Robert Keyes

Gunpowder Plot

Robert Keyes
Print of the execution of the conspirators in January 1606
Details
Born	c. 1565
Spouse(s)	Christina
Plot
Role	Guarding the explosives
Enlisted	October 1604
Conviction(s)	High treason
Penalty	Hanged, drawn and quartered
Died	31 January 1606 Westminster, London

Robert Keyes was a member of the group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a conspiracy to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. He was the sixth man to join the plot.

Unlike several other conspirators Keyes was not a particularly wealthy man. He was trusted by Robert Catesby, the plot's author, with guarding the explosives stored at the latter's lodgings in London. When the plot was uncovered he fled the city, and was captured several days later in Warwickshire. He was subsequently tried with his co-conspirators, found guilty, and in January 1606 hanged, drawn and quartered.

Born in about 1565, Robert Keyes was the son of the Protestant Rector of Staveley in North Derbyshire. His mother was a daughter of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby in Lincolnshire, and related to the Catholic Babthorpes of Osgodby. Keyes' first cousin Elizabeth Tyrrwhitt was married to another member of the plot, Ambrose Rookwood. By 1604, Robert had converted to Catholicism. His wife Christina, a widow when he married her, was the governess for the children of Henry Mordaunt, 4th Baron Mordaunt, at Drayton in Northamptonshire, and for this Keyes gained the use of horses and other amenities.

English Catholics had hoped that the persecution of their faith would end when the apparently more tolerant King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth I, but Robert Catesby, a Catholic zealot from Ashby St Ledgers, remained unimpressed by the new royal dynasty. He therefore planned to kill James by blowing up the House of Lords with gunpowder, following which he would help incite a popular revolt to install James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth, as titular Queen. His role being to guard the gunpowder and other items stored at Catesby's house in Lambeth, Keyes joined the conspiracy in October 1604.