Horizon

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part IV

Part III
Part II
Part I

(Hat tip to Joan's Place).

The Toryish flavor of Bonfire has undoubtedly been encouraged across the years by the sponsorship of local Conservative brewing interests, who have had an indulgent attitude towards a ceremony that both panders to their politics and profits their hostelries. The nonconformist community, which one might assume to be in tune with anti-Papal rhetoric, has by contrast always suspected Lewes’ November 5 events as an excuse for superstitious drunkenness. Bonfire is a High Church affair.

There is no mistaking the triumphalist clarion of the Boyne in Lewes’ crescendo, a sound not lost on such present-day visitors to the festival as the Presbyterian hard-liner the Rev. Ian Paisley. But for all that flag-waving and No Popery there remains an abiding counter-tradition deeply embedded within Bonfire, a tradition that de-emphasizes the savage indignation of the powder plot executions and instead uses Lewes as an instrument of popular celebration and protest. This alternative reading relies not so much on the contingent circumstances of Jacobean intrigue as on the atavistic urge to make merry during the darkening autumnal evenings, to party away the ending of the year. The primitive attraction to winter festival flames was expressed by the Celtic holiday of Samhain, the predecessor to today’s Halloween; ecclesiastical watchdogs have been condemning the lighting of November bonfires since at least the Third Council of Constantinople in 680 AD . As Professor John Scarisbrick, one of Britain’s foremost Catholic scholars, recognizes: “It’s quite extraordinary how the Guy Fawkes thing caught on. It must have played on something very powerful in the English psyche”.

The make-believe, mock hierarchies and mimicry of Bonfire attest to its strong psychological connection to the older festivals of misrule that characterized the medieval calendar. There is a tradition of parodic ‘let’s-pretend’ that expresses itself in visual and semantic form; Lewes bonfire societies have developed elaborate, quasi-militaristic titles and officers, with Grooms in Waiting and Staff Buglers in attendance to Field Marshals, Inspector Generals and Chief Pioneers (a theme no doubt influenced by the strong links between the Victorian bonfire enthusiasts and the local Volunteer Army regiment). The counterfeit array of bishops that harangue the audience from their pulpits are an explicit jab at the Catholic elite, certainly. But they also make fun of uniformed authority in general, the drunkenness and absurdity of the clerics’ behavior tacitly ridiculing the dignity of organized power. The fancy dress, now an elaborate game of competitive group embellishment with amazing variety – one observer in the 1880s noted “Devils, clowns, pantaloons, Salvation Army representatives, Shakers, cavaliers, sprites, jesters, courtiers, troubadors, tambourine girls in Italian costumes, Zouaves, artillerymen, chasseurs, sailors and ” among the crowd - began as a means for troublemakers to avoid identification by the police. Even in these tamer days masquerade serves its purpose of licensing misbehavior, the revelers letting off steam in an effervescent atmosphere of beer and illuminations.

Other than just the opportunity to let rip and ignore conventional taboos, Bonfire also encourages more coherent acts of public complaint. Even at its most virulently anti-Catholic, the Lewes fete was as much to do with castigating the Establishment for its Papal backsliding as it was a celebration of the state’s legitimacy. The decision in 1850 to allow the Catholic hierarchy to re-establish itself in England was criticized in Lewes in the traditional combustible manner, and Bonfire has been punctuated ever since by protests that the Anglican Church is slouching towards Rome, recent victims of the flames including the former Archbishop of Canterbury himself, Dr. Robert Runcie. All a bit unsavory to modern liberal eyes, of course, but a reminder that the work done in Lewes is no less grass-roots disapproval of the behavior of those higher up than simply national self-congratulation.

To Be Continued

Posted by Alan Allport at November 5, 2005 11:05 AM