All Things ASE

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November...

For the last 400 years, on the fifth of November, a large part of the English population has watched firework displays, and stood in front of a bonfire, as a scarecrow figure known as Guy is burnt in effigy.

In this piece taken from his recent Cultural Lecture Series talk, ASE’s Alumni Association Coordinator and tutor, Rob Jones, considers what the night has really been all about, and who Guy Fawkes really is…

Rob dressed as Guy Fawkes for ASE’s 25th anniversary costume party, back in 2014.

The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators, including Guy Fawkes .

The Origins of the Celebration.

In January 1606, only weeks after the failure of the plot to blow up the new king, James VI and I, and most of the English government, Parliament passed a law declaring that November the 5th should be a day of public thanksgiving, with sermons read in church and bonfires lit in celebration.

A few days later, the surviving conspirators were executed by being hanged, drawn and quartered. Amongst their number was Guy Fawkes. A catholic from Yorkshire, he had travelled to the continent and fought with the Spanish army against the protestants in the Netherlands. Whilst he was not as politically influential and connected as the likes of Robert Catesby - who had come up with the plan - or many of the others who were catholic gentry from the midlands and north of England, his experience with gunpowder ensured he had a pivotal role; placing, protecting and, on the fateful day, lighting the half-ton of gunpowder placed beneath the chamber where the king was to open parliament.

Over the next hundred years, the celebrations waxed and waned according to the political situation. The Commonwealth that arose after the execution of Charles I focused more on the survival of Parliament than it did on the survival of the king whose son they had just executed, whilst James II, a devout catholic, tried to suppress the protestant celebration, even though it was ostensibly in thanks for the survival of his father!

A Night for Parties and Protest

Bonfire Night became part of a wider range of popular protests that were common in England through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Industrialisation of both cloth-making and agricultural labour changed working practices and led to protests such as those run by the 'Luddites' - named after a fictional leader 'Ned Ludd' - and the ‘Swing Riots’, where agricultural labourers following another fictional leader, 'Captain Swing', protested against the modernisation of farming methods. Every time, Bonfire Night was a key date around which these protests became focused.

All of these protests had something of the carnival air of Bonfire Night, and used many of the same elements: torchlit processions, noise and fireworks, dressing outrageously, and carrying effigies of the target of their ire.

The passing of the 1829 Relief Act, which permitted Catholics to once again enter the law and sit in Parliament, saw Bonfire night regain its sectarian tone, as did the decision of Pope Pius IX to reinstitute Catholic bishoprics in England in 1850.

This latter act saw a bonfire raised in central London and the Pope being burnt in effigy, and revitalised the night in the towns of Exeter in Devon, Guildford in Surrey and Lewes in Sussex, which were already noted for their large celebrations and the disorder connected with them. In Lewes there were regular fights between the ‘Bonfire Boys’ and the police, whilst in Exeter in 1867 several hundred soldiers were mustered to break up a riot ostensibly about the banning of traditional bonfire in the cathedral close, but which targeted butchers and bakers shops, as part of a series of riots over food prices.

A broadside about Pope Night published in 1768 (Library of Congress)

Bonfire Night in America

In America the celebration was also observed, but was known as ‘Pope Night’. The earliest reference, in 1632, saw a bonfire in Plymouth Massachusetts rage out of control and destroy several houses. By the early 1700s it was a major celebration in many New England towns including Boston, Marblehead, Newburyport, Salem and Portsmouth.

The celebration developed along much the same lines as they did in England. Unsurprisingly, given the strong Puritan tendencies of the New England colonies, the anti-Catholic element was always quite strong. By the 1720s effigies of the Pope and the Devil were being paraded through the streets before being burnt on a pyre, whilst young boys would carry miniature Popes on boards door to door, demanding financial tribute for their artwork, in a style reminiscent of trick or treat.

The main event though was the dragging through the streets of the carnival floats bearing the effigies (sometimes as much as sixteen-feet long). In Boston two groups grew up - the North End and South End - each of whom would parade their own Pope through the streets, banging on doors of the wealthy to ask for donation towards the cost of the celebrations (reflecting the penny for the guy tradition in England), before coming together for a street battle to seize the other gang’s float. The winners would then drag both away and burn them on a fire at their own end of town.

The street fights, drunkenness, and demands for money became increasingly violent, with men badly injured or even killed, and the authorities tried to quash the event by banning riotous assembly, but to little avail.

It was to be the Revolution that saw its end. Needing the support of Catholic France, and hoping that Canada might rebel too, George Washington banned his men for participating in ‘that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the effigy of the pope’. Unlike England, it never recovered.

Burning crosses, representing 17 Protestant martyrs, paraded at the Lewes Bonfire Celebrations (Creative Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lewes_Bonfire,_Martyrs_Crosses_02_detail.jpg)

A Tradition or Echoes of Past Intolerance?

The more riotous aspects of Bonfire Night have died out. The Guilford gangs were suppressed in the 1860s, and Exeter’s celebrations were curtailed in 1890.

In Lewes, however, the Bonfire Boys continue to parade through the streets. There is much more of a carnival atmosphere than one of menace, nonetheless the burning of unpopular figures in effigy, usually political ones, continues alongside the burning of an effigy of Pope Paul V (the Pope at the time of the Gunpowder Plot), crosses representing seventeen protestant martyrs killed in the reign of Mary, and a banner saying ‘No Popery’.

These latter elements have been the subject of controversy since the 1930s, and have led the Cliffe Society (the only of the Bonfire clubs to persist in carrying the banner and burning the effigy of the Pope) to be banned on occasion from the main parade. The Society insists that it is maintaining an old English tradition, and that it is not being done in a spirit of anti-Catholic feeling, but this does beg the question as to how long a tradition should be observed, when it is grounded in division, intolerance, and bigotry.

The Guy Fawkes mask from the movie ‘V for Vendetta’ has become an icon of popular protest.

From Terrorist to Freedom Fighter.

Why should Guy Fawkes have become the fall… guy, for the November the fifth conspiracy?

It seems that he became the popular figure quite early on. The song ‘Remember, Remember, The Fifth of November’ that went with the parading of his effigy included his name from at least the eighteenth century 

The 1790s saw the first records of people begging for money for ‘Guy Faux’. In 1802 The Times newspaper recorded a group of ‘idle fellows… with some horrid figure dressed up as Guy Faux’ being arrested for begging and vagrancy. The practice of burning an effigy, and the figure of the ragged Guy Fawkes became conflated, so that from this period we start to see effigies become known as ‘Guys’ being paraded around town, usually by children, who would beg from ‘a penny for the guy’.

By 1876 the figure of the Guy, a scarecrow character made up of old clothing stuffed with straw or newspapers, had become so widely recognised that it had become the term used for any man looking down-at-heel and shabbily dressed, and this was to broaden in meaning during the next century until it became, as it is today, a generic term for a man.

The idea of Guy Fawkes as the iconic figure of the plot was reinforced in the 1840s by the publishing of popular romantic gothic fiction about him written by William Harrison Ainsworth. Ainsworth recast Fawkes as a doomed tragic hero, who receives a prophecy that he will be executed, and whose plot is uncovered by John Dee, the Elizabethan mystic and alchemist, raising the dead. Yet Fawkes persists in the plot, despite being begged by his protestant wife to give it up, and the whole tale ends with him repenting his acts on the scaffold, as his wife dies and the conspirators are all executed.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Guy Fawkes became a more acceptable stand-in for the Pope on top of the bonfire, and 'penny for the Guy' was a core element of the lead up to the fifth. By the nineties, however, the tradition was dying out, and Fawkes forgotten. 

He got a new lease of life, however, with the release of the movie V for Vendetta in 2005. Based on the 1980s graphic novel by  Alan Moore and David Lloyd, it is a dystopian story where a masked and anarchist-revolutionary conducts a campaign against a British fascist police state.  Adopting the face of a grinning Guy Fawkes, the novel and movie begins with the antihero blowing up the houses of Parliament.

As we have seen, Bonfire Night has always been used as a pretext for popular protest. Fawkes had always been a villain of the piece (even if a slightly pitiful one). In the story of V for Vendetta, however, the figure of V takes the leading role, as a freedom fighter (although a flawed figure like so many of Moore's heroes), aiming to lead Britain's population to rebel against the tyrannical regime of the Fascist Norsefire party.

Lloyd chose the symbol of the mask saying: "Why don't we portray him as a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those papier-mâché masks, in a cape and a conical hat? He'd look really bizarre and it would give Guy Fawkes the image he's deserved all these years. We shouldn't burn the chap every November 5th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!" 

With the release of the movie the image of Guy Fawkes' face has become international. The mask started being used to disguise the faces of activists and protesters across a range of anti-government and anti-capitalist demonstrations. Moore and Lloyd have welcomed the symbol's popularity, welcoming that their fictional rebel has been embraced and made flesh. 

However, this anarchist figure of anti-establishment, secular protest is a long way from who Guy Fawkes actually was, what he stood for, and what the celebration of his failure was about. But then, as we have seen, Bonfire Night has never just been about November the fifth. Instead it has been recast to fit the times, and to suit the purposes of those who celebrate it.

For many, it is simply a chance to watch the fireworks in front of a big bonfire, eat toffee apples, and have a mug of hot soup as the winter draws in.