Four hundred years of grudges against Parliament, and I still got the tie-break wrong.
YORK, England – Every year around now the country remembers Guy Fawkes with a bonfire, a sausage and a quiet argument about parking, and every year I am reminded that the bit nobody covers properly is the aftermath. Who found the others? Who asked the questions? Who decided what Parliament should do about it all? I am a history student, I keep a diary, and I have decided that the aftermath is where the good paperwork is.
Morning: The Walk Along the Wall
I walked a stretch of the old city wall before breakfast with my kite bag over one shoulder, because York in a westerly is a gift. The wind came off the flat land to the west with nothing to stop it, and my kite, a small red delta I call Sergeant, went up so fast that I had to sit on a low stone to stop myself leaving the ground.
A tour guide with a tiny flag told a group that Guy Fawkes was born in this city. He said it the way people in York say it, as a fact the city mentions roughly as often as it breathes. A child at the back asked if Fawkes had a kite. The guide said “not that we know of” and moved briskly on.
Lunch: The Talk I Meant to Book
I have to confess something to you, dear reader. The National Archives held an online talk this week called Gunpowder Plot: punishing the plotters, and I did not book a place. It cost 15 pounds, which is roughly three sausage rolls at the pub quiz, and I do not have a fixed view on sausage rolls versus scholarship, but the sausage rolls won.
The listing, which ianVisits carried in its events calendar, says the talk was given by Dr Daniel Gosling, a Principal Legal Records Specialist at The National Archives. It covered the records on the aftermath of Fawkes’ capture, including the manhunt for the other conspirators, the interrogation and trial of the plotters, and the parliamentary debate on how to punish them and commemorate the plot.
Read that again slowly. A parliamentary debate on how to commemorate it. That is the most English sentence I have ever seen. A group of men have just tried to blow up the building and the next item on the agenda is how best to remember it. I would have liked to hear that talk. I would have liked, even more, to see the minutes of the debate, because I am quite certain someone said “I think a plaque”.
My Own Tiny Archive
For the benefit of the course, I took my own notes from the listing and made a short list of what a student should know about the aftermath of any plot:
- Someone always gets caught in a cellar, and someone else always gets blamed on the way to the cellar.
- The paperwork is better than the plot.
- Parliament will commemorate the thing that nearly destroyed it, with a ceremony and a sandwich.
- Nobody in history has ever been surprised by a delay.
Afternoon: A Reading List With Attitude
Dr Pemberton-Hale, our tutor, has set us three chapters on early modern state security. I read one on the train, with the kite bag propped against my knee, while a woman opposite me did a crossword and glared at the string poking out of the bag as if it might be explosive. It was not. It was fifty metres of the strong sort, and the nearest it came to violence was knotting itself around her umbrella.
This kind of reading is the reason I write for The London Prat in the first place. You cannot read about a state responding to a plot without noticing how much of the response is theatre, and the way the network treats that theatre is set out in this guide to what commentary is and is not. I recommend it to anyone who ever stood in a lecture and thought “this is a pageant with footnotes”.
Evening: The Quiz, The Wedding Budget, The Chips
The pub quiz was held at the Wandering Ferret, a pub whose carpet has strong opinions about spilt drinks. Our team, the Hanging Chads, fought bravely. The history round had a question about the capture of Fawkes and I knew the answer, but Tobes got there first and said “was it the thing with the barrels”, which was, to be fair, correct.
During the tie-break, Dilly told us her cousin’s wedding was going to cost 18,000 pounds, which led us to a farm.fm story about a farmer who offered wedding guests actual rust for free. We decided that the rust was the best value on the table. Tobes said that 18,000 pounds could buy a great deal of gunpowder, and we all looked at him, and he said “for fireworks, obviously”.
We went to the chip shop afterwards and ate chips on a wall in the cold, discussing treason, wedding budgets and whether it is ever right to name a kite after a sergeant. We concluded that it is.
Notes For Tomorrow
If you want to see how The London Prat handles the British habit of commemorating the things that nearly went wrong, British news as the network sees it is a useful corner, and you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat as well.
The plan for tomorrow is simple. I will read the second chapter, fly Sergeant on the wall before breakfast, and ask Dr Pemberton-Hale whether the minutes of that commemoration debate survive. If they do, I will find out what the plaque said. If not, I will assume it said “Please do not do this again”, which I think is the spirit of most memorials.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/