Gunpowder Plots_A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night Read online

  Even today it is not uncommon for many to remember Guy Fawkes Night not as a moment of collective celebration but as one of exclusion. When parents refuse invitations to Guy Fawkes parties – they may be overly sensitive to cultural traditions, but the seven or eight year old, unaware of the burdens of memory, is acutely conscious of the feeling of being excluded from the fun. Neighbours caution certain families of the potential ‘difficulties’ of their presence. The mimicry of burning a condemned criminal is itself a vicious act, another remnant of the brutality of the pre-modern state – but an act liable to spill over into more contemporary combustion.

  At a time when liberal sensitivities are rightly outraged at the inhumane treatment meted out in the name of ‘freedom’ at Guantánamo Bay, it is worth recalling the routine nature of dismemberment and butchery fundamental to the display of state power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It might also be remembered that Irish Roman Catholic communities both in Ireland and on the ‘mainland’ have borne the brunt of paramilitary and judicial punishment. While it is difficult to estimate the total number of Roman Catholics who suffered persecution and death across the period, there are glimpses of the cruelty in moments of political and military crisis. Hundreds of priests were executed, thousands of families were reduced to penury and poverty through fines and imprisonment. The

  most brutal atrocities are associated with the wars in Ireland in the 1640s and the early 1690s. One contemporary, the statistician William Petty, writing in the 1670s, estimated that over half a million Catholics (about 41 per cent of the entire Irish population) perished one way or another in the military conflict in Ireland in the 1640s and 1650s. Malnutrition, battle, siege, assassination and state execution were routine means of dispatch.

  This treatment, which could be regarded as ethnic cleansing, was perpetuated in the eighteenth century: as late as 1798, in quelling the Irish rebellion, it was reported that 30,000 civilians were killed. The Protestant mind of the period regarded such atrocity as God’s work: the extermination of Irish papists was a providential duty – it was striking at the forces of Antichrist. Some of the more extreme ‘hot’ Protestant views can be seen in Oliver Cromwell’s declaration in 1650 to the Catholic clergy: ‘you are part of Antichrist, whose Kingdom the Scriptures so expressly speaks should be laid in blood… and ere it be long, you must all of you have blood to drink’. The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, for example, were explicitly celebrated as ‘just judgements and righteous justice’. Many, in England, have forgotten these terrors. But just as the papacy in 1970 was still conferring sainthood on Catholic victims of the Popish Plot, so Catholic cultural memory is sensitized to the significance of Bonfire Night. Despite achieving a measure of emancipation in the nineteenth century, the experience of Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has not been a happy one. By placing the memory of such atrocity so prominently in our mind’s eye it may be possible to recognize that Guy Fawkes’s end is a strange and violent act to remember. In our modern pluralist age we are encouraged to exercise tolerance towards other faiths and religious rituals; there are, however, moments when the bare bones of earlier ages puncture the fabric of modernity – Bonfire Night is one of those moments.

  For many Roman Catholics, even today, Bonfire Night prompts painful collective memories of persecution, punishment and martyrdom. As good citizens today merrily set fire to effigies of Guy Fawkes, they might usefully pause to consider the suffering and pain which Catholic communities in England, Scotland and Ireland have experienced over the course of the last four centuries. English Protestant society was a persecuting culture. The threat of Catholic subversion or military invasion in the Elizabethan period had seen the development of legislation which subjected Roman Catholics to penalties and punishments for practising their faith, for not conforming to the doctrine and liturgy of the established Church and for refusing to take oaths of political loyalty to the sovereign. After the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570, Roman Catholics by default became political subversives, since the thrust of the Papal Bull was to declare Elizabeth a heretic: as every good Catholic understood, it was not possible to obey, or keep faithful promises, with such a heretic. Fines, deprivations, imprisonment and executions were the instruments of anti-Catholic policy.

  Loyal Roman Catholics were in a classic bind – their religious conscience insisted upon conformity to the counsel of the Pope; their political loyalty may have been to their sovereign. Obeying two authorities was impossible: while some English Catholics developed a brand of moral casuistry (the most obvious remnant of this today is the practice of crossing one’s fingers when being less than straightforward with the truth) that allowed them to conform publicly while maintaining religious integrity in the privacy of the domestic sphere. The so-called anti-recusancy penal laws (those who refused to take the Anglican communion or to swear oaths of obligation were known as recusants) aimed to bring Catholic priests and lay people to a conformity: those who refused were deprived of their civil rights, their property, and ultimately their lives.

  Statutes of Supremacy and Uniformity, passed and revised during the Elizabethan settlement, laid the foundations for subsequent treatment of every Catholic dissident in the seventeenth century. Acknowledging the spiritual authority of the Pope became a crime punished by confiscation, fine and imprisonment. Serial offenders were liable to the charge of high treason: punishment in this case was hanging, drawing and quartering. The families of such criminals were also punished: heirs were incapable of inheriting honours and offices; all property was forfeited to the Crown. Any who refused oaths of loyalty to the Crown were subjected to the same penalties. At a more routine level, the Act of Uniformity was concerned with religious conformity: clergymen and lay people were fined (12d.) each time they missed church services. These sorts of fine cumulatively destroyed the economic welfare of individual families and impoverished the Catholic community. The great diaspora of Irish Catholics to the New World was not the product of adventure and opportunity, but of brutal persecution.

  After the excommunication of the queen, the most severe statutes tightened up the punishments for those who were disloyal: it was high treason for anyone to be ‘reconciled’ to Catholicism. Again, potentially massive fines, lengthy imprisonment and possible death might be imposed for repeated worship at Catholic Masses. The fine for not attending Anglican service was raised to £20 a month – a huge sum in today’s terms (an average income for a farmer might be £30–£40 a year!). Some Acts specifically stigmatized clergymen and seminary priests: the Jesuits were particularly singled out as the most insidious group, and consequently suffered martyrdom in large numbers. According to some accounts, more than 150 Catholics died on

  the scaffold between 1581 and 1603. As we shall see, these numbers are a fraction of those who died in the following century.

  The thrust of the many anti-popish laws during the period before and after the Plot was to define Catholics as ‘rebellious and traitorous subjects’. This legislative culture provided the immediate context for the anxieties and brutality that the Gunpowder Plot provoked. James I, far from offering tenderness to Catholics, explicitly endorsed and reinforced earlier laws: new oaths of allegiance and associated statutes imposed ever heavier fines, confiscations, longer imprisonments and cruel punishments. Catholic communities were subject to discipline in their lives, religion and property: they were banned from all forms of public service (so they could not legally be lawyers or doctors, hold civil offices, or act in any military capacity). New Acts along similar lines were passed in the 1670s and after 1689. The threat of Catholic support for the deposed Stuart monarchy in the form of a Jacobite invasion meant that even in the eighteenth century penalties were increased. For example, the most routine form of discrimination was the imposition of land tax at double rate. Imagine the government today insisting that all Muslims must pay twice the rate of income tax.

  These legal instruments p
rovided a complete means for discrimination against the Catholic community. While it is clear that enforcement in England, Scotland and Ireland across the period was sporadic and regional – times of political crisis were the usual prompt for fierce implementation, as we shall see – it is also clear that many of these laws persisted on the statute books into the nineteenth century. In the case of Ireland, it should also be remembered that there was an intensification of persecution after 1689: the triumph of ‘King Billy’ empowered the Protestant ascendancy to attempt to destroy the Catholic faith by measures of forced conversion. The constitutional legislation forbidding Catholic accession to the throne is still established law.

  Given the increasing public sensitivity about criticism and hostility towards other people’s religious belief, it is surprising that Bonfire Night still persists as a supposedly collective moment of cultural commemoration. Remnants of the once dominant anti-Catholic prejudices of the establishment are still evident when a new Minister of State for Education is ‘exposed’ as a member of a Roman Catholic secret society. Catholics in public politics are still fair game, where Jews and Muslims are not. Treatment of ‘other’ religions is increasingly sensitive in the public media: the case of Roman Catholicism still seems to be a legitimate target. The constitutional insistence that a British monarch should not be allowed to marry a Catholic is a powerful vestige of the Protestant foundations of our modern political culture – Bonfire Night is a powerful moment for subliminally confirming these prejudices.

  Contrary to popular belief, effigies of Guy Fawkes only started to be burned on bonfires in the eighteenth century. Traditionally, on seventeenth-century bonfires it was elaborate models of the Pope and his co-conspirators that were designed for destruction. Sometimes such effigies were paraded around the streets and pelted with mud and ordure; at other times cats were trapped – their howls of pain meant to signify the wailing of the Whore of Babylon. Contemporary prints of some of the events certainly suggest a very sophisticated ritual – contemporaries describe models of the Pope processing to the great bonfire accompanied by Jesuitical plotters and devils: there were ‘mighty bonfires and ye burning of a most costly pope, caryed by four persons in divers habits, and ye effigies of 2 divells whispering in his eares, his belly filled full of live catts who squawled most hideously’.

  Contemporary engravings displayed the pageant of satire against the Catholic faith and a prediction of future plots against Protestantism – the processio Romana included priests, friars, bishops, cardinals armed to the teeth. As the verses on the Jesuit float noted, ‘It is our faith, our principle, our trade/ Through purple floods of Monarch’s blood to wade/To burn, destroy, confound, Assassin kill/A Jesuit can do nothing but what’s ill’. Such public burnings, sometimes accompanied by the destruction of confiscated Catholic property (relics, vestments, prayer books), were enormously popular – it is estimated that at one such burning in 1679 more than 200,000 watched the pyre at Temple Bar in London. While it is difficult to recover the experience of repression the Roman Catholic minorities suffered, their victimhood was publicly manifest in the executions, lynchings, imprisonment, fines and political exclusion they experienced into the nineteenth century. Evident too is the powerful political instrument the repression of ‘popery’ delivered into the hands of those who held the reins of national government.

  The image of the popish plotter dominated both print and visual culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A work which combines both media, The Protestants Vade Mecum, or Popery Display’d in its proper colours, in Thirty Emblems, lively representing all the Jesuitical Plots against this nation (1680), takes great care to present a persuasive and illustrated narrative of the ‘hellish designe’ of popery against the true religion, each image confirmed with an appropriate scriptural reference. Starting with an emblem of Jesuits plotting against Henry VIII, the book describes the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as punctuated by popish plots – the persecution of Bloody Mary, the Armada conspiracy, the Gunpowder Plot (neatly illustrated with an extract from Job (24:16): ‘In the dark they dig through houses, which they had marked for themselves in the daytime; they know not the light’),

  the murder of Charles I, the burning of London, are all linked in a crescendo of conspiracy. The last seventeen emblems deliver a detailed narrative of the ongoing Popish Plot exposed by Titus Oates. Visual narratives of plots were also produced in other forms – playing cards exposed the main players and vilified the guilty: the Gunpowder Plot and the Popish Plot of 1678 both inspired the equivalent of strip cartoons to show the reality of the conspiracies. These all fomented a politics of fear: Protestant communities were anxious that popish atrocity was imminent; Roman Catholics were the constant target of public discipline and exclusion.

  The identification of Roman Catholics, more specifically Jesuits, as a persisting and devious fifth column ever ready to destroy true religion was also a staple element in many of the political engravings of the period. In one of the most controversial pieces – ‘A project of a Popish successor displayed by hell bred cruelty, popish villainy, strange divinity, intended slavery, old English misery’ – the central figure is half-Irish Catholic, half-devil (complete with cloven hoof and horned head). With one hand the figure (trampling with one foot on skulls, with the other on the crown) sets light to faggots that will burn Protestant martyrs, while a sanctified trumpet blows flames that kindle fires in London and Westminster. In the background, clergymen, under the whip of another horned and winged devil, drive the Church towards Rome.

  The continuity of these images of Jesuitical conspirators, inspired by devils, aiming to overturn the Protestant state can be seen in the powerful engraving prepared for Oliver Cromwell (in the late 1650s) and adapted for the reign of William III in the 1690s. The ‘Embleme of Englands Distraction’ represents the figures of Cromwell and William bringing freedom and happiness to England; the two pillars of Church and state support a godly community, with the eye of providence, the dove of peace and the angel of fame looking benignly on. In the background, a divine wind steers the ship of state between Scylla and Charybdis. Both figures trample underfoot the Whore of Babylon and the many-headed Hydra of error. In the bottom-right-hand corner, hidden from the view of the ploughmen and agricultural labourers, papists set about undermining the foundations of the pillars of the state with pickaxes, while another applies the bellows to the lighted fuse leading to barrels of gunpowder – in the foreground, Jesuits sanctify these conspiratorial actions. These images of plotters, arsonists and assassins haunted the political landscape of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society.

  The legacy of the Gunpowder Plot shaped popular and elite attitudes to political and religious crisis. The fear of real, and imagined, Roman Catholics, even if they were a minority, was rendered more dangerous by perceptions of international conspiracy. Whether they were colluding with the Spanish, French or Irish, the memory of the Gunpowder Plot delivered a template for understanding subsequent political crisis. The fear of popery became a cultural force capable of being mobilized not simply by the government, but even sometimes against the government.

  Writing in 1679, the radical pamphleteer Charles Blount described the bloody spectacle he insisted it had been, ‘the last time Popery reigned amongst us’:

  First, imagine you see the whole town in flames… at the same instant, fancy amongst the distracted crowd you behold troops of Papists ravishing your wives and daughters, dashing your little children’s brains out against the walls, plundering your houses and cutting your own throats… Then represent to yourselves the Tower of London playing off its cannon, and battering down your houses about your ears. Also, casting your eye towards Smithfield, imagine you see your

  father, or your mother, or some of your nearest and dearest relations, tied to a stake in the midst of flames, when with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven, they cry out to God for whose cause they die.

  Seventeenth-century English,
Irish, Welsh and Scottish men, women and children lived their lives in the perpetual fear that the next Popish Plot would be successful: the eternal vigilance of the watchful, aided by providential protection, was all that saved the godly city from the ‘black crew of papists’. The dark plot inspired by the wiles of the Roman Antichrist was potentially to manifest itself in assassination, treason, arson, rape and massacre. There was, as the single-page broadside The pedigree of Popery; or the genealogie of antichrist (1688) asserted, a historical and logical connection between the devil and the rule of popery – carnal policy and the mystery of iniquity had created the Jesuits, who had in turn inspired the monsters of ‘Atheism, tyranny, treason, assassination, perjury, inquisition, massacre, masquerade and open popery, City burning…’, the list goes on and on before concluding: ‘and all kinds of abominations, which walking abroad in a dress of religion and dissimulation, complete the whole train of Antichrist’. The evidence of the Gunpowder Plot was a providentially exposed tip of a much deeper and perdurable conspiracy: seventeenth-century Protestants were convinced that behind every political difficulty or religious corruption lay ‘popish’ subterfuge.

  The vision of the triumph of popery laid a political foundation for stigmatizing any oppositional milieu. Anti-popery, inspired by the revelation of the near-miss of 1605, provided propaganda which dwarfs the effectiveness of the anti-communist scares of McCarthyite America, or even the ‘war on terrorism’ today. Anxiously conjuring up powerful images of the downfall of Protestant civilization consequent on the restoration of Roman Catholicism, Blount went on to describe how ‘Beautiful

  Churches, erected for the true worship of God’ would be ‘abused and turned into idolatrous temples, to the dishonour of Christ, [and] scandal of religion’. ‘Our apparent ruin stands at hand,’ he lamented, ‘the sword already hangs over our heads, and seems to be supported by no stronger force than that of a single hair, his Majesty’s life.’ If anything should happen to Charles II, ‘let no other noise be heard among you but that of arm, arm to revenge your sovereign’s death.’