One thing I knew for certain: Guy Fawkes was a bad man. A
very bad man. So bad, in fact, that every year, in the days leading up to November
5th, my brother Ian and I would round up old clothes from the rag bag, stuff
them with crumpled newspaper into a reasonable facsimile of a human being, and
trundle him around the streets of Clifton Village, requesting “a penny for the
guy” from passers-by. The money went to buy fireworks, while Guy met his fate,
sizzling on a bonfire. Gleefully, we sang,
"Please to remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot."
At first it was all good, clean fun. Even when I learned the
word “effigy,” and understood that the guy we were burning represented a real person,
I was unfazed. He was a traitor, pure and simple. He deserved to die.
As I grew older, the black and white certainties of
childhood history became clouded with nuanced shades of gray. Was Guy Fawkes
really the scheming villain of my youth, or might he have been set up?
What is known is that on 5th November, 1605, Guy Fawkes was
caught in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament with several dozen barrels of
gunpowder, looking for all the world as if he was about to blow up the Houses
of Parliament, King James I, and with him, the cream of the English
aristocracy's fairest and finest (which if you ask anyone of Irish extraction,
isn't saying very much.)
Nobody asked questions like: how did he manage to procure so
much gunpowder when it was so scarce, and how did he get it past the guards?
Guy was found guilty, and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn
and quartered. I won’t spoil your breakfast by describing the technique, which
ranks among the most brutal methods of execution ever devised by man (which is
saying quite something): suffice it to say only that the castration which began
it was the easy part, after which things rapidly got worse. So determined was
our hero to avoid the torture that he jumped headlong from the scaffold and
broke his neck, thus depriving the assembled onlookers of their morning’s
entertainment.
While not quite in the same league as the Borgias in Italy,
the court of James I was not far behind. In particular, the Lord Cecil was a
ruthless schemer such as would make Richard Nixon look like the Easter Bunny.
There is some considerable evidence to suggest that Cecil masterminded the
whole plot, including Guy Fawkes’ arrest. And execution. His goal was to stir
up vehement anti-Catholic sentiment, and in that he was more than successful.
Historical revisionism notwithstanding, November 5 was
always a good excuse for a party and the best were in Yorkshire. Being in the
north of England, Yorkshire is considerably colder and darker than the south;
and on November 5th, the darker and colder the better. Certain
traditional delicacies were prepared in advance: parkin, a dark and gloriously
sticky gingerbread made with black treacle and golden syrup, and the aptly
named "mushy peas"—overcooked peas mashed to a glutinous paste (a technique
pioneered and perfected in the kitchens of British Rail)—and rendered strangely
exotic by the addition of mint sauce (finely chopped mint leaves mixed with white
sugar and vinegar.)
Most major holidays are relatively homogeneous, and involve
dinners round a table using knives, forks and spoons. Not so our Yorkshire Guy
Fawkes celebrations! The contrasts were thrilling: icy cold at our backs
driving us ever closer to the ferocious, skin scorching, hair frizzing heat of
the raging bonfire; fingers frozen numb, threatening to drop the paper cups
that did little to insulate against the veritable furnace of mushy peas; the
biting cold of the icy ground snapping at our feet through ridiculously thin
soled shoes; the roaring whoosh of flames devouring everything we fed them—
leaves, branches, broken down furniture, even on one occasion a piano deemed
beyond all hope, wildly out of tune, with a cracked sounding-board….It
serenaded us in its death throes, twanging a macabre melody as one by one its
strings exploded, curling red-hot into the black night sky. Wild, pagan,
celebrating a revolutionary who sought to overturn the status quo by
unthinkably violent means: five dozen barrels of gunpowder, ready to blow the
English government to kingdom come.
Or was he some poor stooge, easily manipulated by those more
devious, more ambitious, more malevolent than he? Are the children’s voices, still
urging their listeners five hundred years later, to “remember, remember the
fifth of November” doing exactly what Cecil wanted: stirring up anti-Catholic
feeling in a country where to this day “all religions are the same, except
Catholics, and they’re wrong.”
