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Guy Fawkes Day

Guy Fawkes, a convert to Catholicism, was a member of a group of provincial English Roman Catholics which planned to carry out the Gunpowder Plot, or the Powder Treason, which was a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill King James I of England and VI of Scotland, his family, and most of the Protestant aristocracy in a single attack by blowing up the Houses of Parliament during the State Opening on November 5, 1605.  Fawkes had served in the army on the continent and was a munitions and explosives expert.  The conspirators had also planned to abduct the royal children, not present in Parliament, and incite a revolt in the Midlands.

On the night of November 5th, throughout Britain, bonfires are set alight, effigies are burned, and fireworks are set off.  The people do this to commemorate their country's most notorious traitor: Guy Fawkes.  ...  In 1605, Guy Fawkes (also known as Guido - yes, really) and a group of conspirators attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament ... in what is known as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.  Britannia gives the history behind this act of Catholic revolt, its circumstances and outcome.

Guy Fawkes Day was practiced in British colonies in America -- it was referred to as "Popes Day."  Here is a source for references on Guy Fawkes practices in the American Colonies:

Morgan, Edmund Sears
The Stamp Act Crisis; Prologue to Revolution
Chapel Hill, Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va
by the University of North Carolina Press [1953]

The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports And The Origins of The American Revolution

Nash, Gary B.
Abridged ed.
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1986.

The following is from The Urban Crucible about "Popes Day" and it's impact on this British colony, chapter called "The Seven Years' War and Its Aftermath" (pages 164-165):

"Standing in contrast to these important harbingers of the breakdown of paternalist labor relations in Philadelphia was the persistence of rational cultural practices in Boston.  The leather apron men were the most remarkable of Boson's inhabitants in perpetuating the highly symbolic and ritualistic culture of the laboring classes.  The Pope's Day celebration in Boston provides the best glimpse of their universe.  Held every November 5 to commemorate the thwarting of the Catholic conspiracy in England, when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, Pope's Day had become the high point of antipopery in New England.  Also called Gunpowder Plot Day, this annual festival had special appeal on both sides of the Atlantic among urban artisans, especially of the lower ranks.

"In the 1730's or earlier, Boston's artisans began to commemorate the day with a parade and elaborate dramaturgical performances that mocked popery and the Catholic Stuart pretender.  For several years artisans from the North End [of Boston] dominated the elaborate mummery.  But South Enders soon began competing with them, parading through the streets with their own stage.  What started out as friendly competition soon turned into gang battles.  The victorious party won the right to carry the opposition's pageantry to the top of a hill and to burn it at night along with their own stage.  As the years passed, artisans from both areas formed paramilitary organizations with elaborate preparation preceding the annual event. Though not so intended, Pope's Day became a school for training lower-class leaders, for organizing men who worked with their hands, and for imparting to the lower element a sense of its collective power.

"Boston's Pope's Day also involved the ritual of status reversal so well known throughout Europe.  November 5 became the day when youth and the lower class ruled, not only in controlling the streets of the town but also in going from house to house to collect money from the affluent from financing the prodigious feasting and drinking that went on from morning to night. These "forced levies" were handed up during the morning by well-to-do householders as a matter of course, for, as Isaiah Thomas, a young printer's apprentice, recalled some years later, "but few thought it quite safe to refuse." Authorities in Boston made attempts to control the violence and indiscipline of Pope's Day, especially after melees in which fatal injuries were inflicted, but in general they were powerless to change its character.

"In this increasingly structured social system [New England colony], in which the distance between rich and poor was widening, the patrician elite could also attempt to demonstrate its power ritually through elaborate weddings, horseracing, fox hunting, dance societies, and other socially exclusive events and organizations.  All these manifestations of elite urban culture blossomed rapidly at mid-century [1700's].  Just as Pope's Day in Boston demonstrated the power and distinctive cultural traditions of the laboring classes, these upper-class social events exhibited how extensively the wealthy were emulating the patrician conventions of Georgian England.

"Yet the crystallizing upper-class cultural forms largely failed to exact deference from those of mean or middling condition.  Behind a mask of obeisance, required by the realities of an economic system in which clientage was still widespread, lay an increasingly stormy visage.  In the past an irreverent stance toward authority and high status had surfaced episodically during times of stress.  Egalitarian feelings had also grown extensively during the Great Awakening.  Now hostility toward men of great wealth intensified and the cultural hegemony of the elite, never firmly established, tottered precariously."

[Interesting. It looks like this author sees a connection between Guy Fawkes and the American Revolution!!]

Source:
Dorothy M. Paul
Newsgroups: soc.genealogy.britain
Subject: Guy Fawkes-Colonial/Revolutionary America
Date: 3 Nov 1997
Organization: RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative

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