Sir Everard Digby was a member of the group of provincial members of the English nobility who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Although he was raised in an Anglican household and married a Protestant, Digby and his wife were secretly received into the strictly illegal and underground Catholic Church in England by the Jesuit priest Fr. John Gerard. In the autumn of 1605, he made a Christian pilgrimage to the shrine of St Winefride's Well in Holywell, Wales. About this time, he met Robert Catesby, who was planning to blow up the House of Lords with gunpowder as an alleged act of tyrannicide and a decapitation strike against King James I. Catesby then planned to lead a popular uprising aimed at regime change, through which a Catholic monarch would be placed upon the English throne.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was an unsuccessful attempted regicide against King James I by a group of English Catholics led by Robert Catesby who considered their actions attempted tyrannicide and who sought regime change in England after decades of religious persecution.