A Penny for the Old Guy

First, sorry to be so long in posting again, but my plans for this past weekend got derailed, so I didn't really have anything new to talk about. However the last couple of days have been chock full of great experiences, and I'll start with this one.

Yesterday was Nov. 5, Guy Fawkes Day here in England. In 1605, Fawkes and some co-conspirators hatched a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament during the king's annual address, wiping out most of the leadership of the country. Fawkes, you see, was a Catholic, and England was now fully and militantly Protestant. Elizabeth I had died in 1603 naming her cousin James VI of Scotland as her heir--she was the "Virgin Queen" remember. So James Stuart comes to London to become James I of England. The idea was that the plotters would stuff the basement of the Parliament with barrels of gunpowder (hence the name The Gunpowder Plot) and set them off when all the members, the lords, and the king were assembled. This would be the signal for a rising of Catholics and an attempt to restore England to Catholicism. It was foolish nonsense of course, and in any event the plot was discovered. Fawkes and several others were arrested, tried, and executed by being hanged, drawn, and quartered, the prescribed punishment for treason.

Shortly after that, there began a tradition that every year on Nov. 5,  huge bonfires would be lit and effigies of "The Old Guy" would be tossed into the flames while denouncing Catholicism and praising England's Protestant faith. Children would pass among the onlookers asking for "a penny for the Old Guy," and fireworks would be set off as well. The tradition has lasted into the present day, although its anti-Catholic sentiments have been pretty much expunged. Now it is more just a celebration than any kind of political or religious statement. And, these days it is rapidly being overtaken by Halloween as the trappings of that American holiday are more and more in evidence here.

Anyway, ever since my English major days when Guy Fawkes Day figured so prominently in several novels I was reading, I always wanted to attend a bonfire, and last night I got to do so.

I hope you can see it, but this was the bonfire--a right proper one--held on the football pitch below the Carriage House.

It made me feel like as though I was in a Thomas Hardy novel or something like that. Very satisfying indeed. Tomorrow I'll post again recounting the Remembrance Day ceremony here in the Pegasus Courtyard honoring the fallen and the veterans of England's wars, coupled with a unexpected treat not unrelated to that service.