The History of Bonfire Night
‘What you’ve got to remember,’ said Strike … ‘is that Quine disappeared on the fifth. Bonfire night!
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
‘God, of course!’ said Robin.
‘Flashes and bangs,’ said Strike
The British celebrate Bonfire Night on the fifth of November. In parks and back gardens bonfires are lit, fireworks are let off and people gather to eat toffee apples and jacket potatoes and pray the rain holds off.
The flashes and bangs of the fireworks make this the perfect night for the murder of gothic author Owen Quine. As Strike notes, any noises resulting from the gruesome killing of Quine in Talgarth Road, would be obscured by the noise.
At first, given the foul, ritualistic way Quine’s body is treated and displayed, the exact time that Owen died is unclear – a bookshop owner in Putney is sure he saw Quine alive and well on the 8th November, and his wife Leonora only comes to the offices asking Strike to track her husband down, ten days after he disappeared. However, under Robin’s patient questioning the bookshop owner realises Quine’s visit was a week earlier than he’d thought, and the police and the detectives become convinced Quine died while the neighbours were celebrating in traditional fashion. But what lies behind this annual ritual which provided the killer with a perfect distraction?
The story behind Bonfire Night involves a place that Robin will come to know well while undercover on a future case, the Houses of Parliament.
As she approached the palace, with its intricate gold mouldings starkly shadowed in the early morning sun, the famous clock tower silhouetted against the sky, her nerves and her excitement mounted.
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
In 1605 a group of English Catholics hatched the Gunpowder Plot. They planned to assassinate King James I, his son, and his key ministers by blowing up the Houses of Parliament when the King arrived to open the parliamentary session.
James I had only inherited the throne from Elizabeth I a couple of years before, and though he was a devout Protestant, the Catholics in England hoped he’d prove more tolerant towards them than Elizabeth had, as his mother shared their faith. They were quickly disappointed, and decided to launch a stunning coup, killing James and his son, and putting his nine-year old daughter on the throne instead.
The conspirators leased a cellar directly below the House of Lords where the State Opening of Parliament would be held, and over a matter of months filled it with gunpowder – more than two tonnes of it. Only one of the conspirators had any experience with explosives, a soldier in his mid-thirties called Guy Fawkes, so he was left in the cellar, guarding the gunpowder and ready to light the fuse, while most of the other conspirators left for the Midlands, preparing to kidnap the Princess.
However, one of the conspirators sent a letter warning a Catholic nobleman to stay away, and he immediately handed the letter over to the King’s Chief Minister. The cellars were searched and Guy Fawkes and his gunpowder were discovered. The other conspirators were captured or killed a few days later. Fawkes was tortured in the Tower of London and executed for high treason in January of 1606. It was ordered that bonfires be lit, and sermons preached condemning the plot and celebrating its failure in every parish in the kingdom each year on the anniversary of its discovery. Bonfire Night then was actually compulsory until the act was repealed in 1859.
Under cover of the neighbourhood fireworks, you knocked Quine out, tied him up, sliced him open.
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
The fireworks which covered the sound of Quine being murdered were part of the celebrations from the 17th century. Samuel Pepys mentions them in his famous diary in 1660, and Poor Robin’s Almanack of 1677 notes that that we give thanks for the discovery of the gunpowder plot with ‘Squibs and Crackers’.
Almost two hundred years after the plot, a tradition developed of topping the bonfire with an effigy of Guy Fawkes. This was often a scarecrow, dressed in a tall hat and with a mask featuring a beard and long moustache, matching how Guy Fawkes appeared in a woodcut created round the time of his trial.
Once close enough to the crowd of protestors to make out individuals, Strike pulled from the carrier bag swinging from his hand a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, white with curling eyebrows and moustache and now mainly associated with the hacking organisation Anonymous, and put it on.
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
A stylised version of the mask, from the graphic novel ‘V’ by Alan Garner, became strongly associated with anarchist protestors in the 21st century, especially after the film version appeared in 2006. It was adopted by hacktivist group Anonymous and occupy Wall Street protestors, and some countries have even tried to ban it.
When Strike needs to follow activist Jimmy Knight on a protest march without being recognised, the stylised mask is a perfect disguise. He’s not even the only one wearing it. A skinny boy who is also wearing an Anonymous mask gives Strike a double thumbs up as he is shunted around by the people stewarding the march. Strike returns it.
‘Got an inhaler?’ asked the elderly steward in concern. He wore a frock coat, white tie and tails and an ornate badge of office. In his unexpected grandeur, Robin thought wildly of the white rabbit, popping up in the middle of madness.
Lethal White, Robert Galbraith
When Robin goes undercover to work at the Houses of Parliament as an assistant to Jasper Chiswell (Lethal White), she is thrilled to visit the famous building, not as a tourist but as a temporary insider. The building Guy Fawkes tried to blow up was largely destroyed by fire in 1834, but some of the oldest parts remain, including Westminster Hall. The angels that decorate the famous hammerbeam roof are the same ones which looked down on Fawkes’s trial here in 1606. He was sentenced to a death as grim as Owen Quine’s, being hung, drawn and quartered, though he escaped the worst of it by jumping from the scaffold and breaking his neck immediately.
The kind steward who looks after Robin when she has a panic attack is not the only strangely costumed person who looks after the Palace of Westminster and the people who work in it. Even today, the Yeoman of the Guard, in their Tudor uniforms of scarlet and gold, search the cellars for explosives before the monarch arrives to address Parliament.
‘Nobody’s seen him entering Talgarth Road but we’ve got a neighbour at number 183 who swears she saw Quine leave it at one in the morning. Early hours of the sixth. The neighbour was letting herself in after a bonfire-night party!’
The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith
Though Bonfire Night is not mandatory anymore, and hopefully the religious turmoil in which it began has passed away, the British still gather to light fires and let off squibs and crackers. Even Owen Quine had a tradition of playing with sparklers with his daughter Orlando. Like Guy Fawkes, he thought his actions on Bonfire Night were going to bring him a glorious new future, but his plot also failed and led to a gothic death while the fireworks exploded outside.
