Also on this day

Trajan becomes Roman emperor. Lewis Carroll, writer of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, pictured, is born. As the First World War rages, Britain introduces conscription.

USA, UK and USSR sign the Outer Space Treaty, limiting the use of the Moon to peaceful purposes.

blast. One wrote to Lord Monteagle, warning him to stay away. A search revealed Fawkes, and gunpowder, in the vaults.

He was tortured and eventually named his co-conspirators. Catesby was killed in a stand-off shortly after the discovery of the gunpowder, but other surviving plotters, including Fawkes, were put on trial for “powder treason, prodigious and unnatural”.

It took one day for them to be convicted. On January 30 and 31, they were hanged, drawn and quartered. The second day of executions, including that of Fawkes, was at the Old Palace Yard, “in the very place which they had planned to demolish, in order to hammer home the message of their wickedness”.

Fawkes’s body was sent across the land, to be “set up in some high and eminent Place, to the View and Detestation of Men, and to become a Prey for the Fowls of the Air”.

The date of the discovery of the gunpowder, November 5, marks Bonfire Night, when effigies of Fawkes are burnt to this day.

Last week I asked, which England footballer was born January 20, 1981? It is Owen Hargreaves. This week: Which composer, whose works included The Magic Flute, was born this day in 1756?

Watch Shaun and his colleagues on The Chase on ITV at 5pm every day of the week.