GUY FAWKES.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXII, Issue 4340, 9 November 1921, Page 4

GUY FAWKES.

HISTORICAL NOTES. When Mr Edward Fawkes, an ailvocate of the Archbishop’s Cpnsistory Court at York tfad his son Guy Chris', tened ,at St. Michael le Belfrey in thaf town in-1570, I do not suppose either he or anyone eilse dreamed of ithe; immortal renown that was about to descend on '.he family. Small: boys who want to have their Guy Fawkeses his - torically correct should not that Guy Fawkes was described as "fall, with brown hair ana auburn beard.” Nor should he be represented with a bloated nose .and an air of dissipation, for he Was “a man of great piety, of exemplary temperance, of mild and cheerful demeanour.” As he served for about eleven years with the Spanish army in Flanders, he probably had a foreign ehst in his appearance before he went back .to England. In fact, it was precisely because he was unknown in London that ’the other conspirators drew him into the plot They began by hiring a house"ifext door to the House of! Lords, and polling through. It was hard work, and it proved unnecessary, for before they had gpne far they found the old lady who stored coals in .the cellar under the House of Lords wanted ‘to let it. The pious and exemplary Mr G. Fawkes became the new tenant, and put 36 barrels of gunpowder under the coals, to send Kjing, Clergy, Lords, and Commons sky high. The Fifth of November, now celebrated only by the small boy, was started bn its career with as solemn observance under an Act of Parliament as Armistice Day itself. Even as late as 1852 a pamphleteer wrote : “His Majesty's clergy are required to give public warning to their parishioners the Sunday before ‘for the due observance’ of the said Jlay-; and oh the *day itself there isi a special form of prayer with thanksgiving appointed to be used, and the rubric in the Book of Common Prayer says, that the cleygy must allso read "publicly, distinctly, and plainly’ the Act of Parlia-> ment by which this a nnual commemoration is enjoined. Then, besides this solemn observance of the day 'at morping prayer’ in churches there is al,ways a great variety ofl entertainments of a more popular kind going on the streets in the evening.” Another writer at a little later date ex-’ pressed his regret that the Fifth of November was then celebrated mainly by "tumujltuous mobs.” I looked carefully through a Prayer Book yesterday, but could find no trace left in it of special prayers on November 5. It was the Crusaders who brought back fireworks from the East as novelties to Britain, and made fireworks displays popular events on holidays, but though the illuminations habit lingers for celebrations of great events, Guy Fawkes now has the fireworks, pretty well to himself —even if most of them do come, from considerably further East than the Crusaders ever heard of.

It was at the little village of Dunchurch, in Warwickshire, that Catesby the rest of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators assembled to hear what happened after Guy Fawkes had put the match to his barre'ls. Thev sitayed at the Red Lion Inn, now a private house in the centre of the village. A stone’s throw from that building there stands to-day a statue to Lord, John Scott, a .former lord of the manor, whose wife composed the music of "Annie Laurie,” and a stone’s throw from the sltatue is the village blacksmith’s shop of Longfellow’s poem, with a "spreading chestnut tree” stfll. growing outside the door, a shoot from <the old one of 1842, when Longfellow stayed in the Dun Cow Inn across the road. Of course other places claim to have the original blacksmith’s shop, but an English moving picture concern which went into the matter a year or two back decided in favour of Duhchurch, and took its picture there.