Gunpowder Plots Read online

  The cavalcade’s musical accompaniment matches its sights, a flux of precision and chaos. Several full marching bands are interspersed through the procession: jaunty ragtime brass, a bagpipe ensemble, military oompah, Boy Scout orchestras stumbling over burned-out debris as they read from the sheet music mounted in front of their noses, concentrating grimly on keeping in step and time. Tradition is seasoned with innovation: over recent years a drum troupe of PVC-wrapped goth fetishists and dreadlocked urban shamans have coalesced to fire-juggle and pound out their fierce tribal beats. But ever constant are the bangs and explosions over which all the music struggles to make itself heard, and which forces both participants and observers over a decibel threshold where loud detonations no longer startle, and where the relentless noise eventually produces a strange enervation, both thrilling and curiously calm.

  For those watching this display it is immediately clear that, most unusually for such a sumptuous and spectacular event, the intention is not to please the spectators. The Fifth is for the bonfire societies themselves. Visitors are at best tolerated: those who find a Bonfire Boy engaging them in friendly conversation should check the pavement by their feet, where the odds are that a surreptitiously dropped squib is about to explode. Public explanations of the event tend to be perfunctory – officially, it’s simply a commemoration of Guy Fawkes Night like any other across Britain – yet the procession teems with slogans and banners that proclaim other messages entirely, or develop the meaning of bonfire in unexpected ways. To the outsider, these can appear alarming: the profusion of anti-papist imagery raises the spectre of sectarian hatred, while the Cliffe’s belligerent and skull-studded motto, ‘Death or Glory’, gives little reassurance against the possibility of violence and anarchy. Both sectarian prejudice and violent anarchy are indeed firmly rooted in the traditions of the Fifth; while both have become to some extent symbolic, the right to parade such incendiary symbols remains at the core of the modern celebration.

  But there is more being remembered here than the Gunpowder Plot. A finely embroidered banner of William of Orange’s landing in 1688 reminds us that the Fifth is also the anniversary of a tyrant deposed and liberty restored, and more recent commemorations such as female suffrage align this liberty with the twentieth century’s progressive causes. Another solemn banner suggests, by contrast, a sectarian history even older and more bitter than Guy Fawkes: the commemoration of the Lewes Martyrs, seventeen local Protestant citizens burnt at the stake in the High Street under Queen Mary in 1557. ‘Enemies of Bonfire’ are paraded in effigy: local councillors who have attempted to curtail the celebrations, pigs’ heads in riot helmets representing the previous year’s heavy-handed policing, Home Secretaries who have attempted to make political capital out of deploring Bonfire Night. Slogans, banners and causes traverse the modern political spectrum from left to right and back again, while plainly uniting the procession that marches beneath them. There are contradictions here, but there is also a history within which they are all assimilated, and which offers the Fifth its continued raison d’être. As one of the most prominent banners announces

  to a torch-lit and shell-shocked town, ‘We Burn To Remember’.

  The processions follow their designated routes from their home corners of the town through its centre, snaking past one another in cacophonic chaos, bands struggling to keep time as they weave through each other’s ranks. The Vikings of the Cliffe cross paths with the Zulu vanguard of the Borough Bonfire Society, whose origins date back to the Boer War and whose feathered headdresses tower almost as high as the Vikings’ crosses. All the processions intersect at the Lewes Martyrs’ Memorial on the High Street, where Remembrance wreaths mark the focus for a mass conflagration of bangers, livid pink emergency flares and hand-held ‘illuminations’ of Catherine wheels. But this is not the end of the ceremonies, only the end of their beginning. Now the processions peel apart and head for their own turf, the fire fields on the edges of town where each will mount a firework display to outdo the others.

  The Cliffe field was until recently a free-for-all, thousands of visitors packed tight in dark, muddy and drunken chaos, but after one too many knife incidents and rocket injuries it is once more strictly controlled: a semi-private celebration for the participants themselves. A bonfire the size of a house is set alight, the beacon towards which the Cliffe process through the darkness, now trailing behind them the giant effigies stuffed with explosives whose detonation will frame the display: a huge Guy Fawkes, an equally towering Pope and, dwarfing both and teetering on its flatbed truck, a topical centrepiece to stand as the emblem of the year. These are exquisitely sculptured tableaux, scabrously witty and casually obscene, in a line of descent from today’s Spitting Image puppets to the James Gillray lampoons of their heyday. Some years’ effigies are local in their targets, some international; they frequently combine twin themes to brilliant effect. Recent Fifths have seen President Clinton dressed as a Stars and Stripes superhero, ‘Captain

  Viagra’, clutching a pendulous phallic missile decorated with the motto ‘In Gob We Thrust’ – and, in a nod to Gillray’s famous image of Pitt and Napoleon, a demented President Bush gorging on a pie in the shape of the globe.

  The sensibility is sharply defined but, once again, hard to contain within a modern political frame. Traditionally right-wing issues such as Brussels and farming, for example, have made regular recent appearances – EU Commissioners spattered in slurry, their arms embedded in cows’ sphincters, and in 1992 a memorably quixotic John Major mounted on a dinosaur (from that summer’s hit film Jurassic Park) and tilting feebly at the European flag. Yet in 2000, the year of foot-and-mouth disease, the target was Labour’s pusillanimous failure to repeal Section 28, represented by a stern Gordon Brown spanking a stockinged and suspendered Peter Mandelson over his knee. The motto beneath this tableau, ‘Don’t It Make Your Brown Eye Blue’, was typical in its insouciance, provocatively politically incorrect, but in the service of a defining politically correct cause. If there is any unifying theme in the centrepieces, and indeed in the event as a whole, it is the ridicule of authority, which knows no political favourites. It is a theme that the Cliffe cheerfully turn against themselves: their own officials, often the drunkest members of the crew, proudly sport pompous uniforms decorated with slogans like ‘Chief Official Wanker’.

  The sculptures are designed in tight secrecy by a fireworks committee, and the climax of the procession is the first sight that the Cliffe themselves have had of them. As they are led to their site of execution, and the procession breaks rank to become spectators, attention turns to a scaffolded gantry that stands ten feet high in the foreground of the display. When all preparations are complete, this is mounted by a robed figure bearing crook and mitre, ‘The Archbishop of the Cliffe’, and two accompanying ‘bishops’ in clerical dress, their protective welding-visors both indicating and inviting the ritual to come. Opening an ecclesiastical tome, the ‘Archbishop’ attempts to read a Latin Mass to the crowd over a deafening chorus of boos and chants of ‘Burn the Pope!’; bangers and squibs rain onto the gantry from all sides, until the bishops become the eye of a storm of flashes, bangs and smoke. Through his ordeal by fire, clutching at his mitre, smoke billowing up through the cassocks of his fellow bishops, the ‘Archbishop’ proceeds through a litany – full of topical wit, though inaudible beyond the front row – of charges against Guy Fawkes, the Pope and the Enemies of Bonfire, interrupted by the rhetorical call of ‘What shall we do with him?’ and the ever more emphatic audience response of ‘Burn him!’

  When the hoarse spectators have reached fever pitch and the bishops can endure the assault no longer, the sermon is concluded and the display begins. Guy Fawkes, then the Pope, and finally the effigy of the year, become the centrepieces for a pyrotechnic performance of savage intensity. The scale, of course, is spectacular, but there is a brutality of intent that sets it apart from the usual grand public display. There are the conventional high, blossoming starshells trailing g
old and silver showers, but they are framed by deafening bangs that shudder the ground for minutes on end and fusillades of retina-scorching magnesium flares that seem to rip the sky apart; each display is terminated with extreme prejudice as the centrepiece is detonated, ripped grotesquely limb from limb, its carcass left burning in tatters. It is a display that elicits not the typical response of oohs and aahs; this is rather the full-throated roar of satisfaction vented, a mob burning their enemies on a cold winter night. These days there is irony, to be sure, and a ribald hilarity that must have been present from the beginning; but beating beneath them still is the pulse that characterized the origins of bonfire. As a newspaper report observed more than 150 years ago, ‘there is a strong dash of earnestness in the fun inseparable from this demonstration.’

  Itg seems unlikely that celebrations of the Fifth in Lewes date back in any recognizable form to the Lewes Martyrs, or even to the Gunpowder Plot. Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the events of Bonfire Night are scantily recorded; across England generally the official civic observance became dutiful rather than enthusiastic, a courtly and parliamentary event rather than a popular one. It endured as a public holiday that united the Church, for which it affirmed the establishment against the Catholic threat, and the state, for which it commemorated the Whig triumph of 1688 in securing constitutional liberties. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century, after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, that it began to chime with a new public mood that recognized the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot as a time-honoured rallying point for a new sectarian venom against the assault on ‘English liberties’. In the growing towns and cities it became a night where young men, particularly artisans and labourers, could let off steam – and bangers, crackers and squibs – under a patriotic banner, often with the implicit or explicit support of an anti-Catholic gentry.

  Such was the case in Lewes, where by the late eighteenth century there were warning signs of Bonfire Night’s potential to get seriously out of hand. In 1785 what the Hampshire Chronicle described as ‘the greatest riot perhaps ever known at Lewes’ began when a bonfire was assembled at School Hill in the centre of town, a large crowd of young men stoking it until it reached a ferocity that terrified the local residents. They complained to the magistrate, who read the Riot Act to the crowd and attempted to lead an effort to pull the fire apart; the crowd resisted, scuffles broke out, and the magistrate was knocked down and rolled into the river, accompanied by the ‘firing of rockets, squibs, grenades etc.’ The disorder persisted until midnight, by which time enough officers and Justices of the Peace had been assembled to disperse the rioters. Arresting them, though, was harder: in a pattern that would repeat itself for decades, many of them broke away and melted into the night, while others fought off the authorities to free their comrades before they could be secured and locked up.

  This kind of disorder became widespread across England in the early nineteenth century, as Bonfire Night became one of ever fewer opportunities for the burgeoning ‘lower orders’ to vent wider social frustrations. The conscription and food riots of the Napoleonic Wars had produced new anxieties among the propertied classes about public order, and led to new emergency powers to maintain it; at the same time, the disenfranchised majority had become increasingly politicized by radicals like Tom Paine (who worked in Lewes as an excise officer in the 1770s, and is now the town’s favourite son). As the gentry and leading citizens withdrew their support from the festivities, shadowy and anonymous ‘bonfire gangs’ came to fill the vacuum, collecting subscriptions, coordinating crowds and building bonfires and effigies. Particularly across southern England, the Fifth took on the character of a night of misrule, where masks were worn, dissent vocally expressed, authority figures parodied and their houses targeted with bonfires, tar barrels and rockets.

  While such dissent plainly had a political dimension, it was an awkward fit with the nineteenth century’s emerging political structures. By the 1820s, grass-roots campaigns for political reform – the union movement and, after the 1832 Reform Act, the Chartists – were determinedly shunning civil disobedience in favour of lobbying and peaceful demonstration: rioting, for them, was an unwelcome hangover from the mob violence of the eighteenth century, easily dealt with by the authorities and politically counter-productive. The causes of bonfire, in this context, were unsophisticated, amounting to little more than a right to make mischief: as one newspaper dismissed them, ‘the lower classes absurdly consider the suppression [of bonfire] as an infringement on their rights as Englishmen.’ Bonfire put down its deepest roots in rural market towns, typically in the southern counties, where industrialization, urbanization and working-class politics were at their weakest.

  Nor was the energy of the popular demonstrations easily harnessed by either of the political parties. Their anti-Catholicism and patriotic commitment to Church and king were in the Tory spirit, but their unpredictable violence made them dangerous bedfellows for local grandees, and attempts to co-opt them for overtly political purposes could backfire in ridicule or worse. They also, on occasion, adopted unambiguously Whig causes: in 1831, after the Reform Act had been rebuffed at the first attempt by the House of Lords, the bishops who had voted it down became the year’s most popular bonfire effigies. To the chagrin of politicians, what had become the most popular festival of the year in a huge swathe of England’s heartland, from the Home Counties as far west as Devon, had turned politics itself into one of its most succulent targets.

  In Lewes, the riotous celebrations were by now becoming more ritualized, and taking place on a disturbingly large scale. The shadowy coordinators, their identities frequently concealed with masks and blacked-up faces, were first dubbed ‘Bonfire Boys’ in 1827; in 1832, for the first time, blazing tar barrels were rolled through the streets and set in motion down School Hill, trailing incendiary debris behind them. When police attempted to seize the barrels, the Bonfire Boys turned the chase into a new sport and, in 1834, took to piling the barrels into a huge bonfire outside County Hall. The same year, in nearby Brighton, when the High Constable attempted to suppress the revelry a stone-throwing mob smashed the windows of the hotel where he was staying.

  In Lewes, as elsewhere, the Fifth was exposing and exacerbating an ugly rift that was developing in the town between the emerging middle class – propertied, often Liberal in politics, nonconformist in faith and puritan in inclination – and the agricultural and labouring poor, in their view asserting their traditional rights, covertly supported by the longer-established Tory and Anglican gentry. The struggle for control of the town on the Fifth became ever more hotly debated through the 1840s, and the celebrations ever more daring and dangerous. The flashpoint came in 1846, when ‘disguised persons in several parties and accompanied by a large mob’ opened the evening in now-traditional style by dragging tar barrels through the town to a large conflagration outside County Hall, after which they turned their attention to the house of the local magistrate, Mr Blackman. When Blackman emerged from his house and attempted to arrest one of the ringleaders, ‘he received a blow over the eye from one of the bludgeons which was on the instant raised, and he was felled to the ground’, and ‘carried into the house in a state of insensibility’. The Bonfire Boys allegedly had no idea whether he was alive or dead, and little interest: the bonfires, squibs, rowdy singing and drinking carried on unabated for several hours more.

  This incident was a trigger for the anti-bonfire party to mount what they saw as a long-overdue campaign to curtail the excesses of the Fifth in Lewes. A pamphlet entitled Observations on the Doings in Lewes of the 5th November 1846, signed anonymously by ‘An Old Inhabitant’, fired the first shot in a campaign that would build through 1847 to enlist the editorial support of the Sussex Advertiser and mount a petition to the Magistrates’ Bench. ‘Old Inhabitant’ argued that the ‘disgusting parade of disguises, bludgeon and riot’ should now be consigned to the past. He could not imagine a more ‘disgusting sight’ than ‘a
large body of human beings in a state of savage excitement, slaves to the worst feelings and impulses of which their nature is susceptible’, taking over the town with impunity in disguises that recalled ‘the poison-cup and the stiletto of the Italian bravo’. In his view, the authorities had no choice but to ‘adopt such decisive measures’ as would thwart any ‘unseemly proceedings’ in the future. By September 1847 his sentiments had been echoed in a petition of thirty-two ‘leading inhabitants’, warning the local magistrates that ‘we have great reason to apprehend that such riotous and tumultuous proceedings will be attempted upon the Fifth of November now next ensuing.’

  The debate had bubbled all year, with local newspapers dividing along recognizable party lines: the Liberal Sussex Advertiser calling for the festivities to be suppressed, the Tory Sussex Agricultural Express deploring the excesses, blaming the volume of alcohol consumed and proposing a compromise: that the celebrations be moved perhaps to a less contentious site outside the town. From the Bonfire Boys themselves there had been silence, but few doubted that a show of strength was afoot, and they were to be proved right. At the stroke of midnight on 4 November, the rumbling of tar barrels was heard and a crowd of Bonfire Boys began their procession down the High Street, ‘preceded by a man armed with a pick axe and disguised by a mask, and followed by about eighty others armed with bats and bludgeons, shouting and making an awful uproar’.