In the calmer weather of the eighteenth century, the search became progressively ritualised. In 1760 an agreeable new piece of ceremony was introduced, as is demonstrated by the accounts of a wine-merchant named Old Bellamy who was allowed to rent the vaults. The searchers ended their search by drinking the loyal toast in port which he supplied. By 1807 it had become the regular practice, supported by custom, for ‘The Lord Chamberlain of England’ to make a search for ‘combustibles’ under or near either House of Parliament before its Opening. After the fire which demolished much of the Palace of Westminster, Bellamy’s wine-shop moved to nearby Parliament Street – but happily the custom of port-drinking continued.24
From the beginning of the twentieth century, a detachment of ten men of the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard was accustomed to perform the search just before the Opening of Parliament by the sovereign and it still does. The Yeomen of the Guard, in their splendid scarlet uniforms and black Tudor hats, carrying lanterns, weave among the large modern pipes which heat the Palace of Westminster. Port is still drunk at the end of the search (after a lapse, the custom was revived, but without the loyal toast, in 1976).25 So far as is known, however, the one successful search ever made – in the sense that perilous substances and a perilous person actually turned up – occurred on the night of 5 November 1605.
A second feature of the historiography of the Gunpowder Plot has been the attention paid to the date itself, variously known as Guy Fawkes Day and Bonfire Night.* Unlike many English celebrations, 5 November was not invented by the Victorians with their talent for conjuring up instant, rich, immemorial traditions. Nor for that matter are its origins lost in antiquity, linked over centuries to the Celtic fire festival at the beginning of winter (which later merged into the Catholic Feast of All Saints also on 1 November). As David Cressy has written in his study of the subject, there has been ‘much speculative nonsense’ floated along these lines: the English Bonfire Night comes directly from the date of the Opening of Parliament in 1605, and the proximity to 1 November is purely coincidental.*26
Nevertheless this emphasis on the day itself has, like the opposing arguments, been present since the beginning. The first bonfires were lit on 5 November 1605 itself, the first sermon preached soon after. An analysis of the Gunpowder sermons (those preached on the anniversary) shows a concentration on the day which is almost mystical in its fervour. In 1606 Bishop Lancelot Andrewes preached from the text ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’ He went on, ‘The day (we all know) was meant to be the day of all our deaths… It is our Passe-over,’ and made an even more solemn comparison to the Day of Resurrection. Altogether Andrewes, a fervent preacher of King James, would preach ten Gunpowder sermons. In 1618 he summed up the national feeling of patriotism mixed with religion: ‘Here we have the making of a new Holy-day (over and above those of God’s in the laws).’27
Predictably enough, celebrations waxed or waned according to the waves of anti-Catholicism which periodically shook England. Any apparent support given to that dangerous foreign-based religion, any renewed threat from its supporters, was enough to make the annual bonfires burn brighter. The marriage of Charles I to a French Catholic princess, the so-called Popish Plot of 1679, the Catholicism of James II – how convenient that his supplanter William III landed in England on 5 November! – all these events met with outbursts of conflagration.28
Yet there was one element present in the celebrations of the anniversary which would need diplomatic handling as the years passed. The original 5 November had been a date of royal deliverance: essentially it was a monarch who had been saved from destruction. Yet in 1647 – two years before the execution of Charles I – Parliament abolished all feasts except the 5 November celebration, on the ground that the day stood for the foiling of Papists, regardless of its other implications. Fifth of November continued to be celebrated under the Commonwealth, the only national feast to survive. This was despite a certain illogicality in commemorating the saving of a King from destruction by a people who had recently put their own King to death.29
Still stranger, in a sense, was the transmutation of Bonfire Night after it had crossed the Atlantic. Here were men and women who had come, very many of them, to throw off the chains of royalist absolutism: it might be questioned whether the annual memory of an English King’s deliverance was really such an appropriate occasion for rejoicing. If celebrating a royal anniversary was too negative, the answer was to emphasise the positive: that is, to burn a Pope of Rome, still in charge, rather than Guy Fawkes, long vanished. Thus Pope Day, a rumbustious occasion of mob revelry and mob rivalries, came to be celebrated, mainly in New England, on 5 November. It was a special feature of Boston life among the ‘lower elements’, but spread as far south as Charleston.30
Increasingly, there was something anarchic about the occasion, with strong anti-governmental undertones, particularly so long as that government was British. During the struggles for American Independence, advantage was taken of the flexibility inherent in Pope Day (or Bonfire Night) when the effigy of any displeasing person could be burnt so long as that of the Pope went along too. Not everyone joined in the revelry: the custom was condemned by George Washington as ‘ridiculous and childish’. Notwithstanding, Lord Bute, George III’s Prime Minister, began to feature. In 1774, in Charleston, the Jacobite Pretender to the throne (Bonnie Prince Charlie), the Pope and the Devil all shared a bonfire with English tea. In another contemporary bonfire Lord North was burnt, wearing his Star and Garter, as well as Governor Hutchinson, once again accompanied by the Pope and the Devil. When an effigy was burnt in 1780 of Benedict Arnold, the turncoat American general who joined the British side, it was a symbolic protest which bore very little relation to the original 5 November celebration.31
So the bonfires of Pope Day died down, the celebration lingering on in the nineteenth century in places like Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth and New Castle in New Hampshire mainly as an occasion for a boisterous outing for children, asking for money. Those in Newburyport who chanted, ‘Here is the Pope that we have got / The whole promoter of the Plot,’ had very little, if any, idea of the historical significance of what they were saying. In the United States, the coincidental proximity of 5 November to Hallowe’en on 31 October (to say nothing of the great national feast of Thanksgiving, roughly three weeks later) has meant that few folk memories of it survive, let alone celebrations, except among those of recent British descent, or with special British connections.*
In the Old World, as opposed to the New, Guy Fawkes Day was far from vanishing away. A study of popular prints on the subject of religion from 1600 up till 1832 shows anti-Catholicism and the political connotations of Popery as one theme that spans the whole period. The prayer of thanksgiving on 5 November remained in the Anglican Book of Prayer until 1859.† Protestant pastors annually remembered the hideous fate designed for King and Royal Family ‘by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter’. As they intoned, ‘From this unnatural conspiracy not our merit but Thy mercy, not our foresight but Thy providence delivered us,’ it was made clear that the unnatural conspiracy had been the work of the Catholics, not just a small group of them.32
This stubborn sense of Catholic menace did however mean that Guy Fawkes Day itself moved away, as in the United States, from the notion of royal deliverance. It moved in the direction of rowdy popular demonstrations on the one hand and anti-Popery on the other. Typical of the rowdy aspect was the running battle in Exeter, extending over forty years, between a popular force known as ‘Young Exeter’ and the authorities. In the course of it a High Churchman and right-wing Tory was burnt in effigy for his opposition to the Reform Bill in 1832.33
As for anti-Popery, the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 was marked by the burning of the effigies of the new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman, along with the Pope and certain Jesuits, on 5 November. For his part, Cardinal Wiseman protes
ted against people being invited ‘to feast their eyes upon the mock execution of individuals’ (expressing the distaste that many have always felt for such practices).* At least Catholic priests in England could thank God ‘that their effigies and not their persons’ were in the hands of those who had made the effigies and lit the bonfires.34
This was not an exaggerated reaction, given the bursts of anti-Catholicism which continued to erupt publicly even in places where wiser counsels might have been expected. The publication of David Jardine’s A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot in 1857 merely stirred the controversy further. For Jardine placed a full measure of blame upon the Jesuits, with Garnet ‘a willing, consenting and approving confederate’. He also made a thinly veiled accusation that certain documents condemning the Jesuits had been suppressed.35
In this way William Turnbull, a Scottish Catholic archivist working in the Public Record Office, became embroiled in the controversy as the supposed author of this suppression. Extreme Protestants – led by the rabidly anti-Catholic Tory MP for Warwickshire North, Charles Newdigate Newdegate – howled for his resignation. In vain the Master of the Rolls, Lord Romilly, issued a public statement which totally exculpated Turnbull. Newdegate, who also issued wild accusations of treason against Cardinal Manning, had his way. Turnbull resigned in 1861 and died, broken by the experience, not long after. Certainly the Gunpowder Plot cast a long shadow.36 One of Newdegate’s additional motives in his campaign of enmity was to smear his Liberal political opponents in Warwickshire who happened to be Catholics: the Throckmortons of Coughton Court.
The immolation of current hate-figures – in effigy – was the way Guy Fawkes Day was to go from the eighteenth century onwards. It was, after all, a fertile field, and remains so. Joan Courthope was the daughter of a late-nineteenth-century Sussex squire. When she was thirteen, she recorded in her diary angry British feeling concerning the Boer leader ‘Oom Paul’ Kruger at the outset of the Boer War. On 5 November 1899, at Ticehurst, a suitable effigy having been constructed, the march ‘The Downfall of Kruger’ was played and a large bonfire was lit. At the end, Joan noted laconically, ‘Kruger chucked in.’37
A hundred years later, the most famous Bonfire Night celebrations in England, those of Lewes in East Sussex, also concentrate, merrily enough, on burning the infamous – or just the famous. In 1994 effigies included Mrs Thatcher, John Major on a dinosaur taken from the film Jurassic Park, and the Home Secretary Michael Howard in the week of the publication of the unpopular Criminal Justice Bill, as well as Guy Fawkes himself. The celebrations were attended by an estimated eighty thousand people, with two thousand of them marching.38
The town festival has a long history – anti-Catholicism was encouraged by the fact that seventeen Protestant martyrs were burnt there under Queen Mary Tudor – and in 1785 the Riot Act had to be read, owing to the conspicuous violence of the crowd. Nowadays there are five rural Bonfire Societies, whose members adopt various forms of historical fancy dress for their contests. Only one of them, however, the Cliffe, still burns an effigy of the Pope. (But the Cliffe is careful to make it clear that it is a seventeenth-century Pope which is being burnt, not the present incumbent.) An apt comparison can be made to the Palio in Siena with its similar loyalties and rivalries. In short, Lewes now provides ‘a night of wildness and fun’ rather than something more sinister, although there will always be those who will be made uneasy by the sight of the words ‘No Popery’ on a banner slung across an English street, let alone the burning of the Pope – any Pope – in effigy.* Perhaps those, including the present writer, who recoil from such sights, should take comfort from the sensible words in an American colonial almanac of 1746:
Powder-plot is not forgot
‘Twill be observed by many a sot.39
All these ebullient and on the whole light-hearted festivities have little connection to the serious men who plotted the downfall of the government in 1605. The courage of the Powder Plotters is undeniable and even those hottest in condemning their enterprise have paid tribute to it. A notable example of this is provided by the historian S. R. Gardiner, locked for many years in the late nineteenth century in a Pro-Plot versus No-Plot controversy. He even expressed a certain satisfaction that so many of the original conspirators cheated the scaffold by their doomed last stand at Holbeach. ‘Atrocious as the whole undertaking was,’ he wrote, ‘great as must have been the moral obliquity of their minds before they could have conceived such a project, there was at least nothing mean or selfish about them. They had boldly risked their lives for what they honestly believed to be the cause of God and their country.’40
In their own times this was understood, even by those – Catholics – who disapproved in principle of any such adventure based on the destruction of the innocent. Father John Gerard, in his Narrative, compared the conspirators (his intimate friends) to the Maccabees, the Jewish warriors who delivered their people from the Syrians in the second century. ‘Seeing members of their brethren to suffer patiently the unjust oppression of their adversaries’, the Maccabees decided that if everyone was similarly passive ‘they will now quickly root us out of the earth’.* The comparison was an apt one as this was in essence the stance expressed by the conspirator Robert Keyes at his trial, when he spoke little but ‘showed plenty of spirit’. Keyes thought it the lesser of two evils ‘to die rather than live in the midst of so much tyranny’.41
It is not a position that the world can expect to see abandoned so long as the persecution of minorities – and for that matter of majorities – survives. Terrorism after all does not exist in a vacuum. ‘I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness or because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people…’ These are not the words of Robert Catesby, but mutatis mutandis they could in fact have been uttered by him had he lived to defend his actions to the world. This is in fact the speech, three hundred and fifty years later, of Nelson Mandela, in the dock for his leadership of the African National Congress, at the Rivonia Trial of 1964: he chose to quote it in his autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom as an explanation but not an excuse.42
Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment (and served twenty-five years) before he was elected President of South Africa in 1991. In the end, President Mandela was not, therefore, to be one of the myriad ‘defeated’ human beings to whom ‘History’, in the lines of W. H. Auden on the Spanish Civil War, ‘may say Alas but cannot help nor pardon…’ Yet this passage in his autobiography reminds us of one reason why terrorism, successful or otherwise, will probably always remain as the behaviour of last resort for some: ‘The hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought [my] people nothing but more repressive legislation, and fewer rights.’
The Gunpowder Plotters were terrorists and they were defeated. They were not good men – by no stretch of the imagination can they be described as that. The goodness in this tragic episode belongs to the priests and lay brothers such as Nicholas Owen (Little John) and the heroic women. But, under different circumstances, they might have been very differently regarded. One might go to the opposite extreme and represent the Plotters as brave, bad men: but perhaps brave, misguided men is a kinder verdict which may be allowed at this distance of time.43
The study of history can at least bring respect for those whose motives, if not their actions, were noble and idealistic. It was indeed a ‘heavy and doleful tragedy’ that men of such calibre were driven by continued religious persecution to Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
* The argument looks fair to continue, since Father Edwards has returned to the attack in ‘Still Investigating Gunpowder Plot’, Recusant History (1993), a review of Nicholls’ book countering his arguments.
* Although this may have been a shortened version. Scholarly disputes on the dating of Macbeth agree at least on one thing: that the inspi
ration of the Porter’s scene must have followed the trial and execution of Father Garnet. See Macbeth (Muir), pp. xv–xxv, for a discussion of the play’s dating.
* A painted version of this engraving hangs in New College, Oxford, today (see plate section); it was commissioned and donated by a physician named Richard Haydocke, who probably had a hand in the design, and maybe in the painting as well (Weller, passim).
* Another knocker at Hell’s Gate – ‘a farmer, that hang’d himself on th’ expectation of plenty’ – may also be a reference to Garnet, since Farmer was among his many aliases, those ‘appellations’ listed by Coke as evidence of deceit.
* It is the day, not the year, which has proved ‘utterly and even maddeningly MEMORABLE’ in the words of W. C. Sellar and R. C. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930, pp. 62–3). It would be fair to say that there are many able to mutter:
Please to remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder Treason and Plot
We know no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot
(in one of its many variations) who, if challenged, would not be able to name the actual year in which these memorable events took place.
* It will be recalled that this date was changed twice: the last postponement was from 3 October. According to Cressy’s argument, we might well have been chanting ‘Please to remember the Third of October’.
* Widespread enquiries by the author in 1993–4 failed to produce information concerning any indigenous celebration of 5 November in the United States – that is, festivals with continuity to the seventeenth century and Pope Day. All those who did mark Guy Fawkes Day in one form or another were careful to emphasise that their rituals were purely enjoyable and had absolutely no connotation of anti-Catholicism: as one correspondent wrote: ‘much more Dionysian than anti-papal’.