Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night Origins

Remember, remember the fifth of November, gun powder, treason and plot.

The English remember each year with bonfire parties in every town and village throughout the country. There are firework displays, beers and barbeques and children staying up late but on all those bonfires burn ragged human effigies of Guy Fawkes.

Year 2005 marked the four hundredth anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ attempt at one of the greatest and earliest acts of political terrorism. He would try to
assassinate the king along with the whole Parliament in one mighty blast of gunpowder as they gathered for the
ceremonial State Opening of Parliament of 1605.

Fawkes and his fellow plotters were Roman Catholics, a community that had had been excluded from government and much of mainstream society for seventy years, since the Protestant Reformation.

When James I
came to the throne in 1603 they had hoped for greater tolerance, as the new king had quietly promised before
his accession. They had reason to believe him. His mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had died for her faith,
beheaded at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire.

He was a pragmatist and continued to persecute the Catholics, knowing that many of the English regarded
the Pope as a foreign puppet and a threat to English independence. His refusal to improve Catholic rights in
England disappointed and enraged the conspirators.

Their leader, Robert Catesby came from a minor gentry family in Lapworth in Warwickshire, not far from
Stratford-upon-Avon.

They had refused to follow the flood at the Reformation and remained loyal to Rome.

Catesby had joined the Earl of Essex when he attempted a coup four years earlier against James’ predecessor, Elizabeth I.

Guy Fawkes himself had been brought up a loyal Protestant but at some point in his youth decided to swap
faiths and became a mercenary for His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain. During this period he became
an expert in artillery and explosives.

His advice to Catesby was to hire a house next door to the Palace of Westminster. The old palace was more
like a small town, a great sprawl of connected buildings beside the river.

The kings had moved out centuries
before but the two Houses of Parliament, Lords and Commons, still had premises among the slightly battered mediaeval architecture. Members of the Lords and
Commons would meet the king in the chamber of the House of Lords for the State Opening.

The unused parts of the palace were put to commercial advantage. The empty cellars were rented out
for private use, often as warehouses convenient for the Thames. All the plotters needed do was hire the basement immediately under the House of Lords. Fawkes made the arrangements under the unimaginative alias of John Johnson.

Then they dug a tunnel to the house
they’d hired next door in the modern
Parliament Square.

They worked for eight months as casks of gunpowder were delivered to the
house, trundled along the makeshift passage and stacked in the cellar.

About twenty barrels of powder were
smuggled right under Parliament. Fawkes with his knowledge of explosives layered iron bars on the top of the pile for greater impact, and the whole thing was hidden under the innocent but very flammable cover of coal and firewood.

When finally some of the king’s closest advisors got wind of the plot, two search parties were dispatched to
explore the cellars. The first found good old John Johnson sitting beside his pile of coal and firewood. They wished him good day and passed on, looking for somebody who seemed suspicious. The second party discovered the powder and arrested Fawkes. Parliament was safely opened the next morning.

Modern security is more sophisticated, though the threat is not so different. Every autumn the Queen ceremonially opens Parliament with members of both houses gathered in the chamber of the House of Lords. Every autumn
the Yeoman of the Guard, Beefeaters from the Tower of London, ceremonially perform two searches of the basement. Guy Fawkes was tortured to name his fellow
conspirators. The signature on his confession is torn and broken like the hand that wrote it. Catesby and five other plotters fled to their stronghold in the Midlands but were eventually tracked down at Holbeche House in Staffordshire.

After a short skirmish Catesby and three fellow conspirators died from their wounds while the rest were captured. In all eight plotters joined Fawkes in the horrible death
of a traitor, not beheaded but hanged, drawn and quartered.

But Guy Fawkes Night still sends sparks into the autumn skies four centuries later to remember the failure
of gunpowder, treason and plot.

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