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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.
Remember, remember the 5th of November.
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
If you grew up in the UK, there's a good chance you've probably recited that verse at least once in your life.
Because, although the gunpowder plot failed, its memory ignited a tradition that has lasted for more than 400 years.
I'm Danny Bird, and in this four-part history extra series on the gunpowder plot, I'm joined by historian Professor John Cooper from the University of York.
In this final episode, we trace the afterlife of the gunpowder plot, how it was commemorated with sermons, bonfires and fireworks, and how Guy Fawkes was transformed from failed conspirator into an enduring figure of folklore, and how his image, centuries later, has become a global icon of resistance to authority.
In January 1606, just two months after the failed gunpowder plot, Parliament passed an act of thanksgiving to be observed every 5th of November.
What did this act call for and how did it lay the foundations for an annual day of national commemoration?
This is a really interesting example of the government and Parliament taking advantage of a pretty terrifying situation and set of circumstances in order to turn it to the benefit of royal government.
And it's a very sort of sectarian Protestant inflected definition of that government as well.
So what the gunpowder plot seems to do is to slot into a growing series of divine revelations of plots and conspiracies against Protestant monarchy that have been uncovered and discovered and thwarted the last minute, of course, by figures like francis walsingham and robert cecil, but essentially by the providence of god.
And that's the sort of rhetoric that's underpinning the act of parliament calling for this act of thanksgiving.
And what this act does, it's one of a whole series of statutes since the reformation, essentially telling parish churches what to do under certain circumstances, and it creates an additional service that's added to the Book of Common Prayer.
And it's a service of thanksgiving, a service in celebration of the deliverance this word is used of the monarchy and the crown from harm and the deliverance of England itself.
But this also comes with either the encouragement or in public festivities of other kinds.
It's not just that you were expected to, as a loyal member of society, expected to go to church from now on once a year to celebrate the confounding of the gunpowder plot, but it's also sort of expected that you will participate in powder treason celebrations of attending bonfires and burning of effigies of Guy Fawkes and celebrating essentially, the continuing establishment of the English stage.
You know, this is quite strongly politicised.
Interestingly, from quite an early stage that sort of establishment interpretation of what that day of Thanksgiving becomes subverted by other definitions of what that day is.
Do we know much about how the public at this time responded to the order to essentially commemorate the 5th of November?
Historians working on this sort of whole notion of bonfires and bells and celebration have noted that in later medieval England, in pre-Reformation England, there were lots of points in the calendar saints' days where you could celebrate, where essentially you could have a party.
You could feast.
You could set off fireworks.
You could light fires.
And there was a time of misrule, basically when the authorities wouldn't take too much notice if some unruly things happened in your community.
The Reformation, first of Henry VIII and then of Elizabeth.
It really shuts down that kind of parish religion, those sorts of festivities.
And it gets replaced in Elizabeth's reign by a celebration, an annual celebration of the Queen's accession on the 17th of November, where people hold those bonfires and so on.
So there is already long before the gunpowder plot is discovered.
There's already a kind of 30-year-old culture of urban and civic and local parish celebration of what
Celebration of the monarchy?
Maybe.
Celebration of Englishness?
Possibly.
Celebration of ties of local community?
Absolutely, I think.
The thing is, that hasn't really transferred to the reign of James.
And James is irritated by that that after James comes to the English throne, people continue to celebrate Elizabeth's Succession Day.
But once the powder treason has been discovered and once this act of thanksgiving is passed by Parliament, that changes.
And so then we have this kind of officially mandated day of celebration, essentially, when people can come together and give thanks for something.
Now, whether all of those people are actually perpetually giving thanks for the providential saving of King James from being blown up, or whether they're giving thanks for other things or simply enjoying themselves, is a very interesting question.
And certainly the connection between the real history and the kind of imagined history or the forgetting gets more and more interesting the further from 1605 you travel through history.
And, as we discussed in episode three John, the 1600s were a highly disruptive century for Britain and Ireland.
Do we have any information about whether the commemoration of the 5th of November was celebrated during the decade that Britain was under republican rule?
Yeah, so we're talking about the period after the execution of King Charles I in 1649.
What's we know about royalist culture in that time, so under republican rule, is that it goes underground in some of the same sorts of ways that Catholic culture has gone underground following the Henrician and Elizabethan reformations.
People continue to remember and to mark royal events during that decade of the 1650s, but they do it in secret.
So What you don't see is anything like the sort of same level of public celebration.
How could you?
Because, of course, the act of Thanksgiving is mandating a kind of a celebration of the survival of monarchy.
And once the monarchy has been abolished in 1649, there's no way that the Republican or the Cromwellian protectorate regime are going to allow public celebrations of the deliverance of monarchy.
It's the last thing that would want to happen.
But we do know that people remembered this date.
It's marked in almanacs.
It's marked in calendars that circulate in discrete underground royalist circles.
But then, of course, after the death of Cromwell and after the restoration of the monarchy in Charles II in 1660, all of this comes back.
All of this sort of royalist culture of bonfires and bells and celebrations comes back, but with additional features added to do with the history of the previous 15 or 20 years including, of course, the marking of the day of the execution or martyrdom, depending on how you see it, of King Charles I, which is the 30th of January.
So you get the 30th of January and the 5th of November and then a whole series of other dates being celebrated as part of a sort of rather Protestant but also definitely royalist culture.
And over time, the solemn religious aspects of the 5th of November's commemoration shifted into more festive traditions, as you've just sketched out, including bonfires and fireworks.
How did this transformation happen?
And what did lighting fires and setting off fireworks come to symbolise for these communities, do you think?
By the time you get into the later 17th century the sort of immediacy of the events of the gunpowder plot has receded, I think.
And when people are celebrating... they're celebrating for subtly different reasons.
So Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators have ceased to be genuine historical figures and have become sort of bogeymen, have become just sort of types of Catholic conspiratorial tyranny and the danger that England might fall into.
So the sort of publicly endorsed celebrations continue in that line and just they become more and more sort of aggressively and offensively anti-Catholic I think.
But at the other end of society.
So away from those official celebrations and away from church services.
And church services continue to be held for Powder Treason Day all the way into the 19th century.
The celebration of Bonfire Day, Powder Treason Day begins to acquire some other meanings.
And it becomes less to do with, I think, the celebration of the deliverance of james, are more to do with resistance to tyrannical power and sometimes resistance to authority itself, and this is where the local authorities get very alarmed.
I think so there is a risk and you see this particularly in the 18th and earlier half of the 19th centuries that this bonfire night, as we might call it, becoming a time of riot, crowd action misrule, that is, government that's increasingly focused on local authorities, increasingly focused on policing and preserving the public peace, preserving public order, are really quite alarmed about, and we see echoes of that kind of not just anti-authoritarian but anti-authority understanding of what gunpowder means to this day in places like lewis and sussex that still, of course, maintain this extraordinary tradition of bonfire celebration, but it's very much a celebration That's anti-authority.
And these are people who just don't want to be pushed around by anybody.
Just to pursue that anti-Catholic legacy a little bit further.
Because, you've mentioned, the effigies of Guy Fawkes and the Pope were burned on these bonfires.
How much of that was fermented by the ground up, essentially?
Was that a popular exercise or was that something that was sort of state sanctioned?
Well, certainly the anti-Catholicism is state sanctioned, to the degree that the state has promulgated an official form of religion that mandates people to celebrate this act of thanksgiving.
And let's also remember that Catholics are formally excluded from public life until the Catholic Emancipation Act, or at least effectively excluded, because they have to take an oath of supremacy to the monarch as supreme governor of the church, which they're not prepared to do because they would think of the Pope as being the head of the church.
And so Catholics continue to be excluded from public life in that way.
I mean, I think it's when people are burning images of Guy Fawkes and when they're burning images of the Pope.
What are they actually doing?
Does this represent sort of genuinely viscerally poisonous anti-Catholic sectarian feeling?
Or has it become almost like a kind of folk belief, a kind of folk religion, that certainly by the 18th and early 19th century, when Pope burnings take place?
Now, some communities, definitely that anti-Catholicism really survives.
In others.
I think that the burning of Guy Fawkes and the burning of an effigy of the Pope, it's almost become absorbed within a kind of festive parish culture that isn't perhaps as anti-Catholic and sectarian as it might appear to us to be.
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Across the Atlantic, English colonists in North America also marked the 5th of November.
They called it Pope's Day, often with street processions and fights between rival gangs.
How did the commemoration of the gunpowder plot take on a new life in the colonies and And what role do you think it played in shaping early American identity?
Yeah, it's a really interesting question, isn't it?
Because why would American colonists want to celebrate the discovery of the gunpowder treason?
We know a certain amount about this, for the early and middle part of the 18th century actually, where we know that some of the great cities of what was then the British Empire were New York and Boston in particular.
We've got records of them celebrating what, as you say, is not called Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night.
It is called Pope's Day.
Effigies of the Pope are paraded in crowd action.
Effigies sometimes of Guy Fawkes as well.
These effigies are burned on bonfires.
What's going on there?
Well, at some level, this is anti-Catholic feeling, I think.
I think particularly... where this takes place in New England.
New England is strongly Protestant, strongly Puritan in its culture.
So it wouldn't be that surprising that those traditions, those anti-Catholic traditions, have survived.
I think, to a degree that is very difficult in a post-revolutionary, post-American revolution world, to a degree that's very difficult for us to understand.
It represents a kind of yearning for connection with old England actually.
I mean by one reading of American history.
All Americans just wanted to be American and nothing else, at the point at which they landed in Plymouth Colony.
I just don't believe that.
And I think that there's ample evidence for very strong political religious, but particularly cultural and family connections between America and Britain, right the way through to the point of revolution and beyond it.
So if we're seeing culture in what was then British North America continuing with those practices of parish religion from old England, that's not surprising.
What is really interesting is what happens in Boston in the 1760s.
And there in the way that you might get in some English cities.
At the same time you get rival gangs creating Pope figures and parading them and burning them on rival bonfires.
But then they start fighting with each other and heads get broken and people get punched and killed.
It's the north end and the south end of Boston that we know are doing this.
And all of this just looks like sort of unruly crowd action until you get into the mid 1760s.
And then there's a very specific political context around the Stamp Act, which is when Parliament, the English Parliament, British Parliament, tries to impose famously, you know, parliamentary taxation on America without representation of America in the British Parliament.
And the Americans don't like that.
And there are some interesting instances of how that Pope's Day crowd action was then pivots and starts becoming anti-British action, anti-British establishment action.
This is some way the 1760s, still some way short of the revolution, but it's a very interesting example of that sort of longevity of gunpowder treason in a totally different set of political and geographical circumstances.
And in the 19th century, William Harris and Ainsworth's novel Guy Fawkes retold the story of the gunpowder plot in a more sympathetic light, casting the conspirators as tragic figures.
What do you think this tells us about the Victorian attitudes to this period in history?
That's a very good question.
I think the Victorians, in their approach to history, they're doing a number of things simultaneously.
The practice and study of history becomes much more professionalised.
So Victorian scholars are wanting to get beyond the rhetoric, get behind the propaganda and the hype around the gunpowder plot and get back to the original stories.
Get back to the original evidence.
The confessions, the state paper evidence and questions start being asked about.
Well, this evidence was extracted under torture.
This would not stand up in court these days.
Also, the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in the middle of the 19th century, you know, creates a new set of context in which Britain starts to and tries to, at least in some parts of society, tries to, sort of tries to get away from that sense of Catholics as being incorrigibly and viscerally conspiratorial and opposed to the established state and wanting to provoke conspiracy wherever they see it.
So I think there's a questioning in historical circles around that.
But the Victorians were also great romanticizers of history.
You know, I mean think of, I don't know, novels of Walter Scott or the famous and very famous, influential biographies of English queens by the Strickland sisters.
You know, the Victorian period is a period that's very hungry for history.
And it's particularly hungry, actually, for the history of the 16th and the 17th century.
And a lot of this gets romanticised.
And this isn't only in literary form, it's also in artistic form.
So we start seeing much more sympathetic artistic images, depictions of the gunpowder plotters that also, I don't know, capture some of their what their daring do, their glamour, you know, the bravery and the chivalry of these people, rather than sort of stepping aside from them as being a threat to the Protestant establishment.
So I think all of that is going on in the Victorian period.
And in the 20th century, the writer Alan Moore reimagined Guy Fawkes in his graphic novel V for Vendetta, which was subsequently turned into a movie.
With the protagonist's mask, later becoming a global protest symbol, a stylised version of Guy Fawkes' face.
What do you think this modern reinvention of a 17th century failed conspirator into a powerful emblem of rebellion and resistance to authority tells us about the plot and posterity's fascination with it?
You know, I'm not sure it tells us anything very much about the plot itself.
I think it tells us a lot about people's fascination with outcasts and radicals and rebels.
So the idea of a Guy Fawkes mask and the donning of a Guy Fawkes mask as being in any way connecting you with the politics of 1605 and the Catholic and Protestant politics of religion of that time is just preposterous.
I think Guy Fawkes is a very recognisable figure.
We've got a strong sense of what his portrait looks like, or at least what we think his portrait looks like, because of all of the engravings that are produced at the time, and he's a very distinctive figure.
I mean, you know, you can probably imagine, as you're listening to this, you know the character with the extravagant moustache and the beard and the floppy hat and that sort of.
There's something devilish, isn't there?
But also there's a kind of twinkle in the eye of this kind of version of Guy Fawkes.
This is Guy Fawkes, the lovable rebel, and it's not that difficult to see how history, over the years it becomes the power of history, becomes changed and mutated in all sorts of ways.
And people think about Guy Fawkes in as much as they do think about him.
They might think of him as a sort of a heroic, romantic rebel or freedom fighter type figure, rather than somebody who was prepared to, you know, murder the king and all the royal family and everybody else in the city of Westminster in an enormous conflagration in 1605.
For centuries, the gunpowder plot was remembered as a Catholic conspiracy against the Protestant state.
But some historians argue that Robert Cecil and James VI and I manipulated it or exaggerated its significance to consolidate their power.
How far was the plot a genuine threat and how was it shaped into propaganda?
The extent to which the plot is a genuine threat shaped by propaganda.
It's a spectrum and it depends where you sit on that spectrum.
So there are historians, respectable historians, who will argue that the gunpowder treason of 1605 was the culmination of a whole series of elizabethan plots and conspiracies that weren't real.
They were fabricated by the establishment, they were fabricated by the state, they were fabricated by Francis Walsingham and Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex and other intelligence leaders in order to keep themselves in power and in order to maintain funding in their secret services.
I don't believe that.
I believe that the gunpowder plot was real.
And I think that there's lots of evidence that it was real, not only in the British state papers, the National Archives.
We've got lots of, lots of evidence of confessions and interrogations and other kinds of evidence that more or less tally that the plot was real.
And Guy Fawkes never denied, actually, and Thomas Winter never denied that the plot was real.
That's not the issue.
I think what is absolutely clear though, is that once this plot is discovered, it is turned into a propaganda victory.
It is weaponised by the state and it's weaponised by through a variety of media.
It's weaponised in sermons.
It's weaponised, as we've heard, in religious services and the official liturgy of the Church of England.
It's weaponised in parliamentary rhetoric.
And it's weaponised in arguments around the Privy Council table, I think.
And so yes, it is propagandised and broadcast and distorted and remade and manufactured, without a shadow of doubt.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't very real kernel of truth in the fact that there was actually a gunpowder treason plot and it really did try and kill the King and blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Do you think that appetite for conspiracy theory speaks more to modern sentiments than it does to the actual reality?
Or was that notion of it always having been a conspiracy there from the start?
Elements of this being a conspiracy right from the start Yeah, I mean, that began at the time.
So there were discussions in the English Catholic community at the time because Catholics they can't quite believe that people from their community have gone this far.
I think
And a lot of loyal Catholics are appalled and horrified, not only because of what this might imply for their lives that there's going to be a further repression but also that Catesby and his men had just gone way too far that you might resist.
But under no circumstances should you rise up and tear down the entire fabric of society and kill the monarch.
That's way too far.
So the sense that they didn't really do that, the sense that this might all have been a contrived plot brought into existence by Robert Cecil that is there at the time.
And there is.
If you look back into the Elizabethan period, there is some evidence.
Francis Walsingham did that with one of the major anti-elizabeth plots, the babington plot.
In a sense, he he takes the outline of a plot and then kind of allows it to grow in order to see who it will implicate.
So you can see why that sort of sense of conspiracy story might be there back in the 17th century.
Yeah, i mean, i think in terms of our modern perceptions of this and modern approaches to conspiracy theory, There was a strong strand for many years in Catholic historiography that reassessed all of the plots and conspiracies of this period.
And, at its extreme and this was highly scholarly work at its extreme did make a clear argument that Catholics, all Catholics, were essentially loyal to the English or the British state.
And wherever we see evidence of apparent conspiracy and plot and sedition involving Catholics, that that is essentially manufactured by the English intelligence services.
Now, again, I don't believe that.
I think that there is ample evidence that certain radical Catholics were involved in plots, but that those plots were also, in some cases, allowed to grow in order to see who they would implicate.
And I think there's a possibility that of that with the gunpowder treason, as to what's going on between late October and the 5th of November 1605.
What's going on after the government comes to hear about the plot and then the plot being discovered?
There's a gap of several days there.
What's going on there?
Why does James take some time to hear about this?
So I think you know if you are minded to think in conspiratorial terms.
There is a very interesting story there.
But obviously our own modern society I mean now more than ever is obsessed with conspiracy stories and in a world of widespread belief in conspiracy and a widespread collapse in a belief in political, the ethics of political authority and widespread belief in fake news, there is a much more receptive context to people saying well, of course, this was just a conspiracy.
It's just like now when there are political conspiracies on a grand scale.
So i actually i think, because of our culture right now, we're almost now more open to, I think, an erroneous argument that the gunpowder plot was just an enormous fabrication of the government.
Beyond bonfires and fireworks, how has the gunpowder plot become part of the state ritual of the British state?
Well, the state opening of Parliament before the state opening of Parliament.
The cellars of the Palace of Westminster are still searched, still ceremonially searched by yeoman warders.
I mean this is less these days and anti-terrorist measure also.
No doubt all sorts of other anti-terrorist measures are undertaken when at the state opening of parliament.
But it's part of that wonderful to some people, slightly archaic and absurd to other people.
Absolute fabric of the british state, sort of pomp and circumstance of of life in the 21st century united kingdom.
You know the fact that you have men in a sort of simulacrum of 17th century costume searching the cellars for another Guy Fawkes.
I mean it's the same part of parliamentary ritual as Black Rod hammering on the door of the House of Commons and so on.
You know, it's one of the rituals, it's one of the myths, if you like, but functioning myths, important myths that enable us all to have continued faith in the fabric of parliamentary democracy, I suppose.
And it just so happens that the practice of that parliamentary democracy in the UK is still surprisingly dressed up in a lot of this pomp and circumstance that if you look at the Welsh Senate or if you look at the Scottish Parliament, just doesn't happen.
Or, for that matter, the Doyle in Ireland.
You know, this sort of level of ceremony and so on does not happen.
But Parliament still meets in a royal palace.
I mean, absurdly, it's a different royal palace from the palace that Guy Fawkes tried to blow up.
So the cellars that they're searching are.
They're searching the cellars.
They're different cellars from the cellar in which Guy Fawkes sat.
So quite where they go and what they think they're doing is an interesting question.
But it's just, yeah, I don't object to it.
Finally John, perhaps from a personal point of view, how do you think the commemoration of the 5th of November has evolved from an anti-Catholic ritual into a more secular tradition in your lifetime, but also more generally across history?
And what does this transformation reveal about Britain shifting national memory and its relationship to treason and survival, and the ways that nations adapt and preserve collective identity over time?
I think it's a long time since Guy Fawkes, since Bonfire Night, has been openly and visibly anti-Catholic.
I think it's something that Catholics in some cases continue to be uneasy about.
You can see why that might be the case in the comparatively few communities where bonfire night is still celebrated with burning torches and a banner saying no potpourri.
You know, you might be forgiven for thinking that that looks like anti-Catholic sentiment.
I mean one of the places where this takes place in Lewes, in Sussex.
I think it was a very important moment in Lewes when the local Catholic priest was prepared to get involved in the bonfire night celebrations.
And that was a sort of acceptance that, even though there was a big figure of the Pope that was burned and fireworks were thrown at, or a cardinal, that this wasn't genuinely anti-Catholic feeling.
When the late Ian Paisley, a Northern Ireland politician, turned up in Lewes thinking that this was a genuine example of English anti-Catholicism and started to distribute leaflets, Lewes people took note of that.
And next year, they burned an image of Ian Paisley on their bonfire.
So in a sense, they were sort of consciously rejecting the sectarian nature of bonfire.
But I think there's something, speaking personally, something interesting about it has happened in my lifetime.
I don't think people really refer to the 5th of November so much as being Guy Fawkes night.
I think the bonfire night and Guy Fawkes have got a bit decoupled.
And I think that where communities do hold bonfires on the 5th of November, The idea of constructing a guy and a penny for the guy and burning a guy which is always a bit odd because, of course, Guy Fawkes was hanged and not burned
You know, there's a bit of a misremembering of history going on there.
I just don't think that that happens very much anymore.
When I was growing up, it was still common for families to celebrate Guy Fawkes night or bonfire night as a family celebration.
So if you had a garden big enough, you held a bonfire in the garden.
And you, I mean, you know, my mother and I made a guy each November the 4th, and we burned it on the fire in the garden on bonfire night.
And if you didn't have a garden, you went to a neighbour who did have a garden and you know you'd have cinder toffee and you'd set off fireworks.
That sort of culture of individual household celebrations of bonfire night.
Even when I was growing up, it was beginning to be replaced by big urban civic events bonfires, as it just became more difficult to hold bonfires in your garden and fireworks became very expensive and the setting off of fireworks was banned by local orders and so on.
So all of those changes began to happen.
These days.
You know, if you've ever tried to organise a November the 5th bonfire night, as people in my Yorkshire village have faced you, It's increasingly difficult because just getting the insurance to be able to do this the public liability insurance can run into hundreds or even thousands of pounds and people simply cannot afford.
Communities cannot afford to hold public bonfires.
So that's an issue.
I think the other thing that began to knock Guy Fawkes' night on the head, as I can remember it, was the rise of Halloween.
Halloween was unknown when I was a small child.
Halloween became in the later decades 1980s, 1990s a major thing, an american import, and now it's a huge marketing opportunity.
And so when people set off fireworks and light fires, is it for halloween, is it for, is it for bonfire?
And certainly in the uk, less so in the us, is a weird sort of forgetting and a kind of plasticity and a hybridity to to whether we're doing halloween or whether we're doing bonfire night or quite what it is that we're doing.
But we're going to light a fire and set off some fireworks and have a good time.
And that brings us to the end of this episode and this series.
My thanks to Professor John Cooper and to you for joining us.
Professor Cooper is reader in modern history at the University of York and author of The Lost Chapel of Westminster.
He was also a historical advisor on the 2017 BBC drama series Gunpowder.
If you enjoyed this series and want to know more about the Gunpowder plot, head over to the History Extra app to go beyond the podcast.
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This holiday, discover meaningful gifts for everyone on your list at Kaye.
Not sure where to start?
Our jewelry experts are here to help you find or create the perfect gift in-store or online.
Book your appointment today and unwrap love this season only at Kay.
