Can you guess who sent me this post? :)
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When most people in America hear the name “Guy Fawkes,” if they have any idea who he is, it is usually as a leering grinning mask. This, as a result of the film V For Vendetta, in which the protagonist wears such a mask and has as his ultimate object a re-enactment of the Gunpowder Plot. But who was Guy Fawkes, actually?
The real Guy Fawkes (no, I’m referring to THE real Guy Fawkes here!) was a soldier of fortune in the late 16th C. fighting for Spain against the Protestant Netherlands. Spain’s attempt to conquer England, Fawkes’s homeland, had just been thoroughly beaten back in 1588 in the naval battles known as the Spanish Armada. Partly due to this and partly due to the memories of the reign of Bloody Mary earlier in the 15th C., where a Catholic monarch of England had sought to destroy the protestant Church of England, the Catholics in England, who were known as the Recusants, of which Fawkes was one, became thought of as enemies of the State. (“Recusant” = i.e., they recused themselves from attending the Anglican church and from paying money for its support — this was, if the authorities were of a mind to be strict about it, an offense punishable by a fine; to actively do things like harbor Catholic priests, who were banned, was potentially punishable by prison or death.)
Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, without legitimate offspring of course, since she never married, and the succession to the throne was settled as being the legitimate heirs of Henry VII of England, father of the Eighth. Through the line of descent that included Mary Queen of Scots, also the then-Dowager Queen Consort of France, and her subsequent marriage to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, their son James VI of Scotland was installed as James I of England, in a uniting of the crowns if not the Kingdoms themselves (that happens later, in 1707). James was a Protestant of course (the “King James Bible,” remember?) although his mother had been a Catholic (and as some thought, a plotter to restore Catholicism as well as to place herself on the throne of England). There WAS, however, a legitimate heir, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James, who was a child at the time and, it was thought, could be enthroned with Catholic regents and as an adult, could be married off to a continental Catholic prince, at which point all persecutions of Catholics in England would once and for all end.
Obviously, James wasn’t going to abdicate, so, he needed to be assassinated, and the Gunpowder Plot was devised– blow up the Parliament building at the ceremonial opening of Parliament, which would kill James and all the MP’s who had installed him as King. Guy Fawkes, by then known as Guido Fawkes and using the alias “John Johnson,” was the plotter entrusted with actually placing the explosives under the building and setting a slow-burning fuse. The night before, however, he was discovered, arrested, and tortured to reveal the other plotters.
Eventually tried and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, he “cheated the hangman” by jumping off the scaffold, breaking his neck, and making the disemboweling and pulling off of his limbs pointless. He was then cremated, an event commemorated every November 5th in Britain as “Bonfire Night.”
Now, many out there will say, “But by modern standards, Guido ‘Guy’ Fawkes could be considered a ‘terrorist,’ trying to kill a King, to the benefit of, if not at the behest of, the Pope.” Other will say that the whole succession of the English/British throne was illegitimate and that England was something of a rogue state at the time. Believe what you will. The point is that Guido “Guy” Fawkes was NOT an anarchist, as many try to make him out. He was either a “religious extremist” as his enemies would call him, or a restorer of the old and legitimate order of things, as his supporters would contend.
Is my screen name, then, meant to commemorate the second alternative here? Pretty much. Would my detractors think I was an extremist of some kind? Need you ask? But it’s meant to remind people that you can romanticize the idea of some sort of hero who died a glorious failure far beyond what it will bear. The point is that had the Plot succeeded, it is likely we may never have known Fawkes’s name– he would have been “anonymous,” sarcasm intended.
While by no stretch am I advocating that extreme measures be taken absent extreme necessity, what I AM saying is that if one is prepared, once pushed to that extreme (an objectively-measurable extreme, and not based on “feelz”), to respond in kind, yet to work to effect change by methods well short of responding extremely while it is still possible to do so, do NOT think responding in kind will be the act of a “hero.” If that’s why you’re doing it, you don’t have your head on straight. You may come to be regarded as a hero in time, but “heroes” are often enough people who stood and fought because they had nowhere to run and nothing else they could have done in the moment.
May it never come to a point in this country where blowing up the Capitol Building during the SOTU Address will be a response commensurate with the threat. But a lot of that depends on YOU.
