\nThe Fifth of November<\/em>
\nGunpowder, Treason, and Strife . . .<\/em><\/p>\n
Back when I was in my Anglican interim, I loved commemorating Guy Fawkes Day<\/strong><\/a>. A haunting little historical nursery rhyme, bonfires, the burning of effigies, and children in raggedy clothes with ash-blackened faces accosting householders, begging A penny for the Guy!<\/em>\u2014what\u2019s not to love? I had a vague notion of the historical events behind the festivities, and knew that Shakespeare had referenced them in his haunted (and contemporaneous) masterpiece, Macbeth<\/em>. Mostly, though, what I knew about Guy Fawkes day was that some bad guy named Guy had tried to blow up the English Parliament, but the plot was foiled and the guy was executed, so all loyal Brits must yuck it up in quaint fashion once a year.<\/p>\n But here it is the Fifth of November, and for this Catholic revert\u00a0Oh, damn, the penny just dropped: I AM the Guy.<\/em><\/p>\n Because the real Guy Fawkes, like his co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot we don\u2019t hear so much about, was a Catholic. And a Catholic in a time and a place where that was a lot tougher than the Accepted Wisdom lets on. In the wake of Henry VIII\u2019s celebrated split from Rome, English Catholics had been scapegoated as badly as English Jews had been 300 years earlier. When the faith of the sovereign was the faith of the nation, it was risky to be on the wrong side. And that side changed with whiplash suddenness, the Tudors being notoriously poor at securing the succession.<\/p>\n Frankly, Catholics didn\u2019t endear themselves to their countrymen during the reign of Bloody Mary Tudor, who imprisoned, tortured, and burned enough Protestants to fill Fox\u2019s Book of Martyrs<\/em>. Mary came by her Catholicism from her Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon, and from Mary\u2019s reign onward Catholics were viewed as \u2018foreigners.\u2019 The Spanish Armada\u2019s assault on Elizabeth I made matters worse, as did the pope\u2019s excommunication of Elizabeth\u2014in essence, revoking the divine protection accorded monarchs and practically sending invitations to an assassination.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the side we all heard, we Anglicans and Brits. That made it easy to buy the specter of the bogeyman Guy Fawkes, a Catholic fanatic bound on blowing the Houses of Parliament sky high on opening day, and taking out the Protestant King James I and his heir, Prince Henry, while he was at it. Fawkes and his co-conspirators, like some Popish al Qaeda\u2014backed and funded, so the story goes, by a devilish cabal of Jesuits\u2014would then kidnap the young Princess Elizabeth, crown her a Catholic queen, marry her to a Spaniard, and reclaim England for the Vatican. Way<\/em> over the line, Guido! Burn that Guy in effigy, indeed!<\/p>\n Only (as with another official account of an act of terror<\/strong><\/a> we\u2019ve heard recently) there was more to the story. I came by this knowledge by accident earlier this year, reading Clare Asquith\u2019s Shadowplay<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, a fascinating study of Shakespeare\u2019s plays as coded statements about the religious agonies of his time.<\/p>\n What no one is pleased to remember about the Fifth of November is the depth of desperation to which England\u2019s Catholics had been driven by decades of government persecution. It wasn\u2019t just a case of one side\u2019s being in power and the other having to suck it up as the loyal opposition. Imagine if, on Wednesday, whichever party loses tomorrow\u2019s election were instantly banned. Everyone required to re-register as a member of the party in power and campaign actively for the winning party\u2019s platform. All elected officials representing the losing party driven from office, and no members of the losing party allowed to run again. All losing-party consultants and lobbyists deprived of citizenship and exiled. Members of losing party (and their minor children) no longer permitted to enroll in public universities or receive advanced degrees. Possession of losing-party pamphlets, buttons, signs, bumper stickers\u2014even clothing in the losing party\u2019s colors\u2014made punishable by imprisonment, torture, forfeiture of all personal property. Dissemination of \u2018seditious\u2019 losing-party materials punishable by death. Neighbors deputized as a network of spies, sharing in the spoils of confiscated goods when they rat out \u2018traitors.\u2019<\/p>\n Those are precisely the conditions under which England\u2019s Catholics lived in the last years of Elizabeth I\u2019s reign\u2014only the persecution was spiritual as well as temporal. Catholics were barred from the sacraments, because priests were barred from the country. No priests, no Eucharist, for real. Centuries of Catholic culture, embedded in the calendar of saints\u2019 days and festivals, were erased. Catholic religious articles\u2014prayerbooks, rosaries, missals, images of the Blessed Virgin\u2014were as dangerous to possess as gunpowder.<\/p>\n There was hope that with the accession of James (the son of a Catholic, and married to the Catholic Anne of Denmark) things might change. And at first, the hope seemed justified. James swore to end religious execution, and promised to extend some measure of religious liberty to Catholic subjects. Catholics, known as recusants, who wished to opt out of forced Protestant church attendance, for example, could do so by paying exorbitant fines to the crown. The occasional member of a Catholic family, if he views were not too extreme, could take his place in the House of Lords. The presence of Anglo-Catholic diocesan priests was tolerated as long as they refrained from saying Mass in public and preached the party line. Like the clergy of so-called state churches under the Nazis and the Communists, like many Catholic clerics<\/strong><\/a> of our own time, they believed the government\u2019s promises to respect the freedom of conscience\u2014so long as that conscience never spoke against the head of state, and so long as the practice of religion remained a private matter, carefully kept out of the public square, carefully prohibited from the rocking of boats.<\/p>\n But accommodation was not enough for the fervent, whose faith was maintained under persecution by the courage of Jesuits and foreign clergy. Living under aliases, constantly fleeing spies and persecution, hidden in secret \u2018priest holes,\u2019 these men preserved access to the Eucharist. They carried messages between Catholic families and their sons, sent to the continent for Catholic education at universities like Douai. And they kept alive hope that Catholic Europe would intervene on the side of their persecuted English brothers.<\/p>\n Accommodation was also not enough for the increasingly powerful Puritan faction among English Protestants, represented by the spymaster Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury. Cecil despised Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular, and he dropped enough hints of their threat to the order of the state that King James withdrew most of his initial gestures of toleration. Spain, too, weary of war, signed a treaty with England that precluded any invasion on behalf of the Catholics, now stranded. The Parliament that was to convene on November 5, 1605, was set to institute even harsher anti-Catholic laws.<\/p>\n Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators\u2014all of them laymen\u2014were convinced (or so Fawkes confessed after being broken on the rack) that \u201cdesperate times require desperate measures.\u201d He did not seem to have known what history later made evident: that the Plot was infiltrated from the start by Cecil\u2019s spies, and the search of the vaults beneath the Houses of Parliament that netted Fawkes and his barrels of powder was orchestrated. The King was never in any danger, and the Jesuits (some of whom knew of the plotters\u2019 intentions, but believed themselves to be bound by the seal of confession from revealing the information) had done everything within their power to deter violence. That did not prevent James, who had begun his reign by vowing to end torture (again, like someone else we know), from applying it with gusto to those of the plotters who survived capture, and to several Jesuits netted in the same sweep. Convicted of treason, the plotters and the Jesuits who survived imprisonment and torture were executed in the most agonizing manner, by being hanged, drawn, and quartered.<\/p>\n The very night of the plot\u2019s discovery, November 5, loyal citizens were urged to light bonfires of thanksgiving and to keep the feast alive in memory. The burning of the \u2018guy,\u2019 a straw-stuffed effigy of Guy Fawkes (who was not actually the most prominent member of the conspiracy, but certainly the one whose name is remembered) followed quickly after. That Guy Fawkes Day was always meant to be anti-Catholic, rather than simply patriotic, was pointed out by Antonia Fraser in Faith and Treason<\/em><\/a><\/strong>, her study of the Gunpowder Plot. It was the pope, and not always Guy Fawkes, who was burned in effigy under Cromwell\u2019s Puritan Parliament, which abolished all civil holidays but the November 5 commemoration\u2014and it was the pope whose effigy was burned when the holiday came to the American colonies.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a more sobering history than most of us, even Catholics, are aware of. And this year, as a voting Catholic, the echoes of 1605 are troubling. True, we live under the protection of the First Amendment\u2019s guarantees that the faith of our governors need not be our faith, and that we are entitled to free exercise of religion. But we also know what it is like to have those freedoms questioned and curtailed, under the guise of the good of the state (framed as the right to equal marriage, the health of women, the exercise of the free market). We know what it is like for our bishops to be assured that conscience will be respected, only to have that promise\u2014like the promise to end torture and execution without due process\u2014evaporate in the face of other agendas. We know what it is like to be told be our leaders and a loud majority of our fellow citizens that the practice of our faith in the public square is intolerable, evil, unAmerican; that everything would be fine if we just kept our beliefs to ourselves and practiced them in suitable quiet behind closed doors for an hour on Sunday morning, if we just stopped FORCING WOMEN TO BEAR THEIR RAPISTS\u2019 BABIES, as Rachel Maddow says 6 times an hour every night of the week. We know what it is like to have fellow Catholics tell us it\u2019s just fine to permit late-term abortions or to dismiss half of the electorate as whining parasites that Ayn Randian pragmatism would cull. We know\u2014I know, anyway\u2014what it is like to be effectively disenfranchised because I can vote for neither party\u2019s presidential candidate and remain true to the core principles of my Catholic faith. Damned if I do, damned if I don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>I would not, or so I like to think anyway, ever condone the kind of violence that handful of English Catholics plotted. And we are, despite the more extreme doomsday scenarios that haunt our nightmares and stud some bishops\u2019 sermons, a good long way from the kind of persecution those English Catholics endured, or that our sisters and brothers endure right now in many parts of the world. Yet I can\u2019t help but wonder if this isn\u2019t what the leading edge of persecution feels like\u2014this hint of gunpowder sulfur in the air, this disquiet, this uneasy sense that whomever is elected tomorrow, the cost of being Catholic in public in America will not go down any time soon. We are reminded Put not your trust in princes<\/em> and Blessed are you when men persecute you<\/em>, so we are not unwarned.<\/p>\n