Guy Fawkes

Guy Fawkes was born in York in 1570, the same year that Queen Elizabeth I of England was excommunicated by the Pope for decapitating too many Catholics and for not being mean enough to the Dutch.  Elizabeth's father, Henry the Eighth, had also been excommunicated for the venial sin of manwhoredom, so Liz just dusted off the old Anglican Church thing and passed a bunch of laws making it illegal to be Catholic in England.  Which you'd think would be fine, seeing as how Anglicanism is basically just Catholicism except you wear different silly hats and can get divorced whenever you feel like it, but you know how medieval people can be with their religious stuff so of course everyone ended up murdering each other in the streets with pitchforks and hammers and firebombing cathedrals with Molotov cocktails crafted from incense censers, tiki torch oil, and handfuls of rusty nails.  I mean, sure, J.C. might have said "blessed are the peacemakers," but obviously he was just foreshadowing the .45 Colt revolver and not actually talking about something as crazy as making peace with a person whose family wronged your family six generations ago. 

Fawkes was actually born Protestant, but he converted to Catholicism as a teenager – partly because he really liked his Catholic stepdad, and partly because I think this was like the Elizabethan teenager version of getting a nosering and blasting Fuck Tha Police as you speed past the Highway Patrol office with expired plates and a six-pack of open containers in the passenger seat. 

Becoming Catholic in England in 1585 was honestly pretty fucking dumb though, because at this point it was illegal for Catholic people to go to mass, get married in the church, join the army, become lawyers, vote, change their underwear, or just honestly exist in general.  There was some hope that this would change in 1604, when Elizabeth died and was replaced by the Scottish-born King James the First, but James was like, nope, lol, fuck Catholics, and made it so that anyone who didn't put twenty bucks into the offering plate at an Anglican Church every Sunday morning had a royal tax collector come to his house and beat the shit out of him with a pipe. 

This, naturally, was not fun, so Guy Fawkes left England, sailed across the Channel, and found something that he truly enjoyed – shooting Dutch people in the face with an arquebus.

Serving as a hardcore mercenary soldier under the command of the Catholic King of Spain, Fawkes attempted to crush out a rebellion in the Netherlands led by Protestant Dutch forces seeking to break away from the Spanish Empire.  Known for his bravery, courage, determination, and skill with black powder explosives, Fawkes led his squads into combat during that weird period of Early Modern warfare where guys wore heavy armor and fought in pike phalanxes but there were also dudes roaming around with guns shooting holes through everyone's plate armor with those bonkers-looking guns that took sixteen minutes to reload and were massively inaccurate at any distance longer than your dining room table.  Like, the kind of warfare you get when you try to add antique firearms to a Dungeons & Dragons adventure but you're pretty sure you're not doing it correctly.

Around this time Guy Fawkes started referring to himself as Guido Fawkes, for reason that are hilariously never explained.  Best guess is that he was trying to sound more European, and therefore Catholic, but honestly nobody knows.  What we do know is that he attained the rank of Captain, fought in several brutal battles against the Dutch Resistance, and took the time in 1604 to personally go visit the King of Spain and request that Spain attack England and depose James I.  Which, I like the balls on that.  Guido even offered to assist by fomenting revolution in the countryside. 

The King passed, but word of this must have gotten around somehow, because in April of 1604 Fawkes was contacted by some guys in London offering him an intriguing idea – we have a plan to overthrow James, and we need a badass explosives guy on our Oceans 11 squad. 

Fawkes left the mercenary force, came back to London, and met up with a shadowy crew of soon-to-be co-conspirators at a tavern called The Duck and Drake Inn, a place that I only imagine as being either a hardcore D&D bar with a Half-Orc behind the counter washing a dirty mug with a grease-soaked rag or one of those wood-paneled Brit Pubs with the red phone booth outside where guys in suits drink room-temperature ale at noon on a Tuesday and complain about the market, international politics, and Chelsea's new Striker.  This crew, led by some guy whose name I forgot, had a pretty daring plan to end this whole anti-Catholic thing once and for all – by stuffing the cellars underneath Parliament with enough explosives to dent the Moon, lighting a fuse, and then Sept of Balor-ing that shit into the stratosphere with a fireball so big you'd get a tan on the ISS.  With the King and all of Parliament turned into meat shrapnel, the conspirators would then kidnap the 9 year-old Princess, arrange a marriage between her and some Catholic prince somewhere, install her as a new Catholic Queen of England, and then cross out "Catholic" in all the brutal, repressive, totalitarian Medieval British law books and string-replace it with "Protestant" to show those jerks who was really in charge. 

Guido Fawkes thought about it a sec, tried to mentally picture the image of several chunks of King James achieving escape velocity and being ejected from Earth's atmosphere on an eventual collision course with Jupiter, and nodded back approvingly.

He was in.

Guy Guido Fawkes went out and rented a house next door to Parliament – one that conveniently had a cellar that ran underneath the House of Lords – and then he spent the next couple weeks stuffing that cellar with literally two tons of explosive ordinance, somehow hauling 36 monstrous kegs of gunpowder into the tunnels below the English Parliament and packing them in to a solid brick of Elizabethan C4 that he could not fucking wait to use to vaporize the King.  He got the place, got the gear, and the date was set – the King and Parliament would be in session on November 5th, 1605, and Guydo Fawkes was going to detonate those assholes into an exploding crater so unbelievably over-the-top that all England was going to think they were in the middle of one of the bad Transformers movies.

Sadly for him, Fawkes never got the opportunity to pull off one of the biggest terrorist bombings in British history – some member of Parliament, the awesomely-named Lord Monteagle, received an anonymous letter warning him not to go to work on the 5th, and he immediately reported it to the authorities.  Sweeping the tunnels below Parliament on the night of November 4th, English guards found Guido Fawkes looming ominously over a few thousand pounds of black powder, with a pack of matches in his pocket and a murderous look in his eyes, and immediately arrested him.

Fawkes was brought to the Tower of London, where he was tortured on the Rack for two days without sleep.  He was resilient at first, but eventually broke, giving up the plot and his co-conspirators.  To his credit, he stayed defiant to the end – in his confession, he said he'd assembled enough explosive to "Blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains," and when King James sentenced Fawkes to death he mentioned that the captured would-be saboteur had "a Roman resolution", which is a very British way of saying that the guy had large gonads and was kind of a prick.

The Gunpowder Plot co-conspirators were rounded up and either killed in shootouts or hung as traitors, and Fawkes was sentenced to be drawn, hanged, and quartered – a brutal method of death we've seen before in the Isabella the She-Wolf of France article – where basically you're hanged within an inch of your life and then while you're swinging there being lightly choked by a noose some psychopath cuts off your dick and balls, cuts out your tongue, and pulls out all your intestines while you watch helplessly.  Then they chop off your head, cut you into four pieces, and then publicly display those pieces in prominent locations around the countryside to warn other assholes not to try to explode the King of England.

Well…. Fuck that.  That didn't sound like a great time to Guy Fawkes, so when they brought him to the gallows he just jumped off the podium and broke his own neck in the fall.  Honestly, that sounds pretty impressive.  I'm picturing it going down like he was about to dive into the deep end of a swimming pool but didn't extend his arms over his head, so he just pogo-sticked his spine on the floor, and the mental image of that makes me laugh even though this is all actually pretty horrible shit we're talking about here.  He died immediately, and the executioner still went through all the dong-slicing and quartering shit with Fawkes' dead body, but it wasn't the same, and good on Fawkes for taking the enjoyment out of that, I guess.

But for some reason the story of Guy Fawkes doesn't just end with his ball-less torso being hung on a fencepost in Derbyshire.  For whatever reason – maybe the craziness of the plot, or the fact that he'd actually found all that explosive, or the way he was defiant even in defeat – he transcended to that level where he was not just forgotten, but hatefully remembered by history.  He was executed in January of 1606, and that year, in November, on the anniversary of his plot, people held huge bonfires where they lit effigies of the Guy on fire and drunkenly called him a motherfucker.  The next year, they did it again.  And now, even in 2020 – 415 fucking years after the Gunpowder Plot – England still has huge bonfires, parties, and fireworks displays to commemorate the defeat of Guy Fawkes and the Plot, where they burn his effigy and also effigies of anyone else they don't like that year.  I guess this is a show of solidarity with the King and Parliament.  Or maybe it's just fun and cathartic to have a day every year where you can metaphorically set fire to voodoo dolls of your exes, ancient traitors, and whichever politicians you currently disagree with, while your town shoots off a ton of fireworks (July 4th isn't really a big holiday over there).  Whatever it is, I like it.

November 5th is a pretty strictly Brit thing, but Alan Moore really blew up Guy Fawkes in the American consciousness  in 1988 when he put out the graphic novel V for Vendetta – the mask V wears in the story is a Guy Fawkes mask, and his plot is roughly equivalent to Fawkes's (with the exception of the fact that he's not a complete religious zealot nutbar).  But, much like all Alan Moore things, it was adapted for the screen by a bunch of people who completely missed the entire fucking point of the story, so in the 2006 adaptation V is a badass cool dude freedom fighter, so now the common perception is that this guy was a walking Rage Against the Machine lyric when in reality he was probably more like a 17th-century Timothy McVeigh with a goofy hat and a wicked 'stache.

But, honestly, in the end that's what I think is so badass about Guy Fawkes – not him as a man, so much, but this super-weird legacy that he left behind.  How a medieval commoner who was mad about religious persecution and tried to simultaneously assassinate the entire leadership of his country is now a guy who has a national holiday (and one of the islands in the Galapagos!) named after him – one part anti-establishment icon of resistance, one part terrifying delusional Bond villain, one part notorious traitor hatefully remembered through generations for a crime he never actually finished completing, and one part adorable historical curiosity, charming in its quirkiness --  most of those things completely inexplicable and weird, without any rhyme or reason.  And I think that's awesome.

Links:

Britannica

History.com

The Telegraph

History Extra

Atlantic