Guy Fawkes, or Bonfire Night, is still a key part of the national festive landscape, though perhaps less so than a generation ago. But should it still be celebrated at all? Does its roots in anti-Catholic prejudice make it an illegitimate piece of historical re-enactment? Should it be “cancelled”?
I loved it as a boy. I remember the thrill of being outdoors on a chilly night, warming up with a cup of soup and a sparkler, waiting for the bangs and flashes to start, seeing rockets screaming up to the sky, and watching the pile of wood turn into a shockingly large inferno that scorches your legs through your trousers if you stand too close. A homely celebration was the best fun: a friend’s garden transformed into a flame-lit theatre, someone’s brave father lighting the fuses, a home-made Guy collapsing among the roaring timbers. All on a school night! Good times.
I soon knew that the fun had a link with history. Hurray for the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot! Is this what we were celebrating? Not really: it’s not as if we were taught to fear Catholic terrorism as we lit our sparklers. But on some level, the historical basis added to the sense that the festival mattered. It was part of the national story. This is one little part of what makes us British, I vaguely felt.
It was used by the government to discredit the clandestine network of Jesuit priests who risked life and limb to minister to Catholics.
The Gunpowder Plot was the rather desperate attempt of a Catholic noble, Robert Catesby, to reverse the course of English history. Dismayed that the new king, James I, was proving as hostile to Catholics as his predecessor Elizabeth I, Catesby recruited a band of defected Catholics in 1605. They planned to blow up Parliament, hoping to kill the king and his ministers, and restore a Catholic monarchy. Guy Fawkes was the explosives expert who only much later became singled out as the story’s anti-hero. The following year a public service of annual thanksgiving was instituted, and it became a major national festival. Though effigies of the pope were burned, there were no widespread anti-Catholic reprisals: the conspiracy was seen as an isolated event. English Catholics were quick to distance themselves from such extremism. On the other hand, it was used by the government to discredit the clandestine network of Jesuit priests who risked life and limb to minister to Catholics. It became easier to portray them as possible agents of subversion.
Over the next century or so, the festival helped England (and soon Britain) to define itself as a modern nation, united by a common enemy (Continental Catholicism) and by a progressive creed (liberty). This ideology became the glue for the union with Scotland, and then the empire. As the historian Linda Colley puts it in her book Britons: “Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible”. In the nineteenth century, anti-Catholic prejudice began to fade. In 1859 the Anglican prayer book ceased to call for an official commemoration of the event.
By the late 20th century these historical echoes were muted, at least for non-Catholics. For another Anglican perspective, I ask Andrew Rumsey, Bishop of Ramsbury, for his thoughts. He has just written an excellent book called English Grounds, in which he explores the role of landscape and folklore in English religious history. “I have clear memories of “Penny for the Guy”” he tells me by email, “a custom which – as a seasonal means of extortion – was dying out in the 1970s before being replaced, red squirrel-like, by the orange menace of Trick or Treat”. Though he remembers the Bonfire Night of his boyhood as a powerful national tradition, he writes, “I have no recollection of ever considering its anti-Catholic sentiment. This seems remarkable now, but Guido Fawkes was a rogue in broad hat and raffish moustache – another Robin Hood, really. His dissidence was not religious, to my childhood mind, just the most thrilling of the many treasonous plots that seemed to besiege the monarchy in those times. Its felons and flames blurred into the broadly Anglican landscape of village life while we stood well back, with no harm intended”.
One might have expected the festival to fade away in the 20th century, with the decline of anti-Catholic feeling. But because religious passions had cooled, there was no real sense that it was problematic. It drifted into being a fairly meaningless excuse for an autumnal party. Sixteen years ago, when the festival turned 400, there was a brief debate among Catholics about whether it was worth objecting to. The historian Justin Champion was almost alone in calling it a “despicable relic” that still had the power to harm, like the Orange parades in Northern Ireland. Most commentators were nuanced, seeing some benefit in the festival’s ability to remind us of our history. Having taught history to easily-distracted children, I know how important it is to be able to link the events of the distant past to fun events that they know about. Thanks to those plotters, at least one episode from the Stuart era is likely to lodge in their brains.
The idea of burning anyone in effigy does not feel very healthy
Most British Catholics have never felt excluded by the tradition. “We just saw it as part of English culture, and didn’t feel at all bothered by it”, says one of my Catholic friends who grew up in the 1970s, even though her family belonged to a close-knit Irish community in West London. “We joined in the fun, and had a few rockets in the back garden”. Another friend of the same vintage had a similar experience, even though his family had recently moved from Belfast, and so was highly aware that such festivities could turn nasty. “It felt like festive fun, with no link to religion or sectarianism, but back then religion didn’t seem so highly charged, at least in England”. But then, as a teenager, he visited a friend in Lewes, and had a different perspective. This Sussex town has, almost uniquely, held on to the old tradition that allows Protestant triumphalism free rein. Not only Guy Fawkes but the Pope is burned in effigy. “When I saw the pageantry on the Lewes streets”, he recalls, “I had a sense of what the festival used to mean. But it felt a bit unreal, more like historical re-enactment than the unleashing of real sectarian passions. This was England, after all”.
I phoned the Catholic priest in Lewes, Father Jonathan Martin. Do Catholics feel intimidated by the event? “Some might; some won’t. Amongst my congregation, there are some who look forward to the event, and who, indeed, are members of Bonfire Societies. There are some who, for a whole host of reasons (and not principally “religious” reasons) do not particularly like the disruption. But it’s very much part of the life of the town, and a tradition that draws the crowds. For most of the crowd, I’m sure, it’s simply a fun night, and the fireworks are undeniably spectacular”.
Call me a wet liberal, but the idea of burning anyone in effigy does not feel very healthy. Even if intended to symbolise the defeat of terrorism, there is a danger of demonising a whole group of people associated with that scapegoat. Soon after 9/11, effigies of Bin Laden were burned on some bonfires, which could be seen as a natural updating of the tradition. But not in a way that serves to reduce religious tensions. So what should become of a festival with such questionable roots? Maybe the solution is for Catholics (and indeed Muslims) to get involved, and help to redefine Bonfire Night as an inclusive celebration of religious freedom. A day on which we condemn all forms of terrorism and bigotry, and cheer, with soaring rockets or a few damp squibs, the flawed but vital tradition of British liberty.
Theo Hobson is the author of God Created Humanism: The Christian Basis Of Secular Values (SPCK Publishing)
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