_heroes/reformation/php/martyrs.php
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/gunpowder_hutton_01.shtml
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to cool people who
did cool stuff. You're a weekly reminder that one day
podcasters will be hunted and they will need to hide
in small closets. But they'll be so used to it
that at first we'll think we're safe. But then we'll
realize that we're too in love with the sound of
our own voices, and they'll hear us whisper you between
(00:24):
the boss, and we'll be throwing to ads. As isn't
to throw to ads, but it's what we'll be doing
when they catch us and with me in this terrible
fate that awaits us all as Chelsea Weaversmith.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hi, Hi, live from the Heidi Hole in my own house.
Thanks for having me again, Mark.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah. And the one who will be masterminding hiding all
of us is none other than Queen Sophie Lickterman.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Bloody Sophie, Bloody Sophie.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Former Queen I fired Ralph, remember right, totally Yeah, shortest
rain of all times.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Noble noble. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
So we are on part two of Well heighty Holes.
You probably guessed because it was in the title and
you already listened to part one. But that's where we
are at and we have just finally explained a bunch
of stuff about some kings and queens, and don't worry,
there's going to be more of it. But first we
can finally introduce this week's main named cool person, who
(01:26):
is like all things, he's not the only one who
did this stuff. And there's actually all these papers that
I really want to read, but I only have so
much time in this world about the way that actually
all of this persecution ended up changing the role of
women within the church and actually ended up giving like
women a lot more positions of power, even though the
pope was like, no, we can't let women have more power,
(01:48):
and they were like, doesn't matter, We're doing it anyway.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Okay, that sounds cool.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
But I don't know as much about that yet, because
I found out about that about two hours ago, fair enough,
and I started reading a bunch of stuff and then
I was like, what am I doing?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I have to finish the script?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, oh, I was already done with the script, and
then I was adding more to it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh No, that's the curse. That's the historian podcast curse.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, because there's always more.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
There's more context, more context. I need a context. I'm
addicted to it.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
The whole world is just a rubber band ball of context.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So Nicholas Owen, not known as Saint Nicholas Owen until
nineteen seventy, was born in Oxford, which I assume is
in England, and it is if the year fifteen sixty two.
I've probably even been there, but I still refuse to
admit that I know anything about English geography, even though
i've actually it's been anyway, whatever, isn't it fun to
have performative outrage about a thing that doesn't actually affect you.
(02:47):
That's what I like to do, is what gets me
out of bed.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It feels good.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yeah. He was born in fifteen sixty two. He's one
of four sons. His father was named Walter Owen, and
if history knows his mother's name, what I read bothered
to tell me. His father was a carpenter, and he
decided to follow in his father's footsteps, and he prenticed
as a joiner, a carpenter specializing in joinery, and they
(03:12):
were a devout Catholic family. One of his brothers became
a priest, and another brother worked as a printer, printing
illegal Catholic literature.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Well, there you go. The printing press is here.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah. That was the like I was like, I think,
hold on, I have a thig somewhere in here. It's
one of these things where I have learned what year
the printing press was invented many times. I've looked it
up many times.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
For this show, over and over as I but it's.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
As you start pulling apart all these threads of history,
then the dates matter to me, Like, h hmm. I
didn't care about what year the English Civil War was
when I first did episodes with English Civil War because
there's only about a five year period that I was
like really paying attention to, right, Yeah, But now this
stuff that's happening in about sixty years before it, I'm like, oh, oh,
(04:01):
I see why this matters because it relates to this
other thing.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
A little connecting tissue. Yeah, it looks like just for
all of our knowledge, fourteen fifty thereabouts. So yeah, we've
had it for about one thousand years, which feels like
so little when you're looking. Yeah, Carriod, you're just like,
as long as I know, like fourteen or fifteen, that's
all I need to know, even though it's yeah, not
(04:25):
a thousand years. One hundred years.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Oh okay, yeah, it's been a I think you're trying
to say to now, And I was like, well, it's
more like six hundred, but you.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Know, yeah, I'm being insane.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, okay, So young Nick did not have an easy life.
He had pretty bad health. He was small. He was
generally described as deformed, and he walked with the limb
from where a horse fell on him and the broken
bone never quite set right. But when he was twenty
(04:55):
six or so, he joined the Jesuit Order, not as
a priest but as a lay brother, and I think
he already knew what he wanted to do. I think
he was like, I'm doing this because I'm going to
build priest holes. He spent eighteen years of his life
building priest holes. He built hundreds of these things. People
(05:15):
are still discovering them. WHOA, that's cool. Yeah, people are
still finding like escape tunnels. And like there was like
a thing where I think it was in the seventies. No,
it was like three hundred years later, So the seventeen hundreds.
I was close. There was a seven in there. A
bunch of kids were just like playing in a house
and then they like kind of ran into a wallboard,
and the wallboard like pivoted on an axis. It like
(05:37):
revealed a hidden chamber.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Wow. There's something like very Disney about that, I know. Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Wow. And each one he built is very bespoke this business.
Each one was different, right, because it had to respond
to the very exact things that this particular house had,
and because you never want to build it the same way,
because if one of them gets busted, you don't want
them to just be like, oh, we know what this
guy's trick is.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, he worked as a traveling carpenter, doing whatever odd
jobs he could during the day, and then he built
priest holes in Catholic houses at night by candlelight. It
seems like he usually worked alone. Although I read one
thing that he had an apprentice, but I actually think
that source was wrong becauzeneraism. Other sources that the guy
who was caught with him and they called his apprentice
was actually more like an apprentice to one of the priests. Again,
(06:29):
you probably run into this a lot. I think what
your podcast is kind of about taking this thing that
there's a lot of pop knowledge about and then being
like all the pop knowledge is wrong. Sorry, guys. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, but sometimes the academic knowledge too, and it's like
it's pretty maddening because it's like you trust your academic sources,
like those people are like my patron saints are like
people in academia. But then sometimes you're reading to academic
pieces and you're just like, well, you said this, and
you said this, and then you're like, your source is
actually kind of dubious here, why did you use that source?
(07:00):
And I'm sure you go through the same thing and
it's pretty panantic of us.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
No, totally, and like and you run across you're like, okay,
well why are you saying this? Like right, what is
your skin in this game? Even when you're talking about
something from like the year twelve?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, because you're processing it through whatever lens, like no
matter what. So you can actually take even a fact
and process it in all these different ways and it
can start taking on new meanings. So it's it's history
is not easy. It's not an easy thing to actually
figure out.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, and I get so annoyed because I want the
kind of interesting pop versions of things to be true
and they just almost never are.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
You know, it's like when I pick a topic, I'll
like dig through the pop stuff first, and I make
pop history, right, I am not in the story me too, Yeah,
but like you have to dig through all of the
people being like, ah, this is the way it was.
And part of the reason I guess obsessed with context
is because it changes what you read when you read
the like thousand word article on well now half of
them are AI generate, which is even more of a nightmare.
(08:01):
But anyway, he's working mostly alone, probably, but he's also
not the guy who does it all. But he's still whatever.
He dedicated his life to it. He changed his name constantly,
but he's most famously remembered today by the nickname Little John,
though he was also called Draper, which is a cool name,
and little.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Michael, little Michael, I.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Know, and I think it's it's it's literally because he
was kind of small, yeah, and the pop version is
like and it helped him with his job because he
could fit into the small spaces. Oh sure, yeah, yeah probably,
but like I don't know, it's kind of cart and horse,
wrong order kind of thing going on. Like I'm sure
he could have done just fine if he was a
different size.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
He was big Michael, Yeah, he was big Michael. She
was Henry the Eighth.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, big draper.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
The big drape Yeah yeah, cool.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah. He worked for the necessities of life. He also
like worked for money as a you know, carpenter during
the day, but he didn't get paid to build these
priest holes. And all of his work in tight spaces
is probably what left him with a hernia and this
only made his health worse. Oh no, and he didn't stop.
(09:13):
And the spots he built were elaborate. Some had feeding
tubes because priests were getting caught when they would emerge
for food and water. Like the presiders would like steak
out a place. It's not like when you see movies
of people coming to look for hidden people. They like
stomp around while someone's under the floorboards and then they leave,
you know, like they would basically lay siege to houses
(09:37):
for like like later some people are going to get
caught after like a twelve days, you know, m h
because they would be like, we know this guy's here,
and they'd be like, no, he's not, and they would
look for days and they wouldn't find him, you know.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
And then I yeah, like you're saying, they'd stake it
out and probably watch for any like sign that yeah,
something might be going on.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah, yeah, you know, light through various holes and whatever,
all kinds of things, and so yeah, they would feed
like hot broth downfeeding two Like what a wild way
to live for a while.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
You know, this is reminding me of which couldn't be
more of a different situation. But I did this episode
last Halloween called Buried Alive about the history of people
being buried alive, and I found this whole on newspapers
dot Com. This like totally forgotten phenomenon where people.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Would they build the bells.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
No, the bells bells happen, but it's kind of fake.
It like kind of happened, ye, But this is literally
people in like the thirties forties who did it as
like a sideshow act, and they would bury themselves underground
for like ninety days, and they'd have like a phone
down there and people would feed them through the tube
and people could call them on the phone and talk
to them, and it's kind of incredible, and a lot
(10:53):
of women did it, and there were like these battles
of who could stay underground, like someone's at the used
car lot buried and like another person's at the county
fair buried and they're like in this locked in battle
to see who can stay underground the longest.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
What a good world we've built. That's amazing though.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
It's honest, right, it's really fun.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
People do real strange things.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
They're like characters too, you know. They were just like
total showmen and show women.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So yeah, this.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Is definitely a higher risk factor though than they were experiencing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
I know, like I've never committed a crime, but sometimes
when I'm imagining myself having committed crimes, when you're like
in a squat and there's like cops in there looking
for you, I hate it.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah, it sounds horrible.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Like I was trying to explain once to my family
the specific panic attacks that happens when you're like in
a squat that's like laid siege tube with cops outside
you've barricade yourselves in. And they were like, you're the
only person I will ever meet who has had this problem. Yeah,
and I'm like I am too. While the other people
were fine with it, I'm the one who was freaking out.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah yeah, I mean rightly.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Yeah, I would struggle to hang out in like I
did a bunch of so that it's about the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising, and you know, one of the people who
survived to write a book about is time spend a
couple of days standing in a wall.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Jeez.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yeah, And just like I don't know, I wonder what
I'm made of?
Speaker 2 (12:16):
You know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
But do you know what you can be made of?
Do you know what this podcast is made of? It
is built around ads. It's the gravy through the feeding tube.
Give me that broth, Yeah, broth, here's some ads, unless
you have a cooler zone media, in which case you
(12:40):
just get the transitions, just the best part. Andrew Beck. Okay,
so some of the Heidi holes that they would build
would have second Heidi holes within the Heidi hole.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Ooh that's smart.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Really the hunters would find an empty hiding hole.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, and and they'd leave like a little pope pat behind.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
So he had like, oh, we all got the pope.
There are a bunch of stories of like they were
trying to catch this one guy. Hmm. I can't remember
the man's name off the top of my head. He's
one of the main sources who because he survived all
of this and he wrote his memoirs and I started
reading them but oh my god, do priests at this
time right in nonsensequal ways. It is like sixteen pages
(13:23):
of jargon about the church, and I'm like, are you
going to get to the plot? And the answer is maybe,
but I don't know. I didn't get that far anyway.
One of the people who survived all of this was
one of the more important I think bishops at the time.
They would like catch him where they would show up
and they would see the church candles just snuffed out
with like smoke up and they would like, know, he's
(13:45):
in the house and they still couldn't find him. Wow. Actually,
later our hero's gonna bust him out of the Tower
of London. But we'll get to that.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Cool. Cool, cool.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah. So he would also build obvious priest holes elsewhere
in the house. They could be found quickly, so they're like, ah,
we found the priest hall. There's nothing in it. Most
of these holes were tiny and uncomfortable. These were not
priest rooms. It is much easier to hide a coffin
sized space between a ceiling and the next floor than
(14:14):
it is to hide a whole room. Yeah. Behind fireplaces
and understairs were favorite spots for him. Actually, I would
have assumed most of them would involve digging into the ground,
but those were pretty rare, interesting and I do not
know why, maybe because it takes a lot of work
to dig, but they dug escape tunnels and shit.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, so that's very weird.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Yeah. Sometimes he would build spots accessed by an entire
fake chimney. He would patiently chisel out masonry to free
a few blocks to build rooms within walls. He tended
to avoid outside walls because I think they were easier
for hunters to measure. And then I found one source
that says he used false perspectives and illusion but I
(14:58):
could not find an exam of what they're talking about.
And it is driving me.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Mad now because that sounds really cool.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I know, And so I'm thinking it might have been
like cool shit with wallpaper or like angles of the
ceiling joist or something, you.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Know, maybe like some mirrors.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, he's now the patron saint of illusionists and escape artists.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Really.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Yeah, Oh that's cool. And they would build smaller cubbies too,
so people could hide their you know, religious paraphernalia, like
their bibles and rosaries and candles and all that stuff.
Sometimes he worked in huge mansions. There's a thing I
was reading that was basically saying that like a lot
of these like manor houses at the time kind of
(15:37):
had to be like the everything house for the town.
You know, they would be like which is part of
why I think they like jails and shit and them
sometimes okay, but like so, he'd often work in these
huge manners. Take Hindlip Hall, where he built eleven or
twelve distinct priest holes. And if you want to imagine
this place, just imagine a English rich person manner that's
(16:00):
huge and sort of like a castle but not quite
where you're probably watching some TV show there that you
wish had different class analysis than it does. Sure, if
you're imagining that, you're imagining Hindlipaul correctly. They hit a
lot of people there. There was a tunnel from the
cellars to the garden, and folks didn't rediscover that tunnel
until nineteen seventy four, which is wild because that place
(16:21):
had been rebuilt since then. Wow, the Gatehouse of Hindlipaol
was built in fifteen ninety specifically so that it would
hide the construction of other spots throughout the house. They're like, yeah,
of course there's a lot of construction going on. We're
built another wing on the house. Never mind the like
one weird itinerant guy with a limb who's building stuff,
and the habing Tins were living there at the time.
I've read contradictory stuff about their family, because why would
(16:44):
everything agree with itself? But as best as I can tell,
the older brother, Edward was arrested for treason and beheaded
in fifteen eighty six because oh Mary, Queen of Scots,
tried to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and become queen, and so
she got executed, and so did a bunch of other people,
including the older guy. Thomas Habington, though was the Queen
(17:07):
Elizabeth's godson, and so he was spared, and so he
continued to build Heidi holes and work against Wow yeah wow,
And of course many of these were built, including a
hindlip Paul by Saint Nicholas Owen, and these holes seem
to be effective. I spent a long time trying to
(17:27):
find an actual number of like people who died when
I'm like, because like when you talk about the Protestants
and the marrying persecution, like, oh, two hundred and forty
some people died or whatever, right, You're like, all right,
how many Catholics died And it's like yeah, And I'm like,
does that mean not very many? I think it means
not very many. I think it's about like three hundred
over like one hundred years or something, you know. But
it is also still like so many people are going
(17:51):
to jail, so many people are being evicted. It's a
bigger thing than just burning people at the stake.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, because you have to measure yeah, like them material
effect of like seizing property and all that kind of
stuff too.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, it seems to be that these holes were effective
because the number of priests getting caught. This is another part.
Like pretty much you were only getting burned to the
steak if you were like the priest. Okay, and the
priests got really good at hiding and so you can
see this, like imagine a graph. The number of priests
getting caught is going down significantly, but the number of
(18:27):
priests working in the country is going up significantly.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Wow. Okay, so they knew what they were doing. They're
figuring it out. Yeah, And like spreading that word is
also so interesting, like to think about how you know,
priests found out where to go and when to go
and like there just had to be so many people
collaborating on this beyond just the person building them.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
No, that's such a good point. Like again, I actually
thought I was going to do a little footnote about
this guy and then talk about like how people hid
Jewish people during the Holocaust. Yeah, which I'll probably get
to it a different point because I'm Heidi holes are cool,
but like I know that, for example, one of the
main places that hid a lot of Jewish people very
successfully was Amsterdam and the Netherlands more broadly, and it
was because a huge percentage of the Dutch people were
(19:10):
part of the resistance. But a lot of other countries
the resistance was very like stabby and shooty, but the
Dutch resistance was like Heidi, right, and it was much
more of a mass movement. And so the thing it
was very effective at was hiding people. The thing it
wasn't as effective at was like killing Nazis. You win some,
(19:31):
you lose some, sure, But yeah, And I've read the
different things about like how they kne where the Heidi
holes were, but they kind of they struck me as
probably apocryphal, where it was like, ah, there was this
sigil of a lamb made on a wax seal on
the outside of the houses. And it reminds me a
lot of like hobo signs where I was going to.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Say the say like anarchists, like like you're saying like squat,
like here's the squad, here's the marking that.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Yeah, yeah, totally, and that actually is real. There is
a squad or sign.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
It's a yeah, yeah, it's real.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Expect you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do,
yeah yeah, And it is an end with an arrow
on the top, and then a more modern one will
also have a little crossbiece on the bottom, so it
looks kind of like a female symbol and a male symbol.
And these are like on squatted buildings and places where
you can kind of publicly squat.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah you know what was that thing called for train
hopping crew change Guide, which is another way that information
spread in this interesting way about like the right times
and places that you could hop trains. And again it's
like this like total offline. I mean, I'm sure it's
online now, but at that time it was just the
way you spread information.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Well, you're not allowed to put it online, and every
now and then people leak it online and then I
think gets mad at them.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah, I mean you shouldn't do that. Yeah, you're ruining it.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Yeah. And you know there's the thing about like, oh,
all the hoboes in nineteen thirties use these all these signs,
and like maybe probably, but like I don't know, I
don't think that anyone was like putting the symbol of
the lamb on their house to be like here, you're safe,
because like the second person who's going to know that
is a priest hunter.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Is a priest hunter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now it feels
like it has to be just word of mouth or something,
but I don't know.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah exactly. And like these communities of trust where like
people have been co religionists for thousands of years, yeah,
or a thousand years or so. In fifteen ninety four,
Owen was caught. They arrested him and they tortured him
to try and get information out of him about where
these holes were, about where people could be hiding, and
(21:31):
he didn't say shit, and they let him go.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
WHOA Yeah, why do you think they let him go?
Speaker 1 (21:38):
I think because it's like there's still kind of a
rule of law thing going on. Okay, yeah, and he's
not a priest, and I think that they're just like
it's also just like no one talks to everyone walks.
It's like a default thing to remember. It's like generally safer,
you know.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
And then in fifteen ninety seven he helped two Catholics,
including that priest I forgot to put into the script,
or actually I didn't forget. What I do is I like,
I intentionally minimize the number of named characters I include,
because my brain goes blank when people tell me like
eight million names.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
It's ter I do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah, yeah, And so I was like, oh, this guy
isn't like important enough. I think it might be Girard,
but he actually is important enough. I've like, well, hmm,
if you want to follow this further, he is important enough, right,
And he's in the Tower of London, this priest, which
is the big scary jail, and it's the city's most
(22:33):
notorious prison, the country's most notorious prisons where they have
put kings and shit, you know, when they're arrested. Because
it's also not safe to be a king, they get
arrested a lot too. So the Catholics bribe some guards
and they go up to the roof and they throw
a weighted cord down and the rescuers, who are on
a boat, attach a rope and send it up like
and then the Catholics go hand over hand down the
(22:54):
rope at a steep angle, like fucking animated Robin Hood.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah, that's what's say. I's like, wow.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
And at least one of them I believe is the priest,
the one who wrote a book about this later made
it to roam into Safety.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Wow. It's bad ass.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah. And then one of the most accidentally famous moments
in all of history hits our story, the gunpowder plot.
Remember remember the fifth of November?
Speaker 2 (23:23):
How could I forget it?
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:27):
I was around in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah, my mom has a lot of memories of celebrating
Guy Fox's day in England, and you know, making the
dummy and putting it in the wheelbarrow with a bunch
of fireworks. And it does sound fun, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
It's both fun and so sketchy. It's such a sketchy concept,
not just the fireworks part. That's fine. No, it's not like, hey,
kids have bottle rocket fights. Just be safe, you know,
like whatever, Yeah, but like, actually, maybe do reading don't
just do that because a podcaster said it. But like
the idea of like, oh, we're going to burn this
guy Fox effigy, Like.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
It's not a yeah, but I like the building a
dummy and putting fireworks on it. If you just take
it completely out of its content.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Oh yes, just make a James one, make them both whatever,
they're both probably dicks. Well all yeah, yeah, well that
was their idea.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, right, there you go, if you honor his memory, blow.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Them all up. Yeah, because they certainly were willing to
kill a lot of innocent people to do this thing.
This isn't really an episode about the gunpowder plot because
there's so so much to weighe through that is somehow
so politically charged. But I'm still going to do a
little bit about it. And when I was like first
sol v for Vendetta, I think I read the book
before I read the book before I saw the movie.
(24:43):
You know, I was like, Oh, this guy Fox person
sounds kind of cool. And then you're like, read it
more about it, and you're like, not just some bullshit.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Just like yeah, it's not.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
But then if you keep reading it in this context
of like it is absolutely criminal to be a Catholic
and the majority of the country is Catholic, and the
rulers have imposed this religion on everyone from above. It
almost comes back around and actually my main problem is
that it's too terroristic, but like it almost flips the
(25:12):
freedom fighter in a way that I didn't expect because
I was pretty on the like noah whatever, Like he's
not a revolutionary hero, but like kind of could have been.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Okay, Okay, he's interesting. That is interesting. Yeah, everything in context, baby, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
And then you know, if you read this from the
context of believing that people should not have divided loyalty
between Rome and England, then obviously he's even more of
a villain. Okay. So you have James the first running
England and Scotland starting in sixteen oh three. His mom
was Mary, Queen of Scots, that Catholic who is Queen
for nine days. But he wasn't raised by her, and
(25:53):
he was Protestant. And he also, slightly unrelatedly to today's story,
sucked so badly. He's one of the worst people. He's
wildly misogynistic, he's terrified of witches. He does like a
lot of the work to make people afraid of witches
and like writes books about witchcraft, and we talked about
(26:13):
this and been in our Witches episode. Kind of the
thing was that, like, actually the Church didn't really believe
in witchcraft, so they were like, superstition is fake, all
magic comes from God, so if someone's doing magic, it
actually literally can't be demonic. So people are just kind
of trying to do a dumb thing, so we'll just
ignore them. Was like the primary way of dealing with
(26:35):
witches for hundreds of years in Catholic Europe, and King
James was part of the like, but we really want
to burn witches though thing. Yeah, and this isn't to
say that Catholics didn't burn, which is they absolutely did.
The main argument of that particular episode is that the
witch burnings were actually a pissing match between the Protestants
and the Catholics about who could do populism and appeal
to the masses by letting them take out their grievances
(26:58):
on each other with witch burnings.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Wow, that sounds right to me. I believe that. Yeah immediately, yeah,
uh huh.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
It kind of blew my mind and then I was like,
oh no, yeah, that just makes sense.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
No, I mean it's both Yeah, a lot of the
most simple things are mind blowing unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, totally. King James is also the King James Bible guy,
the addition that the right wing loves the best because
it is wildly inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yeah. I listened to a podcast about this and it
was really and yeah, it was bizarre.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It's also the one that Trump is selling is that
God blessed the USA edition.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Mm hmm. And there was like a little gay stuff
going on, possibly with King James too, which.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
I was to say, he's so gay. Yeah, he's bisexual.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
He was like wearing that like medallion with a guy's
face on it all the time or something like that.
I don't know, I haven't it was a long time
ago I listened to this, so no, no take it
as fact. But I'm pretty sure there was a pendant
with his pretty boyfriend on it.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I believe it. I did more research about him in
the Witch's episode, but though the stuff that I relearned,
he was definitely sleeping with his wife and he was
extra definitely sleeping with a bunch of guys.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, and who knows how that affected the Bible that
he created.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, yeah, weird, but he's super right wing.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, that's very true.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
And he continued the persecution of Catholics, and some Catholics
decided that they didn't want to be persecuted anymore, and
they came up with a relatively straightforward idea about how
to deal with this problem. What if you just got
like a fuck ton of gunpowder and then you just
like blew up Parliament while King James was there and
(28:34):
all of his parliament. And the way I wrote it
originally in this script is and we'll try to do
it on the fifth of November. That seems like a
day we can make memorable. But actually the reason they
did it it was the first day of the parliamentary session.
And really interestingly, originally the parliament was going to be
some time in I want to say August, but I
actually not one hundred percent certain, but it was delayed
(28:55):
because of like fears of plague. And if it hadn't
been delayed, they probably would have blown up parliament, wow,
and killed King James.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
And everything would be different in wha, Everything would be different,
no idea. You know, we can't even possibly imagine.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Wow. I know, although I read and actually linked in
the notes, I actually read a BBC what would have happened. Guess.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Oh, that's cool, okay.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
And their overall guess is that Protestantism actually would have
become like absolutely the law of the land and the
religion of the land and probably even Protestantized Ireland. Interesting, okay,
but they're like, but here's what we think would have
happened if it had actually like also worked on a
like swinging around to a Catholic revolution thing. Sure, right,
(29:38):
and the answer is everything would be different and nothing'd
be better, you know, right. But I've read modern Catholic
moderates arguing that the whole gunpowder plot was a red
false flag attack, a fabrication phone actually from the state
guy Cecil, Lord Cecil, the Secretary of State to give
(29:58):
them an excuse to be shittier to Catholics.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Like a Reichstag Fire kind of scenario.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah, which we've done episodes on the Reichstag Fire was started.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
By it's a complicated one.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, it was started by a committed leftist who was
trying to do a thing. It didn't work, nope.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah, and then there you go.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yeah, I love the time as a flat circle. We
still have these arguments today. Anyone who takes up arms
against oppression, it's actually helping oppression. But also like sometimes, huh.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
You got to take every instance in its own context.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, but what you shouldn't take in context you should
just accept wholeheartedly without question. Is everything being advertised except
for the bad stuff that's being advertised. Please don't think
I'm being serious and then get addicted to online gambling. Anyway,
here's that's and we're back. So this whole thing Hulk
(30:54):
gun Powder plot is still politicized to this day, modern
Catholics arguing it was a false flag attack or on
the other side, I want to read you the sentence
from the clearly presenting itself as neutral worldhistory dot org.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Okay, hit me.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Elizabeth One of England had encouraged the Protestant religion in
her kingdom, and this policy was continued by her successor,
James One of England dot dot dot as I cut
out a bunch of senses, and then it talks about
a further blow to extreme Catholics hoping to restore their
faith as the primary religion in England. Okay, And I
(31:29):
was like, oh, yeah, Elizabeth the first encourage the Protestant religion.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, outlaw in all.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Competitors and then restoring the faith as the primary religion
of England when what these extremists you want to restore
the primary religion.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
That's wild.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
It's the majority religion.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Yeah, Like it's actually far less extreme than yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And to be fair, the gunpowder plot people actually pretty extreme.
Well that yes, yes, and other Catholics who heard about
it were like, maybe don't do that though, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
I have a sense this made back fire.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah. Yeah. And guy Fowx we'll talk about him in
a second. And these conspirators, they didn't want freedom of religion.
No one was arguing for freedom of religion. Well some
people were actually a lot of moderates were arguing for
freedom of religion. None of the people killing each other
were arguing for freedom of religion. They just, like the Protestants,
wanted to be the only game in town. They were
(32:26):
probably not good people, but I don't know. At first
they figured they would dig a tunnel from a rented
house to underneath Westminster Palace. But then they realized that
the coal sellers under Westminster Palace were just available for rent.
Oh great, and so they were like, all right, we're
going to rent one. And then they just filled it
with we were a podcast out of here.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, yeah, to.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
The podcast at the time, barrels of gunpowder. Actually, that's true.
The podcast at the time was basically zines and street
corner Preachers.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, but just screaming.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yeah, yeah, totally. They put thirty five barrels of gunpowder
in their heidie hole that they rented.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
That's so wild that you could just rent a place
that you could put a bunch of gunpowder.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
I have a feeling they stopped doing that after that.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
And then they just like covered it up with like
scrap wood and we're like, nah, it's just like we're
throwing scrap wood. I don't know whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Okay, some thing's never changed.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah. And they needed someone to light the match. They
need an experienced bomber. They need someone who could make
a fuse. They needed Guy Fox, Yes, which is a
good name. And then if you read an anti Catholic shit,
his real name is Guido Fox and he's Spanish. Ooh,
this isn't true.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
He was known by Guido Fox when he fought in
Spain as a Catholic mercenary against the Belgians or something.
He was a Guido when he was in Spain. But
the longer you have an open conspiracy with a ton
of people, and their plan was to blow up all
of Parliament and then they're going to march north and
be like we killed the king. Everyone joined us, and
we're gonna have a big grand revolution. It'll be just
(34:08):
like we see in the movies, where like you just
do one action and then everyone's happy. So that part
wouldn't have worked. And the longer you have this kind
of thing, the more someone's gonna leak, right, And what
happened was is that one of the conspirators we don't
know who it is, but we think we know who
it is. But again there's a million names, and I'm
good one of the conspirators sent an anonymous letter to
one of his family members, or just someone who was
(34:30):
part of parliament. There's someone who was in parliament who
is also Catholic. Because there was still I don't entirely
understand of this work. There's still people who are like
Catholic who were in government. They just weren't allowed to
be very active about it, I think. And they wrote
a note that read quote, they shall receive a terrible
(34:51):
blow this parliament. And yet they shall not see who
hurts them.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
It's cool.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
And that guy, instead of being like, oh sweet, you're
gonna have a revolution, I'll just not go to work
that day, he tipped everyone off and they all investigated,
and they went down to the basement, and then they
were like looking in the coal cellars. And they actually
waited till the night before to go down to the
basement to look, even though they knew like nine days
before that.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Maybe they're just scared of the basement.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Bloody Mary's down there. And they go in and there's
guy Fox holding a lantern and he's like, I'm not
Guy Fox. He gives a name, and he's like, I'm
a servant. And they just see all the wood and
they keep looking. But then they're like, oh no, that
guy seems sketchy. So they go back and they find
all the barrels of gunpowder and they're busted. It's likely
(35:40):
that this gunpowder wouldn't have gone off anyway because it
had been sitting too long and it was likely not
explosive anymore. Okay, but they didn't know that. There's later
a whole thing about like then they tried to dry
out the gunpowder by a fire and it blew up
and heard a bunch of them. But like, that story
feels very pat and the whole thing is framed now
as a celibate of let's blow up a guy because
(36:01):
he tried to blow up a different guy.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Does he tried to blow up some other bad guys?
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Yeah, yeah, the good guys. The Crown tortured the shit
out of him for ten days and he spilled the
beans and other folks were rounded up, though a bunch
of them died in a last desperate stand sword versus
gun against the cops. Wow, and a guy with a
cool name, Thomas Winter, died that way.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Okay, that is a cool name.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Those were the lucky ones, the ones who died sword
against gun. The rest of them were hanged, drawn and quartered.
And I hate that I have to every now and
then remind people what this is, just so that people
could understand how terrible the past was, all right, tell
us in this case, Okay, Like, normally, if you're trying
to hang someone, if you're a good executioner, their neck breaks,
(36:49):
and if you're a bad executioner, they suffer and dangle
and slowly suffocate. Right, so they intentionally are badly hanged
they hang you until you're almost dead, and then they
cut your dick off, and then they got you and
then they behead you and then you're cut into four
parts after.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
That's not what I thought it was.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
It was that you think it was the horses being pulled.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
In from Yeah, I think that's what I thought it was.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah. Yeah, they get real creative with killing people in
the medieval era.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
But then so many medieval torture devices are fake. Do
you know that. That's so interesting?
Speaker 1 (37:21):
I want to iron about that.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, iron man, it's not real. Yeah, it was like
made in the eighteen hundreds as like kind of almost sideshow.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Like yeah, the Victorians were like check out the spooky past,
and you're.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Like, yeah, they did like to do that does make sense,
but yeah, I do believe yeah, what you're talking about,
that's one of the real ones.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah, no, it's it's it's wild because yeah, they make
up all this fake stuff about the past, but they
absolutely were unhinged as hell in the past, and like yeah,
and I'm always trying to figure out which ones are real,
but like they're so creative. Every single time the medieval
people killed someone, they were like I came up with
a new way to do it. Like I read about
people getting like sewn into sackson thrown into the town
square from like the steep.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
They know, And then you're like, how can I really
know which of these is true and which is like
a sensationalized Yeah, it's just you may never know.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, this has been like the biggest thing. I actually
wrote a piece about this, but called like how Metal
was the Past, where it's just like it's so hard
to know about like the history of occultism and Satan
worship and and all of this stuff, where like some
of that shit's real. My favorite example of this is
some of the first episodes we talked about Lady Batore.
It's usually pronounced Bathory, but that's wrong, And now I'm
a pedant about it. She's the one I have you
(38:26):
heard of her? She like bathed in virgin's blood in
order to stay young. Yeah yeah, yeah, she probably just
the king owed her money, okay, and so he like
set her up as like an evil villain in order
to get her to steal all of her shit.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
That sounds much more likely than her bathing and virgin blood.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, But then what's presented unquestionably by all the sources
that I've seen is that when she was a kid,
she saw her dad who was in charge, so a
thief into the stomach of a horse. Dang, And so
it's like that's an evil metal thing. It is, but
it's lawful, so no one talks about it.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, and it's not a woman, right, yeah, well that's
a woman getting killed, but that's fine. Women deserve to
die because they steal.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, that's neither here nor there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Anyway, drawn and quartered very real, slightly different at different times,
but real unpleasant. And I think it was just like
they were like, we tried just killing people do bad stuff,
but that didn't stop anyone, so we just have to
go even worse. And you're like, we tried like providing
social safety net.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
No, they're like, we're artists of death. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, Like the most evil torturer that we've read about
this whole thing was one of these priest hunters, and like,
to be fair, blowing up parliament with like hundreds of
people in it probably not really an ethical thing.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
But no, no, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
But actually one of the things that happened one of
the spirits didn't know one of the conspirators went to
that priest who's name I forget, oh unless his father
Garnett this time, I actually don't remember, went to one
of the priests and confessed beforehand and was like, hey,
is it evil in a war if you kill civilians
as well as who you're trying to kill, And like
(40:19):
was like genuinely trying to figure out whether it was
ethical to do this thing.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
You know, do we know what the priest said.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I think the priest said, don't do this, yeah, and
then we'll get to it. And he still dies. But
so guy FOWX when he's on the scaffold, he actually
jumps off the scaffold so his neck will break and
he doesn't have to deal with the rest of the shit.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
That's smart.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Yeah, you know, he's standing there and he's like first time,
like the meme, but it's not his first time, so
he jumps off, and I mean it is his first
time getting hanged.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Probably, I would think, so, Yeah, not all.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
The conspirators were real conspirators. The two Catholic priests was
kind of mentioning them early. They were wanted because they
were the priests of the conspirators. The crown figured probably
accurately that the conspirators had revealed their plans in confession,
although I think they did it in that oblique way
where they were like, hey, is this ethical, Not like yeah,
(41:16):
you want to help us blow up the fucking parliament.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
They're like, they're like, so I have this friend.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, totally, Am I the asshole? Oh that's the confessing
pruf of the.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Modern that is, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
And so they were like, all right, well, we're going
to round up and torture these priests in order to
find out if they knew about it. And one of
these priests, Father Garnett, had actually caught wind of this
plot and told them, no, don't do that. You're going
to kill a bunch of random people. What the fuck?
And the two priests managed to stay hidden for a
solid ten days or so. This is why it gets
(41:54):
back to Nicholas Owen, because they went to Hindlip Manor
and they hid in a priest hole. And Father Garnett
had been working out of hind Lit Mannor for like
eighteen years or something at that point, maybe twelve, I
can't remember. I might be confusing with a different number
of years, but he've been working there for a long time,
and so they hide in a hole so small that
they can't straighten their legs, and also hiding in a
(42:17):
priest hole in Hindlet Manor at that time is none
other than Saint Nicholas Owen, as well as Ralph Ashley,
who was either his apprentice or much more likely the
apprentice to one of the priests. So more than one
hundred armed men surround the estate on January twentieth, sixteen
oh six, was a few months after the executions. And
(42:38):
for ten days these people kept watch and search the place,
and they couldn't find any priest holes. But after four
days in a priest hole with nothing but an apple
to eat, Owen and Ashley come out to find food
and they are captured and in the like hagiography, which
I can say in a kind of more literal sense
because he's literally a priest now, they're like they came
(42:59):
out of it because they wanted to distract the people
from the real priests who are hiding. I'm like mm
hm nodding. They came out because they ran out of
food and water.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
No one's poorn broth down the mountain tube for them. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Yeah. The two confessor priests were captured eight days later,
including the one who tried to stop it, because yeah,
there was no one to slip broth down the feeding hole.
When Owen was arrested, Lord Cecil, the Secretary of State,
and the one who people believe orchestrated the false flag
gunpowder attack, which I don't believe. He wrote about arresting
(43:34):
Nicholas Owen quote, great joy was caused all through the
Kingdom by the arrest of Owen, knowing his skill in
constructing hiding places and the innumbrable number of these dark
holes which he had schemed for hiding priests throughout the kingdom.
And he was tortured extensively, and this time he could
look and say first time to someone because it was
(43:55):
not his first rodeo. Yeah, And we have the records
of his confessions because they wrote it all down, and
all he ever said to his torturers was the stuff
they already knew, like where he'd been caught, okay, which
is fucking He's a cool guy.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, I mean, that's smart.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
He had almost certainly nothing to do with the gunpowder plot,
which is interesting. Actually, the gunpowder plot people, as far
as I can tell, they late later, the Catholic Church didn't,
I believe, beatify them, like make them holy, but not sainthood.
But it's like those one step lower, sure, because they
were guilty of actual crimes that are illegal, that aren't
just heresy or whatever. You know. Anyway, Yeah, there's your
(44:37):
gratitude for you.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, real nice.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
The torturers knew that Nicholas Owen was ill and that
he had a hernia, and so they strapped a plate
of iron to his stomach to keep his organs in
place while they tortured him. God, okay, he died from
his torture on March twenty second, sixteen oh six. Or
the Protestant version of the story is that he eventually
used a steak knife from dinner to kill himself. But
(45:01):
I'm not the only one struggling to imagine that one
of the world's most devout Catholics at this time suicide
condemned you to hell. The Church has come around on this, Yeah,
but I don't buy it that this man killed himself,
and neither of most historians that I read.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like propaganda.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, exactly. The Protestants aren't like, fuck, yeah, it was
cool when we killed all the priests.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
Sure, yeah, yeah, I know, but it lets it off
the hook a little bit, like just that small amount.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the priests who were caught as
well as the apprentice were executed on April seventh, and
the BBC had to write up about what if the
gunpowder plot had succeeded and their assumptions that would have
led to an absolute Protestant majority and effectively ended Catholicism
in England, Scotland and Ireland. Wow, and just if basically
(45:50):
like if there hadn't been a little fear of plague
that summer or that same one says, or maybe we
could have gone the other way. And their main argument
is that they like marched north from there and been like, hey, everyone,
we killed the king. It's going to go great. And
everyone had been like, may you just like massacred hundreds
of people? Like what the fuck?
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (46:09):
That actually maps with what I read of history is
that like people, even when people are like fine with
like revolutionary violence and war and civil war and all
that shit, people tend to get turned off by terrorist
attacks of mass casualty.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
It tends to doesn't do what you think it's gonna do.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
Yeah, it makes no one happy. Nicholas Owen was sainted
in nineteen seventy and he's the patron saint of illusionists
and escape artists and his feast day is the twenty
second of March. But my real takeaway is that it's
possible to build places people can't find people, and it's
worth knowing about if you ever live in a repressive government.
(46:49):
But we don't.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
But just as like a hypothetical, Yeah, wow, what a
journey that was. Yeah, I mean I'm really like I
really want to know the ins and outs of like
the very like nitty gritty particulars of each of these
like Heidi holes, right, and I'm sure it's hard, but
and like ah, and just imagine because you know, I'm
(47:11):
like a I'm an abandoned train tunnel person, like I
love to go to Yeah I've been doing some shit
and like yeah, I love that kind of thing. And
like these forgotten things that you have to like hike
to and you find them and like you have to
you know, go through these bushes and then there's fucking mine.
Like that stuff is amazing. So it's like just imagine
like living somewhere like England where you could live in
(47:32):
a household enough to like lean on a wall, and
it's like there's the Heidi Hole. It's incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Yeah, some of them are like publicly like tourist attractions.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
I'm definitely going to try to go to one of
those next time I go to the UK, because I
do visit family there, so I'll let you know when
I go to the Heidi Holes.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
And it's funny because it's like this stuff isn't hidden history,
but it's history that I didn't know about, Like I
didn't not if you had asked me like two weeks ago,
like were they just kind of killing the Catholics for
hundreds of years in England? I would have been like,
probably some of them or something. I don't know. I
know that they weren't allowed to like practice freely and stuff,
but I wouldn't have known that there were priest hunters.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
No, it almost sounds fake, you know, it really does
almost sound fake.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
But religious persecution is as old as religion, and that's
for sure. Probably you shouldn't force people to be different
religions than they already are.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah, I mean, everybody read your Bible because boy, it's
batshit crazy and you can't eat bats but it is
batshit document. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, but you know, if you're going to cherry pick
that document, I recommend the parts about be nice to
neighbors and foreigners and poor people.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
Hey, to pick out what matters to you, I guess.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Yeah, or just you know, come up with what you
believe on your own.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I think maybe we just need to toss the whole
thing out.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
I'm not sure people are pretty attached, but I understand.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Yeah, I know, it's okay. Just figure it out on
your own.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah. Oh, anyway, that's what I got, you guy. Thing
you want to.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Plug the priest hunters in the Heidi hole. That could
be our band.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
That would be a very queer band.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
It would be that would be a very queer band.
I am just the host of American hysteria. That's all
I am. And that's all I do. So go listen
to that and you like weird history, and you like panantic,
you know, digging into the past, as I know you
all do because you listen to this show Faria. Yeah,
you will enjoy American hysteria. We do urban legends, moral panics,
(49:41):
conspiracy theories, hoaxes, craze is kind of any fantastical thinking
in American culture from the Puritans to the present, as
we say, so check it out. I do try really
hard as you do to get things right.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
I want you to also do not just America, because
I want your tape on the dance crazes where like
people would dance themselves to death in England.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Margaret, You're so lucky because I did one with Sarah Marshall,
a two part episode called Tarantism, which is about the
spider bite dances, and we get a little into the
other ones, but Tarrantism is like, for me, the coolest one.
So we did leave the United States to do a
little dance craze stuff because I love it. And there's
like so much misinformation there too, right, it's just like
(50:26):
anything else.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
But I assume what I know about it is false
because I know the thousand word version. Actually I know
the five hundred word version.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Well I feel like Sarah Marshall, which I'm sure a
lot of I do too. Yeah, yeah, I love her.
We love her. I have a plug. I want to
plug James Stout's book that's available for pre order from
AKA Press Against the State.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Yeah, I've even it's good. There's a blurb for me
on it. I think it's an important book.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Ooh, you blurbed.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
I don't know if I made it onto the final version,
but if you like the stuff we talk about on
the show and want to think about how it applies
to how politics and statelessness and all of those things
interact with like military and possibility and things that are
happening now and things are happening in the past, like
it talks about the Spanish Civil War, which if you've
made it this far in the show, you probably don't hate. Yep,
(51:18):
that's so cool, So everyone go pre order that. Yeah,
all right, bye everyone, Thank you guys.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to cool people who
did cool stuff. You're a weekly reminder that one day
podcasters will be hunted and they will need to hide
in small closets. But they'll be so used to it
that at first we'll think we're safe. But then we'll
realize that we're too in love with the sound of
our own voices, and they'll hear us whisper you between
(00:24):
the boss, and we'll be throwing to ads. As isn't
to throw to ads, but it's what we'll be doing
when they catch us and with me in this terrible
fate that awaits us all as Chelsea Weaversmith.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hi, Hi, live from the Heidi Hole in my own house.
Thanks for having me again, Mark.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah. And the one who will be masterminding hiding all
of us is none other than Queen Sophie Lickterman.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Bloody Sophie, Bloody Sophie.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Former Queen I fired Ralph, remember right, totally Yeah, shortest
rain of all times.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Noble noble. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
So we are on part two of Well heighty Holes.
You probably guessed because it was in the title and
you already listened to part one. But that's where we
are at and we have just finally explained a bunch
of stuff about some kings and queens, and don't worry,
there's going to be more of it. But first we
can finally introduce this week's main named cool person, who
(01:26):
is like all things, he's not the only one who
did this stuff. And there's actually all these papers that
I really want to read, but I only have so
much time in this world about the way that actually
all of this persecution ended up changing the role of
women within the church and actually ended up giving like
women a lot more positions of power, even though the
pope was like, no, we can't let women have more power,
(01:48):
and they were like, doesn't matter, We're doing it anyway.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Okay, that sounds cool.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
But I don't know as much about that yet, because
I found out about that about two hours ago, fair enough,
and I started reading a bunch of stuff and then
I was like, what am I doing?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I have to finish the script?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, oh, I was already done with the script, and
then I was adding more to it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Oh No, that's the curse. That's the historian podcast curse.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, because there's always more.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
There's more context, more context. I need a context. I'm
addicted to it.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
The whole world is just a rubber band ball of context.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So Nicholas Owen, not known as Saint Nicholas Owen until
nineteen seventy, was born in Oxford, which I assume is
in England, and it is if the year fifteen sixty two.
I've probably even been there, but I still refuse to
admit that I know anything about English geography, even though
i've actually it's been anyway, whatever, isn't it fun to
have performative outrage about a thing that doesn't actually affect you.
(02:47):
That's what I like to do, is what gets me
out of bed.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
It feels good.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yeah. He was born in fifteen sixty two. He's one
of four sons. His father was named Walter Owen, and
if history knows his mother's name, what I read bothered
to tell me. His father was a carpenter, and he
decided to follow in his father's footsteps, and he prenticed
as a joiner, a carpenter specializing in joinery, and they
(03:12):
were a devout Catholic family. One of his brothers became
a priest, and another brother worked as a printer, printing
illegal Catholic literature.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Well, there you go. The printing press is here.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah. That was the like I was like, I think,
hold on, I have a thig somewhere in here. It's
one of these things where I have learned what year
the printing press was invented many times. I've looked it
up many times.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
For this show, over and over as I but it's.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
As you start pulling apart all these threads of history,
then the dates matter to me, Like, h hmm. I
didn't care about what year the English Civil War was
when I first did episodes with English Civil War because
there's only about a five year period that I was
like really paying attention to, right, Yeah, But now this
stuff that's happening in about sixty years before it, I'm like, oh, oh,
(04:01):
I see why this matters because it relates to this
other thing.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
A little connecting tissue. Yeah, it looks like just for
all of our knowledge, fourteen fifty thereabouts. So yeah, we've
had it for about one thousand years, which feels like
so little when you're looking. Yeah, Carriod, you're just like,
as long as I know, like fourteen or fifteen, that's
all I need to know, even though it's yeah, not
(04:25):
a thousand years. One hundred years.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Oh okay, yeah, it's been a I think you're trying
to say to now, And I was like, well, it's
more like six hundred, but you.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Know, yeah, I'm being insane.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, okay, So young Nick did not have an easy life.
He had pretty bad health. He was small. He was
generally described as deformed, and he walked with the limb
from where a horse fell on him and the broken
bone never quite set right. But when he was twenty
(04:55):
six or so, he joined the Jesuit Order, not as
a priest but as a lay brother, and I think
he already knew what he wanted to do. I think
he was like, I'm doing this because I'm going to
build priest holes. He spent eighteen years of his life
building priest holes. He built hundreds of these things. People
(05:15):
are still discovering them. WHOA, that's cool. Yeah, people are
still finding like escape tunnels. And like there was like
a thing where I think it was in the seventies. No,
it was like three hundred years later, So the seventeen hundreds.
I was close. There was a seven in there. A
bunch of kids were just like playing in a house
and then they like kind of ran into a wallboard,
and the wallboard like pivoted on an axis. It like
(05:37):
revealed a hidden chamber.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Wow. There's something like very Disney about that, I know. Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Wow. And each one he built is very bespoke this business.
Each one was different, right, because it had to respond
to the very exact things that this particular house had,
and because you never want to build it the same way,
because if one of them gets busted, you don't want
them to just be like, oh, we know what this
guy's trick is.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, he worked as a traveling carpenter, doing whatever odd
jobs he could during the day, and then he built
priest holes in Catholic houses at night by candlelight. It
seems like he usually worked alone. Although I read one
thing that he had an apprentice, but I actually think
that source was wrong becauzeneraism. Other sources that the guy
who was caught with him and they called his apprentice
was actually more like an apprentice to one of the priests. Again,
(06:29):
you probably run into this a lot. I think what
your podcast is kind of about taking this thing that
there's a lot of pop knowledge about and then being
like all the pop knowledge is wrong. Sorry, guys. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, but sometimes the academic knowledge too, and it's like
it's pretty maddening because it's like you trust your academic sources,
like those people are like my patron saints are like
people in academia. But then sometimes you're reading to academic
pieces and you're just like, well, you said this, and
you said this, and then you're like, your source is
actually kind of dubious here, why did you use that source?
(07:00):
And I'm sure you go through the same thing and
it's pretty panantic of us.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
No, totally, and like and you run across you're like, okay,
well why are you saying this? Like right, what is
your skin in this game? Even when you're talking about
something from like the year twelve?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, because you're processing it through whatever lens, like no
matter what. So you can actually take even a fact
and process it in all these different ways and it
can start taking on new meanings. So it's it's history
is not easy. It's not an easy thing to actually
figure out.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, and I get so annoyed because I want the
kind of interesting pop versions of things to be true
and they just almost never are.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
You know, it's like when I pick a topic, I'll
like dig through the pop stuff first, and I make
pop history, right, I am not in the story me too, Yeah,
but like you have to dig through all of the
people being like, ah, this is the way it was.
And part of the reason I guess obsessed with context
is because it changes what you read when you read
the like thousand word article on well now half of
them are AI generate, which is even more of a nightmare.
(08:01):
But anyway, he's working mostly alone, probably, but he's also
not the guy who does it all. But he's still whatever.
He dedicated his life to it. He changed his name constantly,
but he's most famously remembered today by the nickname Little John,
though he was also called Draper, which is a cool name,
and little.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Michael, little Michael, I.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Know, and I think it's it's it's literally because he
was kind of small, yeah, and the pop version is
like and it helped him with his job because he
could fit into the small spaces. Oh sure, yeah, yeah probably,
but like I don't know, it's kind of cart and horse,
wrong order kind of thing going on. Like I'm sure
he could have done just fine if he was a
different size.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
He was big Michael, Yeah, he was big Michael. She
was Henry the Eighth.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, big draper.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
The big drape Yeah yeah, cool.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah. He worked for the necessities of life. He also
like worked for money as a you know, carpenter during
the day, but he didn't get paid to build these
priest holes. And all of his work in tight spaces
is probably what left him with a hernia and this
only made his health worse. Oh no, and he didn't stop.
(09:13):
And the spots he built were elaborate. Some had feeding
tubes because priests were getting caught when they would emerge
for food and water. Like the presiders would like steak
out a place. It's not like when you see movies
of people coming to look for hidden people. They like
stomp around while someone's under the floorboards and then they leave,
you know, like they would basically lay siege to houses
(09:37):
for like like later some people are going to get
caught after like a twelve days, you know, m h
because they would be like, we know this guy's here,
and they'd be like, no, he's not, and they would
look for days and they wouldn't find him, you know.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
And then I yeah, like you're saying, they'd stake it
out and probably watch for any like sign that yeah,
something might be going on.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah, yeah, you know, light through various holes and whatever,
all kinds of things, and so yeah, they would feed
like hot broth downfeeding two Like what a wild way
to live for a while.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
You know, this is reminding me of which couldn't be
more of a different situation. But I did this episode
last Halloween called Buried Alive about the history of people
being buried alive, and I found this whole on newspapers
dot Com. This like totally forgotten phenomenon where people.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Would they build the bells.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
No, the bells bells happen, but it's kind of fake.
It like kind of happened, ye, But this is literally
people in like the thirties forties who did it as
like a sideshow act, and they would bury themselves underground
for like ninety days, and they'd have like a phone
down there and people would feed them through the tube
and people could call them on the phone and talk
to them, and it's kind of incredible, and a lot
(10:53):
of women did it, and there were like these battles
of who could stay underground, like someone's at the used
car lot buried and like another person's at the county
fair buried and they're like in this locked in battle
to see who can stay underground the longest.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
What a good world we've built. That's amazing though.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
It's honest, right, it's really fun.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
People do real strange things.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
They're like characters too, you know. They were just like
total showmen and show women.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So yeah, this.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Is definitely a higher risk factor though than they were experiencing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
I know, like I've never committed a crime, but sometimes
when I'm imagining myself having committed crimes, when you're like
in a squat and there's like cops in there looking
for you, I hate it.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Yeah, it sounds horrible.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Like I was trying to explain once to my family
the specific panic attacks that happens when you're like in
a squat that's like laid siege tube with cops outside
you've barricade yourselves in. And they were like, you're the
only person I will ever meet who has had this problem. Yeah,
and I'm like I am too. While the other people
were fine with it, I'm the one who was freaking out.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah yeah, I mean rightly.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Yeah, I would struggle to hang out in like I
did a bunch of so that it's about the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising, and you know, one of the people who
survived to write a book about is time spend a
couple of days standing in a wall.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Jeez.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yeah, And just like I don't know, I wonder what
I'm made of?
Speaker 2 (12:16):
You know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
But do you know what you can be made of?
Do you know what this podcast is made of? It
is built around ads. It's the gravy through the feeding tube.
Give me that broth, Yeah, broth, here's some ads, unless
you have a cooler zone media, in which case you
(12:40):
just get the transitions, just the best part. Andrew Beck. Okay,
so some of the Heidi holes that they would build
would have second Heidi holes within the Heidi hole.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Ooh that's smart.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Really the hunters would find an empty hiding hole.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, and and they'd leave like a little pope pat behind.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
So he had like, oh, we all got the pope.
There are a bunch of stories of like they were
trying to catch this one guy. Hmm. I can't remember
the man's name off the top of my head. He's
one of the main sources who because he survived all
of this and he wrote his memoirs and I started
reading them but oh my god, do priests at this
time right in nonsensequal ways. It is like sixteen pages
(13:23):
of jargon about the church, and I'm like, are you
going to get to the plot? And the answer is maybe,
but I don't know. I didn't get that far anyway.
One of the people who survived all of this was
one of the more important I think bishops at the time.
They would like catch him where they would show up
and they would see the church candles just snuffed out
with like smoke up and they would like, know, he's
(13:45):
in the house and they still couldn't find him. Wow. Actually,
later our hero's gonna bust him out of the Tower
of London. But we'll get to that.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Cool. Cool, cool.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah. So he would also build obvious priest holes elsewhere
in the house. They could be found quickly, so they're like, ah,
we found the priest hall. There's nothing in it. Most
of these holes were tiny and uncomfortable. These were not
priest rooms. It is much easier to hide a coffin
sized space between a ceiling and the next floor than
(14:14):
it is to hide a whole room. Yeah. Behind fireplaces
and understairs were favorite spots for him. Actually, I would
have assumed most of them would involve digging into the ground,
but those were pretty rare, interesting and I do not
know why, maybe because it takes a lot of work
to dig, but they dug escape tunnels and shit.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, so that's very weird.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Yeah. Sometimes he would build spots accessed by an entire
fake chimney. He would patiently chisel out masonry to free
a few blocks to build rooms within walls. He tended
to avoid outside walls because I think they were easier
for hunters to measure. And then I found one source
that says he used false perspectives and illusion but I
(14:58):
could not find an exam of what they're talking about.
And it is driving me.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Mad now because that sounds really cool.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I know, And so I'm thinking it might have been
like cool shit with wallpaper or like angles of the
ceiling joist or something, you.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Know, maybe like some mirrors.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, he's now the patron saint of illusionists and escape artists.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Really.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Yeah, Oh that's cool. And they would build smaller cubbies too,
so people could hide their you know, religious paraphernalia, like
their bibles and rosaries and candles and all that stuff.
Sometimes he worked in huge mansions. There's a thing I
was reading that was basically saying that like a lot
of these like manor houses at the time kind of
(15:37):
had to be like the everything house for the town.
You know, they would be like which is part of
why I think they like jails and shit and them
sometimes okay, but like so, he'd often work in these
huge manners. Take Hindlip Hall, where he built eleven or
twelve distinct priest holes. And if you want to imagine
this place, just imagine a English rich person manner that's
(16:00):
huge and sort of like a castle but not quite
where you're probably watching some TV show there that you
wish had different class analysis than it does. Sure, if
you're imagining that, you're imagining Hindlipaul correctly. They hit a
lot of people there. There was a tunnel from the
cellars to the garden, and folks didn't rediscover that tunnel
until nineteen seventy four, which is wild because that place
(16:21):
had been rebuilt since then. Wow, the Gatehouse of Hindlipaol
was built in fifteen ninety specifically so that it would
hide the construction of other spots throughout the house. They're like, yeah,
of course there's a lot of construction going on. We're
built another wing on the house. Never mind the like
one weird itinerant guy with a limb who's building stuff,
and the habing Tins were living there at the time.
I've read contradictory stuff about their family, because why would
(16:44):
everything agree with itself? But as best as I can tell,
the older brother, Edward was arrested for treason and beheaded
in fifteen eighty six because oh Mary, Queen of Scots,
tried to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and become queen, and so
she got executed, and so did a bunch of other people,
including the older guy. Thomas Habington, though was the Queen
(17:07):
Elizabeth's godson, and so he was spared, and so he
continued to build Heidi holes and work against Wow yeah wow,
And of course many of these were built, including a
hindlip Paul by Saint Nicholas Owen, and these holes seem
to be effective. I spent a long time trying to
(17:27):
find an actual number of like people who died when
I'm like, because like when you talk about the Protestants
and the marrying persecution, like, oh, two hundred and forty
some people died or whatever, right, You're like, all right,
how many Catholics died And it's like yeah, And I'm like,
does that mean not very many? I think it means
not very many. I think it's about like three hundred
over like one hundred years or something, you know. But
it is also still like so many people are going
(17:51):
to jail, so many people are being evicted. It's a
bigger thing than just burning people at the stake.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, because you have to measure yeah, like them material
effect of like seizing property and all that kind of
stuff too.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, it seems to be that these holes were effective
because the number of priests getting caught. This is another part.
Like pretty much you were only getting burned to the
steak if you were like the priest. Okay, and the
priests got really good at hiding and so you can
see this, like imagine a graph. The number of priests
getting caught is going down significantly, but the number of
(18:27):
priests working in the country is going up significantly.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Wow. Okay, so they knew what they were doing. They're
figuring it out. Yeah, And like spreading that word is
also so interesting, like to think about how you know,
priests found out where to go and when to go
and like there just had to be so many people
collaborating on this beyond just the person building them.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
No, that's such a good point. Like again, I actually
thought I was going to do a little footnote about
this guy and then talk about like how people hid
Jewish people during the Holocaust. Yeah, which I'll probably get
to it a different point because I'm Heidi holes are cool,
but like I know that, for example, one of the
main places that hid a lot of Jewish people very
successfully was Amsterdam and the Netherlands more broadly, and it
was because a huge percentage of the Dutch people were
(19:10):
part of the resistance. But a lot of other countries
the resistance was very like stabby and shooty, but the
Dutch resistance was like Heidi, right, and it was much
more of a mass movement. And so the thing it
was very effective at was hiding people. The thing it
wasn't as effective at was like killing Nazis. You win some,
(19:31):
you lose some, sure, But yeah, And I've read the
different things about like how they kne where the Heidi
holes were, but they kind of they struck me as
probably apocryphal, where it was like, ah, there was this
sigil of a lamb made on a wax seal on
the outside of the houses. And it reminds me a
lot of like hobo signs where I was going to.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Say the say like anarchists, like like you're saying like squat,
like here's the squad, here's the marking that.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Yeah, yeah, totally, and that actually is real. There is
a squad or sign.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
It's a yeah, yeah, it's real.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Expect you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do,
yeah yeah, And it is an end with an arrow
on the top, and then a more modern one will
also have a little crossbiece on the bottom, so it
looks kind of like a female symbol and a male symbol.
And these are like on squatted buildings and places where
you can kind of publicly squat.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah you know what was that thing called for train
hopping crew change Guide, which is another way that information
spread in this interesting way about like the right times
and places that you could hop trains. And again it's
like this like total offline. I mean, I'm sure it's
online now, but at that time it was just the
way you spread information.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Well, you're not allowed to put it online, and every
now and then people leak it online and then I
think gets mad at them.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah, I mean you shouldn't do that. Yeah, you're ruining it.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Yeah. And you know there's the thing about like, oh,
all the hoboes in nineteen thirties use these all these signs,
and like maybe probably, but like I don't know, I
don't think that anyone was like putting the symbol of
the lamb on their house to be like here, you're safe,
because like the second person who's going to know that
is a priest hunter.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Is a priest hunter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now it feels
like it has to be just word of mouth or something,
but I don't know.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah exactly. And like these communities of trust where like
people have been co religionists for thousands of years, yeah,
or a thousand years or so. In fifteen ninety four,
Owen was caught. They arrested him and they tortured him
to try and get information out of him about where
these holes were, about where people could be hiding, and
(21:31):
he didn't say shit, and they let him go.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
WHOA Yeah, why do you think they let him go?
Speaker 1 (21:38):
I think because it's like there's still kind of a
rule of law thing going on. Okay, yeah, and he's
not a priest, and I think that they're just like
it's also just like no one talks to everyone walks.
It's like a default thing to remember. It's like generally safer,
you know.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
And then in fifteen ninety seven he helped two Catholics,
including that priest I forgot to put into the script,
or actually I didn't forget. What I do is I like,
I intentionally minimize the number of named characters I include,
because my brain goes blank when people tell me like
eight million names.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
It's ter I do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah, yeah, And so I was like, oh, this guy
isn't like important enough. I think it might be Girard,
but he actually is important enough. I've like, well, hmm,
if you want to follow this further, he is important enough, right,
And he's in the Tower of London, this priest, which
is the big scary jail, and it's the city's most
(22:33):
notorious prison, the country's most notorious prisons where they have
put kings and shit, you know, when they're arrested. Because
it's also not safe to be a king, they get
arrested a lot too. So the Catholics bribe some guards
and they go up to the roof and they throw
a weighted cord down and the rescuers, who are on
a boat, attach a rope and send it up like
and then the Catholics go hand over hand down the
(22:54):
rope at a steep angle, like fucking animated Robin Hood.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yeah, that's what's say. I's like, wow.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
And at least one of them I believe is the priest,
the one who wrote a book about this later made
it to roam into Safety.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Wow. It's bad ass.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah. And then one of the most accidentally famous moments
in all of history hits our story, the gunpowder plot.
Remember remember the fifth of November?
Speaker 2 (23:23):
How could I forget it?
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:27):
I was around in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah, my mom has a lot of memories of celebrating
Guy Fox's day in England, and you know, making the
dummy and putting it in the wheelbarrow with a bunch
of fireworks. And it does sound fun, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
It's both fun and so sketchy. It's such a sketchy concept,
not just the fireworks part. That's fine. No, it's not like, hey,
kids have bottle rocket fights. Just be safe, you know,
like whatever, Yeah, but like, actually, maybe do reading don't
just do that because a podcaster said it. But like
the idea of like, oh, we're going to burn this
guy Fox effigy, Like.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
It's not a yeah, but I like the building a
dummy and putting fireworks on it. If you just take
it completely out of its content.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Oh yes, just make a James one, make them both whatever,
they're both probably dicks. Well all yeah, yeah, well that
was their idea.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, right, there you go, if you honor his memory, blow.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Them all up. Yeah, because they certainly were willing to
kill a lot of innocent people to do this thing.
This isn't really an episode about the gunpowder plot because
there's so so much to weighe through that is somehow
so politically charged. But I'm still going to do a
little bit about it. And when I was like first
sol v for Vendetta, I think I read the book
before I read the book before I saw the movie.
(24:43):
You know, I was like, Oh, this guy Fox person
sounds kind of cool. And then you're like, read it
more about it, and you're like, not just some bullshit.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Just like yeah, it's not.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
But then if you keep reading it in this context
of like it is absolutely criminal to be a Catholic
and the majority of the country is Catholic, and the
rulers have imposed this religion on everyone from above. It
almost comes back around and actually my main problem is
that it's too terroristic, but like it almost flips the
(25:12):
freedom fighter in a way that I didn't expect because
I was pretty on the like noah whatever, Like he's
not a revolutionary hero, but like kind of could have been.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Okay, Okay, he's interesting. That is interesting. Yeah, everything in context, baby, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
And then you know, if you read this from the
context of believing that people should not have divided loyalty
between Rome and England, then obviously he's even more of
a villain. Okay. So you have James the first running
England and Scotland starting in sixteen oh three. His mom
was Mary, Queen of Scots, that Catholic who is Queen
for nine days. But he wasn't raised by her, and
(25:53):
he was Protestant. And he also, slightly unrelatedly to today's story,
sucked so badly. He's one of the worst people. He's
wildly misogynistic, he's terrified of witches. He does like a
lot of the work to make people afraid of witches
and like writes books about witchcraft, and we talked about
(26:13):
this and been in our Witches episode. Kind of the
thing was that, like, actually the Church didn't really believe
in witchcraft, so they were like, superstition is fake, all
magic comes from God, so if someone's doing magic, it
actually literally can't be demonic. So people are just kind
of trying to do a dumb thing, so we'll just
ignore them. Was like the primary way of dealing with
(26:35):
witches for hundreds of years in Catholic Europe, and King
James was part of the like, but we really want
to burn witches though thing. Yeah, and this isn't to
say that Catholics didn't burn, which is they absolutely did.
The main argument of that particular episode is that the
witch burnings were actually a pissing match between the Protestants
and the Catholics about who could do populism and appeal
to the masses by letting them take out their grievances
(26:58):
on each other with witch burnings.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Wow, that sounds right to me. I believe that. Yeah immediately, yeah,
uh huh.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
It kind of blew my mind and then I was like,
oh no, yeah, that just makes sense.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
No, I mean it's both Yeah, a lot of the
most simple things are mind blowing unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, totally. King James is also the King James Bible guy,
the addition that the right wing loves the best because
it is wildly inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yeah. I listened to a podcast about this and it
was really and yeah, it was bizarre.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
It's also the one that Trump is selling is that
God blessed the USA edition.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Mm hmm. And there was like a little gay stuff
going on, possibly with King James too, which.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
I was to say, he's so gay. Yeah, he's bisexual.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
He was like wearing that like medallion with a guy's
face on it all the time or something like that.
I don't know, I haven't it was a long time
ago I listened to this, so no, no take it
as fact. But I'm pretty sure there was a pendant
with his pretty boyfriend on it.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I believe it. I did more research about him in
the Witch's episode, but though the stuff that I relearned,
he was definitely sleeping with his wife and he was
extra definitely sleeping with a bunch of guys.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Yeah, and who knows how that affected the Bible that
he created.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, yeah, weird, but he's super right wing.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, that's very true.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
And he continued the persecution of Catholics, and some Catholics
decided that they didn't want to be persecuted anymore, and
they came up with a relatively straightforward idea about how
to deal with this problem. What if you just got
like a fuck ton of gunpowder and then you just
like blew up Parliament while King James was there and
(28:34):
all of his parliament. And the way I wrote it
originally in this script is and we'll try to do
it on the fifth of November. That seems like a
day we can make memorable. But actually the reason they
did it it was the first day of the parliamentary session.
And really interestingly, originally the parliament was going to be
some time in I want to say August, but I
actually not one hundred percent certain, but it was delayed
(28:55):
because of like fears of plague. And if it hadn't
been delayed, they probably would have blown up parliament, wow,
and killed King James.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
And everything would be different in wha, Everything would be different,
no idea. You know, we can't even possibly imagine.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Wow. I know, although I read and actually linked in
the notes, I actually read a BBC what would have happened. Guess.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Oh, that's cool, okay.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
And their overall guess is that Protestantism actually would have
become like absolutely the law of the land and the
religion of the land and probably even Protestantized Ireland. Interesting, okay,
but they're like, but here's what we think would have
happened if it had actually like also worked on a
like swinging around to a Catholic revolution thing. Sure, right,
(29:38):
and the answer is everything would be different and nothing'd
be better, you know, right. But I've read modern Catholic
moderates arguing that the whole gunpowder plot was a red
false flag attack, a fabrication phone actually from the state
guy Cecil, Lord Cecil, the Secretary of State to give
(29:58):
them an excuse to be shittier to Catholics.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Like a Reichstag Fire kind of scenario.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah, which we've done episodes on the Reichstag Fire was started.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
By it's a complicated one.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, it was started by a committed leftist who was
trying to do a thing. It didn't work, nope.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Yeah, and then there you go.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yeah, I love the time as a flat circle. We
still have these arguments today. Anyone who takes up arms
against oppression, it's actually helping oppression. But also like sometimes, huh.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
You got to take every instance in its own context.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, but what you shouldn't take in context you should
just accept wholeheartedly without question. Is everything being advertised except
for the bad stuff that's being advertised. Please don't think
I'm being serious and then get addicted to online gambling. Anyway,
here's that's and we're back. So this whole thing Hulk
(30:54):
gun Powder plot is still politicized to this day, modern
Catholics arguing it was a false flag attack or on
the other side, I want to read you the sentence
from the clearly presenting itself as neutral worldhistory dot org.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Okay, hit me.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Elizabeth One of England had encouraged the Protestant religion in
her kingdom, and this policy was continued by her successor,
James One of England dot dot dot as I cut
out a bunch of senses, and then it talks about
a further blow to extreme Catholics hoping to restore their
faith as the primary religion in England. Okay, And I
(31:29):
was like, oh, yeah, Elizabeth the first encourage the Protestant religion.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, outlaw in all.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Competitors and then restoring the faith as the primary religion
of England when what these extremists you want to restore
the primary religion.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
That's wild.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
It's the majority religion.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Yeah, Like it's actually far less extreme than yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
And to be fair, the gunpowder plot people actually pretty extreme.
Well that yes, yes, and other Catholics who heard about
it were like, maybe don't do that though, yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
I have a sense this made back fire.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah. Yeah. And guy Fowx we'll talk about him in
a second. And these conspirators, they didn't want freedom of religion.
No one was arguing for freedom of religion. Well some
people were actually a lot of moderates were arguing for
freedom of religion. None of the people killing each other
were arguing for freedom of religion. They just, like the Protestants,
wanted to be the only game in town. They were
(32:26):
probably not good people, but I don't know. At first
they figured they would dig a tunnel from a rented
house to underneath Westminster Palace. But then they realized that
the coal sellers under Westminster Palace were just available for rent.
Oh great, and so they were like, all right, we're
going to rent one. And then they just filled it
with we were a podcast out of here.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, yeah, to.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
The podcast at the time, barrels of gunpowder. Actually, that's true.
The podcast at the time was basically zines and street
corner Preachers.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yeah, but just screaming.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yeah, yeah, totally. They put thirty five barrels of gunpowder
in their heidie hole that they rented.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
That's so wild that you could just rent a place
that you could put a bunch of gunpowder.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
I have a feeling they stopped doing that after that.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
And then they just like covered it up with like
scrap wood and we're like, nah, it's just like we're
throwing scrap wood. I don't know whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Okay, some thing's never changed.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah. And they needed someone to light the match. They
need an experienced bomber. They need someone who could make
a fuse. They needed Guy Fox, Yes, which is a
good name. And then if you read an anti Catholic shit,
his real name is Guido Fox and he's Spanish. Ooh,
this isn't true.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
He was known by Guido Fox when he fought in
Spain as a Catholic mercenary against the Belgians or something.
He was a Guido when he was in Spain. But
the longer you have an open conspiracy with a ton
of people, and their plan was to blow up all
of Parliament and then they're going to march north and
be like we killed the king. Everyone joined us, and
we're gonna have a big grand revolution. It'll be just
(34:08):
like we see in the movies, where like you just
do one action and then everyone's happy. So that part
wouldn't have worked. And the longer you have this kind
of thing, the more someone's gonna leak, right, And what
happened was is that one of the conspirators we don't
know who it is, but we think we know who
it is. But again there's a million names, and I'm
good one of the conspirators sent an anonymous letter to
one of his family members, or just someone who was
(34:30):
part of parliament. There's someone who was in parliament who
is also Catholic. Because there was still I don't entirely
understand of this work. There's still people who are like
Catholic who were in government. They just weren't allowed to
be very active about it, I think. And they wrote
a note that read quote, they shall receive a terrible
(34:51):
blow this parliament. And yet they shall not see who
hurts them.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
It's cool.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
And that guy, instead of being like, oh sweet, you're
gonna have a revolution, I'll just not go to work
that day, he tipped everyone off and they all investigated,
and they went down to the basement, and then they
were like looking in the coal cellars. And they actually
waited till the night before to go down to the
basement to look, even though they knew like nine days
before that.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Maybe they're just scared of the basement.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Bloody Mary's down there. And they go in and there's
guy Fox holding a lantern and he's like, I'm not
Guy Fox. He gives a name, and he's like, I'm
a servant. And they just see all the wood and
they keep looking. But then they're like, oh no, that
guy seems sketchy. So they go back and they find
all the barrels of gunpowder and they're busted. It's likely
(35:40):
that this gunpowder wouldn't have gone off anyway because it
had been sitting too long and it was likely not
explosive anymore. Okay, but they didn't know that. There's later
a whole thing about like then they tried to dry
out the gunpowder by a fire and it blew up
and heard a bunch of them. But like, that story
feels very pat and the whole thing is framed now
as a celibate of let's blow up a guy because
(36:01):
he tried to blow up a different guy.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Does he tried to blow up some other bad guys?
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Yeah, yeah, the good guys. The Crown tortured the shit
out of him for ten days and he spilled the
beans and other folks were rounded up, though a bunch
of them died in a last desperate stand sword versus
gun against the cops. Wow, and a guy with a
cool name, Thomas Winter, died that way.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
Okay, that is a cool name.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Those were the lucky ones, the ones who died sword
against gun. The rest of them were hanged, drawn and quartered.
And I hate that I have to every now and
then remind people what this is, just so that people
could understand how terrible the past was, all right, tell
us in this case, Okay, Like, normally, if you're trying
to hang someone, if you're a good executioner, their neck breaks,
(36:49):
and if you're a bad executioner, they suffer and dangle
and slowly suffocate. Right, so they intentionally are badly hanged
they hang you until you're almost dead, and then they
cut your dick off, and then they got you and
then they behead you and then you're cut into four
parts after.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
That's not what I thought it was.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
It was that you think it was the horses being pulled.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
In from Yeah, I think that's what I thought it was.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yeah. Yeah, they get real creative with killing people in
the medieval era.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
But then so many medieval torture devices are fake. Do
you know that. That's so interesting?
Speaker 1 (37:21):
I want to iron about that.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, iron man, it's not real. Yeah, it was like
made in the eighteen hundreds as like kind of almost sideshow.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Like yeah, the Victorians were like check out the spooky past,
and you're.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Like, yeah, they did like to do that does make sense,
but yeah, I do believe yeah, what you're talking about,
that's one of the real ones.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah, no, it's it's it's wild because yeah, they make
up all this fake stuff about the past, but they
absolutely were unhinged as hell in the past, and like yeah,
and I'm always trying to figure out which ones are real,
but like they're so creative. Every single time the medieval
people killed someone, they were like I came up with
a new way to do it. Like I read about
people getting like sewn into sackson thrown into the town
square from like the steep.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
They know, And then you're like, how can I really
know which of these is true and which is like
a sensationalized Yeah, it's just you may never know.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, this has been like the biggest thing. I actually
wrote a piece about this, but called like how Metal
was the Past, where it's just like it's so hard
to know about like the history of occultism and Satan
worship and and all of this stuff, where like some
of that shit's real. My favorite example of this is
some of the first episodes we talked about Lady Batore.
It's usually pronounced Bathory, but that's wrong, And now I'm
a pedant about it. She's the one I have you
(38:26):
heard of her? She like bathed in virgin's blood in
order to stay young. Yeah yeah, yeah, she probably just
the king owed her money, okay, and so he like
set her up as like an evil villain in order
to get her to steal all of her shit.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
That sounds much more likely than her bathing and virgin blood.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, But then what's presented unquestionably by all the sources
that I've seen is that when she was a kid,
she saw her dad who was in charge, so a
thief into the stomach of a horse. Dang, And so
it's like that's an evil metal thing. It is, but
it's lawful, so no one talks about it.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Yeah, and it's not a woman, right, yeah, well that's
a woman getting killed, but that's fine. Women deserve to
die because they steal.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, that's neither here nor there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Anyway, drawn and quartered very real, slightly different at different times,
but real unpleasant. And I think it was just like
they were like, we tried just killing people do bad stuff,
but that didn't stop anyone, so we just have to
go even worse. And you're like, we tried like providing
social safety net.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
No, they're like, we're artists of death. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, Like the most evil torturer that we've read about
this whole thing was one of these priest hunters, and like,
to be fair, blowing up parliament with like hundreds of
people in it probably not really an ethical thing.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
But no, no, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
But actually one of the things that happened one of
the spirits didn't know one of the conspirators went to
that priest who's name I forget, oh unless his father
Garnett this time, I actually don't remember, went to one
of the priests and confessed beforehand and was like, hey,
is it evil in a war if you kill civilians
as well as who you're trying to kill, And like
(40:19):
was like genuinely trying to figure out whether it was
ethical to do this thing.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
You know, do we know what the priest said.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I think the priest said, don't do this, yeah, and
then we'll get to it. And he still dies. But
so guy FOWX when he's on the scaffold, he actually
jumps off the scaffold so his neck will break and
he doesn't have to deal with the rest of the shit.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
That's smart.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Yeah, you know, he's standing there and he's like first time,
like the meme, but it's not his first time, so
he jumps off, and I mean it is his first
time getting hanged.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Probably, I would think, so, Yeah, not all.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
The conspirators were real conspirators. The two Catholic priests was
kind of mentioning them early. They were wanted because they
were the priests of the conspirators. The crown figured probably
accurately that the conspirators had revealed their plans in confession,
although I think they did it in that oblique way
where they were like, hey, is this ethical, Not like yeah,
(41:16):
you want to help us blow up the fucking parliament.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
They're like, they're like, so I have this friend.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, totally, Am I the asshole? Oh that's the confessing
pruf of the.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Modern that is, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
And so they were like, all right, well, we're going
to round up and torture these priests in order to
find out if they knew about it. And one of
these priests, Father Garnett, had actually caught wind of this
plot and told them, no, don't do that. You're going
to kill a bunch of random people. What the fuck?
And the two priests managed to stay hidden for a
solid ten days or so. This is why it gets
(41:54):
back to Nicholas Owen, because they went to Hindlip Manor
and they hid in a priest hole. And Father Garnett
had been working out of hind Lit Mannor for like
eighteen years or something at that point, maybe twelve, I
can't remember. I might be confusing with a different number
of years, but he've been working there for a long time,
and so they hide in a hole so small that
they can't straighten their legs, and also hiding in a
(42:17):
priest hole in Hindlet Manor at that time is none
other than Saint Nicholas Owen, as well as Ralph Ashley,
who was either his apprentice or much more likely the
apprentice to one of the priests. So more than one
hundred armed men surround the estate on January twentieth, sixteen
oh six, was a few months after the executions. And
(42:38):
for ten days these people kept watch and search the place,
and they couldn't find any priest holes. But after four
days in a priest hole with nothing but an apple
to eat, Owen and Ashley come out to find food
and they are captured and in the like hagiography, which
I can say in a kind of more literal sense
because he's literally a priest now, they're like they came
(42:59):
out of it because they wanted to distract the people
from the real priests who are hiding. I'm like mm
hm nodding. They came out because they ran out of
food and water.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
No one's poorn broth down the mountain tube for them. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Yeah. The two confessor priests were captured eight days later,
including the one who tried to stop it, because yeah,
there was no one to slip broth down the feeding hole.
When Owen was arrested, Lord Cecil, the Secretary of State,
and the one who people believe orchestrated the false flag
gunpowder attack, which I don't believe. He wrote about arresting
(43:34):
Nicholas Owen quote, great joy was caused all through the
Kingdom by the arrest of Owen, knowing his skill in
constructing hiding places and the innumbrable number of these dark
holes which he had schemed for hiding priests throughout the kingdom.
And he was tortured extensively, and this time he could
look and say first time to someone because it was
(43:55):
not his first rodeo. Yeah, And we have the records
of his confessions because they wrote it all down, and
all he ever said to his torturers was the stuff
they already knew, like where he'd been caught, okay, which
is fucking He's a cool guy.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, I mean, that's smart.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
He had almost certainly nothing to do with the gunpowder plot,
which is interesting. Actually, the gunpowder plot people, as far
as I can tell, they late later, the Catholic Church didn't,
I believe, beatify them, like make them holy, but not sainthood.
But it's like those one step lower, sure, because they
were guilty of actual crimes that are illegal, that aren't
just heresy or whatever. You know. Anyway, Yeah, there's your
(44:37):
gratitude for you.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, real nice.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
The torturers knew that Nicholas Owen was ill and that
he had a hernia, and so they strapped a plate
of iron to his stomach to keep his organs in
place while they tortured him. God, okay, he died from
his torture on March twenty second, sixteen oh six. Or
the Protestant version of the story is that he eventually
used a steak knife from dinner to kill himself. But
(45:01):
I'm not the only one struggling to imagine that one
of the world's most devout Catholics at this time suicide
condemned you to hell. The Church has come around on this, Yeah,
but I don't buy it that this man killed himself,
and neither of most historians that I read.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like propaganda.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, exactly. The Protestants aren't like, fuck, yeah, it was
cool when we killed all the priests.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
Sure, yeah, yeah, I know, but it lets it off
the hook a little bit, like just that small amount.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the priests who were caught as
well as the apprentice were executed on April seventh, and
the BBC had to write up about what if the
gunpowder plot had succeeded and their assumptions that would have
led to an absolute Protestant majority and effectively ended Catholicism
in England, Scotland and Ireland. Wow, and just if basically
(45:50):
like if there hadn't been a little fear of plague
that summer or that same one says, or maybe we
could have gone the other way. And their main argument
is that they like marched north from there and been like, hey, everyone,
we killed the king. It's going to go great. And
everyone had been like, may you just like massacred hundreds
of people? Like what the fuck?
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (46:09):
That actually maps with what I read of history is
that like people, even when people are like fine with
like revolutionary violence and war and civil war and all
that shit, people tend to get turned off by terrorist
attacks of mass casualty.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
It tends to doesn't do what you think it's gonna do.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
Yeah, it makes no one happy. Nicholas Owen was sainted
in nineteen seventy and he's the patron saint of illusionists
and escape artists and his feast day is the twenty
second of March. But my real takeaway is that it's
possible to build places people can't find people, and it's
worth knowing about if you ever live in a repressive government.
(46:49):
But we don't.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
But just as like a hypothetical, Yeah, wow, what a
journey that was. Yeah, I mean I'm really like I
really want to know the ins and outs of like
the very like nitty gritty particulars of each of these
like Heidi holes, right, and I'm sure it's hard, but
and like ah, and just imagine because you know, I'm
(47:11):
like a I'm an abandoned train tunnel person, like I
love to go to Yeah I've been doing some shit
and like yeah, I love that kind of thing. And
like these forgotten things that you have to like hike
to and you find them and like you have to
you know, go through these bushes and then there's fucking mine.
Like that stuff is amazing. So it's like just imagine
like living somewhere like England where you could live in
(47:32):
a household enough to like lean on a wall, and
it's like there's the Heidi Hole. It's incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Yeah, some of them are like publicly like tourist attractions.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
I'm definitely going to try to go to one of
those next time I go to the UK, because I
do visit family there, so I'll let you know when
I go to the Heidi Holes.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
And it's funny because it's like this stuff isn't hidden history,
but it's history that I didn't know about, Like I
didn't not if you had asked me like two weeks ago,
like were they just kind of killing the Catholics for
hundreds of years in England? I would have been like,
probably some of them or something. I don't know. I
know that they weren't allowed to like practice freely and stuff,
but I wouldn't have known that there were priest hunters.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
No, it almost sounds fake, you know, it really does
almost sound fake.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
But religious persecution is as old as religion, and that's
for sure. Probably you shouldn't force people to be different
religions than they already are.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah, I mean, everybody read your Bible because boy, it's
batshit crazy and you can't eat bats but it is
batshit document. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, but you know, if you're going to cherry pick
that document, I recommend the parts about be nice to
neighbors and foreigners and poor people.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
Hey, to pick out what matters to you, I guess.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
Yeah, or just you know, come up with what you
believe on your own.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I think maybe we just need to toss the whole
thing out.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
I'm not sure people are pretty attached, but I understand.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Yeah, I know, it's okay. Just figure it out on
your own.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah. Oh, anyway, that's what I got, you guy. Thing
you want to.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Plug the priest hunters in the Heidi hole. That could
be our band.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
That would be a very queer band.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
It would be that would be a very queer band.
I am just the host of American hysteria. That's all
I am. And that's all I do. So go listen
to that and you like weird history, and you like panantic,
you know, digging into the past, as I know you
all do because you listen to this show Faria. Yeah,
you will enjoy American hysteria. We do urban legends, moral panics,
(49:41):
conspiracy theories, hoaxes, craze is kind of any fantastical thinking
in American culture from the Puritans to the present, as
we say, so check it out. I do try really
hard as you do to get things right.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
I want you to also do not just America, because
I want your tape on the dance crazes where like
people would dance themselves to death in England.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
Margaret, You're so lucky because I did one with Sarah Marshall,
a two part episode called Tarantism, which is about the
spider bite dances, and we get a little into the
other ones, but Tarrantism is like, for me, the coolest one.
So we did leave the United States to do a
little dance craze stuff because I love it. And there's
like so much misinformation there too, right, it's just like
(50:26):
anything else.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
But I assume what I know about it is false
because I know the thousand word version. Actually I know
the five hundred word version.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Well I feel like Sarah Marshall, which I'm sure a
lot of I do too. Yeah, yeah, I love her.
We love her. I have a plug. I want to
plug James Stout's book that's available for pre order from
AKA Press Against the State.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Yeah, I've even it's good. There's a blurb for me
on it. I think it's an important book.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Ooh, you blurbed.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
I don't know if I made it onto the final version,
but if you like the stuff we talk about on
the show and want to think about how it applies
to how politics and statelessness and all of those things
interact with like military and possibility and things that are
happening now and things are happening in the past, like
it talks about the Spanish Civil War, which if you've
made it this far in the show, you probably don't hate. Yep,
(51:18):
that's so cool, So everyone go pre order that. Yeah,
all right, bye everyone, Thank you guys.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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