Anniversary-driven popular history sometimes engages the talents of the finest professional scholars but does not always see them at their best. James Sharpe is highly regarded for his pioneering work on the history of early modern crime and is known for the most important study of witchcraft in a generation (Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996]). This book on the Gunpowder Plot lacks the weight of his previous publications and has little new to say to modern or early modern historians. As the author himself acknowledges, it was written in a hurry to meet the marketing opportunity of the four hundredth anniversary of the 1605 Gunpowder Treason. Sharpe's writing is jaunty and accessible, with plenty of anecdotes and illustrations, but there is no new research here, few fresh insights, and little arresting information.
Revelation of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 shocked Jacobean England. The plotters, Roman Catholic desperadoes, intended to destroy in one blow the Anglo-Scottish King James and most of the Stuart royal family, along with the Protestant episcopacy, peerage, and parliamentary gentry assembled at Westminster on 5 November. In the resulting carnage and confusion they hoped to implement a Catholic restoration. This would have been a terrorist attack of world-class significance, if it had succeeded. Instead, with the plotters’ cover blown, the authorities arrested the explosives expert (or fall guy) Guy Fawkes and quickly rounded up or killed his coconspirators. The genius of the plot was Robert Catesby, although it is Guy Fawkes who is remembered. There remains some lingering suspicion that the entire plot was set up by the Jacobean government mastermind Robert Cecil, but neither Sharpe nor any other mainstream historian takes this seriously. Stuart preachers and politicians immediately interpreted the Stuarts' escape as a deliverance sent from God and instituted an annual service and ritual of commemoration and thanksgiving.
Sharpe provides a solid but perfunctory account of the genesis, unfolding, and commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot. He shows, with generous reference to other authorities, how commemoration of the plot mutated across the seventeenth century. An annual opportunity for protestant congratulation developed into a contested anniversary, with puritan and nonconformist as well as royalist and populist manifestations. The anniversary that at first helped to solidify the Jacobean regime became a Whig cultural festival by the time of Charles II and took on a new lease of life after 1688 because of the providential landing of William of Orange on 5 November that year. All of this is well known, and Sharpe retells it with verve.
The most interesting sections of this book deal with the emergence of Guy Fawkes as the eponymous hero or villain of the Hanoverian and Victorian anniversary, and his reemergence in literary burlesque. By the time of the French Revolution Guy Fawkes had been reinvented for the London stage, and a generation later he appeared as a figure in comic pantomime. The dangers of the Catholic Plot could no longer be taken seriously, although Irish immigration, Catholic emancipation, and religious agitations of the mid-nineteenth century brought the conspiracy of 1605 renewed attention. Close reading of provincial newspapers and police reports might show how English communities coped with the pressures of the Fifth of November, but Sharpe does not go far in that direction.
Victorian England tamed Guy Fawkes night, although it also gave birth to invented traditions of Gunpowder celebrations at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, and Lewes, Sussex. Rowdy plebian excesses were eventually repackaged as middle-class entertainments. Freelance squibs and crackers gave way to the commercialized displays of modern fireworks. Despite repeated warnings that Gunpowder Night is in decline, the anniversary has flourished in variant forms to the present. Sharpe gives personal testimony of the performance of the anniversary in early twenty-first century Yorkshire, where most of its seventeenth-century roots have been forgotten. Gunpowder Treason Day, which became Guy Fawkes Day, has become Fireworks Day or Bonfire Night, with no more than a vestigial connection to Catholic plotting. A disturbing phenomenon for historians is the emergence of new folk beliefs linking the anniversary to ancient fire festivals, beliefs that have grown despite the skepticism of modern historical research. It reminds us of the multiple audiences for historical scholarship, academic, popular, and all points in between, and of the opportunities and perils of catering to them.
