In the beginning, Guy Fawkes Night was official.
An ‘Act for a publick thanksgiving to Almighty God every year on the fifth day of November’ was passed in January 1606 – months after the failure of the ‘many malignant and devilish papists, Jesuits and seminary priests’ described in the Act. They had ‘conspired horribly’ to blow up James I, his queen and MPs on 5th November 1605, at the opening of Parliament.
Officially, the thanksgiving was to take the sober Protestant form of church attendance, prayers and, by extension, the preaching of sermons. But, pretty quickly, the lighting of bonfires, a longstanding celebratory ritual and more spectacular pyrotechnics were added on.
In 1607 in Canterbury, thanksgiving took the form of lighting 106lb of gunpowder. Guy Fawkes had been planning to set off a quantity as much as 50 times as big.
When you think about it, setting off a big explosion to celebrate avoiding an even bigger one is a bit odd.
Remembering the 5th remained a useful practice to successive regimes. Supporters of Charles II, after the return of the monarchy, and opponents of James’s son Charles, who suspected him of covert ‘popery’, all embraced anti-Catholic rhetoric, and lit fires to prove it.
Samuel Pepys described that sight, still familiar in Restoration London, of ‘boys in the street [who] fling their crackers’. Only the Great Fire could temporarily suspend the ritual.
What enshrined the 5th as an unofficial celebration was the prospect, and then the succession, of a Catholic king, Charles II’s brother James II.
In the years before his succession, popes were burnt in effigy and ever more virulent anti-Catholic sermons were preached. Charles moved to suppress the bonfires. When James succeeded, so did he, though the sermons continued.
It was no accident that the man who was invited to replace James on the throne in 1688, the Protestant William III, arrived in England on 5th November. For a time, the ‘double deliverance’ of the Protestant monarchy would be celebrated, though today even fewer people connect William to the date than they do Guy Fawkes.
If Guy is increasingly absent from 5th November celebrations, it isn’t the first time he has disappeared from popular memory.
Until the 19th century, when the Gunpowder Plot was discussed, or preached upon, other conspirators tended to be named, such as the actual ringleader, Thomas Catesby, or the man who probably betrayed it, Francis Tresham.
It is difficult to say why Guy Fawkes himself emerged as the representative conspirator when he did.
Still, the fact that he was the man discovered in the parliamentary storeroom, surrounded by barrels of gunpowder, with fuses about his person, does make his story stick in the mind.
It may be that, as Catholicism became more widely accepted through the 19th century, shifting the focus away from ‘popery’ and onto a single terrorist was less controversial.
In recent years, dreaded health-and-safety concerns have reduced the number of Bonfire Night celebrations.
With each passing year, Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, as the reason for them, have receded steadily into the background. A typical list of London’s fireworks displays for this year, itemising bonfire nights from Blackheath to Alexandra Palace, doesn’t mention Guy at all.
Guy does live on in one form, thanks to his reinvention in the modern equivalent of the 17th-century broadside ballad, a graphic novel.
In V for Vendetta (1982) by Alan Moore, the anarchist rebel who is trying to overthrow a fascist dictatorship wears a Guido Fawkes mask.
The success of the novel and a subsequent film have led to the mask’s being adopted by all sorts of protesters, as well as the name’s being taken by a right-wing blog.
There is one exception to the general disappearance of anti-Catholic sentiment on Guy Fawkes Night.
The Cliffe Bonfire Society of Lewes, Sussex, one of six in the town, still displays its ‘No Popery’ banner, and refuses to join the procession of the other societies, which have dispensed with them.
This seems to be tolerated as bloody-minded tradition rather than active bigotry, though some disagree.
Outside the Sussex epicentre of bonfiring, there are perennial worries that 5th November might be overtaken entirely by Hallowe’en celebrations, imported from America and increasingly popular (though it’s hard to find anyone over 20 with a good word to say about it).
If that is happening, it might be seen as a return to earlier celebrations of All Saints Day, the Catholic red-letter day on 1st November, which was replaced by its Protestant alternative, 5th November.
Thomas Hardy wrote about the connection of ‘festival fires’ with pagan Britain and ‘Druidical rites’, which might appeal to some present-day inclinations.
In fact, from the beginning, 5th November has been more about current obsessions.
So, yes, there will be drones as well as fireworks at this year’s events.
But you can bet they’ll burn the Prime Minister, too.
