22 March 2002
Gunpowder Find at British Library
A stash of gunpowder which may have come from the barrels that Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators hoped to use to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605 has been unearthed by curators in the basements of the British Library. The news comes in a statement issued by the British Library.
The potentially explosive discovery was buried deep in the Library’s collections, housed in a box of assorted gunpowder, most dating back to the 19th century but some possibly earlier.
The box, in the John Evelyn Collection (the archive of the diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706) and the Evelyn family which was acquired by the Library in 1995), was found to contain a solid bar of gunpowder, as well as grain, believed to be samples, wrapped in brown twists of old paper. Evelyn was born into a substantial Surrey land-owning family whose fortunes were founded in gunpowder manufacture.
Mysterious circumstances surround the origin of the gunpowder. A late 19th or early 20th century “mourning” envelope (a small white envelope edged in black) was enclosed in the box. An old hand-written ink message on the envelope intriguingly says: “Gunpowder. Large package is supposed to be Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder.” Underneath that, in pencil, another sentence has been added, dated 1952: “But there was none left!”
Ironically, the box in which the gunpowder and the envelope on which the reference to Guy Fawkes was made is a “Westminster Bond Envelope” box - with a photographic illustration on top of the Houses Of Parliament.
Gunpowder was made from saltpetre, sulphur and carbon, alcohol and water or urine were added to the ingredients and the mix was dried in an oven and then broken into small grains or particles, known as corned powder. The thin, solid bar of gunpowder found in the box might well be a sample taken out of an oven before being broken into crumbs, as described above. Finding dry old gunpowder is rare because it is mostly recovered from battlefields or has been kept outside and is dampened.
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