YES
Neha Shah
Thursday evening saw us celebrate Bonfire Night and remember the actions of Guy Fawkes, the despondent war veteran, angry about the promises the government had broken. Fawkes, along with a number of other men, was ready to take extreme action by blowing up 36 barrels of gunpowder underneath the Houses of Parliament.
The plan failed, however, and the veteran was seized and dragged before the king. He was tortured in order to produce confessions, and after a show trial, was taken to the yard outside Parliament where the politicians could all watch as the protagonists were hanged by the neck, cut down while still alive, castrated, disembowelled, and cut into pieces.
Despite injuries so bad that he could barely sign his own confession, Guy Fawkes was brave enough to jump from the scaffold before the executioner could stop him, breaking his own neck and saving himself the additional agony that the State wanted to visit upon him.
Imagine that a despondent war veteran was found today, with a bomb, underneath the Houses of Parliament. Many might identify with that veteran’s concerns. He might be frustrated that taxpayers have to pay for MPs on an annual salary of £74,000 to have an additional home, and that these MPs are receiving a ten per cent pay rise from a salary committee that they themselves set up. He might be angry that all of this happens while the government tell the terminally ill to get up and work, cut junior doctors’ basic pay and take away independent living allowances from the most vulnerable in society.
Given that we may well identify with the concerns of such an individual, why do we still celebrate the capture, torture and death of Guy Fawkes, instead of remembering his heroism, his strong anti-establishment stance and his refusal to accept the status-quo? After all, imagine what we’d do to that modern-day veteran if he was caught red-handed with his bomb under Parliament, and how it would compare to what we would do if he turned out to be a Muslim.
It is for all of these reasons, and so many more, that in today’s political climate, celebrating Guy Fawkes is arguably more relevant than ever. Although the Fifth of November was instituted as a holiday to commemorate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot and an opportunity to stir up anti-Catholic prejudices, contemporary celebrations have focused on his recast role an anti-authoritarian hero.
At the start of the twentieth century, he was the protagonist of children’s stories; by the end, he was the face of Alan Moore’s protagonist in V for Vendetta. His face has entered the popular consciousness as a prompt for questions about civil liberties and the relationship between citizen and state. Upon the release of the V for Vendetta film in 2006, David Lloyd, the artist who worked with Moore on the film, said that Fawkes “has now Moore on the film, said that Fawkes “has now become a common brand and a convenient become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny.”
Two years later, in January 2008, hacktivist group Anonymous launched “Project Chanology” – a coordinated attack on the Church of Scientology’s website which they deemed to be censoring information. Rule 17 of Anonymous’s code of conduct, circulated to protesters before its “first real life public demonstration” states: “Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles.” The Guy Fawkes mask, and its status as an icon for the law being taken into the hands of the people, provided just the consciousness” cover that Anonymous needed. Since then, the image of Guy Fawkes has been adopted by the Occupy movement, and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has also donned a Fawkes mask. It has become a regular feature of many protests. The unbreakable spirit of Fawkes, in many regards, lives on. Surely that is worth celebrating.
But the occasion is also worth celebrating for those who do not view him as an anti-authoritarian hero, but instead as a Catholic for those who do not view him as an anti- authoritarian hero, but instead as a Catholic terrorist. Not, of course, in order to toast the death of Catholics, or even to view the burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes in good taste, but in far broader terms; it averted a national disaster.
For if the plot had succeeded in destroying Parliament, and slaughtering the entire English ruling class, the consequences for the British Isles would have been devastating, most particularly (ironically enough) for English Catholics themselves. There would probably have been civil war across England, with the Catholic minority being targeted more harshly than ever, perhaps even being exterminated as a reprisal for regicide. Even retaining the importance of the religious identity of the Guy Fawkes story, we can see an ongoing relevance, because the failure of the Catholic Church to re-establish itself in Great Britain was a small but crucial step to ending the Papacy’s status as a world power.
For me, Bonfire Night is certainly still relevant, not just in remembering the date, but what it stands for; the importance of our political processes, and the prevention of people from hijacking them through public apathy. Whilst on the rack, Fawkes famously said “a desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy,” and it is worth channeling some of this sentiment when thinking about contemporary political reform.
NO
We don’t really remember the fifth of November, do we? When the Comment Editors approached me with this question, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard it labelled ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ since I left primary school. Nowadays, it’s always ‘Bonfire Night.’ It’s the time of year when British people gather round at the back of a neighbour’s house and argue about how to light small missiles before setting fire to their garden shed. At least that’s how it was when I was younger. Even then, it was always ‘Bonfire Night,’ and often you don’t even see bonfires anymore.
For most, it used to be an occasion where we would celebrate some foiled plot to blow up Parliament, four hundred years ago. Where five-year-olds would wander the streets and knock on strangers’ doors asking for pennies in return for burning the effigy of a Catholic terrorist on a fire. Nowadays if a five-year-old wants to pretend to kill a terrorist without parental supervision, they’ve got Call of Duty; and Call of Duty won’t involve burning down half the neighbourhood with it. We have moved on from a society that celebrates mindless violence in the streets.
Instead, what’s left of ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ is bigger, and more soulless events, normally with an even larger and more soul-destroying cost. Groups of people gather at the local rugby or football club for ‘Fireworks Night’ where local ‘celebrities’ make guest appearances and local parents wish a rocket would strike them instead. There’s no link to the past anymore. As part of our growing process of disenchantment with the past the event means less and less. The displays are much more events to celebrate the lives of communities, than the history of the Gunpowder Plot. It seems Guy Fawkes has fallen out of vogue, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason to resuscitate him. It’s as if we have got to keep the festival, but not the troubling connotations that go along with it.
For starters, there are numerous other events that are hugely more important than an arguably minor plot that failed. Instead of a failure that helped provide a rallying point for anti-Catholic fervour for much of the centuries that followed, why don’t we have a national holiday like the Americans? They fire the defence budget of a small European country in the air on the 4th of July to celebrate their independence, their foundation of a nation against tyranny.
If you were to ask Britons the significance of 1st May, the Act of Union, or 15th June, the signing of Magna Carta, they’d most likely have no idea, and these dates are far more significant.
Compared to the national holidays of other countries, there is no positive message that comes from the Gunpowder Plot. The story of Guy Fawkes tells us about religious violence, our suspicion of foreigners, and outdated models of government; in short, nothing that you would want your children to aspire to.
If we really remembered what we celebrate on the fifth of November, it’d be the torture and execution of a rag-tag mob of failures. I’m not going to argue that celebrating torture and execution of traitors is wrong; many others will argue that. The Gunpowder Plot has just become rather insignificant. In the wider course of British history, Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators made no difference. Their attempts to overturn the Protestant establishment failed and, if anything, they made life even worse for Catholics. We shouldn’t remember the plot because, essentially, it characterised a period of religious bigotry and intolerance that we want to forget. We have moved on from persecuting Catholics – maybe we should move on from celebrating 5th November on these terms too. After all, fears of popery and wooden shoes are very 1688, and given the widespread distrust in Parliament, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a handful of strange people wishing the plot succeeded.
The Plot is not particularly relevant to the modern nation we live in. In an age of iPhones and the internet, the slow pace of the narrative about Guy Fawkes struggles to hold our attention. Against the threat of modern terrorism, we are desensitised to quaint tales of seventeenth-century conspiracy. The fact it has become ‘Fireworks Night’ is perhaps a testimony to that. Terrorists are such a pervasive threat nowadays, not just to our institutions, or our politicians, but to our citizens as well. However much information Theresa May might want to store about your internet habits, she’s not threatening to exhume your corpse and posthumously decapitate it for ‘liking’ Pope Francis on Facebook. We are in some ways more civilised these days. Burning a dummy ISIS leader once a year isn’t going to have much effect beyond the nation’s jingoists. We just can’t really identify with the same world view as seventeenth-century Englanders.
I really don’t want to be a killjoy, and I enjoy traditions like Guy Fawkes Night, for all their ills. But, it’s just not relevant anymore, and you can’t force it to be so. It has already morphed into something different as ‘Bonfire,’ or the somewhat anaemically titled, ‘Fireworks Night.’ Thrown into competition with Halloween, it just becomes another consumerist celebration.
Perhaps in this, it has found its niche and will continue to be an event, albeit one separated from its original meaning. Whether we should or shouldn’t, I think we will remember Guy Fawkes in the back of our minds even if his links to ‘Fireworks Night’ all but disappear completely. Nowadays, we celebrate the fifth of November more as an excuse to make loud noises, rather than to celebrate quashing treasonous papists.
