"Lay up the fagots neat and trim;
Pile 'em up higher;
Set 'em afire!
The Pope roasts us, and we 'll roast him!"
Old Song.
The recent attempt of the Romish Church to reestablish its hierarchy in
Great Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems to
have revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport,
which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, had
very generally fallen into disuse. On the 5th of the eleventh month of
this present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted up
with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"
of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. Popes, bishops, and cardinals, in
straw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amid
the shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtless
been quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishop
of Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about and
burned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one.
In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legal
restrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may on
its own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishops
Methodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, it
is not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter at
issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. It
is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it
cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the
spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a
hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and
tent-makers of the New Testament.
Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary Guy
Fawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train under
the Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of New
England, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the younger
plants of grace in the Puritan vineyard. In those solemn old days, the
recurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideous
images of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strong
waters, and its blazing bonfires reddening the wild November hills, must
have been looked forward to with no slight degree of pleasure. For one
night, at least, the cramped and smothered fun and mischief of the
younger generation were permitted to revel in the wild extravagance
of a Roman saturnalia or the Christmas holidays of a slave plantation.
Bigotry--frowning upon the May-pole, with its flower wreaths and sportive
revellers, and counting the steps of the dancers as so many steps towards
perdition--recognized in the grim farce of Guy Fawkes's anniversary
something of its own lineaments, smiled complacently upon the riotous
young actors, and opened its close purse to furnish tar-barrels to roast
the Pope, and strong water to moisten the throats of his noisy judges and
executioners.
Up to the time of the Revolution the powder plot was duly commemorated
throughout New England. At that period the celebration of it was
discountenanced, and in many places prohibited, on the ground that it was
insulting to our Catholic allies from France. In Coffin's History of
Newbury it is stated that, in 1774, the town authorities of Newburyport
ordered "that no effigies be carried about or exhibited only in the
daytime." The last public celebration in that town was in the following
year. Long before the close of the last century the exhibitions of Pope
Night had entirely ceased throughout the country, with, as far as we can
learn, a solitary exception. The stranger who chances to be travelling
on the road between Newburyport and Haverhill, on the night of the 5th of
November, may well fancy that an invasion is threatened from the sea, or
that an insurrection is going on inland; for from all the high hills
overlooking the river tall fires are seen blazing redly against the cold,
dark, autumnal sky, surrounded by groups of young men and boys busily
engaged in urging them with fresh fuel into intenser activity. To feed
these bonfires, everything combustible which could be begged or stolen
from the neighboring villages, farm-houses, and fences is put in
requisition. Old tar-tubs, purloined from the shipbuilders of the
river-side, and flour and lard barrels from the village-traders, are
stored away for days, and perhaps weeks, in the woods or in the rain-
gullies of the hills, in preparation for Pope Night. From the earliest
settlement of the towns of Amesbury and Salisbury, the night of the
powder plot has been thus celebrated, with unbroken regularity, down to
the present time. The event which it once commemorated is probably now
unknown to most of the juvenile actors. The symbol lives on from
generation to generation after the significance is lost; and we have seen
the children of our Catholic neighbors as busy as their Protestant
playmates in collecting, "by hook or by crook," the materials for Pope-
Night bonfires. We remember, on one occasion, walking out with a gifted
and learned Catholic friend to witness the fine effect of the
illumination on the hills, and his hearty appreciation of its picturesque
and wild beauty,--the busy groups in the strong relief of the fires, and
the play and corruscation of the changeful lights on the bare, brown
hills, naked trees, and autumn clouds.
In addition to the bonfires on the hills, there was formerly a procession
in the streets, bearing grotesque images of the Pope, his cardinals and
friars; and behind them Satan himself, a monster with huge ox-horns on
his head, and a long tail, brandishing his pitchfork and goading them
onward. The Pope was generally furnished with a movable head, which
could be turned round, thrown back, or made to bow, like that of a china-
ware mandarin. An aged inhabitant of the neighborhood has furnished us
with some fragments of the songs sung on such occasions, probably the
same which our British ancestors trolled forth around their bonfires two
centuries ago:--
"The fifth of November,
As you well remember,
Was gunpowder treason and plot;
And where is the reason
That gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot?"
"When James the First the sceptre swayed,
This hellish powder plot was laid;
They placed the powder down below,
All for Old England's overthrow.
Lucky the man, and happy the day,
That caught Guy Fawkes in the middle of his play!"
"Hark! our bell goes jink, jink, jink;
Pray, madam, pray, sir, give us something to drink;
Pray, madam, pray, sir, if you'll something give,
We'll burn the dog, and not let him live.
We'll burn the dog without his head,
And then you'll say the dog is dead."
"Look here! from Rome The Pope has come,
That fiery serpent dire;
Here's the Pope that we have got,
The old promoter of the plot;
We'll stick a pitchfork in his back,
And throw him in the fire!"
There is a slight savor of a Smithfield roasting about these lines, such
as regaled the senses of the Virgin Queen or Bloody Mary, which entirely
reconciles us to their disuse at the present time.
It should be the fervent prayer of all good men that the evil spirit of
religious hatred and intolerance, which on the one hand prompted the
gunpowder plot, and which on the other has ever since made it the
occasion of reproach and persecution of an entire sect of professing
Christians, may be no longer perpetuated. In the matter of exclusiveness
and intolerance, none of the older sects can safely reproach each other;
and it becomes all to hope and labor for the coming of that day when the
hymns of Cowper and the Confessions of Augustine, the humane philosophy
of Channing and the devout meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the simple
essays of Woolman and the glowing periods of Bossuet, shall be regarded
as the offspring of one spirit and one faith,--lights of a common altar,
and precious stones in the temple of the one universal Church.