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Comment by 123pie123 | Hacker News Reader

My (non uk) friend ask me a simple question.. Is the 5th November a celebration of Guy Fawlkes getting captured or a celebration of him trying to get rid of the government

I thought everyone/ most UK people would know the real answer and after asking around it appears it's not clear cut.

Anecdotically (asking about 8 people from the UK) 5 people thought bonfire day was celebrated for Guy Fawlkes being captured. (ie killed for trying to burn down parliament) but a few (3) of the 5 people I asked where mostly guessing and was not really sure.

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Neither. It’s just “Fireworks Night” or November 5th. Everyone knows about Guy Fawkes trying to blow up Parliament and then getting tortured etc. And if you’re actually ask people how they feel about that story, sure you’ll get a range of different answers, and it will probably seem to correlate with people’s political proclivities and you’ll make some spurious inferences. But honestly, as a Brit who has experienced 35 Fireworks Nights, no one is discussing or concerned with the Guy Fawkes story any more than they are discussing or concerned with the morality of elves at Christmas. It’s purely about fireworks and large, public night time gatherings (fun).

It's mostly known as bonfire night where I'm from.

And the whole bonfire thing typically comes with the effigy being burned, so I find it hard to believe most people would be ignorant to its meaning.

as a kid we had 'penny for the guy'

where by you'd go around each house asking for money with an effigy (or for a laugh - one of us dressed as an effigy)

This 'begging' was also done by standing next to a shop with a cardboard message and the effigy on the ground

https://brecon.fyinetwork.co.uk/my,25267-Guy-Fawkes-Night-Pe...

https://blog.adkinshistory.com/penny-for-the-guy/

Common quip in the UK is he was the only man ever to enter parliament with honest intentions.

I actually think this might be a good thing!? When I was taught about the gunpowder plot it was presented as a serious of facts rather than a judgment like "this person was evil and got what they deserved" it was "this is what happened, this is why they did it, these were the consequences" a judgement on whether there was virtue in the actions or not was not really a part of it. That's probably a good way to present history?

I do remember as a child having a lot of sympathy for Fawkes and the others!

To me it is a commemoration rather than a celebration. Though I've always enjoyed the spectacle of it all since well before I knew any of the history.

> I do remember as a child having a lot of sympathy for Fawkes and the others!

It would surely be interesting to hear what could justify blowing up the parliament and murdering royal family in a child's mind.

If you simplify everything enough (as children tend to do) it’s not hard to see Guy Fawkes as a freedom trying to rekove a tyrannical government, rather than a religious zealot trying to replace it with an equally oppressive government (just towards a different group of people).

Thanks! I see it now. I couldn't picture it in my mind as it is so contrary to what I know.

> an equally oppressive government (just towards a different group of people).

Could you expand on this? I contrast the then contemporary government against the reign of Bloody Mary, and it's hard to see how it could have been as bad as what Papists would surely have done.

Of course I oversimplified, any government formed by the conspirators would had probably had to kill a lot more people to solidify their rule. Then again any attempt to impose a new religion by the central government would result in a lot of violence. While England was majority protestant by 1605, protestantism was largely violently imposed on a significant part of the English population whom wanted to remain catholic.

While I don't want to downplay the persecutions that happened during Mary's reign they, they much like Guy Fawkes day or the "Spanish Black Legend" are to a some extent myths propagated by the protestant establishment over several hundreds of years. Protestants were mostly just as eager in persecuting heretics (not only catholics but also other protestants) as the catholics were. Even if they sometimes ended up killing less people I think it's more of a difference of degree rather than kind.

I found https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/myth-bloody-mary-1809... quite interesting.

I don't recall unfortunately, however I suspect that as I often had run-ins (conflict over school regulations) with teachers that it was a reflection of anti-authoritarianism mixed with sympathy for the oppressed. To me the papists seemed like they just wanted to follow their own way (I don't know enough [now] to know if Catesby intended to usher in oppression by Catholics to replace the then oppression by Protestants/Royalists but that certainly didn't cross my mind at the time).

Similarly, when learning about "priest holes" (places to hide a Catholic priest who came, presumably to lead mass, to your home) my sympathy was with those hiding. It never crossed my mind that they might effectively be plotting the otherthrow of the established order, only that they were oppressed and hunted down.

I guess it's a first-order vs second-order level of thinking.

Royals become royals by mass murder, then oppress the people they rule over. In France I would have been on the side of the revolutionaries for sure. You would side with the royals (and now I notice your username)?

> Royals become royals by mass murder, then oppress the people they rule over.

That way they wouldn't remain royals for long. At minimum they must keep their army loyal. One would imagine that they would prefer a good cause to fight for, so oppression must be justified to them somehow. It's easier to just avoid intentional oppression.

> In France I would have been on the side of the revolutionaries for sure. You would side with the royals (and now I notice your username)?

I guess so. Good things are easy to break but difficult to create.

> Similarly, when learning about "priest holes" (places to hide a Catholic priest who came, presumably to lead mass, to your home) my sympathy was with those hiding. It never crossed my mind that they might effectively be plotting the otherthrow of the established order, only that they were oppressed and hunted down.

As a kid we learned all about the priest holes and catholic persecution at my catholic school. Then when out with my parents I saw a large monument in a park to a group of people who where burned at the stake for openly practising their religion.

More catholic persecution I thought. We're obviously the good guys being picked on by the bad guys.

I was shocked to discover that it was protestant martyrs who'd been burnt at the stack by catholic fanatics.

Before Guy Faulks the country had already flipped backwards and forwards between catholic and protestant absolute rulers.

That was a wake up call for a young me that there are very few "good guys" involved in anything to do with absolute politics or absolute religion.

Anyone you can't vote out is a tyrant, revolutionary or not. They will do horrific things simply because they can and no one can stop them.

Absolute power corrupts absolute rulers absolutely.

The former. The pope was also burned in effigy alongside or in place of Guy Fawkes: a celebration of the defeat of the plot and the continuation of the protestant succession to the crown.

Given that we traditionally burn him in effigy on a bonfire I'm pretty sure we're celebrating him being caught.

As a kid my Catholic neighbour kids were not allowed to celebrate Guy Fawkes night

Curiously, I was raised as a Catholic and we were absolutely celebrating Guy Fawkes’ Night when I was small (when I got older it drifted into “fireworks night” and stopped having a connection beyond gunpowder). Made our own effigies and burned them, too.

I'm glad to hear that all of you don't wish that the plot had succeeded.

If the question is in the present tense and looks beyond the fact that people enjoy fireworks and a bonfire I’d answer neither.

It’s actually not about Guy Fawkes at all - it’s that an attempt to destroy Parliament was defeated.

By which I mean that it would have died out a long time ago if it were not for the symbolism that Parliament was successfully protected.

I think that the United Kingdom would have been a very different place had this come to pass.

"Guy Fawkes’ Night, the ‘Fifth of November’, has been popular and long-lived for two different reasons. The first is the spectacular nature of the event that it commemorated. Had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, it would have killed the majority of the English political nation of the time, including most of the royal family, aristocracy and leading gentry and many merchants, as well as demolishing Westminster Palace and much of the Abbey and surrounding houses. It was intended not just to overthrow the existing monarch and central and local government, but the Church of England, as established since the Reformation, and the Protestant faith dominant in England. In its place the plotters planned to restore the Roman Catholic religion and enthrone a puppet princess."

If Guy Fawkes day had a modern USA equivalent, it would be celebrated on September 11, and we would burn Osama bin Laden in effigy; the anti-Islamic overtones would be incredibly unfortunate, but become more obscure with time.

Um, wouldn't it be more like on May 2nd, the day (in 2011) that Osama Bin Laden was killed, rather than the 9/11/2001 date on which he enjoyed his rather large victory of sucker-punching the USA? If that plot had failed, and OBL had been captured/killed, then of course 9/11 would be a fully parallel celebration date.

It really does make one wonder about alternate history, if these plots had succeeded instead of failing, or failed instead of succeeding...

Fawkes died 31 January 1606.

I think it varies depending on how much we dislike the current government.

Former. The latter became a thing after V for Vendetta.

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