Horizon

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part I

By way of a 'hello' after two months abroad, and in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes' Day on Saturday, here is a little piece I wrote five years ago.

Every year, on the evening of November 5, the small town of Lewes in Sussex, England, is taken over by an extraordinary demonstration of public carnival known simply as ‘Bonfire’ – a mixture of Jacobean sectarianism, Victorian pomp, and modern-day pyrotechnics practically unknown elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Five locally recruited ‘Bonfire Societies’ muster in the High Street, surrounded by tens of thousands of spectators, and process through the main thoroughfare dressed in a bizarre collection of costumery: Zulus, Vikings, Mongols, American Indians, Siamese dancers, Renaissance aristocrats and stripe-shirted pirates, are to name but a few of the exotic specimens on display. Accompanied by military, jazz and youth marching bands, the celebrants pay homage at the town’s war memorial before continuing to parade with a medley of banners, tableaux, and gigantic effigies of historical and contemporary ‘enemies of Bonfire’. The theme is inflammatory; firecrackers erupt, blazing tar barrels are dragged on iron pulleys before being hurled into the River Ouse, and bonfires illuminate the skyline. A mock convocation of bishops gives a series of ex tempore sermons to the crowd, lambasting local and national figures for their supposed crimes. Finally the effigies are devoured by the flames, in some cases suffering the pre-combusted indignity of being blasted to pieces by internally placed fireworks. Among the regular victims of this faux execution are two stock villains from early-modern English demonology; Guy Fawkes, would-be assassin of King James I, and Pope Paul V, excommunicator of Queen Elizabeth I and chief bugbear of the militant Protestant tradition.

Bonfire is the most dramatic extant observance of an almost 400-year old English commemoration of the failure of the ‘Gunpowder Plot’, the pro-Catholic attempt to murder King and Government by the detonation of hundreds of pounds of explosives beneath the 17th Century Houses of Parliament. The forestalling of this attempted coup, which for over two centuries figured in the authorized calendar of liturgical thanksgiving offered by the Church of England, has customarily been a focus point for state-sanctioned anti-Catholicism and the presentation of English history as a ceaseless battle against Romish encroachment. That tradition has mostly lapsed. In the secular Britain of the millennial fin de siecle, now more observantly Muslim than Christian, the overt religiosity of Guy Fawkes’ Night has been almost entirely dropped or forgotten. It is the faint survival of that Catholic-bashing strain at Lewes, most visibly in the annual reduction of Pope Paul, that makes the festival so unusual, provocative – and, perhaps to some, so weirdly compelling. Controversy over Bonfire’s ‘No Popery’ has grown in recent years. Catholic priests have complained that the wanton burning of Popes is offensive. The Vicar-General of Arundel and Brighton, the Rev. John Hull, has guardedly advised that “the interest of all Christians is to ... look to the future, not the past”. An ecumenical organization, Harmony United, has been established to lobby for greater religious sensitivity at the festival. Bonfire organizers are recalcitrant. The Pope in question is not the present-day wielder of the Fisherman’s Ring, they argue, but a long-dead predecessor and a bad one to boot. It’s a bit of “harmless fun”, an innocent vestige of a long-cherished local practice. And besides, they don’t burn him. They blow him up.

To Be Continued