This is the story we were brought up on. It has to be a staple of every primary school curriculum. Sanitised, desalinised and vacuum-packed to be accessible to every five year old in the country.

History is very often brought from the ages to us in this way. Other great festivals suffer in the same way. When the revolutionaries of France stormed the Bastille they were able to gloriously liberate less than a dozen prisoners. When an American celebrates Thanksgiving he is commemorating how the founding fathers gave thanks to the native Americans who supplied them with succour during the winter. Since then the native American’s have been thanked further by being removed from their traditional lands and into reservations.

The Gunpowder Plot suffers from more historic hyperbole than most events. From day one it has been a matter of conjecture and misrepresentation from the authorities. What Antonia Fraser has achieved is to tear back the cover of the primary school story to reveal a web of Catholic plotters, recusant Catholic families, Jesuit priests, court toadies and duplicitous politicians. In other words, this is the gunpowder plot for grown ups.

We are introduced into a world of Catholicism being driven underground. Old families bankrupted by fines, priests in hiding, and, most importantly, disaffected young Catholic gentlemen who placed their high moral and religious principles on a greater level than practical common sense.

Characters seemingly lost to history are reintroduced; Robert Cecil manipulates both the King and the plotters, Henry Percy caught between two camps and losing all, James I who is most responsible for the garbled story that has come down to us, Guido Fawkes, who names has hurtled down the centuries to rank alongside Oswald, Quisling and Judas. And, of course, the ultimate villain of the piece, Robert Catesby, the enigmatic and adored leader of the plotters whose role in the affair has been forgotten by all bar the knowledgeable.

Catesby’s plotting ends in disaster and the subsequent flight and final shootout at Holbeach is high drama. The badly orchestrated shootout in the courtyard is akin to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This shootout and other events relating to the plot were played out in houses and estates close to Birmingham, many of these still being extant.

As the story reaches a climax, Fraser turns our understanding of the events of 1605 on its head. Certainly, the plotters were terrorists, as Antonia herself calls them, but they were terrorists who causes little actual damage. Salisbury and the King become the true master of terror, using torture to gain their needs and using the tide of public opinion to crack down even harder on the Catholics.

Eventually the terrorists are executed and our sympathies lie with them. In particular we are drawn to Father Garnet, a Jesuit priest innocent of plotting, who is tortured, interrogated and finally executed in the cause of political necessity.