Remember, Remember: How Parliament Invented Bonfire Night

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Today, the story of a holiday that began as an act of Parliament, became a weapon of religious politics, crossed an ocean, and ended with children asking strangers for a penny. Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into England on the fifth of November, a date that has been lit by bonfires for more than four hundred years.

Start with the plot itself, briefly, because the night that followed matters more here than the conspiracy. In late October 1605, a Catholic nobleman, Lord Monteagle, received an anonymous letter. Its writer urged him to stay away from the coming opening of Parliament, and added a strange instruction: burn this letter, for the danger would be past as soon as he did. Monteagle took it to the king's ministers. Around midnight on the fourth of November, Sir Thomas Knyvet led a search of the rooms beneath the House of Lords. In a storeroom piled with firewood, his men found a man who gave his name as John Johnson, and thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. Johnson was Guy Fawkes, a Yorkshireman who had spent years soldiering for Spain. The plan, hatched by a small circle of Catholic gentlemen around Robert Catesby, had been to kill King James the First, his lords and his Commons in a single blast.

What happened next is the part worth lingering on. As word spread through London that the king was alive, people lit bonfires in the streets. The Privy Council approved, on one condition: the celebrating was to be done "without any danger or disorder." That condition would be tested for centuries.

Within months, Parliament made the celebration official. In January 1606, while the surviving conspirators awaited execution, it passed what became known as the Thanksgiving Act. Every fifth of November, ministers in every parish church were to hold a special service of thanks, and the text of the act itself was to be read aloud to the congregation. Attendance was, in principle, compulsory. A new form of prayer entered the Book of Common Prayer. A failed assassination had become a national holy day, and it would stay on the law books for two and a half centuries.

Towns took to it with enthusiasm and a budget. Councils paid for bell ringing, sermons, music and gun salutes. Canterbury, in 1607, laid in a hundred and six pounds of gunpowder for the occasion, a striking quantity for a festival about gunpowder. By the 1620s, Gunpowder Treason Day was the most important state commemoration in England.

It was never only about thanks. The day was a Protestant festival, and its message about Catholics was blunt. When Charles the First married a French Catholic princess in 1625, crowds burned effigies of the pope and the devil, the earliest such burning on record. In the political crises that followed, the effigies grew bigger and the processions more theatrical. In 1673, after the king's brother, the future James the Second, became a Catholic, London apprentices burned an effigy of the Whore of Babylon. Then the calendar handed the date a second gift. On the fifth of November, 1688, William of Orange landed in England to take the throne from that same James. Now the day marked two Protestant deliverances, and the prayer book service was amended to give thanks for both.

By the 1700s, the respectable classes treated the night as a polite entertainment: fireworks, a good dinner. Further down the social ladder it was rowdier. And over that century a new figure took the center of the fire. The effigy on top stopped being the pope and became Guy Fawkes himself, a stuffed figure in old clothes hauled through the streets. In 1790, The Times noticed children begging money "for Guy Faux." The penny for the guy had arrived.

That effigy gave English a word. By 1806, a "guy" meant a Fawkes dummy. By the 1830s, it meant any person dressed so badly they looked like one. By the 1840s it had loosened into plain "fellow," a sense that took hold most firmly in America. Every "you guys" still carries a trace of a straw traitor on a bonfire.

The custom crossed the Atlantic, where New Englanders called it Pope Night. In Boston, rival gangs from the North End and the South End built wheeled stages carrying effigies of the pope and the devil, and fought to capture and burn the other side's figures. It was dangerous. In 1764, a boy was killed when a cart carrying an effigy ran over him. The next year, with the hated Stamp Act just taking effect, the two gangs held a "Union Feast" and marched together under a South End shoemaker named Ebenezer Mackintosh. The crowd skills of Pope Night were turned against British policy.

Ten years later, on the fifth of November 1775, the new Continental Army was camped at Cambridge, and George Washington learned that some of his men planned to burn the pope again. His general orders for that day called it "that ridiculous and childish Custom." The army, the orders pointed out, was at that moment courting the friendship of Catholic Canada. To insult their religion, they said, was "so monstrous, as not to be suffered, or excused." Boston's last known Pope Night came the following year.

Back in England, the nineteenth century brought trouble. In Lewes, in Sussex, men calling themselves the Bonfire Boys rolled blazing tar barrels through the streets. In 1847, the Riot Act was read at them and police were brought down from London. The town had an older grievance of its own: seventeen Protestants burned at the stake in its high street under Mary Tudor in the 1550s. When the pope restored Catholic bishops in England in 1850, the papal effigies came back with fresh anger, and in 1853 the town's first bonfire societies were formed. They still parade every year, carrying seventeen burning crosses.

Parliament, meanwhile, was losing its appetite for official sectarian rejoicing. In January 1859, Queen Victoria removed the special service from the Book of Common Prayer, and that March, Parliament repealed the Thanksgiving Act. The state stepped away. The fireworks stayed.

That is the odd afterlife of the fifth of November. The law that created it is gone. The anti-Catholic sermons have mostly faded; few people at a fireworks display give the pope a thought. Yet pieces of the old day survive in plain sight. Before each State Opening of Parliament, Yeomen of the Guard still walk the cellars of Westminster with lanterns, a ceremonial search for a plot four centuries cold. Children in Britain still build guys, though fewer every year. And people everywhere say "guys" with no idea they are naming a man who never got to light his fuse.

A government once decided how a nation should feel about a near miss and wrote that feeling into law. The people took the bonfires, and kept them long after the government let go.

Thanks for listening to Hidden History.