November’s Explosive Historic Festival
By C. A. Asbrey
“Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot…”
We all know that way back in 1621, America’s founding pilgrims started a holiday tradition that is still celebrated today. Those same colonists would have already been familiar with a festival we still celebrate across the UK today. Both holidays are founded on a celebration of survival in very different ways, but one is a considerably more stark event than the other. In fact, it was the same culture of religious persecution and sectarianism that caused the pilgrims to sail for America in the first place.
It would be difficult to understate how wide the toxic gulf between Catholics and Protestants had become in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It would be easy to blame it just on religious dogma, but in reality, it was also driven by wealth and power. Recusants were forced to lose property, political influence, and the right to hold certain offices, all of which dented their wealth and the future of their families. Further discriminations quickly became enshrined in law, and Catholic priests were forbidden from celebrating the rites of their faith on pain of death. Many were killed, but that didn’t stop people from worshipping. Wealthy families had priest holes built into every nook and cranny: a kind of Elizabethan panic room where the priests could hide out in the event of a raid. And they did, some even suffocating or starving before it was safe for them to come out.
It was into this poisonous era that Guy Fawkes, also known as Guido Fawkes and John Johnson, was born in 1570. His father’s family were Protestant, but his mother’s side were recusant Catholics. His father died when Guy was eight, and by the time his mother remarried several years later, the young Guy had been heavily influenced by the Catholics in the family. Some might even describe him as radicalised. Some say that Guy was heavily influenced by the Harrington side of his maternal family, as they had a history of hiding priests, one of whom accompanied Guy to Europe at a later date.
Guy was soon heavily involved in the Catholic cause, fighting for Catholic Spain against the Dutch, and becoming involved in political intrigue in England, Ireland and Scotland. And although the Catholic King of Spain gave him a hearing, he refused to finance action in England. So it was up to Fawkes and his conspirators to go it alone. They met at the Duck and Drake Inn in London, and plotted to assassinate the king and replace him with his daughter.
They plotted to tunnel under the Houses of Parliament and stuff the cellars with barrels of gunpowder to blow the place up, but soon found a room that was the undercroft of a nearby house. It was situated directly under the House of Lords, and was deemed the perfect place to store their explosives. The threat of plague delayed the opening of the Houses of Parliament, giving the conspirators more time to stuff even more gunpowder in the cellar. In the end a total of fifty-six barrels were accumulated. A recent study by the University of Aberystwyth found that the resultant blast would have razed everything to the ground within a radius of about 40 metres. Within 110 metres, buildings would have been at least partially destroyed. And some windows would have been blown out even as far as 900 metres away. Nobody within 330 feet of the bomb could have survived. The explosion would have been visible for miles, and audible far further than that. Even if only half the gunpowder had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the House of Lords, and injured people for some distance.
Whole books, and doctoral dissertations have been written about the plot, and learned historians have made it their lives work to unravel the complex knot of betrayal and counterespionage that led to the betrayal of the thirteen co-conspirators of The Gunpowder Plot. Some even claim that there were only twelve plotters and a government spy. Others allege that in an attempt to keep Catholic lords away from the explosion, warning were given, and that these resulted in the exposure of the the plan. Others say that the Earl of Salisbury invented the plot as an act of agent provocateur, and that the plot was allowed to go on as an attempt to discredit the Catholics in England. Whatever the truth, there is little doubt that the Catholics would never have been able to seize power, even if the King had been killed. The outrage would have been so profound that the Protestant majority would have risen up and slaughtered the Catholics, who made up no more than five percent of the population at that time.
However it was done, someone did betray the group, and they were arrested. They were quickly found guilty of high treason and sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. All of those arrested were tortured to expose others in the conspiracy, but when it was time for the execution Guy Fawkes broke his neck at the hanging part of the sentence. He thereby avoided the agony of being drawn down when almost dead, and “drawn backwards to his death, by a horse, his head near the ground. They were to be “put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both”. Their genitals would be cut off and burnt before their eyes, and their bowels and hearts removed. They would then be decapitated, and the dismembered parts of their bodies displayed so that they might become “prey for the fowls of the air.”
The first ceremony related to the event took place the next year, primarily as a Protestant celebration of delivery from the Papist plot. Initially known as Gunpowder Treason Day, this thanksgiving gala soon spread, and developed into parades that ended around a bonfire where the evil ‘Guy’ was burned in effigy. People brought food and drink, fireworks were added and it wasn’t long before it spread to the whole country. Raids could be mounted to rob the firewood from the rival bonfire, sometimes even ending up in public disorder. It suffered a ban under Oliver Cromwell, and his puritan rule, but was reinstated in the restoration, ending up as even more of a night of celebration than before.
In true British style, it soon became an irreverent secular night of raucous fun, the religious overtones forgotten, and dismissed. In 1865 a police constable was killed in Guilford as the authorities tried to stamp out the worst excesses of drunken debauchery and restore public decorum. Although the origins were never forgotten, the anti-Catholic sentiments declined, and even ended up being celebrated by Catholics and Protestants alike—seen more as a triumph of a win of a terrorist attack, or just an excuse to watch a spectacle and get roaring drunk. It became a matter of neighbourhood pride to have a bigger bonfire than your nearest village, and by the 18th century children were pulling along a stuffed figure and begging for a ‘penny for the Guy’. In later periods that money was used to buy fireworks, but in earlier periods it was used to buy food and was an aid to begging. The stuffed figure of the ‘Guy’ comprised of old clothes and a mask, but the term ‘guy’ became a term for a scruffy, or oddly-dressed person. It the cascaded down into the modern usage meaning a casual way to refer to a person of any gender.
The tradition was carried around the world with the growth of the British Empire, but fell out of use in the USA after the revolutionary war, however, it carried on in Salem until 1817. Sometimes the effigy can be changed with the times with political figures being burned instead. Prime Ministers, terrorists, unpopular members of the aristocracy, and even Benedict Arnold have made the list. Lewes in Sussex has a huge parade and burns different unpopular figures every year.
In modern times, people tend to forego the bonfires, although many are still burned. Most either attend firework displays or release their own in their back gardens. Neighbours gather to enjoy a sociable evening with fare like baked potatoes, sausages, and burgers.
But the Houses of Parliament has never forgotten. Before the official opening of parliament, it became a routine to check the cellars, and that quickly became a ritual. Nowadays, there is, of course, a thorough search by counter-terrorist officers, but as part of the ceremonial aspect of the Opening of The Houses of Parliament, the Yeoman of the Guard (commonly known as Beefeaters) perform a ritual search in full uniform. Even though this is unseen by the public, it still carries on to this day as part of the pageantry of the occasion.
