Snuffing out the history of Bonfire Night

Bonfire Night! That special time of year when communities gather together to gorge themselves on sausages of dubious quality around a fire primarily composed of crisp packets. Children still shuddering with the sugar-high of Halloween gleefully skip in the firelight, brandishing sparklers and slightly hairy toffee apples, and everyone prepares themselves for neck cramp once the fireworks start.

In areas where the Ghost of Health and Safety Disasters Past haunts the organisers binoculars are also required, but no one cares because this year all the participants are going to walk home with their original eyeballs. A happy time for all. I’m sure you enjoyed yourself. Just don’t think too hard about why.

In a country where most national holidays are religious events copy-pasted over darker pagan festivals, Bonfire Night is a bit of an oddity. Jesus was probably born in July, we’re told, Ēostre is a fertility goddess and Father Christmas is a pretty suspicious character liable to distribute blood and bones to naughty children in truly pagan fashion if we let him get away with it (providing he gets time off from appearing in Coca Cola adverts). Yet Bonfire Night stands alone in having a verifiable historical basis that nevertheless, we’re all pretty determined to forget. Guy who?
Let’s face it: for most children, Guy Fawkes is just a debatably man-shaped bundle of all the clothing everyone is too embarrassed to wear any more, such as orange fur coats and boots with lava-lamp heels. At best, they know that he fiddled around with gunpowder and was caught trying to blow up parliament, although the fact that he was caught seems pretty inevitable considering his penchant for wearing items from the Spice Girls’ stage wardrobe. At worst they know that if you make him wear your old puffa jacket he will burn with an eerie blue flame before shrivelling up like a slug in salt. It is possible that this is for the best.

The real history of Bonfire Night is an ugly one. In 1605 a small group of Catholics were caught plotting to blow up King James I (he of the obsessive witch hunting) in the hope that his death would allow a more tolerant, pro-Catholic England to emerge from the rubble. Guy Fawkes (he of the orange fur coat, apparently) was found sitting next to 36 barrels of gunpowder and being unable to explain why he was lurking next to said explosives, he and everyone else in on the plot plus a few spare Catholic scapegoats were executed.

One year later it becomes a legal requirement to celebrate James’ survival and everyone in England enjoys a nice bit of annual Catholic bashing, thus setting back the progress of religious tolerance in England another hundred years. Guy Fawkes, the Pope, and anyone else regarded by the people as a bit of a turd were burned in effigy, and everyone got drunk on intensely anti-Catholic sermons and probably more than a bit of alcohol. Toffee apples seem to be a later addition.

As a nation that looks askance at the flag burnings and effigy shreddings characteristic of current turmoil in the Middle East, it seems a little odd that we gather rosy-faced about the bonfire to enact what is basically an institutionalised symbolic lynching. Sparklers are so much safer than actual mob-style burning torches, plus you can write your name in the air in shades of orange retina-damage! We have our victim to burn, followed by a brief period of mentally anaesthetising light displays, followed by sausages. And we all go home, sick with sausage consumption and cattily sniping about how far we were from the action.

Bonfire Night enables society to perform all the tropes of a good lynching crucially without actually hurting anyone. If this fact nestles deep in our subconscious, so much the better.
Gone are the days when we gathered round the bonfire to hear a good sermon about the devilry of Papists, smug in the cosy warmth of vengeful persecution, and good riddance. So forget about the real history next year. Have a sausage. Look at the pretty lights.