Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot
Today in 1605, a cabal of Catholic plotters, hoping to turn back the tides of reformation and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne of Great Britain, attempted to assassinate the very Protestant King James.
Their plan – if you can dignify it by calling it a plan – was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of England’s Parliament.
This was to be followed by a popular revolt in the Midlands during which James’s nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was to be installed as the Catholic head of state. This has come to be known as the Gunpowder Plot.
The plotters were led by Robert Catesby, an Oxford-educated aristocrat whose parents had suffered years of imprisonment for the crime of being Catholic.
The most famous of the plotters was, undoubtedly, Guy Fawkes, a soldier with 10 years of military experience fighting in the Spanish Netherlands, whose job it was to set off the explosion.
The plotters were sold out through an anonymous letter sent warning of the plot.
Fawkes was arrested in the basement with 36 barrels of gunpowder. The rest of the plotters fled and, after a brief fire-fight during which Robert Catesby was killed, they were captured.
Eight of the survivors, including Fawkes, were convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
And that was the end of Catholic attempts to restore the Catholic monarchy in Great Britain. The day is celebrated now with bonfires.
Here’s the story in the words of the old (very anti-Catholic) poem celebrating the defeat of Guy Fawkes and his conspiracy:
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!
In the last few years it has occurred to me that, while our first bishop in the U.S., Bishop John Carroll (friend of Benjamin Franklin and cousin of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence), saw the United States in the late 18th century as that venue wherein a stymied 16th/17th century English/British Catholicism might take root and become what it was meant to be, the reality is that Catholics in the U.S. after the very early 1800s were completely cut-off from English Catholicism. We in the U.S. know about Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima, but we’ve never even heard of (the much older) Our Lady of Walsingham. We celebrate St. Patrick but we have little memory of St. Cuthbert and St. Edward the Confessor. Those saints who opposed monarchy, like St. Thomas Becket and St. Thomas More, make for good films but even their memory little piques our imagination of what English-speaking Catholicism might be on these shores.
To be (of) British (ancestry) in the U.S. comes in the late 18th and early 19th century to mean that one’s identity is shown precisely by renunciation of monarchy and certainly by renunciation of supranational authority like that of the papacy. Even the earliest American Catholics identified with the more accomodationist approach and therefore would have wanted to dissociate themselves from the position of Guy Fawkes, et al. Add to that, as a new nation, such a division between Catholics and other Christians needed to be set aside in favor of shared revolution then we can understand why General George Washington forbade the celebration of November 5 among his troops!
Thus, it seems to me, that the memory of Guy Fawkes, a Spanish-backed, Jesuit-trained English exile plotting by means of blowing up a parliament in order to overthrow a monarch who happens also to be head of the Church of England/Anglican (a term we can even so little tolerate we rebrand it in post-revolutionary North America ‘Episcopalian’) makes so little sense to Americans after the first quarter of the 19th century that we had to choose to forget about it entirely. It is too close to our own origin story and yet Americans, even American Catholics, can neither embrace the defense of the monarchy nor the one who would replace one monarchy with a Catholic monarchy. We must sing a new song and that song is “Going my way!” And that, I think, is the irony of “Remember, remember, the fifth of November…” In the U.S. we have nothing to remember on November 5 even as Guy Fawkes Night revelries in England grew from 1850 on following the promulgation of Universalis Ecclesiae. We cannot remember Guy Fawkes as an enemy of the state nor can we chalk him up as a heroic vigilante. And so we neither celebrate nor reject November 5, we chose to omit.
Fine musings for the day. To paraphrase the poem,
Americans have reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should hereabouts be forgot!