Every year in Britain bonfires are lit in commemoration of one particularly Anglo holiday, one celebrating the triumph of society over extremists but which sadly is fading from collective memory into mere memes of history.
An odd sort of inadvertent cultural exchange has passed this year, with the UK General Election falling on July 4th and the U.S. Presidential Election happening on November 5th. But how many people now remember, beyond recalling the old nursery rhyme:
Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
The sad fact is an onslaught of circumstances are conspiring to destroy one of the final few truly British holidays, those few not shared with the wider world by a common bond of faith or heritage.
The coronavirus lockdown period is an obvious moment that broke chains of habit of decades or centuries for many events. Still, other factors, like local government budgets being raided for modern concerns (social care, mainly, while the wayside leaves the traditional purposes of local government), the proximity to Halloween, and even festivities being shifted to weekends from the 5th itself, all play a part in diluting this unique holiday.
The holiday remains well observed in pockets. The massive displays of Lewis with huge effigies paraded each year still catch global headlines. Elsewhere, Ottery St Mary, Devon locals carry flaming barrels of tar on their backs for ancient and inscrutable reasons.
However, the broader trend nationwide is for more and more Guy Fawkes Day displays of bonfires and fireworks to be cancelled every year. As a slew of reports in the past few days note, cancellations are generally put down to expense but also increasingly due to soulless noise complaints and even concerns about the environment.
Yet several readings of the origin of Guy Fawkes Day leave a tale deeply relevant to modern life. In an extremely 2024 reading, one could ruminate on the very narrow escape of a major political figure barely avoiding death in an assassination attempt.
Just as Donald Trump today credits the “grace of almighty God” for the timing of his head turn from the bullet’s path, so too did Stuart England officially recognise the same of King James VI&I as a result of “God… who on this day didst miraculously preserve our church and state from the secret contrivance and hellish malice”.
Parallels between the religious extremists who contrived to blow up England’s Parliament in 1605 and the Islamists of 21st-century Britain have also been suggested.
Although Guy ‘Guido’ Fawkes himself was not the main conspirator, he nevertheless became the poster boy for the plot to murder the King and destroy Parliament in the process, and his genesis is a familiar one to modern security analysts.
Just three years after the attempted invasion of England to overthrow the Protestant monarchy and install a new Catholic government — the disastrous Spanish Armada destroyed by the fleet of Queen Elizabeth I — a young Guy Fawkes sold his possessions to go abroad and fight for Spain.
Later, returning to England with a great deal of military experience, Fawkes was part of a group of conspirators who believed England had erred from the true faith and that the most direct route to ending what they saw as tyranny was setting off 36 barrels of gunpowder underneath the House of Lords.
Fighters with deep religious convictions returning to England from foreign wars and trying to set explosions in London… There’s certainly something modern Britons can learn from this in their annual national holiday that should stand to serve as a warning to would-be conspirators from trying it on.
Yet in the minds of too many, all that survives is the vestigial image of the Guy Fawkes mask, oddly taken as a symbol of anarchy… ironic, given that Fawkes himself fought only to replace what was admittedly one authoritarian state with another of a different flavour.
So Britons, remember the Gunpowder Plot tonight and keep this slice of cultural history alive. Our American cousins, too, consider lighting a candle to remember religious extremists and political whack-jobs can be handily defeated. Consider it a fair trade for Halloween.
