The Real Story of Bonfire Night

Over 400 years on from the failure of the event we know today as the 'Gunpowder Plot', the 5th of November is still a key date in the British calendar.

According to Google Trends, it’s most popularly known as ‘Bonfire Night’ rather than ‘Fireworks Night’ or ‘Guy Fawkes Night'. And even though Halloween might have overtaken it as our most popular autumn festival, it doesn’t show any signs of disappearing just yet.

Every year in the first really long dark nights of autumn – and after the trick-or-treaters have come crashing down from their sugar highs – the skies above our villages, towns and cities are lit up with fireworks. Children crane their necks to marvel at the sparkling, whooshing displays of light and colour, and our pets cower behind the sofas as the air cracks with the bangs and snaps of expensive pyrotechnics. In fact in 2017 alone, £155m was spent on fireworks for the celebrations, according to Mintel.

But why do we still celebrate a failed religious plot from four centuries ago with an annual festival of fireworks? Why is Guy Fawkes – who wasn’t even the plot’s mastermind – one of the most infamous figures in English history? And is there anything else we should remember, remember when we celebrate the 5th of November?

_{Image: Guy Fawkes night © Sally and Richard Greenhill and Alamy Images}

Background to the Gunpowder Plot

Before the 16th century, like its European neighbours, England was an unquestionably Roman Catholic country.

Almost everyone, from the monarch to ordinary men and women, looked to the pope as Christ’s ultimate representative on earth. Anyone who questioned the teachings or practices of the established Church ran the risk of being condemned as a heretic. Even translating the bible, or any other religious text from Latin, into English was seen as an outrageously radical act.

The dominance of the pope and the Roman Catholic Church came under increasing political and theological attack during the 16th century, a process which culminated in a movement now known as the Reformation. Protestantism – a form of Christianity which rejected various Roman Catholic doctrines – rapidly gained ground across northern Europe.

At first Henry VIII, England’s king from 1509 until 1547, stoutly defended Catholicism, even receiving special recognition from the Pope in 1521 with the title ‘Defender of the Faith’. But later in the 1520s the pope refused to grant Henry an annulment from his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The king was desperate for an heir, and infatuated with another woman, Anne Boleyn. Frustrated by the church at every turn, eventually he declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, and officially broke from Rome in 1534.

Although never really a Protestant himself, Henry closed England’s monasteries and stripped them of their lands and assets. His son Edward VI was raised a Protestant and pushed on with reform during the six short years of his rule (1547-1553), but Edward’s sister and successor Mary was a staunch Roman Catholic. Her rule witnessed a short, sharp attempt to reverse the Reformation in England. Most notably, and to the dismay of many, she had many Protestants burned at the stake, from leading churchmen to ordinary men and women.

However Mary’s rule was cut short by her death at the age of 42, and her sister Elizabeth restored a moderate form of Protestantism in England, known as the Elizabethan Settlement. Attendance at church became mandatory, and Catholicism was driven underground once again.

In the decades after Mary’s death, the people executed were widely celebrated as martyrs, including in John Foxe’s popular book Acts and Monuments (1563). The stories of their brutal deaths became a black stain on the reputation of Mary and English Catholicism, and were used to good effect by anti-Catholic agitators and propagandists.

The ‘optics’ of Catholicism in England were damaged by other events. There was a failed Catholic uprising in 1569 and a foiled plot to assassinate the now reigning Elizabeth I and replace her with her cousin, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. In 1570, Pope Pius V even excommunicated Elizabeth, absolved all her subjects from allegiance to her, and declared that anyone obeying her laws was likewise to be excommunicated. There was also the threat of the Spanish Armada in the 1580s, a failed coup in 1601 and widely shared reports of Catholic atrocities in Europe, including massacres of Protestants in France and Antwerp.

Catholics became viewed as a kind of ‘enemy within’ during this time – regarded as suspicious and generally up to no good. But Catholicism remained popular among the English gentry, many of whom worshipped in their own homes. For most of them, they felt their belief was a private matter, and they remained loyal to the Crown, not wishing to overthrow the regime.

But not for all.

_{Images: Execution of religious radical Edward Underhill during the persecution of Protestants under the reign of Queen Mary I © Granger Historical Picture Archive and Alamy Images and Elizabeth I in 1588 © Historical Images Archive and Alamy Images.}

The Plot

At its heart, the plot was a simple one: to blow up the Palace of Westminster during the opening of Parliament, thereby killing everyone inside – including King James I and his heir Prince Henry.

What they intended to do next is less clear, but it seems that with James dead and the country in chaos, some of the plotters would lead a pro-Catholic uprising in the Midlands. They would take hold of James’s young daughter Elizabeth, who was in Coventry, and install her as queen with a Catholic nobleman ruling on her behalf. Therefore, they hoped, England would be delivered back into the arms of Rome.

The plotters were able to get hold of gunpowder with relative ease – the end of the war with Spain meant there was plenty of it available on the black market. A bigger issue was getting it close enough to the Palace of Westminster.

At first the plotters stored it in a house near the Palace which Thomas Percy managed to sublet from other Catholics. Guy Fawkes, the man in charge of the explosives and an unfamiliar face to most in Westminster, assumed the identity of John Johnson, a servant of Percy’s. In March 1605 an even more convenient piece of real estate became available – an undercroft or storeroom beneath the House of Lords.

The Houses of Parliament of the early 17th century were nothing like the Houses of Parliament today. The buildings had been added to and repaired piecemeal between the 12th and 17th centuries. The Lords met in a large room built in the 13th century as the Queen’s bedroom, and it was in one of the dark rooms underneath it that Fawkes placed the barrels of gunpowder. There was little security, and the buildings were a warren of meeting rooms, apartments, shops, wine-merchants and even taverns – making it reasonably straightforward for the plotters to stash 36 barrels of gunpowder in their undercroft.

Now the plotters just had to wait for their chance - the opening of Parliament on 5th November.

_{Image: Westminster, London in the 17th century © Hilary Morgan and Alamy Images.}

Modern Guy Fawkes Celebrations

In the 20th century the 5th of November became a much friendlier family event. It was common to see fireworks displays in back gardens as well as children wearing Guy Fawkes masks or carting around his effigy, begging ‘a penny for the guy’. As late as the 1950s it wasn’t uncommon for bonfires to spring up on the streets, particularly on bombsites, and people were used fireworks to cause a nuisance in back alleys and city streets. But, on the whole, the 5th of November has now been tamed, stripped of its religious meaning and since the 1990s has been somewhat overtaken by Halloween as the UK’s premier autumn celebration.

In many ways, Guy Fawkes has slipped out of the picture – it’s the bonfire and the fireworks, not Fawkes, which form the centrepiece of most community celebrations. Lewes remains a notable exception, and thousands of people flock to see the town’s elaborate effigies most years.

But Fawkes refuses to fade away entirely. In the 1980s writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd gave Fawkes a new lease of life – the anarchist hero of their graphic novel V for Vendetta wears a stylised Guy Fawkes mask. Thanks to the 2005 film version and its adoption by various campaigning groups, the mask has now become a symbol of anti-establishment protests across the world.

It’s unclear what Fawkes would have made of this, because in seeking to blow up Parliament, he and his fellow plotters were merely hoping to impose a different kind of establishment. But the symbol of Fawkes has long outstripped the reality of the man, and the way we celebrate the 5th has changed greatly over time, depending on the politics, culture and society of the day.

As with everything in history, each generation has and will remember Fawkes and the 5th of November in its own peculiar way.

_{Image: A 5th November fireworks display in England © Steve Allen Travel Photography and Alamy Images.}