12 GUY FAWKES’ LANTERN During the 1800s the University consolidated its collections, spread throughout Oxford, and related them more closely to their respective disciplines. This process of rationalisation had a devastating impact on the Ashmolean, which relinquished many of its contents and received little in return. Rocks and fossils were moved to the nearby Clarendon Building, previously occupied by the University Press, between 1830 and 1832. They accompanied the teaching collection of William Buckland, who later established a geological museum there. They were relocated together with the remaining natural history specimens to the new University Museum between 1860 and 1866. Books, manuscripts, coins and medals were deposited in the Bodleian Library in 1860. Finally, ethnographic artefacts (minus those from the Tradescant collection) were transferred to the new Pitt Rivers Museum in 1886. In exchange, the Ashmolean received rarities from elsewhere in Oxford. One such rarity is the lantern reputedly carried by Guy Fawkes, a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, when he was apprehended in the cellars of Parliament House on the evening of 4–5 November 1605. The Gunpowder Plot was hatched by a small group of radical English Catholics, who aimed to kill King James I, a Protestant, by blowing up the House of Lords on the occasion of the state opening of Parliament. Having received an anonymous tip, the King ordered the cellars of Parliament House to be searched before the event. Fawkes was discovered, lantern in hand, with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder concealed under firewood. He was arrested and the plot was foiled. He was later convicted of treason and sentenced to death.
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