As you prepare to gather round a bonfire and to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at fireworks, don’t forget (indeed, ‘remember, remember’) that you’re part of a well-established national tradition.
What’s now known as the Gunpowder Plot was uncovered on the night of Monday 4 November 1605 when Thomas Knyvett, keeper of Whitehall Palace, led a second search of the vaults under the House of Lords. There Knyvett’s party discovered Guy Fawkes—posing as one John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy, and standing guard over 18 hundredweight (about 900 kg) of gunpowder. The discovery came nine days after Lord Monteagle had raised the alarm having received a letter from his brother-in-law (one of the plotters), warning him not to attend the state opening of parliament on Tuesday the 5th.
The connection between the plot’s discovery and bonfires was made immediately. On the evening of 5 November 1605 Londoners were encouraged to light fires to celebrate the king’s providential deliverance from the assassination attempt. Many did so: John Chamberlain, who lived near St Paul’s Cathedral, that night described a ‘great ringing and as great store of bonfires as ever I thincke was seene.’
Today the Gunpowder Plot is the early modern act of treason, but in truth it was one in a series of conspiracies—albeit one of spectacular ambition. That it became a fixture in the national calendar owed much to the plot’s value to protestants of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries as a warning of what they saw as the threat posed by Catholicism.
- See more at: A few things to remember, this fifth of November | OUPblog
What’s now known as the Gunpowder Plot was uncovered on the night of Monday 4 November 1605 when Thomas Knyvett, keeper of Whitehall Palace, led a second search of the vaults under the House of Lords. There Knyvett’s party discovered Guy Fawkes—posing as one John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy, and standing guard over 18 hundredweight (about 900 kg) of gunpowder. The discovery came nine days after Lord Monteagle had raised the alarm having received a letter from his brother-in-law (one of the plotters), warning him not to attend the state opening of parliament on Tuesday the 5th.
The connection between the plot’s discovery and bonfires was made immediately. On the evening of 5 November 1605 Londoners were encouraged to light fires to celebrate the king’s providential deliverance from the assassination attempt. Many did so: John Chamberlain, who lived near St Paul’s Cathedral, that night described a ‘great ringing and as great store of bonfires as ever I thincke was seene.’
Today the Gunpowder Plot is the early modern act of treason, but in truth it was one in a series of conspiracies—albeit one of spectacular ambition. That it became a fixture in the national calendar owed much to the plot’s value to protestants of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries as a warning of what they saw as the threat posed by Catholicism.
- See more at: A few things to remember, this fifth of November | OUPblog
