THIS WEEKEND people will gather all over Britain to celebrate something that did not happen. Bonfires will blaze, fireworks burst and sparklers sputter to mark that, 400 years ago, King James and his court were not blasted to kingdom come.

The fifth of November is, apparently, the only major date not derived from the life of Christ that has lasted for so long in our popular calendar. And in the light of recent events — as the historian David Cannadine points out in his introduction to Gunpowder Plots, a series of essays commemorating the anniversary of this quirkily fascinating and quintessentially British festival — it takes on a revivified resonance. Put in the Bush and Blair language of our day, he suggests: “The foiling of the Gunpowder Plot was an outstandingly successful pre-emptive strike . . . against forces of organised, fanatical, religiously motivated terrorism.”

So that was a good thing? I was intrigued by Antonia Fraser’s contribution to the discussion. She surmises what might have happened if the plot had succeeded. She imagines a nine-year-old Elizabeth Stuart (her father, mother and elder brother all killed in the explosion) on her Coronation morning. What would that have meant for Britain?

Nominally Catholic — or at least heavily supported by Catholic France — the imaginary reign of Elizabeth II might, Fraser hopes, have been marked by religious tolerance. But might it also have led to a great cultural revival?

The worst depredations of the Reformation had already taken place. Between 1530 and 1570, in successive waves of destruction, the legacy of centuries had been smashed. Statues had been burnt, images whitewashed and stained-glass windows broken. Our visual inspiration had been stripped.

But had that anonymous warning letter not been sent, had that second search of the Westminster cellars not foiled the plot, might — under renewed Catholic patronage — the 17th century have nurtured a British Rubens, a local Bernini, a home-grown Velázquez? Instead we had to borrow painters such as Van Dyck or Lely from the continent — or else take off on a grand tour. A century was to pass before Hogarth came along, heralding our own English school.

But then, had Guy Fawkes lit the touchpaper, might we have forfeited our great landscape tradition, that near-religious worship of nature that gave us Constable and Turner? The past is, of course, another country. But perhaps the extravagance of our Bonfire Night festivities is our way of making up for missing out on so much of the visual exuberance of the Baroque.

• THAT BAROQUE extravagance was not a British tradition may explain why opinion seems so divided on the Rubens spectacular that has just opened at the National Gallery. Master or monster? I am beginning to have an instinct as to what someone will think as soon as I meet him. For every spectator who judges Rubens’s images overblown — even repulsive — there is a bon viveur who revels in his rumbustious vision.

  But what about the curators, that overworked and often troglodytic breed who, when not buried in the bowels of their buildings, are bowed down by the enormous bureaucracy involved in assembling a blockbuster?

  Perhaps it is enough to say that a driving force behind this new Rubens show is David Jaffé — the only curator who ever flipped me upside down on a canal bank in Venice. When you weigh nearly 9st it is most flattering to be treated as if you were a feather, but how did he do it? It turns out that he used to be a gymnast and ran away to join the circus as an acrobat before finally following in the footsteps of his uncle, a famous Rubens scholar. Jaffé, unsurprisingly, considers Rubens — whose own career was pretty varied — a genius.

• THE MOST evocative gap that I have come across this week was that which lay between two signatures reproduced in a history book. Both were written by Guido Fawkes. The first was made shortly after the “iron man” was captured, its firmness a mark of the astonishing composure that led even the King to express respect for his fortitude. The second — a stumbling and barely legible scribble — was that scrawled after torture. In the space between them gaped all the horrors of the rack.

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