Bonfire Night

I was writing a 'test piece' yesterday for a possible new 'mail magazine' web site that Edera and I are thinking of developing this year. The topic I chose, pretty well at random, was 'Bonfire Night'. We celebrate this in England on 5 November each year to commemorate the failure of the 1605 'Gunpowder Plot' to blow up the State Opening of the English Parliament. A group of eight Catholic gentlemen conspired to attempt to assassinate the Protestant King James I and his government and crown his Catholic daughter Elizabeth as queen.

It is years since I've read this history and I was surprised what a different 'feel' it has now compared with when I was a child in the 1950's. Back then it was a interesting if rather dark fable from the far past, although certainly in the North East fifty years ago 'Roman Catholics' as we called them were still viewed with suspicion - perhaps by then more a consequence of Ireland's neutrality in World War II.

Now it all makes so much more sense, because we have come once more to live in a world in which bombs and assassinations are commonplace again and routinely play a part in politics and to promote religious agendas. These eight Catholic 'recusants' in present day terms were simply 'terrorists' - it is amazing to think that the English government could have been so careless as to let them plant 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement under the hall where parliament would meet.

Fifty years ago there was also something alarming and sinister to me about burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, but again we can now hardly see a news bulletin except that we see some crowd somewhere burning effigies of politicians or setting fire to flags.

This vocabulary of anger and hatred seems to have changed not at all over the centuries. When we watch baying mobs setting fire to things on the television news we are looking at our own history too.