Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night Read online

  At quite a different level, that of matrimonial alliances, one of the French princes was an obvious husband for the new Queen Elizabeth, since the question of Henri’s eldest son and the then princess had already been discussed favourably in the lifetime of her father. James had boasted to the French ambassador that his ‘Bessy’ was already quite enamoured of the dauphin’s portrait. (Elizabeth II, in her revolutionized new life, would at least have been able to comfort herself with that memory.) There had also been some question of a double marriage, despite the difference in religion, with Prince Henry marrying the eldest daughter of France; during his brief lifetime Henry had promised his beloved sister that he would not consent to this unless she duly became dauphiness. Marie de Médicis and Henri IV had three sons in all, and if marrying the dauphin (the future Louis XIII) to the queen of England was now considered altogether too ambitious a project, a combination of the two thrones likely to enrage European opinion, then the conventional route would be to marry a younger French prince to Elizabeth II (as the duc d’Alençon had been suggested as a bridegroom for her great predecessor).

  While this prospect of an Anglo-French closeness is merely sketched in, it would be a conciliatory and practical route for the new government to take. France (and Henri IV) had plenty of understanding of the problem of religious minorities with its sizeable Huguenot population, to which Henri had once belonged. All of this is to suggest that the frightful atrocity – as it would have been – of an explosion killing off most of the English establishment would not in fact have resulted in a foreign invasion. After all, who would have invaded and to what end? On the contrary, the great powers, as great powers always have, would have searched for an accommodation which was to their own advantage.

  It remains to hope that the imaginary reign of Queen Elizabeth II would have been marked by more tolerance towards the Puritan dissident sects than that of the first Elizabeth towards the Catholics. Certainly the young Elizabeth Stuart would have made an excellent queen, with her intelligence, charm and sense of ceremonial which she had already displayed at the tender age of nine. In real life, she has been known to history as the Winter Queen, or Elizabeth of Bohemia, from the short-lived reign there of her husband Frederick, prince of the Palatine. In the adversities which followed the rapid dispossession of the young couple, Elizabeth always displayed remarkable strength of character. She was also blessed with remarkable fertility, giving birth to a huge and vigorous family of thirteen children including the soldier prince Rupert of the Rhine and the princess Sophia whose descendants, the Hanoverians, still sit today on the British throne. While one cannot extrapolate the course of one marriage with a completely different man from another, there is reason to hope that the Anglo-French marriage of Elizabeth and a Bourbon prince would have resulted in a similar proliferation of heirs.

  That is the optimistic prognosis to the success of the Gunpowder Plot. Alternatively one could argue more pessimistically that there is an inexorable beat to the march of history. With religious strife continuing in England between Catholics and High Church Anglicans, and Puritans, coupled with the (legitimate) dynastic claims to the English throne of the young Scottish king, Charles, one can easily envisage hostilities between the two countries escalating. There might have been a war in, say, 1639 (the date in real life of the first Anglo-Scottish so-called Bishops’ war)… Perhaps after all fate is not so easily outwitted. Let us go further and imagine King Charles captured, tried, and the warrant for his execution signed by his unwilling – but in the end royally ruthless – sister, Queen Elizabeth II, on 30 January 1649…

  And the rhyme the children would sing around the bonfire?

  Please to remember the Fifth of November,

  Gunpowder Freedom and Plot.

  We know no reason why Gunpowder Freedom

  Should ever be forgot.

  Of course they ask for a penny for (King) Jamie, not the Guy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Four Hundred Years of Festivities

  DAVID CRESSY

  Unlike new nations that celebrate their independence, or old nations that commemorate their revolutions, the English observe no national anniversary to focus and express their patriotism. St George’s Day is virtually meaningless; the queen’s birthday has limited appeal; and none of the great national victories, from Agincourt to the Armada, from Trafalgar to the Battle of Britain, operates in the calendar or in consciousness like the Fourth of July in America or the Fourteenth of July in France. Much of the festive energy available for such occasions has been devoted, instead, to commemorations of the Fifth of November.

  Of all historical providences engrained in the memory of English Protestants, the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot on the eve of 5 November 1605 was the most enduring. Other events of the Tudor and Stuart period may have been more important, but the story of Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up king and Parliament with gunpowder was most widely and systematically remembered. The annual celebration of its defeat enlivened autumns from the Jacobean period to the Victorian. In an attenuated form we remember it still.

  Everyone raised in England knows the rhyme, ‘Please to remember the Fifth of November,/Gunpowder Treason and Plot. We know no reason why Gunpowder Treason/Should ever be forgot.’ And an older generation may recall the more aggressive alternative, ‘Penny for the Guy,/Hit him in the eye,/Stick him up

  a lamp-post [or chimney]/And there let him die.’ For 400 years the English have commemorated the unsuccessful attempt by Guy Fawkes and his associates to blow up the Houses of Parliament. And in the twenty-first century we still celebrate Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night with fireworks and bonfires, ritualized begging, charitable collecting, costuming, masking, mischief, the burning of effigies and the recitation of doggerel verse. The character of the celebration may have shifted from religious exaltation to rowdy disturbances, from ruffians’ activity to quaint English custom, but the commemorative action endures.

  A series of questions springs to mind, and this essay begins to explore some of them. Why is the only annual firework celebration in the English popular calendar associated with the collapse of a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic conspiracy? What does the commemoration mean, and what different meanings have attached to it in the past? What kind of memory has been perpetuated, through what processes and for what purposes? What was the role played by Church and state, political parties and radical groups, newspapers and community organizations, in orchestrating and interpreting the celebration? When did the various names for the anniversary – ‘Gunpowder Treason Day’, ‘Guy Fawkes Night’, ‘Firework Night’, etc. – come into use, and what cultural and political freight did they carry? How was a highly charged national Protestant calendrical memory created in the seventeenth century, and how has it been sustained, manipulated, altered and appropriated, between the Jacobean period and the present? How deeply embedded was the memory of 1605, and to what degree were the commemorations self-consciously ‘kept up’? To what extent did the Gunpowder Plot commemoration create a common and cohesive festival that gave unity to English popular culture, and to what degree was it used, by contrast, to express sectional, partisan, political, social and confessional antagonisms? Was it, in its Victorian manifestation, an exclusively local opportunity for a rough plebeian charivari, or was it still influenced by national debates about politics and religion? Whose festival was it, and where is it situated in the interplay between elite and popular cultures?

  Much speculative nonsense has been written about the bonfire traditions that developed around the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November. Folklorists, anthropologists and historians have often claimed that Guy Fawkes Night is a secular replacement of the ancient Celtic and Nordic fire festivals of Samhain or nod-fyr (need-fire). The medieval Church absorbed these pagan festivals and transformed them into the Christian holy days of the Eve of All-Hallows (Hallowe’en) and All Souls’ Day. But much of the pre-Christian meaning is said to have lingered in an attenuated form. B
esides its nominal religious content, the occasion stood out as a harvest festival and a marker of the end of summer, when there might be debris or surplus materials to burn. Bonfires were lit, it is believed, to strengthen the power of the waning sun. With the decay of All-Hallows in England after the Reformation, the argument continues, the people found it convenient to transfer their festivity (and their fires) to the newly appointed Gunpowder Treason Day.

  The folkloric theory, set forth under the influence of Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, was that ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ exemplified ‘the recrudescence of old customs in modern shapes’. It was ‘a decadent survival’ with ‘maimed rites’ of an ancient agricultural festival that was taken over for ‘ecclesiastico-political’ purposes in the seventeenth century. Modern celebrations of the Fifth of November in South Yorkshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire are supposedly linked to ‘an old feast held in honour of the Scandinavian god Thor’. Some folklorists have even suggested that the burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy was ‘the commemoration of a pre-Christian human sacrifice’, a remnant of an ancient primitive religion.

  The first part of the story is doubtless true. Given the propensity in human culture to adapt existing materials, the claim that an ancient autumn festival lies behind the Christian observances of All-Hallows has strong plausibility. But there is no historical evidence to support the notion that Guy Fawkes Night shares these origins. The choice of 5 November for Gunpowder Treason Day comes from the timing of the opening of Parliament and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, and had nothing to do with the continuing observance of ancient fire festivals. There is barely a flicker of evidence for autumn fires in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century; and although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers could point to rustic practices involving ritual fires at this time of year, the evidence is unclear as to whether these were survival, revival or invention. Further suspicions are aroused by the observation that most of these bonfires were reported from the Celtic fringe or the north and west, whereas the Guy Fawkes–Gunpowder Plot commemorations took strongest root in the south and east.

  It is, of course, possible that the Gunpowder Treason observances triggered a synapse in the English folk memory, and that they may have sounded echoes of a lost or vestigial tradition. But without evidence we cannot support this conclusion. It is more likely that the 5 November bonfires involved the application of an established festive form (the celebratory bonfire) to a new festive occasion sponsored by the state. The burning of effigies (of popes and devils, not of Guy Fawkes) was unknown to the first generation of the Stuart era and was rare before the 1670s; it owes nothing to a putative heritage of human sacrifices. The origins of the festival can be found in the 1606 Act of Parliament, and in the Elizabethan and Jacobean tradition of politicized bell-ringing and celebration. European Renaissance societies lit bonfires as feux de joi, to celebrate royal births and marriages, victories and homecomings. They lit them too at midsummer, at midwinter and on holy days, as expressions of joy and gratulation. Protestant England adapted this custom to its particular religious and dynastic celebrations.

  In 1605 a group of Catholic gentlemen hatched a desperate plot to kill King James and to overthrow the Protestant regime. The government learned of the plot, and found Guy Fawkes – the man with the match – in the cellars at Westminster with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. The conspirators were rounded up, tortured and executed. All credit for the discovery was given to God. Parliament passed ‘An act for a public thanksgiving to Almighty God every year on the fifth day of November… to the end this unfained thankfulness may never be forgotten, but be had in perpetual remembrance’. This is one of the earliest examples of legislated memory, and it provided a model for subsequent acts of commemoration.

  The preamble to the legislation lays out the official interpretation:

  Forasmuch as almighty God hath in all ages showed his power and mercy in the miraculous and gracious deliverance of his church, and in the protection of religious kings and states, and that no nation of the earth hath been blessed with greater benefit than this kingdom now enjoyeth, having the true and free profession of the gospel under our most gracious sovereign lord King James, the most great learned and religious king that ever reigned therein, enriched with a most hopeful and plentiful progeny proceeding out of his royal loins promising continuance of this happiness and profession to all posterity: the which many malignant and devilish papists, Jesuits, and seminary priests much envying and fearing, conspired most horribly, when the king’s most excellent majesty, the queen, the prince, and the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, should have been assembled in the upper house of Parliament upon the fifth day of November in the year of our lord 1605 suddenly to have blown up the said whole house with gunpowder; an invention so inhuman, barbarous and cruel, as the like was never before heard of.

  Special prayers were written, appealing to the ‘Lord, who didst this day discover the snares of death that were laid for us, and didst wonderfully deliver us from the same, be thou still our mighty protector, and scatter our enemies that delight in blood. Infatuate and defeat their counsels, abate their pride, assuage their malice, and counfound their devices.’ Most parishes purchased the Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to be used yearly upon the Fifth day of November: For the happy Deliuerance of the King, and the Three Estates of the Realm, from the most Traiterous and bloody intended Massacre by Gun-powder. These anti-Catholic sentiments – a curse as much as a prayer – remained in the Church of England service book until 1859.

  To Jacobean divines the discovery of the plot was a wonderful providence, a confirmation of God’s covenant with England and an endorsement of the Protestant Stuart dynasty. Remembering it helped to solidify their sense of the English as a chosen people. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes preached at court on the first anniversary, ‘this day of ours, this fifth of November, a day of God’s making… is the Scripture fulfilled in our ears… the destroyer passed over our dwellings this day. It is our Passover, it is our Purim.’ It was also an occasion for anti-Catholic vindictiveness and patriotic merry-making. As far as Church and state were concerned, the Gunpowder Plot should be remembered for ever.

  The physician Francis Herring’s remarks were typical: ‘The Powder-treason, that monstrous birth of the Romish harlot, cannot be forgotten without great impiety and injury to ourselves… We shall be guilty of horrible ingratitude, the foulest of all vices, if we do not embrace all means of perpetuating the memory of so great, so gracious, and wonderful a preservation.’ The plot represented ‘the quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach and stain of human malice and cruelty, not to be parallelled among the savage Turks, the barbarous Indians, nor, as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals’. Latin poets like John Milton punned on the quintessence of cruelty, ‘in quintum Novembris’.

  George Carleton, James I’s bishop of Chichester, explained the diabolical comprehensiveness of the Gunpowder plotters.

  Their hellish device was at one blow to root out religion, to destroy the state, the father of our country, the mother of our country, the olive branches the hopeful succession of our king, the reverend clergy, the honorable nobility, the faithful councillors, the grave judges, the greatest part of our knights and gentry, the choicest burgesses, the officers of the crown, council, signet, seals, and other seats of judgement, the learned lawyers, with an infinite number of common people, the hall of justice, the houses of parliament, the church used for the coronation of our kings, the monuments of our former princes, all records of parliament, and of every particular man’s right, with great number of charters, and other things of this nature, all these things had the devil by his agents devised at one secret blow to destroy.

  Their failure was a cause for perpetual rejoicing. Almanacs, histories, litanies and sermons, as well as the ritual celebration of bonfires and bells, helped imprint the memory of the Gunpowder Plot on the English popular consciousness. The commemoration was an act of loyalt
y as well as piety, with national, dynastic and religious connotations. Many parishes heard sermons on 5 November, and many more augmented the commemoration with public drinking or solemn processions. In some towns, such as Canterbury and Norwich, the celebration of the Fifth of November displayed much of the festive energy that before the Reformation had been reserved for saints’ days. The anniversary became a day of indulgence, of drinking and festivity as well as worship and meditation, even though it was never an official day of absence from work.

  After 1618 renewed concerns about Catholicism, anxieties about James’s pro-Spanish foreign policy and alarm that international Protestantism was in retreat led to sermons calling for greater solemnity and more profound thanksgiving each 5 November. Radical Puritans like Thomas Hooker and moderate episcopalians like George Carleton agreed on the significance of the Fifth of November and the duty of holding it in memory. The opening of Charles I’s reign and the renewal of hostilities with Spain saw a remarkable unity among English Protestants which became especially manifest on Gunpowder Treason Day. Parish observances, both festive and solemn, united centre and localities, court and country, in a common patriotic occasion.

  But the Gunpowder Treason anniversary soon lost its unifying character and took on an increasingly partisan tone. In the 1630s Charles I, married to a Catholic, found the anti-papist bonfires distasteful, and sought to muffle the commemoration. The Arminian ceremonialists who rose in the Church preferred the old calendar of saints’ days to the newer cycle of Protestant deliverances. All of this – plus restored altars, slack sabbaths, and rigid discipline – threw Puritan preachers on to the defensive, and some of them retaliated by re-emphasizing and re-interpreting the Fifth of November. Radicals like the London minister Henry Burton used the anniversary to challenge what they saw as creeping popery, and to stress the need for further reformation.