As we were saying...
From chapter 3 of 'Everything'.....
Fire is an honest leveller - it destroys the homes of rich and poor alike. Man’s mastery and enslavement of the flame has made us kings of this world. In the main fire is complicit with this power brokerage and has been the willing workhorse and sometime hitman with little question. Of course sometimes it needs to teach man a lesson as to who is really in charge.
On November 5th people in Britain get together to be dishonest around a fire, just to commemorate the time humanity’s honest relationship with this particular element began to diverge. Fire has nothing to hide, never has, never will, but the hairless ape?
Now we have learned as a species to keep fire on a leash, caged - a dangerous working animal. We are taught to fear it and be wary of its power when untethered; but that temptation is always there, that primal urge that tells us to jump from the edge of railway platforms is the same one that makes us want to start fires. Once every so often, just so we don’t jump in front of trains, we sate that urge and find a flimsy excuse to light the biggest fire we possibly can.
In 1605 the new king of England, James I, was disliked and mistrusted by the populace - in modern Yankophile parlance we would say his approval rating was at an all time low. Then on 5th November of that year Robert Cecil, the king’s spin doctor proclaimed, "It has pleased God to uncover a plot to kill the King, Queen, Prince and the most important men of the land by secretly putting gunpowder into a cellar under Parliament and blowing them all up at once." Soon the tide began to turn - Catholic ‘terrorists’ like Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators became the common enemy for the country to unite against. There’s nothing like a bunch of bearded folk worshipping at a different altar to raise the collective ire. Fawkes was hanged before his guts were cut out and burnt, then beheaded and cut into four pieces. A surgical strike at the heart of the nation’s evil foe.
The thing was though, Fawkes was set up. He was never the leader of a plot, just a flunky who became an unfortunate scapegoat and unwittingly a poster child for sectarian propaganda. Fawkes was just a roadie, setting things up - the planned explosion wasn’t due for another twelve hours. The king was never in any danger, especially as his guards had been tipped off and were lying in wait. It all worked like a dream though - as the Malvinas did for Thatcher many years later, the gunpowder plot made sure James I’s approval rating went through the roof. It didn’t end there though. ‘Remember, remember, the fifth of November; gunpowder, treason and plot.’ What a catchy slogan. Spin is not a modern phenomenon. So it was that nearly four hundred years after one of the greatest propaganda coups in human history that we all gathered in a Lincolnshire field to celebrate the joyful burning of Catholics.