“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” the old British rhyme goes.
For more than 400 years, Britain has remembered. Every year on this day, fireworks are set off, bonfires are built, and effigies are burned to commemorate the failed 17th-century plot by a group of English Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament—with the country’s entire political establishment and reigning Protestant monarch, King James I, inside.
But for an event rooted in remembrance, what has come to be known here in Britain as Guy Fawkes Night (named after one of the key plotters) could not be further removed from it. Today, the annual ritual is more festive and fun than religious and monarchical. Even Fawkes himself has taken on new meaning, becoming best known around the world not as a would-be religious extremist and terrorist, but as a populist hero. His life has been romanticized in film, his likeness has been preserved in masks, and his legacy has morphed into an almost mythical tale of anti-government rebellion, anarchy, and subversion.
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