The Bandbox Plot of 4 November 1712, was an attempt on the life of

Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, KG PC FRS (5 December 1661 – 21 May 1724) was an English statesman and peer of the late Stuart and early Georgian periods. He began his career as a Whig, before defecting to a new Tory ...

, the British

Lord Treasurer The post of Lord High Treasurer or Lord Treasurer was an English government position and has been a British government position since the Acts of Union of 1707. A holder of the post would be the third-highest-ranked Great Officer of State i ...

, which was foiled by the perspicacity of

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dubl ...

(author of '' Gulliver's Travels''), who happened to be visiting the Earl of Oxford. A bandbox was a lightweight hat-box; this particular one had been configured to fire a number of loaded and cocked

pistols A pistol is a handgun, more specifically one with the chamber integral to its gun barrel, though in common usage the two terms are often used interchangeably. The English word was introduced in , when early handguns were produced in Europe, ...

on opening, much as a modern-day parcel bomb might be arranged to detonate on opening. In this case, the triggers were attached to a thread; Swift, perceiving the thread, seized the package and cut the thread thus disarming the device. The attack was laid at the door of the Whig party and threw enormous popular sympathy behind Harley. The event was widely written about in the broadsheets of the time; Swift himself wrote about the occurrence in his '' A Journal to Stella''.

See also