The Gunpowder Plot
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
Constant remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot provided a saving grace out of this dilemma. Protestants cared too much about the monarch's life to stop being suspicious about Catholicism, regardless of what he might tell them otherwise.
There were strong political reasons to make a lot out of the Gunpowder Plot as late as 1745, when a Catholic-led invasion army made it most of the way to London.
I thought everyone/ most UK people would know the real answer and after asking around it appears it's not clear cut.
Anecdotically (asking about 8 people from the UK) 5 people thought bonfire day was celebrated for Guy Fawlkes being captured. (ie killed for trying to burn down parliament) but a few (3) of the 5 people I asked where mostly guessing and was not really sure.
It really does make one wonder about alternate history, if these plots had succeeded instead of failing, or failed instead of succeeding...
It’s actually not about Guy Fawkes at all - it’s that an attempt to destroy Parliament was defeated.
By which I mean that it would have died out a long time ago if it were not for the symbolism that Parliament was successfully protected.
"Guy Fawkes’ Night, the ‘Fifth of November’, has been popular and long-lived for two different reasons. The first is the spectacular nature of the event that it commemorated. Had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, it would have killed the majority of the English political nation of the time, including most of the royal family, aristocracy and leading gentry and many merchants, as well as demolishing Westminster Palace and much of the Abbey and surrounding houses. It was intended not just to overthrow the existing monarch and central and local government, but the Church of England, as established since the Reformation, and the Protestant faith dominant in England. In its place the plotters planned to restore the Roman Catholic religion and enthrone a puppet princess."
As a kid my Catholic neighbour kids were not allowed to celebrate Guy Fawkes night
I do remember as a child having a lot of sympathy for Fawkes and the others!
To me it is a commemoration rather than a celebration. Though I've always enjoyed the spectacle of it all since well before I knew any of the history.
It would surely be interesting to hear what could justify blowing up the parliament and murdering royal family in a child's mind.
> an equally oppressive government (just towards a different group of people).
Could you expand on this? I contrast the then contemporary government against the reign of Bloody Mary, and it's hard to see how it could have been as bad as what Papists would surely have done.
While I don't want to downplay the persecutions that happened during Mary's reign they, they much like Guy Fawkes day or the "Spanish Black Legend" are to a some extent myths propagated by the protestant establishment over several hundreds of years. Protestants were mostly just as eager in persecuting heretics (not only catholics but also other protestants) as the catholics were. Even if they sometimes ended up killing less people I think it's more of a difference of degree rather than kind.
I found https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/myth-bloody-mary-1809... quite interesting.
Similarly, when learning about "priest holes" (places to hide a Catholic priest who came, presumably to lead mass, to your home) my sympathy was with those hiding. It never crossed my mind that they might effectively be plotting the otherthrow of the established order, only that they were oppressed and hunted down.
I guess it's a first-order vs second-order level of thinking.
Royals become royals by mass murder, then oppress the people they rule over. In France I would have been on the side of the revolutionaries for sure. You would side with the royals (and now I notice your username)?
That way they wouldn't remain royals for long. At minimum they must keep their army loyal. One would imagine that they would prefer a good cause to fight for, so oppression must be justified to them somehow. It's easier to just avoid intentional oppression.
> In France I would have been on the side of the revolutionaries for sure. You would side with the royals (and now I notice your username)?
I guess so. Good things are easy to break but difficult to create.
As a kid we learned all about the priest holes and catholic persecution at my catholic school. Then when out with my parents I saw a large monument in a park to a group of people who where burned at the stake for openly practising their religion.
More catholic persecution I thought. We're obviously the good guys being picked on by the bad guys.
I was shocked to discover that it was protestant martyrs who'd been burnt at the stack by catholic fanatics.
Before Guy Faulks the country had already flipped backwards and forwards between catholic and protestant absolute rulers.
That was a wake up call for a young me that there are very few "good guys" involved in anything to do with absolute politics or absolute religion.
Anyone you can't vote out is a tyrant, revolutionary or not. They will do horrific things simply because they can and no one can stop them.
Absolute power corrupts absolute rulers absolutely.
And the whole bonfire thing typically comes with the effigy being burned, so I find it hard to believe most people would be ignorant to its meaning.
where by you'd go around each house asking for money with an effigy (or for a laugh - one of us dressed as an effigy)
This 'begging' was also done by standing next to a shop with a cardboard message and the effigy on the ground
https://brecon.fyinetwork.co.uk/my,25267-Guy-Fawkes-Night-Pe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2G8k7zXhkI
Full documentary, hosted by Top Gear's Richard Hammond:
Guy Fawkes night’s oddest traditions are due to a 1606 law (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15630581 - Nov 2017 (51 comments)
Guy Fawkes Day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3200117 - Nov 2011 (4 comments)
There is no mistaking that this is not a celebration of his death but his also success in rebellion.
For anyone who isn't familiar with the Gunpowder Plot, I can't resist posting this comedic (but factually accurate) video - the basic facts in just 3 minutes. This is from the brilliant BBC children's show Horrible Histories:
Guy Fawkes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40UuVVsYtaM
(And if you like that, watch Protect thy privacy settings! also featuring Guy Fawkes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/p01g2pt6)
Thought A: Celebrating religious persecution, cleansing, and atrocities is kinda lame.
Thought B: As far as plots go, just how many people are aware of the plot against Harold Wilson, I wonder?
Does anyone recognise this fragment? I'd love to know the full version.
Doesn't have that exact line, though.
If Nov 5th is celebrated because Guy Fawkes failed, why do we not also celebrate October 12th?
If Nov 5th is celebrated because Guy Fawkes tried, why do we not also celebrate Oct 12th?
I can’t speak to who likes/hates who and how much, but the murals in Belfast were hard to miss even as a tourist.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/photos/555460/20-militant-murals...
Nov 5th was a failed coup and the state had an interest in reminding people of that failure and the consequences for the plotters.
Oct 12th was a lapse in the security surrounding the government and so the state had no interest in reminding people of that failure.
I think we’re more sensitive to ‘both sides’ now. Even so blowing up Parliament is still generally seen as a bad thing.
Obviously that’s not to condone either the persecution of any religious minority at the time or the treatment of the plotters.
Could be. Or it could just have been in the interests of the powers of the day to encourage such a celebration, and people went along with it because well, who doesn't love a good bonfire?
At the time of Guy Fawkes, the Protestant world was in a battle for survival. Catholics were in the process of burning over 100,000 people on the cross, and they would imminently launch the 30 year war which is regarded as one of the most destructive in human civilization. In the next 150 years, the UK would face multiple attempts from Catholics to take over the country. Guy Fawkes was a useful and pertinent symbol to remind people of the ongoing battle.
By the year 1984 this had all been finished for more than a hundred years at least. Through the hegemony of England and then the US, Protestantism and the ideals of freedom of religion, freedom of thought, and national independence had won out over the world. The IRA was just a terrorist group of no real importance in the larger scheme of things.
Of course the degree of extremism varied amongst different denominations (however the more liberal and pacifist groups were never in power in anywhere and were often oppressed and persecuted). For instance the closest modern equivalent of calvinism (as practiced by John Calvin himself in Geneva) would surely be Wahhabism (or the Taliban)?
Religious freedom was a fringe idea in the UK until the late 18th/early 19th centuries.
Protestants fled to America and the spirit of freedom of religion was started there, particularly in Pennsylvanian under the Quakers (where all religions including Muslims, Jews and Hindus were welcome... but not Catholics).
The witch burning were started, and continued to be carried out mostly by the Catholics, but there are exceptions such as the large number that took place in Scotland.
Also during the chaos and slaughter wrought by the invading Catholics, there were many cases of revenge attacks as everyone struggled for survival, but I don't know where you get the idea that it was mostly carried out by protestants.
As to your other point, pacifism and pacifist groups were a rarity but that has nothing to do with freedom of ideas. The whole basis of Protestantism is that human authority has no sway over man and each individual has to find god their own way through reading and through thought. It is very clear from history that these ideas were started by the Protestants and were spread everywhere that protestants went. Just look at where in the world all the scientific breakthroughs took place over time.
Luther and Calvin were both were keen on witch burning while for instance the dreaded spanish inquisition did not even officially recognize the existence of witchcraft (the number of people executed in spain is generally low compared to most major protestant countries and almost all there were convicted by secular courts rather than the inquisition). When given free reign, Calvin in this attempt to turn Geneva into a ideal puritan state he created dystopian theocracy, not any less oppressive than almost all Catholic states at the time.
Generally the ideas you're describing were formed by humanists like Petrarch, Erasmus, Bruni etc. (who were all catholic) prior to the spread of protestantism, while they were embraced by some protestant groups, they were mainly further developed by (mostly) secular enlightenment philosophers (most of whom again were from Catholic countries). Most breakthroughs happened in places were people first embraced secularism and stopped taking organized religion too seriously (I agree that this was more likely to happen in Protestant countries but mainly because less organized and smaller protestant churches tended to be weaker and easier to ignore than the catholic church).
Almost all Scientific and engineering breakthroughs in that period happened in Scotland, Netherlands, England, and Germany. This isn't a coincidence. Only after the French revolution and the rise of secularism did the former Catholic world begin to take part in the scientific revolution.
Also, because of the persecution in England and elsewhere, many fled to America and while one can always find examples to the contrary, the fact remains that the separation of church and state in America was pretty much welcomed by all, and it was specifically because of what the people who lived there had learned about religious persecution and how those in power use such persecution for their own ends.
In fact, such a situation, with an entire country of deeply religious people all agreeing to restrict the power of religion, is so extraordinary that you can't simply dismiss it. Clearly extraordinary circumstances existed at the time for this to occur, and this needs to be explained.
Again I'm not sure that's accurate, was Britain really that much ahead before the second half of the 18th century? Copernicus, Galileo, Pascal, Torricelli, Lavoisier, Volta all had a Catholic background. Even the steam turbine was (according to some) invented in Italy by Giovanni Branca in 1645, however since there was no easily accessible coal in Italy the industrial revolution could not have started regardless of their religion.
While in general I don't want to fully dismiss the whole concept of 'protestant work ethic', the success of England, the Netherlands (the low countries were already the most prosperous region in Europe before the reformation even started) and later Prussia can be better explained by their political, legal & economic systems, their geographic location and (in the case of England) access to natural resources rather than their religion.
While I would concede that protestantism had a generally non negative effect on work ethic. Positive attitude towards intellectualism is not something unique to protestants. The tradition of what we consider to 'modern intellectualism' was born in renaissance Italy. It was continuously developed by catholic philosophers, scientists and organizations (e.g. the Jesuits) over the upcoming centuries. While dogmatism and negative attitude towards scientific progress was widespread in catholic countries, the Puritans(again) (and most hardline protestants) were generally anti-intellectual. However one thing protestants were ahead in was literacy, while generally it was not necessarily promoted due to their positive attitude towards intellectualism (it's not like devout protestants really need to read anything besides the bible and business ledgers) it overall still likely had a significant positive effect.
> In fact, such a situation, with an entire country of deeply religious people all agreeing to restrict the power of religion, is so extraordinary that you can't simply dismiss it
The political elite of the US during the War of Independence was remarkably irreligious (at least compared to the previous and future generations). Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams etc. were all either outright critical of organized religion or basically just ignored it. Americans generally became more religious in the first half of the 19th century (as a result of the "Second Great Awakening").