Guy Fawkes Day

What the day is

Guy Fawkes Day is observed on November 5, also called Bonfire Night. In Britain it means fireworks, bonfires, toffee apples and parkin, and it is one of the few widely kept festivals in the calendar with no religious or retail machinery behind it.

Origin and background

In 1605 a group of Catholic conspirators planned to destroy the House of Lords during the state opening of Parliament, killing James I and much of the political establishment, and install a Catholic monarch. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were placed in a cellar beneath the chamber.

An anonymous letter warned a peer to stay away, the cellars were searched, and Guy Fawkes was found there with the powder in the early hours of November 5. He was tortured and gave up the others. Fawkes was not the leader; Robert Catesby was. Fawkes was the explosives man, which is why he was the one caught.

Parliament promptly made the anniversary an annual thanksgiving by law, and the observance was for centuries explicitly anti-Catholic. The effigy burned on the bonfire was originally the Pope rather than Fawkes, and the switch to Fawkes came later as the sectarian edge faded. Some towns, notably Lewes in Sussex, still hold processions that preserve elements modern observers find uncomfortable.

The mask has had an unexpected afterlife. The stylized Fawkes face from the graphic novel V for Vendetta and its film adaptation became a global protest symbol in the 2000s, which means a seventeenth-century Catholic conspirator now stands in for anti-authoritarianism generally.

How to take part

• Go to an organized display rather than lighting your own. They are safer, cheaper and better.
• Check bonfire stacks for hedgehogs before lighting. They shelter in them and are killed in large numbers every year.
• Keep pets indoors with curtains drawn and background noise on.
• Eat the traditional food: parkin, toffee apples, baked potatoes from the embers.
• Read the actual history of the plot, which is considerably stranger than the rhyme.