“Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!”
Some holidays involve wholesome activities like picnics, feasts, or an exchange of gifts, others, like the English holiday Guy Fawkes Day (aka Bonfire Night) call for more exciting activities, namely effigy burning.
The first I ever heard of Guy Fawkes Day was while watching the “Depth Takes a Holiday” episode of Daria, so my impression of the holiday mostly concerned the word “bollocks.” Turns out, there’s a bit more to it than that. This holiday is no mere bit of American fascination with English vernacular for “testicles,” but is instead a commemoration of Britain’s turbulent and often rather nasty past.
Every November 5th for the last 400-odd years Brits gather around bonfires, watch fireworks, and burn effigies of the holiday’s namesake. Traditionally, children often paraded through towns with these effigies during the day, begging from those they met, “Penny for the Guy?” so they could scrounge up the money to buy fireworks. This practice has mostly died off in recent years as someone in the UK finally decided that selling fireworks to vagrant, panhandling minors ought to be illegal.
But where does such a holiday come from? Its roots go back to 1534 when Henry VIII, in rather cavalier fashion, split the Church of England from the Catholic Church so he could leave his wife and marry Anne Boleyn (but not that other Boleyn girl.)¹ This lead to a pretty high level of tensions between the numerous Brits loyal to the Catholic church and English Protestants.
In 1553, Mary I (aka Bloody Mary) reestablished Roman Catholicism as the official church in England and made a nasty habit of burning resistant Protestants to death. In 1559, after Mary I’s death, Elizabeth I once again made the Church of England separate from papal authority.
In response to Catholic resistance to her rule Elizabeth I eventually passed a number of anti-Catholic laws. These laws, combined with anti-Catholic sentiment stemming from the memory of “Bloody” Mary and Spain’s attempted invasion of England in 1588, lead to a prolonged period of harsh and sometimes deadly persecution of English Catholics.
By 1605, things hadn’t gotten any less tense. James I had succeeded Elizabeth in 1603 but did not let up on the persecution of Catholics. The Catholics, in turn, had not yet given up their resistance. A group of conspirators, so the accepted story goes, decided to murder James I and the members of Parliament by setting off a massive explosion of gunpowder on the day Parliament opened, November 5th.
Notified of the conspiracy by a letter of warning to one of the members of Parliament to stay home sick on the 5th, Guy Fawkes was caught in the basement of Parliament seconds away from lighting an obscene amount of gunpowder he and his coconspirators had stored in a room they had rented.² After being tortured, Guy revealed the names of those he worked with. A few were killed during a siege of their hideout, while the rest were rounded up, tortured, and (except for one lucky fellow who died in prison) were hanged, drawn and quartered.³
Of course, there is a second story that the conspirators were largely framed in order to justify continued persecution of Catholics. Even in 1605 its hard to imagine no one would have noticed a bunch of men, some probably known Catholics, just sauntering down into the basement of Parliament with barrel upon barrel of gunpowder.
Today, the Gunpowder Plot, as Guy’s conspiracy became known, and Guy Fawkes himself are remembered in a number of ways beyond the traditional celebrations. The most notable of these is the movie V for Vendetta based on Alan Moore’s dystopian comic-book series of the same name . He is also a powerful political symbol used both by anarchists and by conservative pundits.
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1. Had it not been for Henry VIII’s infamous libido, there may never have been a Guy Fawkes Day.
2. Perhaps this is why governments no longer routinely rent out their important buildings to just anyone.
3. “Drawn and quartered” is the polite way of saying “had their guts ripped out and their bodies hacked into four pieces.”
In stark contrast to these lover galaxies is the Cartwheel galaxy, who looks like a hit-and-run victim. The Cartwheel’s distinctive ripple-in-a-pond look is the result of a nasty head-on collision with a smaller galaxy, which then continued on its merry way, leaving the Cartwheel galaxy to sort itself out alone.
On the flip side of the smaller galaxy’s David-versus-Goliath drubbing of the Cartwheel, is galactic cannibalism, which occurs when large galaxies devour their smaller companions whole or in part. This can be seen in the nearby Andromeda galaxy which has stripped stars from its satellites M32 and NGC 205. It even appears to be syphoning off stars from the Triangulum galaxy, from a distance of a million light-years.
