I SEE some odd things in my job. You are reading the words of a man who once reviewed an underwater string quartet. But I have yet to witness a spectacle weirder than Bonfire Night in the Norfolk village of Corpusty.
This is no jolly fireworks fiesta, but a full-blooded tribal ritual. To the spine-chilling pounding of drums a lifesize effigy of Guy Fawkes is dragged on a cart round five surrounding villages by masked men carrying flaming torches. When it returns it is tied to a stake on a vast pile of brushwood, as high as a double-decker. The men then rush forward with a yell, hurl their torches into the wood, and send flames leaping 100ft into the November sky.
It’s “all a bit of fun”. Or so they tell you in the pub afterwards. But it doesn’t feel like that. More like the last vestiges of a primordial bloodlust.
Which, of course, is exactly what it is. Poor old Guy Fawkes. Popular wisdom holds that “the coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but one”. But that’s tosh. Fawkes, for all his murderous intent, was undeniably a brave man. Yet every November 5 he is fated to die a thousand more deaths. And all because he was demonised by one of the most fiendishly clever spin-doctors in history.
But why am I asking you to “remember, remember the Fifth of November” on the second day of May? Am I revealing a subconscious yearning, probably shared right now by most of the population, to place a few barrels of high explosive under the posteriors of our own posturing and all-too-omnipresent politicos?
Well, quite possibly. But this year marks the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. And the first commemorative show has already opened. It is a stunning exhibition at the Globe theatre in London called Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot, which intriguingly involves the Metropolitan Police and forensic scientists in a re-examination of the prosecution’s murky case against the 13 conspirators. And if you are wondering what on earth Shakespeare had to do with those dark deeds in the cellar under Parliament, you haven’t been keeping up with modern research into this still hugely controversial episode.
It’s one of those stories that “everybody knows” yet, it seems, nobody really knows. The more that scholars delve into the official version of what happened, the more holes appear. Did Catesby and his aristocratic rebels ever start digging a tunnel? Unlikely. Was the unsigned “Monteagle Letter”, which betrayed the conspirators (and which is the prize exhibit at the Globe), a genuine warning from a panicky Francis Tresham to his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle? Improbable. Did Tresham, the one conspirator not killed or executed, really die of a urinary tract infection while imprisoned in the Tower? Implausible. Or was he poisoned to stop him blabbing truths that would be awkward for James I’s sinister enforcer, Robert Cecil? Or smuggled to freedom, as a reward for betraying his friends?
And what of Cecil, the Machiavellian head of state security? If he knew of the plot in late October (as seems clear), why did he wait until the last moment to raid the cellar? Was it a cynical ploy to magnify the threat to the safety of the realm posed by Catholics, and thus to maximise the sense of panic and the public backlash?
If that’s true, he certainly succeeded. The official account of the Gunpowder Plot, rushed out in something called The King’s Book, was brilliantly fabricated black propaganda, worthy of Goebbels. It gave Cecil the chance to round up all of his most detested Jesuit priests. Catholics were barred from important jobs for the next 200 years. And enmity between Catholic and Protestant became so ingrained in the British psyche that we still hear — and fear — its echoes in Northern Ireland and Scotland today.
Some scholars go further. They surmise that Cecil was not the plot’s discoverer, but its covert instigator, rather as Hitler’s henchmen burnt the Reichstag and framed a Communist. According to this theory, Catesby was duped by Cecil’s agents provocateurs into concocting an outrage that would blacken the name of their Catholic faith for centuries.
It’s fascinating stuff, not least because it is all so relevant today. Four centuries on, and we are again being spooked by government ministers and their security chiefs into having nightmares about religious fanatics “in our midst” who may be about to blow up Parliament, or smear ricin on door handles — or whatever the current scare is. Except that the suspects are now Muslims, not Catholics.
And Shakespeare’s connection? A few months after the Gunpowder conspirators were hanged, drawn, castrated, burnt and quartered (not necessarily in that order), the Bard produced a new tragedy which — if Garry Wills’s fascinating 1995 study, Witches and Jesuits, is to be believed — allegorised the whole incident. In this play, which is shot through with references to “dire combustion” and warnings of how evil “mines” goodness, a regicidal maniac also comes perilously close to destabilising a state and seizing power. The maniac’s name? Macbeth.
Wild speculation? Of course. But there will be a lot more of that this year. Forget “who shot Kennedy?” Or “they never really walked on the Moon, you know”. After four centuries, the Gunpowder Plot remains Top of the Conspiracy-Theory Pops.
Wrong number
ODDEST new sculpture in London? That has to be the Royal Society of Arts’s WEEE Man, near City Hall. “WEEE” stands for “waste electrical and electronic equipment”, and the 22ft-high (7m) figure has been erected to draw attention to an impending EU directive that encourages us to repair or recycle our old gadgets, rather than chucking them away.
The statue has been formed from three tonnes of electronic junk, this being the amount that the average British person is estimated to buy and discard in a lifetime. It includes five fridges, eight toasters, 23 keyboard mice, six microwaves, seven PC screens, six TVs, 12 kettles, seven vacuum cleaners . . . and 35 mobile phones.
Hmm. Only 35 mobiles? In a lifetime? To me that figure seems improbably low. As every North London parent knows, any self-respecting teenager will get through at least five every year. One will drown in the pocket of a pair of jeans put in the washing machine. One will be lent to a girlfriend who subsequently moves to Milton Keynes. One will be stolen during PE. One will be left on the back seat of a bus. And one will sink without trace in a latrine at the Reading Festival.
Nepotism? How awful
THE newspapers have had a field day reporting the case of the King’s Lynn comprehensive headteacher Richard Wealthall, who has been hauled in front of the General Teaching Council and accused of family favouritism on what appears to be a truly epic scale. He allegedly installed his daughter as head of drama, his son-in-law as PE instructor, his mistress as head of English and his mistress’s husband as an IT technician. He is also said to have approved a pay rise for his ex-wife, who was also on the staff. And all this, it is alleged, without going through the proper procedures.
No wonder that the sheltered and deeply moral folk of Fleet Street were shocked. Gosh, just imagine the furious outcry if that sort of shameless nepotism went on in newspaper offices!
Hip-hip-who?-ray
JUST 72 hours to go to the United Kingdom’s Big Thursday . . . aren’t you getting excited? I know I am. Craig David’s 24th birthday! It’s a great national occasion. Can’t think why my distinguished fellow columnists have made so little of it.
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