Arcadia England

We’re approaching the 5th of November, and it’s highly possible that this weekend you’ll either be attending one of the UK’s many public firework displays, or noticing more underwhelming displays suddenly shooting out of every back garden near your residence and wondering what this peculiarly British celebration is all about. 

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot

(English folk verse, c1870)

“Bonfire Night” has, for over 400 years, celebrated the foiling of a plot that, in 1605, would, if successful, have killed the king, members of Parliament (such as it was in those days, as this was long before the UK had anything approaching democracy) and destroyed the Houses of Parliament. But the story of how this “celebration” became a stalwart in the British social calendar is a lot more sinister, and even today some of the rituals around it can be very discomforting and even threatening to some people.

As anyone who has seen SIX will know, England became a Protestant country largely because Henry VIII wanted a divorce, was told by the Pope he couldn’t have one, and effectively went off in a strop declaring, “FINE! I’ll start my own church, then!” (It was actually a bit more complicated than that, but you get the gist.) The decades that followed were tumultuous for Catholics and Protestants alike as the country bounced from Protestantism under Henry and his son Edward, briefly but bloodily back to Catholicism under Mary, before becoming decidedly Protestant again under Elizabeth I, who was determined to keep the Church of England as the state religion. Her reign was particularly brutal for Catholics: following a series of bills passed in 1599, Catholic Mass was banned and those found celebrating it could be fined, imprisoned, or even killed; priests were executed as “traitors”, as were those found to be hiding them. In fact, a seventeen-year-old Guy Fawkes - more on him later - arguably became radicalised after watching his pregnant neighbour being beaten to death for hiding a priest in her house. The mere act of being a Catholic was seen as being inherently un-English, and, unsurprisingly, these laws helped stoke huge anti-Catholic feeling. In Elizabethan England, if something bad happened, you blamed the Catholics. 

After Elizabeth died, many Catholics were hopeful that the new King - James, who was already King of Scotland - would relax some of the anti-Catholic measures, allowing them to practice their faith in peace and participate. But he didn’t. The famous Gunpowder Plot was an elaborate and, it turns out, wholly unrealistic plan to change the entire regime of the UK and reinstate Catholic rule in two stages: the first would be to blow up the Houses of Parliament on the day of the State Opening, when the King would be present; with most of the country’s most important key figures dead, the second part involved the rallying of a sort of impromptu army to somehow take over the UK. They hadn't really thought this part through, and in the end, neither happened. The night before the opening of Parliament, one of the plotters, Guy Fawkes - who had been hired due to his experience with explosives - was discovered in a cellar under Parliament, surrounded by 36 barrels of gunpowder and quite a lot of matches and kindling. Fawkes and other conspirators were arrested, tortured then executed, and while his name is now synonymous with the attempted coup (you may hear 5th November being referred to as Guy Fawkes Night) he was actually just one part of a doomed chain: in a twist that makes this discovery somewhat less of a triumph, historians have speculated that the gunpowder was wet and probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. For a fuller account of the whole saga, I recommend the wonderful British Scandal podcast.

Unsurprisingly, the Gunpowder Plot (as it became known) shot anti-Catholic sentiments to new heights. A full 50 years after the failed plot, Catholics were even blamed for the Great Fire of London, despite there being no evidence to support this. 

Bonfire Night quickly evolved into a vitriolic celebration where effigies of the Pope were routinely burned. Before Trick or Treating became the season’s favoured method of coaxing freebies from strangers, children would throw together “Guys” of varying degrees of sophistication and wheel them around in old strollers demanding “penny for the guy?” and adults would reluctantly part with their small change in recognition of these often pitiful efforts of reconstructing a human figure out of pillows stuffed with straw and dressed in old clothes - straw, you see, burned the best, because come November 5th the Guys would be placed on a bonfire. I remember cheering along with everyone else at the image of a (however unconvincingly constructed) human figure disintegrated before my eyes. Each year my mum would watch in anxious despair while my devoutly Catholic but mildly pyromaniac dad set off fireworks in our tiny garden without a thought for health and safety (I miss the 1980s) while I played with sparklers and ate toffee apples, never giving the backstory for this annual frivolity a second thought. 

It took 200 years for Catholics to gain anything approaching equal rights through the Roman Catholic Relief Act, which allowed Catholics access to Parliament. It wasn’t until even later that Catholics and other non-Anglicans were allowed to take up senior positions at the country’s top universities. Meanwhile, as recently as 2021, a local newspaper in Sussex criticised the anti-Catholic intimidation still present in Lewes’s annual Bonfire Night celebrations, and some question whether it’s a celebration in which Catholics should be participating. Today, at least, the UK is a country where everyone is free to practice their faith.

So, you now probably know more than most Brits do about the history - congratulations! Now, go and do what the Brits do: wrap up warm and enjoy the fireworks!