Writers of popular history often try to make their topic relevant to a general audience by using an analogy to modern events; this is why you so often see Napoleon or Caesar compared, albeit erroneously, to Hitler. Over the past few years it has become almost impossible to find an article or television show about the Gunpowder Plot which doesn't mention terrorism. Indeed, most state without hesitation that the plotters were terrorists and their plot was a terrorist attack...but the Gunpowder Plot wasn't terrorism.
The Comparison to Terrorism
To be fair, it's easy to see why people think it is. In recent years terrorism has fully replaced communism as the Anglo-American media's paranoia of choice and barely a day goes by without some sort of terror related story, some reference to religious extremists planning to bomb us (tragically, on a few days their stories have been correct). The Gunpowder Plot reads identically: a fringe group of religiously motivated fanatics (using a corruption of Catholicism instead of Islam) planning to detonate explosives in an underground area (gunpowder in a cellar rather than modern compounds in the World Trade Center's underground car park) beneath a well-known location (the Houses of Parliament in London) in an attempt to change the government to one favouring their religion. Travel to London today and you will see large barriers around the Parliament buildings...because people are still trying to blow it up.
A Question of Definition?
Modern commentators can easily class the plot as terrorism because there is no internationally recognised definition of the term. In her 1996 work The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605, Antonia Fraser tries to prove her assertion that the plot was terrorism with a remarkably broad definition, that terrorism is "the weapon of the weak, pretending to be strong" (Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot, London 1996, p.124), which can probably be applied to the majority of firearm users through history. However, there is a core idea at the heart of the word 'terrorism', one explained in the necessarily long definition which forms the academic consensus and which can be summed up thus: a violent attack, or series of attacks, on either random or symbolic targets, designed to terrorise the greater population and their government into accepting social/cultural/religious or political change. The heart of terrorism is making a change through terror.
The Plot was really an attempted Coup.
The Gunpowder Plotters were planning on a change, but they weren't using terror to do it. Their full plan – the ending is often omitted by commentators - was to remove the king and ruling government in one stroke by destroying them in an explosion, seize the remaining royal children, declare one of them as monarch and create a new, Catholic, government around the puppet crown. This was not a campaign of violence or an attempt to force concessions through fear but a full scale coup. Most historical analogies are dubious and these are no exception, but the Gunpowder Plot was closer to the Russian Revolutions of 1917, or even the Battle of Hastings - that rare occasion when a single battle destroyed a ruling elite and left a new dynasty – than attacks on the World Trade Center or the campaigns of the IRA.
