Remember, remember,
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot!
I only got to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day once when I was a kid, but it was definitely the Best Holiday Ever.
Three hundred and five years ago today, a deranged Roman Catholic named Guy (aka Guido) Fawkes and a group of accomplices were caught in the basement of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder. They had planned to blow up the House of Lords while both the Lords and the Commons had gathered together to hear a speech from King James I. If the explosion had gone off, England’s leadership would have been wiped out, and Fawkes’ co-conspirators would have launched a coup to bring back the Old Religion.
Up until 1859 it was compulsory for cities and towns to celebrate England’s delivery from Catholic terrorists, but for many years thereafter English kids in particular have celebrated the holiday by making effigies of Guy Fawkes and collecting “pennies for the Guy,” with which they buy fireworks and bonfire materials. What makes this particularly memorable is that at least in the old days in England (before the nanny-state police took the fun out of everything) you could buy table fireworks: small Roman candles, flaming volcanoes and other excellent devices that could be set on a table (inside the house, of course) and exploded in a most satisfactory way. I was eleven years old on my first and only experience celebrating this holiday; it is pretty much the perfect age for lighting things that go BANG! on the dining room table.
For a very long time Guy Fawkes wasn’t the only person whose effigy got burned in England’s November bonfires. The Pope, whose effigy was usually marked by a very long nose and a triple crown, was burned along with him. For hundreds of years English public opinion mostly came down against the Pope as the enemy of freedom and the servant of Satan. There were ‘anti-Popery’ riots in London and other cities from time to time. Legend has it that during one such riot in 1673, while riding through Oxford one of King Charles II’s mistresses was harassed by a mob hissing and booing the “Catholic whore.” The boos changed to cheers when the mistress Nell Gwynn stuck her head out the window saying, “Good people, you are mistaken. I am the Protestant whore!”
Hatred of Catholicism made for some great literature. The first book of Spencer’s Fairie Queene is among other things a polemic against Catholicism; maybe the greatest is John Milton’s 1655 sonnet decrying a Catholic massacre of Protestants in northern Italy, “On the Late Massacre in Piemont”:
AVENGE, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
The ‘triple tyrant’ is a reference to the Pope, who famously wore a triple crown.
There’s still at least one town in England (Lewes) where they burn the Pope in effigy on Guy Fawkes Day, but these days everyone, Catholic and Protestant, is a lot more ecumenical than they used to be. And a good thing, too; Europe’s wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants killed millions of people.
That history resonates today, of course, when new waves of religiously inspired terrorists are once again active around the world and when, more fundamentally, people ask whether Islam is compatible with liberal society. Personally, I’m far more optimistic about this than I was six or seven years ago; the Islamic world is full of people who are thinking in creative, new ways about how Islam can both enrich, and be enriched by, Western ideas and values.
Guy Fawkes didn’t represent English Catholics in 1605 any more than the extremists and bombers today represent average Muslims—all 1.57 billion of them. It took Catholics and Protestants a long time to figure out how to live with each other whilestill remaining true to their deepest and strongest-held beliefs. Islam and the Christian world, to say nothing of Islam and secular modern culture, are also going to have to negotiate their relationship and work out some problems. There are still some bad times to come.
But on the whole, as I’ve traveled in the Islamic world from Indonesia to Nigeria, from places like Iraq and Pakistan to more peaceful places like Malaysia and Turkey, what strikes me is the dramatic acceleration in the speed at which Muslims are thinking through the difficult questions about the relationship of their faith to global society, and they are coming up with some interesting and creative ideas.
At my school in the UK, we capped off Guy Fawkes Day with a huge bonfire in a crater left on the school grounds by a German V-2 rocket late in World War Two. There’d been almost twenty years of bonfires in that pit since the rocket fell; it still wasn’t full.
That Guy Fawkes Day was a fantastic event in an eleven year old’s life – but I hope that this kind of holiday keeps slowly fading away, and I hope that new ones don’t come along to replace it.