Tonight is Guy Fawkes night! I hope the rain doesn't dampen the celebrations for our first official Guy Fawkes Day!
T is excited because there are fireworks on sale, but we haven't bought any...
According to Wikipedia:
Guy Fawkes Night originates from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed conspiracy by a group of provincial English Catholics to assassinate the Protestant King James I of England and replace him with a Catholic head of state. The survival of the king was first celebrated on 5 November 1605, after Guy Fawkes, left in charge of the gunpowder placed underneath the House of Lords, was discovered and arrested.[1]
The same month the surviving conspirators were executed, in January 1606 the Observance of 5th November Act 1605, commonly known as the "Thanksgiving Act" was passed, ensuring that for more than 250 years 5 November was kept free as a day of thanksgiving. Each anniversary of the plot's failure was for years celebrated by the ringing of church bells, special sermons, and the lighting of bonfires.Further controversies such as the marriage of Charles I to the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France and the 1679 Popish Plot helped fuel the popularity of the events, which at times became a celebration not of the deliverance of a monarch, but of anti-Papist sentiment.
In England the Catholic hierarchy was restored in 1850. Anti-Catholic sentiment remained strong, and effigies were burnt of the new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, and the Pope. The publication in 1857 of author David Jardine's A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot only stoked the flames higher, and in 1859 the thanksgiving prayer of 5 November contained in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was removed, and the 1606 Act repealed.
Historically the date has been celebrated by the burning of effigies of contemporary hate-figures, such as that in 1899 of Paul Kruger, President of the South African Republic, at Ticehurst. Some modern instances of burning effigies exist; in Lewes in 1994 revellers immolated the effigies of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and John Major, alongside Fawkes
love S.
