Sunday 5 November 2017 – River of Light Fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, Liverpool – VIDEO

This evening I went down to the Albert Dock in Liverpool to watch the fireworks to mark Guy Fawkes Night, the annual commemoration in the UK of the failure of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament by King James I (IV of Scotland). To this day, people in Britain mark the anniversary with the setting off of fireworks – both in public and private displays – and the burning of bonfires, again both in public displays and more private ones.

The Gunpowder Plot was a Catholic conspiracy to spark a rebellion against growing Catholic persecution in Protestant England. The intention was to kill the Protestant King, his family, and his lords and this would provoke a rebellion. The conspirators planned to install the King’s daughter Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic Queen. She would have survived the attack on the House of Lords as she was away from London for her schooling. The Earl of Northumberland was to act as her protector and “the true faith” of Catholicism would be restored to England.

The plot failed when an anonymous letter warning of the plot eventually reached the authorities. The King ordered the area around parliament to be searched and on the evening 4 November 1605 one of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes (pictured), was discovered in a basement beneath the House of Lords, with dozens of barrels of gunpowder. He was arrested and the plot collapsed. Some of the conspirators, led by its leader Robert Catesby, put up a last stand when they were discovered but were all killed or captured. Catesby was among those who died in the shoot-out.

Under torture and threat of torture in the Tower of London and elsewhere, the arrested conspirators and others slowly revealed the plot and fellow conspirators who were quickly rounded up. After more torture and quick trials most were executed by the horrific method of being hung, drawn and quartered which involves them being hung until almost unconscious, then taken down and castrated and their body sliced in quarters. Many of their heads would then be placed on spikes as a warning to the public of the consequences of treachery against the King. Guy Fawkes managed to jump from the scaffold before being hung, thus hanging himself and avoiding the agony of what would follow. Nevertheless, his body was taken down and quartered anyway.

Far from ending Catholic persecution, the Gunpowder Plot led to centuries more of Catholic persecution with Catholic emancipation taking another two hundred years. To this day Catholics in the UK are still discriminated against in some areas of life and it is still impossible for a Catholic to become King or Queen, and only recently has it been legal again for a British monarch to marry a Catholic.

I’ve included two videos below. The first one is mine and was filmed around the Albert Dock in Liverpool before the fireworks and on The Stand during the fireworks. The video below that is from the YouTube channel of Paul Frost and shows just the fireworks, and was filmed from Woodside on the Wirral side of the River Mersey.