Are those fireworks? Or has the Secret Army heard that the Queen was ill, and emerged from the undergrowth to seize power at last? Most people think that we are celebrating Guy Fawkes as a folk hero for having tried to blow up Parliament. 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. On 16 October 1834, it burned down anyway. 229 years earlier, most Catholics had had no idea about the Gunpowder Plot, and they would have disapproved of it in the strongest possible terms. But 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 was 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.
Who did you burn this year?
ReplyDeleteWho do you think, and why?
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