Episode Details

In the small hours of November 5th, 1605, a search party found a man named Guy Fawkes in a cellar beneath the House of Lords, standing among thirty-six barrels of gunpowder meant to destroy the King and the whole of Parliament. The Gunpowder Plot failed. But it confirmed a suspicion two generations in the making — that an English Catholic could not be trusted to keep faith with his King.

This is the story of how a faith became a crime. The scholar-priest Edmund Campion, racked and hanged for saying Mass. A captive queen who signed her cousin's death and brought an armada down on England. The priest folded into a wall while the Queen's men tore the house apart. And the oath, sprung after the powder, that forced every Catholic in England to choose which loyalty to betray — their King, or their God.

It is the story of the box that English law built around the old faith, and the single door left open. A door leading west, across an ocean, toward a coast where one man would try to build something no one had built before. His name was George Calvert. And he would not live to see it.