Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night Page 7

  Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the advance of ‘the Popish interest’ in early Victorian politics also redirected attention to older religious issues. Conservative ministers took to their pulpits and made sure that the anti-Catholic service for the Fifth of November was vigorously observed. Popular histories revived the story of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Treason. The call in the 1830s to ‘Prefer the religion of the Bible to the blasphemies of the Vatican’ echoed confessional tensions of the seventeenth century. But it is a mark of the diminution of religious conflict that when in 1833 the Houses of Parliament actually burned down, by accident, there was no rush to blame the Catholics, and no explicit association of the disaster with the Gunpowder Plot.

  The re-establishment of a Catholic hierarchy and the revival of papal dignities in England in 1850 triggered a fresh round of Protestant sermons on the ‘errors of popery’ and the ‘aggressions of Rome’. Conservative Anglicans lent support to popular radical opinion, as local and national issues intertwined. Anti-Catholic demonstrators took to the streets on 5 November with placards proclaiming ‘no wafer gods’ and ‘no catholic humbug’. The ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850 sparked firework disturbances at Towcester, Kettering and Northampton. Opposition to the Roman revival produced an elaborate anti-Catholic pageant and bonfire in the cathedral yard at Exeter, where figures of the Pope and his officers were consigned to the flames. Elsewhere in England, ‘the bonfires were double in number and more than double in size those of former years’. Old men remarked that they had never seen such a Fifth of November as that of 1850. Not surprisingly, more Guys were reported in London on Guy Fawkes Night 1850 than in recent memory.

  In this new climate a movement grew to remove rather than to revive the service for 5 November, and with it the obsolete services for 30 January and 29 May. Some liberals found the seventeenth-century language ‘offensive to the feelings of our catholic fellow subjects’, or ‘utterly repugnant to the religious feeling of the present day’. The institutionalized memory, they argued, was divisive and anachronistic. Hard-line conservatives, of course, disagreed. In Dublin, one zealous Protestant even tried to bring an action under the Act of Uniformity against a minister who omitted the special service for 5 November, but neither local magistrates nor the Queen’s Bench in London would take up the case. As the archbishop of Canterbury observed in 1858, the service was ‘irregularly disregarded’ and had ‘fallen into desuetude’.

  During 1858 and 1859 the matter was before Parliament, and Lords and Commons debated the removal of the ‘political’ services that were still enshrined in statute. The speeches reported in Hansard reveal divided opinion on the value of remembering the Fifth of November, but general agreement that the time had come for change. George Hadfield, the Liberal member for Sheffield, found the ancient services ‘offensive to every Christian’, and was astonished that the statutes requiring them ‘should have remained in existence for so many years’. Even the bishop of London acknowledged that the wording of the special prayers was ‘likely to call up feelings of indignation in the breasts of their fellow countrymen’.

  Leading the campaign for repeal, Lord Stanhope

  did not for an instant deny that the deliverance of the sovereign and both houses of parliament from a sudden and cruel attack of conspirators was an act of providential mercy deserving to be held in grateful remembrance, and for which thanks were due to almighty God; nor was he inclined to speak in other terms than those of gratitude for the political and religious benefits which this country derived from the landing of King William III; but he submitted to their lordships that in all questions of this kind the lapse of time was a most important element. No man would think, for example, of celebrating by special thanks the expulsion of the Danes by King Alfred, or the return of Coeur de Lion from captivity.

  The duke of Marlborough was reluctant to see change, and suggested that ‘even if the services themselves were expunged, some memorial ought to be retained in the liturgy of the church of the events therein commemorated’. These events, he insisted,

  were great events, calling for some solemn acknowledgement of gratitude, and [he told the Lords] he should be sorry to see the recollection of those events done away with in the future, and the matter passed over in silence. The particular mode of commemoration enjoined by the acts of parliament might possibly not be suited to the present day, but a mode might have been adopted which would have answered all the required purpose in duly testifying the national gratitude for these great events.

  Finally, the Anniversary Days Observance Act became law in March 1859, and a tradition of two and a half centuries’ duration came to a close. Observance of the Fifth of November was removed from the calendar of the established Church of England, to continue henceforth as an unofficial and secular tradition.

  Much of the vitality of Gunpowder Treason Day from year to year came from its utility as a vehicle for dramatizing current political concerns. The street theatre of placards and processions, crowds and disguises, effigies and bonfires lent itself to the derisive depiction of political figures who had played no part in the original drama of the seventeenth century.

  In 1745, after the Stuart rebellion, the fading anniversary of 5 November was revived by burning effigies of the Pope and the Pretender. In 1785 ‘the greasy rogues’ of London ‘dressed up a tall thin figure and… instead of “pray remember the fifth of November”, the cry was “pray remember Pitt and the shop tax”’. In 1788, it was reported, ‘some arch dogs carried a Charles Fox’ in the same manner as effigies of Guy Fawkes, ‘and exalted him at the bonfire’. In 1792 it was the turn of the duke of Brunswick. The Revolution Society held its annual dinner on 5 November, with toasts to the French Revolution. The date was a popular dining night for Orange lodges. The anti-Catholic agitations of 1850 produced effigies of Pope Pius IX and the new cardinal archbishop of Westminster, along with ‘St Guy the martyr’. The Crimean War years saw burning effigies of Tsar Nicholas on 5 November. Interest in Italian affairs in 1867 produced a pageant of the Pope about to be struck down by Garibaldi on Guy Fawkes Night. The Times reported: ‘In many districts the ritualists shared with the pope the honour of being represented as “guys”.’

  Foreign and imperial affairs brought new figures into the Guy Fawkes pageant. Effigies of the 1870s included Pope Leo XIII, the Tsar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, the Amir of Afghanistan, Araby Pasha and the king of the Zulus. The Irish leader Parnell appeared on the bonfires in 1879. As The Times wryly noted in 1880, many of the ‘guys… had nothing to do with the hero of the Gunpowder Plot, but rather burlesqued the incidents of the present time’. Historical memory gave way to current affairs.

  The beginning of the twentieth century saw the burning of effigies of militant suffragists; and in 1909 the Hampstead bonfire featured a placard representing Lloyd George’s Budget. Later it was the turn of the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler, among other celebrities, to go up in flames. And in the England of the 1980s and 1990s, Mrs Thatcher and some of her ministers have been similarly honoured, alongside diabolized Third World bogey men like Saddam Hussein.

  From the eighteenth century to the present, local animosities

  often substituted an unpopular neighbour for the figure of the Guy. The Somerset diarist James Woodforde recorded on 5 November 1768 that ‘the effigy of Justice Creed was had through the streets of Castle Cary this evening upon the [fire] engine, and then had into the park and burnt in a bonfire immediately before the Justice’s house… the whole parish are against the Justice.’ Victorian worthies who were similarly burned in effigy included local Members of Parliament, an enemy of the Kettering shoemakers, four ‘persons prominent in the Plumstead common agitation’, and the disgraced borough councillors of St Albans who had illegally enclosed land in Sandpit Lane.

  The riotousness of Guy Fawkes Night, especially notorious in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, diminished from the mid-Victorian period as public officials determined to bring the festivities unde
r control. The sale of fireworks was regulated and in some places prohibited. Police and magistrates planned strategies to avoid the worst excesses, contesting with revellers for control of the streets. In 1847 the authorities at Lewes determined to restrain the annual disorder, and brought in extra detachments of police and troops. The result was a series of skirmishes between ‘bonfire boys’ and the constabulary, with some of the tradesmen taking the revellers’ side and others barricading their doors. The authorities at Guild-ford similarly reinforced themselves in 1863 with 160 special constables, 50 dragoons, 150 soldiers and two local corps of rifle volunteers in reserve. ‘Several bands of roughs’ disputed this show of force, but the mayor read the Riot Act (although there was no riot), and constables with drawn truncheons attempted to clear the streets.

  Within a few years this policy of intervention paid off; respectability and decorum began to prevail in this area of Victorian life as in so many others. At Godalming in 1870, The Times reported, ‘the preparations made for the preservation of order were enough to overawe the most determined peace-breakers.’ Guildford and Lewes, formerly famous for their extravagance on Guy Fawkes Night, saw the anniversary pass without incident. At Oxford and Cambridge, where Gunpowder Night violence once pitted town against gown, the proctors and constables worked to prevent serious disturbances. By 1876 it could be claimed that ‘the utmost decorum prevailed’ at Oxford, and the following year ‘the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot passed off very tamely in the metropolis.’ Guy Fawkes Night had been tamed.

  Further changes took place in the late nineteenth century, as the anarchic elements of Guy Fawkes Night gave way to organized entertainment. The middle class returned to the ceremony, and took over. Bonfires and street activities which had once been the work of ‘roughs’ and ‘idle mobs’ now became the planned projects of societies and clubs. Special committees sprang up throughout southern England to mount and to manage the Guy Fawkes celebrations. The ‘principal inhabitants’ who had earlier withdrawn behind their shutters on 5 November now came forth as proud sponsors. Landowners provided special fields for the bonfires, thereby diverting the most dangerous festivity from the centres of towns. The more menacing aspects of the Guy Fawkes tradition were eliminated, and a spectacle that had once been divisive and dangerous was remade in wholesome and benevolent garb. In several towns the aggressive masking and disguising of an earlier generation was channelled into jolly costume parades.

  The Hitchin Bonfire Club organized torchlit parades in which more than 400 masqueraders took part. Dorchester enjoyed a procession of costumed ‘guys’, with music from the town band and a display of fireworks costing £50 – in 1879 the subscribers included Lord Alington and the local MP. At Horsham in 1880

  the festivities took place ‘with the sanction of the Local Board authorities, and under the patronage of most of the chief families of the town and district’. Bridgwater adopted 5 November for an elaborate annual carnival. Patriotic processions featured imperial themes. At Winchester the parade was headed by the city fire brigade, while at Salisbury the bonfire was lit by the mayor.

  Previously scattered activities in London coalesced around the organized parades of the Lewisham Bonfire Society in the south and the Hampstead Bonfire Club in the north. Like their counterpart at Hitchin, these were social and philanthropic associations, reminiscent of medieval confraternities. A ‘novelty’ in 1880, the ‘annual carnival’ at Lewisham quickly became an established tradition. The procession featured bands, fancy dress, the banners of friendly societies and a smiling police escort, but it no longer concluded with a bonfire. On the other side of London the ‘cavalcade’ of the Hampstead Bonfire Society drew some 50,000 spectators to see costumed equestrians, musicians, a representation of Britannia and a grand bonfire on the heath. But the bonfire did not necessarily burn a Guy. By the Edwardian era this carnival had become a fund-raising event with ‘Ye Olde Hampstead Bonfire Club’ (the self-conscious archaism a sure sign of an invented tradition) collecting money for local hospitals.

  The anniversary changed again in the twentieth century, with the triumph of the consumer society. Guy Fawkes Night became ‘Firework Night’ as commercial manufacturers like Brock or Paine stepped up production. The Brock company sold 30 million fireworks in 1908: Paine unloaded almost 500 tons. In 1909 a special set piece was available featuring Dreadnought, a model of the great battleship which ‘explodes with a fiery display’. The Times observed that year that ‘firework parties are becoming quite an institution in the suburban districts’. In 1910 the demand for fireworks was said to be up 25–30 per cent from the previous year. Firework enthusiasm was set aside during the Great War, but resumed in the 1920s, when much of the money-raising activity of children – ‘a penny for the Guy’ – was intended to purchase fireworks. The festivity became increasingly the concern of children – more an amusement than a commemoration – so that a correspondent in 1930 suggested turning the Fifth of November into ‘Children’s play day’. Children’s firework parties, with adult supervision, became a common feature of childhood memories of the 1950s and 1960s. The instruction ‘light the blue touch paper and retire immediately’ still evokes a kaleidoscope of sounds, lights and smells.

  The early twenty-first century has seen further modifications to the tradition, mostly in the direction of safety and control. Fewer children handle fireworks or build bonfires; more attend spectacles put on by charitable or service organizations. With paid admission, spectator areas and a narrated programme, the fireworks ‘show’ has increasingly replaced the bonfire party. The rockets go higher and burst with more colour, but they have less and less to do with memories of the Fifth of November. The story of Gunpowder Treason, once taught from the pulpit and revenged in the streets, is now a history lesson in schools. Furthermore, the expensive displays of fireworks put on to celebrate royal and patriotic occasions have in recent years stolen the thunder of the Fifth of November. It might be observed that Guy Fawkes Night is finally declining, having lost its connection with politics and religion. But we have heard that many times before.

  From being a matter of life and death that threatened ‘the martyrdom of the kingdom’ the Gunpowder Plot had been transformed into (The Times’s phrase) ‘an annual jest’. Over 400 years it has been associated with a creative festive tradition, with shifting sponsorship, varying intensity and periodic re-infusions of meaning. As a late Stuart almanac put it, ‘what ere’s forgot, the memory of the Powder Plot will hardly die’. Shaped and reshaped by social, religious and political currents, the anniversary of the Fifth of November has proved remarkably hardy and remarkably versatile. It has endured as a cultural phenomenon because of its mutability, because English society has repeatedly reinfused it with fresh meanings.

  It appears, then, that the long history of the Fifth of November is not one of simple survival or customary continuity, but rather one of recurrent reconstruction, remaking and adaptation to changing concerns. The calendar provided the grid, the anniversary supplied the occasion, but its meaning, its social location and its religious, political and cultural implications have repeatedly been subject to change. Even now, we remember, remember. But part of the task of history is to keep memory honest.

  One final custom deserves mention. The practice of searching the cellars at Westminster, re-enacting the vigilance that discovered Guy Fawkes in 1605, is believed to date from the 1690s when a second Gunpowder Plot was feared. This custom has continued as a quaint anachronism, a parliamentary folly, involving lamplit searches (ignoring the electricity), and concluding with cakes and wine for the Beefeaters. In 1812 The Times reported the ritual searching of the cellars at Westminster before the opening of Parliament. The Lord High Chamberlain, the Usher of the Black Rod, a Yeoman Usher and a dozen Yeomen of the Guard conducted their search, ‘according to custom, since the days of Guy Faux’. The last cellar they came to was occupied by a wine-merchant, so ‘some of the inspectors tasted the contents of the pipes, to ascertain that they d
id not contain gunpowder.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Popes and Guys and Anti-Catholicism

  JUSTIN CHAMPION

  Charm! Song! And Show! A murder and a Ghost!

  We know not what you desire or hope

  To please you more, but burning of a Pope.

  John Dryden

  Bonfire Night is a despicable relic of a culture that commended, in the name of Christian duty, the persecution of religious minorities, the burning of witches and the ritual desecration of suicides. Its persistence in modern culture is unacceptable: that such a supposedly festive ritual, celebrating the immolation of an individual, has been exploited as a political device which stigmatizes a religious minority within the broader community makes it even more obscene. The fact that each year a number of children suffer accidental mutilation, and sometimes even death, through innocently participating in such a gruesome event is still bewildering to many. The tenacity of the ritual in the twenty-first century is a relic of an earlier and more brutal age. Far from commemorating the escape of the Protestant political elite from destruction, to many (even today) it is a residual act of anti-Catholic hatred that still reveals the essentially Protestant foundations of modern political culture in the United Kingdom. Protestant communities in Northern Ireland have successfully reinvented and invigorated festive, and not so festive, displays of historical memory with the marching season and the communal activities remembering the godly defiance of the apprentice boys at the siege of Derry. Few within the broader public on the ‘mainland’ would recognize or acknowledge that, from the perspective of the Roman Catholic minority in England, Bonfire Night may have had as much oppressive force as much of the semi-militaristic display of the Orange marching bands. Recovering the reactions of Roman Catholic minorities to public memorials like Bonfire Night has rarely been attempted.