Tuesday, 5 November 2013

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Most people think that we are celebrating Guy Fawkes as a folk hero for having tried to blow up Parliament, while even those who know the history enter into that spirit by calling him "the last man to enter that place with an honourable intention" and so on.

Here in Lanchester at the weekend, resident and local MP, Pat Glass, judged the Guy competition. It was won by the children of All Saints Primary School. That is the Catholic school, and Pat is a practising Catholic. Quite right, too.

Most Catholics had no idea about the Gunpowder Plot, and they would have disapproved of it in the strongest possible terms. They, of course, paid the price for it. Just as they did for the Spanish Armada, even though the Navy that defeated it was commanded by a Catholic, Lord Howard of Effingham, as loyal to his Queen Elizabeth as I am to mine.

Philip of Spain had expected to be supported by a Catholic uprising in England. But there never was one. As anyone who had known anything about the English Catholics could have told him that there was never going to be.

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