Remember, remember

Today is Guy Fawkes Day in the UK. It’s not a holiday in the sense that you get out of school or off work; but tonight across the realm there will be fireworks and bonfires lit (along with suitable amounts of drinking) to celebrate the exposure and foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and King James I on this date in 1605.

Guy Fawkes wasn’t the leader of the plot, but he was the one charged with its execution (so to speak). Having been a mercenary fighting for the Catholic League and the Spaniards against the Protestant Dutch, he presumably had the experience necessary to handle barrels of gunpowder and set the charges.

He did, but the plot was revealed via a letter warning a Catholic Member of Parliament to stay away on the 5th. One thing led to another, the gunpowder was discovered (“Oi, mate—did you order 30 barrels of black powder and all this firewood and coal?”), Fawkes was apprehended and duly tortured to reveal the names of co-conspirators. (Unsuccessfully—as “interrogators” in our current foreign wars have learned, torture isn’t a good means of acquiring reliable information.)

Eventually there was a trial, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Fawkes cheated the hangman, though: he jumped from the gallows and broke his neck.

I’m guessing the executioners went ahead with the drawing and quartering, however.

Since the 18th Century, effigies of Fawkes, “guys”, have been burnt in bonfires with much gaiety on this night.

Now, while I think it’s a good thing indeed to foil mass murder plots (even when the prospective victims are politicians), there’s something about continuing this tradition of dissing Catholics down into the 21st Century that just creeps me out.

It’s not that I am baptized in the Roman Church, it’s this holdover from the time when where you worshiped defined your entire existence for good or ill. I mean—that’s so 19th Century. (Okay, people over here were certain that JFK would be taking all his marching orders from the Pope; but we got over that.)

But the Brits are stuck in this time warped mentality in which Catholics = Satan-worshiping-overthrowers-of-civilization.

This whole aversion to Catholicism is related to the monarch being the head of the Church of England, which emerged from Henry VIII having the hots for Anne Boleyn (and the possibility of producing a son who wouldn't die in infancy) and needing a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which Pope Clement VII refused to give him. For centuries after Henry declared the papacy irrelevant, all non-CoE followers were required to support the established church with their taxes. So if you were a Methodist, you were voluntarily giving money to your chapel and involuntarily giving money to the Anglicans.

That’s one of the reasons why our Founding Fathers slipped that separation of church and state clause in the First Amendment. That established church thing just rankled. (A lot of the provisions in the Constitution were reactions to British governing practices.)

Charles III has signaled a more ecumenical approach for the new century. He inherited the title of “Defender of the Faith”, which was accorded to Henry VIII by Pope Leo X for his defense of the Catholic Church against Martin Luther (and subsequently taken to designate the British monarch as the head of the Church of England), but has said he prefers to think of himself as a “defender of faith”. (Some Commonwealth countries also removed the “DoF” style from references to the king.) Only recently he was seen praying in the Vatican with Pope Leo XIV; since giant cracks did not appear in the earth’s surface and the sun, in fact, rose again the next morning, this may be A Sign.

Indeed, in an odd turn of events—even as the Church of England elects a female Archbishop of Canterbury and the official head of the denomination reaches out to members of other faiths—evangelicals in the US are pushing for a White (Protestant) Christian-fascist theocracy in the country founded on no established religion.

If we had bonfires here, they’d be tossing witches and irony into the flames.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu