After the failed attempt to blow up Parliament in November 1605, Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest, was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his parboiled head displayed on London Bridge. A 17th Century book describing the execution of this "barbarous traitor" sold at auction last year, with the unique selling point that its cover was allegedly made from the executed man's skin. But was the subject of this text really guilty?
On the day when the UK marks the anniversary of its most famous attempted coup, a historian is asking some awkward questions about one of those executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot.
Glyn Redworth has been researching the letters of a Spanish aristocrat who lived in London during the years surrounding the plot - and he says these reveal evidence Garnet was wrongly condemned.
What brought Garnet to the scaffold in St Paul's Churchyard in 1606 was the claim that he knew about the plot but had failed to alert the authorities.
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