November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, commemorates the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, an event that requires a bit of background to understand. Here is the explanation, as presented in “The Book of Days,” a volume published in 1878 in London.
It seems that when James I became king of England, the English Catholics believed that they would be allowed to worship in peace, and their treatment seemed to be much better during the first year of King James' reign. Unfortunately, Parliament held the purse strings, and did not share his views. Parliament enacted a number of laws designed to repress the Catholics, and the severity of them prompted a few fanatics to develop a scheme for replacing the English government.
Robert Catesby, a gentleman who had converted to Protestantism and later reconverted back to Catholicism, thought of a way he believed would atone for his apostasy: Blow up the king and Parliament that were oppressing the Catholics. He accumulated several co-conspirators and worked out a plan.
A building adjacent to where Parliament met was rented, and December of 1604 saw these gentlemen begin working to tear a hole in the wall of the Parliament House, so they could carry a mine through and blow it up. As these gentlemen were not being accustomed to manual labor, the work was quite slow.
They also were quite nervous about their undertaking, and understandably so. One day they thought they heard a bell ringing deep underground below the Parliament House, so they sprinkled holy water on the site and the ringing stopped. Then they heard a rumbling above them and thought they had been caught, but it was a coal dealer who leased a cellar beneath the House of Lords removing his stock.
Eureka! They dropped their original plan faster than Archimedes jumped out of his hot tub, and rented the cellar from the coal dealer. No more hard digging for these gents. They secretly managed to move thirty-six barrels of gunpowder into the cellar, and then threw in large stones and iron bars for shrapnel. They covered everything with piled-up wood, and had completed their preparations by about May of 1605.
Plans had been developed and new conspirators added during the summer, all preparing for a revolution after the projected October 3rd big bang, during which Prince Charles would be put on the throne. The king moved Parliament's opening day to November 5 for reasons not explored in this book, and that apparently provided too much time for too many conspirators to mull over their actions.
At least one of them communicated with a Catholic member of Parliament, suggesting that he should be absent on opening day. Bad move. The anonymous letter sent to Lord Monteagle was not hidden by him; rather, he seems to have taken it to the Lord Chamberlain, who accompanied Lord Monteagle to the cellar on November 4. They found Guy Fawkes, who had been assigned the task of lighting the bomb's fuse, and Fawkes pretended to be the servant of Mr. Percy, who had rented the premises. Word of the discovery of the anonymous letter was also passed to the conspirators. After all this, the conspirators still decided to go ahead with their plan.
Well, at 2:00 the next morning (November 5), Fawkes was arrested in the cellar. The others were tracked down when they fled, and were either arrested or killed. Those arrested were executed about three months later.
In January, 1606, Parliament made November 5 a holiday, named not for Robert Catesby, the originator of the plot, but for the poor sap whose job was to actually set off the bomb (Naturally, the first conspirator caught!). Until the queen abolished it in 1859, there was even a special service in the English Book of Common Prayer for November 5. In the 1870's, Guy Fawkes Day was still one of the most popular holidays in England, at least among children.
The day was celebrated by dressing up a scarecrow, parading it through the streets in a chair, and burning it in a great bonfire at night, thus turning into Guy Fawkes Night. Representing Fawkes, the scarecrow had a dark lantern in one hand and matches in the other. In former times (prior to the late 19th century), this was a big, important ceremony in London. In what is hoped was an open field they sometimes used two hundred cartloads of fuel in the bonfire, dumping as many as thirty "Guys" into the flames. The church bells would ring, the people would shout and cheer, and a grand time must have been had by all.
One long-standing custom seems to have been soliciting money from the passers-by and onlookers. Shouting things like "Please to remember Guy" or "Pray remember Guy," those involved in parading through the streets with the effigy expected a few coppers from watchers. It is mentioned that many of those with no visible means of support took this opportunity to legally beg with some expected degree of success, by carrying large figures of the celebrities of the day.
In the words of the "time-honoured rhyme,"
"Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
There is no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!"
