Dr Graham Moore said the National Archives has finished taking in parliamentary records linked to November 5th, including the 1605 Thanksgiving Act behind Bonfire Night. The transfer brings those papers into a fully catalogued collection that the public can order and view for free.
The project covered 4m records and took five years. It added 16.5 linear kilometres of material to the 174.5 linear kilometres already housed at the National Archives, with the transferred papers now marked with individual registration barcodes.
Dr Graham Moore and the 1605 act
Moore, an early modern parliament specialist at the National Archives, pointed to the act’s ceremonial opening language as he described how such records were written. “We often find that these acts have very flowery beginnings. The first section of the act lays out the reasons why the act is being instated. And then it goes into the actual legislation itself,” he said.
He also quoted the act’s language about James I: “Sovereign Lord King James, the most great learned religious King that ever reigned therein, enriched with most hopeful and plentiful progeny proceeding out of his royal loins.” Moore added that “there is a little bit about King James I and VI and his loins, which is quite fun.”
Bonfire Night records at Kew
The 1605 Thanksgiving Act was passed by James I after Guy Fawkes’s failure to assassinate the king, the Lords and the Commons at the opening of parliament that year. It directed that church services be held every 5 November to mark the failure of the Gunpowder Plot.
Among the transferred papers is a House of Commons journal with a handwritten entry dated 5 November 1605. That entry records the search of the Palace of Westminster cellars and the discovery of 36 barrels of gunpowder, along with Guy Fawkes.
Flowery words and treason
The records also include An Act of Attainder of divers Offenders in the late most barbarous, monstrous, detestable and damnable Treasons. That act declared Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators guilty of treason and decreed that they were to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
The same archive run now covers material from the formal language of the 1605 Thanksgiving Act to later records such as a suffragette’s banner dated 28 October 1908, which was secretly taken into the Ladies’ Gallery in the Commons chamber. The records are now available for the public to order and view for free, but the transfer has also turned a five-year preservation job into a working archive that can be searched and handled in full.
