Bonfire Night

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603.  Under her rule, English Catholics had been persecuted because Elizabeth was a protestant.  The Catholics hoped that the next in line for the throne, James I, would be more accepting of their religion because he had a Catholic mother.  Unfortunately for the Catholics, James turned out to be even less tolerant of the Catholics than Elizabeth.   This led to a group of 13 young men getting together to discus what they were going to do about it.  

They finally decided that violence was the only way.  Their plan was to get a bunch of gun powder and put in in the cellar of the Parliament and blow Parliament up.  By doing this they would kill the king, maybe the Prince of Wales, and the Members of Parliament who were making life difficult for the Catholics.  Today we would call this group of men terrorists or extremists because they chose violence as the solution to their problem.

As the group worked on the plot it became clear that innocent people would get killed in the attack including some people who even fought for more rights of Catholics.  Some of the people in the group started to have second thoughts.  One of them even sent a letter to one of his friends in Parliament telling him to stay away from Parliament on November 5th.  This letter reached the King and the King's forces made plans to stop the group from blowing up the Parliament.  Guy Fawkes, who was in the cellar with the gun powder when the king's men arrived, was caught and tortured.  He was then executed along with the other members of the plot.

To celebrate the foiled gun powder plot, every 5th of November people get together and light a bonfire and set off fireworks!  The bonfire will usually have an effigy of Guy Fawkes in the middle of the fire symbolizing the burning of Guy Fawkes and the other members of the gun powder plot on the stake.

I actually got invited to one of these bonfires!  It was really fun!  Here are some pictures.

You may not be able to see this very well but if you look closely, you can see the little effigies we put in the fire.

During the bonfire we all got some sparklers and played with them.  It was the second time I have ever played with sparklers!  It scared me when it almost got to the end because I didn't know what I was supposed to do. =)

After the bonfire we went up into the bell tower at the church to watch the fireworks!  This is a picture of us on the bell tower.  We could see tons of fireworks from up there!

This is a picture of me climbing up to the top of the bell tower.  We had to crawl up a lot of ladders and under a lot of bells.

These are some of the fireworks we saw!

The fireworks went on for weeks after that!