The surprising history of bonfires
Remember, remember 5th November, gunpowder, treason and plot.
In modern times, Guy Fawkes Night has become known as Bonfire Night. However, the bonfire has a place of its own in our history, one that predates the Catholic conspirators’ attempts to blow up King James I when Parliament met on 5th November 1605.
The word ‘bonfire’ is derived from ‘bone fire’ ‒ a fire to burn bones in the Middle Ages ‒ but the lighting of fires to celebrate the solstice stretches back to the Romans and Celts and continued well into the reign of Henry VIII. Bonfires were lit to mark midsummer’s eve and people decorated their houses with birch, fennel and white lily garlands. Bridge House on London Bridge was traditionally decorated with flowers and lit with candles to mark midsummer. The burning of the yule log originated from the Vikings who lit bonfires to celebrate their twelve-day festival at the winter solstice called jól.
Bonfires have also been lit to mark the births of royal babies and the deaths of monarchs in the UK. They have, over the centuries, been lit on hilltops along with beacons to warn of foreign invasion, as in July 1588 when beacons were lit from Land’s End in Cornwall all the way to London to mark the sighting of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel.
Bonfires were also a way of marking momentous occasions in the nation’s history. In 1525, when Henry VIII learned his rival, the French King, François I, had been defeated and captured in the Battle of Pavia, he ordered London’s Lord Mayor to light a great bonfire at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The next day, bonfires were lit in every street to mark the death of Henry’s Yorkist rival to the throne, Richard de la Pole.
As Henry VIII’s reign progressed and new religious books and English bibles were smuggled into London from the Continent, Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, ordered bonfires outside St Paul’s Cathedral, where he led book-burning ceremonies.
Into the later Tudor era, bonfires took on a sinister meaning. People lit them on hilltops to drive away the threat of witches as the fire was thought to purge the air. And, as the religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants intensified after the death of Henry VIII, the reigns of his three children became known as the ‘burning times’ after the heretics who burned in fires at Smithfield just outside the Ludgate of the city of London.
It is estimated that during the reign of Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary I, 228 people died in the Smithfield fires. Burnings took place on a wooden platform elevated from the ground. Victims were tied to the stake with chains, and the faggots (brushwood and sticks) were lit after the Lord Mayor cried out: ‘fire the faggots and let justice be done’.
The primary sources, which describe the agonising deaths these people suffered, make for harrowing reading. And if death by burning were not horrendous enough, when the wood was damp, or the wind blew in the opposite direction, they suffered prolonged agony for up to two hours.
The burnings were not limited to London. They also took place in high numbers in Lewes in Sussex, as well as in Canterbury and Maidstone in Kent. Mary I also ordered the burning of Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who annulled her mother’s marriage to the King and who would not convert to Catholicism. On Mary’s orders, Cranmer was forced to watch his fellow bishops, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, burnt at the stake at Oxford before he suffered the same fate. (Read about Thomas Cranmer’s fate)
In 1605, the hatred between Catholics and Protestants was at its height under England’s new Scottish King, James I. James persecuted English Catholics to such an extent that a group of Catholic men ‒ Robert Catesby, Thomas Winter, John Wright, Thomas Percy and Guy Fawkes ‒ came together to assassinate the King, his heir and all his nobles by blowing them up with gunpowder at the state opening of Parliament. The plotters hoped to restore England to Roman Catholicism in the ensuing turmoil.
On 4th November, the conspirators’ plot was foiled by the King’s men. After receiving a strange letter, they searched the cellars beneath Parliament where the conspirators had stored their gunpowder and were ready to light a slow fuse. Guy Fawkes was the man caught at the scene. He was arrested and, under torture, confessed and implicated his fellow conspirators, who were apprehended at Holbeche House. They were put on trial and sentenced to a traitor’s death by hanging, drawing and quartering. Their bodies were displayed around London as a warning to others.
In 1606, an Act of Parliament was passed, ensuring that the failed plot would be commemorated every year. Church attendance on 5th November was compulsory, and until 1959, it was illegal not to celebrate Bonfire Night. (Read about if the plotters had succeeded)
Nowadays, Bonfire Night has lost its religious connotations and become a family event, together with Halloween. Given the history of the bonfire, I consider this quite fitting.