Gunpowder Plots_A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night

by Antonia Fraser

  Burton explained, in the printed version of his sermons, ‘I deemed that day, the memorial whereof should cause all loyal subjects forever to detest all innovations tending to reduce us to that religion of Rome, which plotted matchless treason, the most seasonable for this text… This is a time of sorrow and humiliation, but this day a day of joy and festivity.’ It was time, on 5 November 1636, to recall the true meaning of the deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot, ‘a deliverance never to be cancelled out of the calendar, but to be written in every man’s heart forever’. Formidable collisions took place over the interpretation of the Fifth of November, and Burton’s sermon brought him before the High Commission and to the pillory, where he lost a portion of his ears.

  In the revolutionary decade of the 1640s the Gunpowder commemoration became charged with new significance as fresh conspiracies were feared or uncovered. Parliamentary sermons on 5 November blended historical and biblical reminiscence with calls to action in England’s continuing emergency. Preaching before the House of Commons on 5 November 1644, Charles Herle spoke as if he were preparing the members for combat: ‘You must expect to stand in need of more deliverances: the same brood of enemies that then durst venture but an undermining, dare now attempt an open battery.’ The Philistine pioneers were tunnelling ‘from Oxford, Rome, Hell, to Westminster, and there to blow up, if possible, the better foundations of your houses, their liberties and privileges’. Parliamentarians took possession of the November anniversary, though Royalists disputed their interpretation.

  Some features of the Gunpowder commemoration were neglected or suppressed in the revolutionary 1650s. There was awkwardness and uncertainty as to whether the republican regime should commemorate a Stuart dynastic deliverance. But most parishes still rang their bells each 5 November, and preachers adapted their anniversary sermons to the changing conditions. Unofficially, the day was marked by the lighting of bonfires and the exploding of squibs and crackers. On the night of 5 November 1657 the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, was greeted by a gunpowder squib thrown through his window, by no means the last fireworks disturbance in the university town.

  Writing during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, Samuel Clarke shared the determination that Gunpowder Treason should never be forgotten. He wrote to the end ‘that all sorts may be stirred up to real thankfulness and transmit the same to their posterity; that their children may know the reason why the fifth of November is celebrated; that God may have glory, and the papists perpetual infamy’. Clarke rehearsed the narrative of the plot ‘lest the remembrance of so signal a mercy and deliverance, vouchsafed by God both to our church and state, should be buried in oblivion’.

  But any danger that the anniversary might lapse into oblivion was soon overcome by its continuing utility for religious polemic and political mobilization. Formal observance of the Gunpowder Plot was fully reinstated with the Restoration. The annual thanksgiving was still enjoined by statute, and provided a model for the two new statutory anniversaries of 30 January and 29 May – the one for the execution of Charles, king and martyr; the other for the restoration of his son, the May King, on Royal Oak Day. Officially, 5 November marked the preservation of king and Church, and was honoured in these terms by courtiers, high Anglicans and Tories. But in Charles II’s reign the anniversary took on alternative and oppositional meanings. By this time the memory of 1605 belonged to political culture at large, and could not be controlled by any one interest.

  By the 1670s London apprentices were turning 5 November into a dramatic anti-Catholic fire festival, as well as a challenge to sobriety and good order. They stopped coaches and demanded money for alcohol and bonfires. And in 1673 they paraded an effigy of the Whore of Babylon, decked out with ‘all the whorish ornaments’ of papal crosses, keys, beads and triple crown, and carried it in a torchlight procession to ‘a great bonfire’ in the Poultry. Before this date we hear little about the burning of effigies on 5 November, but henceforth they would be a standard feature of the commemoration. Anti-Catholic processions and demonstrations featured effigies of the Pope, his minions, and figures from English history.

  At the height of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion struggle the Whig opposition orchestrated elaborate pope-burning processions, while the mob engaged in battles over bonfires and drunken attacks on Catholics’ houses. The organized pageantry even had its own souvenir programmes, such as The manner of the Burning of the Pope in Effigies in London On the 5th of November, 1678, With the manner of carrying him through several Streets, in progression to Temple-Bar, where at length he was decently burned. Publications of this sort commemorated the commemoration, and reconnected the spectacle of the street with the political discourse of print. The anniversary became politicized, a point of division between Whigs and Tories. And at the same time it was acquiring a folk life of its own, with a vocabulary of symbolic action – including burning effigies and breaking windows – that was barely controlled by the parliamentary elite.

  The accession of a Catholic king in 1685 gave an ironic twist to the observance of anti-Catholic anniversaries. James II’s government banned fireworks and tried to limit celebrations, but most parishes kept up their traditions of bell-ringing, sermons and bonfires. And after 1688 the anniversary of the landing of William of Orange – significantly but fortuitously on 5 November – focused attention on the double deliverance of liberty and religion. Celebrations of William’s birthday on 4 November became entwined with commemorations of his landing on the 5th. In a further mutation, the Gunpowder anniversary was harnessed to the struggle against arbitrary government and Jacobite tyranny, as well as popish religion.

  By the end of the Stuart period the Gunpowder anniversary had become a polysemous occasion, replete with polyvalent cross-referencing, meaning all things to all men. In the calendar of court and Parliament it was a day of thanksgiving and prayer, with appropriate appearances and feasting; the legislation of 1605 was still in force, and ministers recited the prayers calling God to scatter England’s enemies. High Anglicans used the occasion to recall God’s blessings on the established Church and to warn of the danger from dissenters; others warned of the continuing danger from Rome; Jacobites raised glasses to the Stuart dynasty, recalling the deliverances of 1605 and 1660; the Whigs made 5 November a holiday to enjoy the blessings of the revolution. And below the level of the politically and religiously engaged elite, common people in town and country lit bonfires and threw fireworks, drank heavily and settled their own scores under the cover of England’s unique anniversary.

  During most of the eighteenth century the courtly, parliamentary and civic observances of the Gunpowder Plot were dutiful but muted. Customary routine preserved the Fifth of November as a ‘holiday at all the public offices’, but much of the fire had gone out of it, as just one among forty-nine official holidays. The new Hanoverian elite had diminishing interest in seventeenth-century religious deliverances, so long as Church and state were secure. As far as high society and high politics were concerned in Walpole’s time, the Gunpowder anniversary had shed most of its meaning. Whigs might still reflect on the liberties that were secured on 5 November, though they were more inclined to remember 1688 than 1605; Tories might still recall dynastic history and the salvation of the Church of England. But public attention was directed towards formulaic observance, rather than impassioned political or religious memory. Were it not for the service books and the almanac, it is possible that Gunpowder Treason would have been forgot.

  Eighteenth-century almanacs continued to mark the day in red letters, but with more respect to antiquarian than to present concerns (almanacs were often the most archaic of publications). Often the Gunpowder anniversary became submerged beneath other, current enthusiasms that adopted a similar vocabulary of celebration. In 1741, for example, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported no domestic occurrences on 5 November, but the following Thursday, ‘being the birthday of Admiral Vernon, was distinguished with ringing of bells, bonfires, and illuminations in the citie
s of London and Westminster, Liverpool, etc.’. The Fifth of November observances in the 1760s were overshadowed by John Wilkes’s birthday on 28 October, the duke of Cumberland’s birthday on 7 November, and by the ceremonies for the Lord Mayor’s Day or the opening of Parliament. An Almanac for… 1775 showed thirteen red-letter days in November, including the birthdays of Prince Edward, the duke of Cumberland, the Princess Sophia Augusta and the duke of Gloucester, as well as the day of the ‘Papists Conspiracy’.

  In most years under George II and George III the anniversary thanksgiving was observed with no more than ‘the usual solemnity’; the Park and Tower guns were fired, and the evening concluded with ‘bonfires, illuminations, ringing of bells’ and fireworks on the river. Gunpowder Treason had become a state-sponsored spectacle, a polite entertainment rather than an occasion for vitriolic thanksgiving. Only in 1745, with the Jacobite Rebellion, did 5 November resume its old flavour of mockery, defiance and religious venom.

  Below the level of the elite, however, other groups invested the anniversary with social and political meanings of their own. Class hostilities took cultural form, as the Gunpowder commemoration developed into a festival of order against disorder, of respectability against misrule. The Fifth of November provided an annual occasion for the contest between rowdiness and discipline, a ritualized challenge to hierarchical power, in which the events of 1605 were largely forgotten. It barely mattered that Guy Fawkes had been a Catholic, or that the conspirators had tried to blow up Parliament. Now the historical anniversary served as a pretext for violence, a cover for challenges to the established order. Establishment politicians withdrew their sponsorship leaving young working men in temporary possession of the streets.

  Newspapers complained of outrages and affronts to civility, though from different perspectives the same behaviour might be seen as cheerful good-fellowship and letting off of steam, or the articulation of class antagonisms. Enthusiasts lit bonfires in defiance of local authorities, and celebrants enlivened firework displays by throwing ‘serpents’, squibs and crackers among the crowd. Masked revellers ran wild and revenged themselves on unpopular or uncharitable neighbours by breaking windows and burning fences. It was time for settling scores, whether personal or socio-economic.

  On 5 November 1766 ‘a dreadful fire broke out at Kettering in Northamptonshire, occasioned by the boys throwing squibs… The common people, instead of joining to extinguish the flames, called out tauntingly to a farmer whose ricks were on fire, “Now, farmer, will you sell your wheat at seven and sixpence a strike?” ’ Almost a century later the mob at Guildford asserted a different moral economy by making their Guy Fawkes bonfire from the palings of a sports-ground proprietor who charged too much for admission.

  On Gunpowder Night in the late eighteenth century ‘greasy rogues’ intimidated politer Londoners, and bonfire boys dunned passers-by for money. Youths outraged their elders and ‘roughs’ and ‘ruffians’ menaced householders in other towns. Respectable tradesmen complained of ‘the swarm of boys’ who extracted contributions, and solid citizens braced against the depredations of ‘blackguards’ and pickpockets. Mobs of ‘idle fellows’ caused ‘great annoyance’ to ‘the public’ and to the magistrates who feared their ‘depredations and disorders’ as artisans and apprentices took temporary possession of the streets. (The middle-class writers who provided these newspaper accounts had no doubts about their own socio-cultural affiliations.)

  For both children and adults, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot provided a temporary privileged arena in which ordinary standards of lawfulness and civility could be set aside. It was commonly believed that reciting the verses for 5 November – ‘please to remember’ – licensed the bullying of passers-by into giving money. Wood could be stolen, fences broken down, so long as it became fuel for the bonfire. In some country parishes, villagers claimed the right to hunt over private ground on 5 November. Magistrates and property-owners disagreed.

  In 1785 the traditional bonfire celebration at Lewes in Sussex degenerated into a riot and severely divided the community. ‘Wicked, obstinate and malicious persons’ alarmed ‘the principal inhabitants’ of Arlesford on that same 5 November 1785, when ‘a lawless mob… pelted the Justice and constables with stones, brickbats and sticks’. Only the fortitude of the magistrate, bailiff and principal inhabitants, so it was claimed, prevented ‘a dangerous insurrection’.

  The social challenge of Guy Fawkes Night continued into the nineteenth century. ‘Ruffianism, theft, and riotous conduct’ were standard features of the Dickensian Fifth of November. A correspondent from Lewes complained in 1847 of ‘the grossest riots and excess’ that took over the town each year. ‘Ruffians’ intimidated respectable householders. ‘Bonfire boys’ in masks and ‘fantastical dress’ and armed with bats and bludgeons rolled lighted tar barrels through the streets. Lewes took Guy Fawkes Night seriously, and its annual bonfires were long believed to have been lit ‘from time immemorial’. But other towns, especially in southern England, developed equally vigorous traditions. At Guildford gangs of bonfire celebrants calling themselves ‘guys’ put the town under siege during their Fifth of November ‘lark’. ‘Respectable tradesmen’ and ‘peaceable inhabitants’ barred their doors against ‘facetious rustics’ and the menacing ‘guys’ during these annual ‘riotous proceedings’. The immediate memory centred on local grudges, excess and damage, rather than historical or ideological recollections.

  Guy Fawkes himself had always featured in the narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, but during the seventeenth century when it came to parading and burning effigies the figure of Guy was upstaged by the Pope and the devil. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Guy Fawkes had emerged as the principal figure to be displayed and burned in effigy; and early in the nineteenth century Gunpowder Treason Day became ‘Guy Fawkes Night’, informally renamed in his honour. By the accession of Queen Victoria the autumn fire festival was invariably known as ‘Guy Fawkes Night’, and twentieth-century folklorists seem not to know it as anything else.

  The Times reported in 1788 that ‘Guy Faux in his usual state was carried about the streets in commemoration of the gunpowder plot.’ In 1790 the newspaper mentioned boys ‘begging for money to burn Guy Faux’. In 1792 ‘Guy Faux was burned by the populace’, and so on. The desperado with the tall hat and dark lantern (both objects now on view at Oxford’s Ashmolean museum), became a familiar figure on the autumn streets and in country towns and villages. William Cobbett, on his rural ride through Kent, remarked on the annual burning of ‘Guy Fawkes, the pope and the devil’. As anti-Catholic agitation and historical memory subsided, Guy Fawkes took on the roles of all-purpose bogeyman and carnival grotesque. Children made their own versions with rags and paper (as they do today), but early Victorian technology inspired novel representations. In 1839 The Times reported: ‘A machine twelve feet in height, constructed with tissue, filled with hydrogen gas, and representing the figure of Guy Fawkes… rose in a perpendicular manner’ over Pentonville and drifted south over the City. It was last seen heading across the river towards Kent.

  A recurrent refrain in the nineteenth century was that the celebration of the Gunpowder Plot had declined. From time to time throughout Victoria’s reign the newspapers claimed that the bonfire festivity no longer matched the livelier celebrations of yesteryear. Without ideological passion or organized force to drive it, the annual commemoration was indifferently ‘kept up’. In 1834 The Times noted that the ‘fiery zeal’ of the Fifth of November had ‘gradually decreased, and neither men nor boys any longer take a part or interest in such observance of the day’. The Gunpowder Plot had lost its religious and patriotic meaning, ‘and children carry about their “poor Guy” with no other sentiment or knowledge respecting him than that his exhibition procures them a few pence’. A magistrate who dealt with a Guy Fawkes Night affray in 1839 ‘said, he thought the day was almost forgotten’. In 1843 a correspondent wrote that ‘the observance of the fifth of November has been co
nsiderably on the decline for some time’. Even the association of Guy Fawkes ‘with little boys and fireworks… has subsided of late’. In 1850 The Times described the anniversary as ‘of late years almost forgotten’. Again in the 1860s the occasion was ‘but indifferently observed’. The anniversary ‘passed off very tamely’ in 1877, and The Times remarked on the tameness of Guy Fawkes Night in each of the next few years. Activities on 5 November 1882 were lamentably ‘of the tamest kind’, with ‘few grown lads or adults’ taking part. By 1884 it appeared that ‘the observance of the day’ in London was ‘gradually dying out’. In fact, Gunpowder Treason Day was changing again, not dying, and its apparent subsidence or tameness reflected other Victorian trends.

  Revived religious antagonisms lent new power to the Gunpowder anniversary as Irish Catholics settled among Protestant Londoners. Guy Fawkes provided a mask for ethnic, social and religious confrontations. In 1838

  the effigy of Guy Fawkes was carried by some boys followed by a crowd of others into a court inhabited chiefly by Irish coal-whippers and ballast-getters; who taking umbrage at the appearance of the effigy, and the shouts of the children calling out ‘No popes’ and ‘Pray remember the fifth of November’, were attacked by a number of Irish boys, who captured poor Guy and carried him off in triumph. The protestant boys obtained a reinforcement and made an attack on the ‘Popes’, as they called the catholic boys, and succeeded in regaining the effigy. The two parties commenced flinging stones at each other.

  And later in the Victorian era there would again be affrays involving Irish labourers and a belligerent ‘party with Guys’. Whether these collisions were more acute in areas like Liverpool has yet to be examined.