Another Guy Fawkes Night: Bonfire Night. ‘The only man who ever went into Parliament with honest intentions.’ V-for-interminable-comic-book-and-cinema-preachiness. Fireworks. 1605 and All That.
(Or, as I privately call it, that time when a bunch of my second through sixth cousins, against the urgings of various fifth cousins, tried to blow up my first cousin and a lot of remoter kinsmen … and failed: very conveniently for another lot of fourth and further removed cousins, and to the detriment of a right smart of innocent and uninvolved fifth and remoter cousins.)[1]
After four centuries in America, I can’t say that I or my family have made much of Bonfire Night, as a rule (not counting that Bonfire Night with that nice, jolly-hockey-sticks Home Counties young lady in about 1983 who was doing a semester abroad at Sweet Briar and turned out to have the same hobbitish appetite for real ale and fried mushrooms as had I…).
Yet whether the Gunpowder Plot was what it is believed to have been or was a Cecilian frame-up from the off, it has lessons for us.
The first is that politics must never be allowed to go about in vestments any more than in uniform.
The second is that odium theologicum is no legitimate ground or basis for a revolution, and does not meet the criteria set out by a ninth cousin of mine when he set out that, The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
And the third is that avoidable civilian casualties are absolutely off-limits and terrorism is never the answer—particularly against an even remotely democratic system, and least of all on religious or sectarian grounds.
So … it turns out that Guy Fawkes is relevant after all, and specially so just now. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest this lesson.
[1] This is not bragging, or a source of pride: I do not share in my ancestors’ crimes or glories, and have nothing to do with any of it. But the uses of genealogical awareness shall be important in a later essay on writing…
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 