Remember. - GBC Bulletin Column #29

This past week, millions of people watched as fireworks lit up the sky on and around the Fifth of November. The Fifth is called by many names – “Bonfire Night” is not particularly revealing as to the day’s origins, nor is the less frequently used “Firework Night”. “Guy Fawkes Night” on the other hand, gives us a name with which to start.

Guy, or Guido, as he was called in his Spanish army days, was born during the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 to an Anglican couple in York. After his father died when he was eight, family influences on his mother’s side, together with other formative relationships, led Fawkes to convert to Roman Catholicism in his youth. Such was his loyalty to Romanism that he joined the Catholic Spanish army while it was still at war with England. When the Protestant James VI of Scotland became King James I of England and Ireland in 1603, an increasingly fanatical Fawkes was seeking support for a Catholic rebellion in England and in 1604 joined a small group of English Catholics plotting the assassination of the new king, with the aim of establishing a Catholic monarchy, and thereby, a Catholic country. The conspirators purchased the lease of a cellar beneath the House of Lords in 1605, which they filled with 36 barrels of gunpowder concealed beneath wood and coal to be ignited during the opening of Parliament, thus reducing the building to rubble and killing all within it.

But their plan was thwarted by the power of the sovereign God. Fear of the plague pushed Parliament’s opening back to 5 November. Concerned for the safety of like-minded (if less fanatical) officials scheduled to attend the opening, the Catholic Lord Monteagle was warned by one of the conspirators to stay away. Religious differences aside, a suspicious Monteagle had the letter shown to King James, who ordered a search of the cellars. So it was, in the early hours of 5 November, awaiting the hour of the assassination, a certain Guy Fawkes was captured and the lives of the King and many of his subjects were spared. Before Fawkes even confessed and the other conspirators were captured days later, all of London knew of the King’s escape and was encouraged to celebrate by lighting bonfires as a “testimony of joy.” An Act of Parliament declared that 5 November be remembered with thanksgiving as “the joyful day of deliverance”, observed from the beginning by the lighting of fires, and from the 1650s to the present by the shooting of fireworks.

At the start of the 20^th Century, Guy Fawkes began to be portrayed in a sympathetic, even heroic light. He became a symbol of “the people” and opposition to totalitarianism. His likeness is worn as a mask by libertarian and anarchist protest groups convinced their anti-government causes are just. But Guy Fawkes was a terrorist, eager to join others in establishing a totalitarian Catholic dictatorship under which adherents to Reformation teaching would have suffered. “Ideas are bullet-proof”, one modern day “Guy” is quoted as saying. Maybe…but those who come up with the ideas and act them out do not share such invulnerability. “Woe to those who dream up wickedness and prepare evil plans on their beds!” (Micah 2:1). This Remembrance Day, we add to the festivities of the Fifth a day of recognition for those whom God has used thus far to protect us from violent and evil men, the totalitarians and terrorists of yesterday and of today. Remember, and rejoice, for God is good, great, and exceedingly gracious. 

This was printed in the worship bulletin of Grace Baptist Church (Wood Green) on 10 November 2013.