In honor of Bonfire Night
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For those who celebrate Guy Fawkes Day...
As Bonfire Night approaches and firework displays light up the UK, in a file on a shelf in the labyrinthine National Archives can be found a flat vellum page, inscribed in exquisite calligraphy, and the origin of this week’s explosive celebrations.
The 1605 Thanksgiving Act was passed by James I after Guy Fawkes’s failure to assassinate the king, the Lords and the Commons, at the opening of parliament that year.
Celebrating the “miraculous and gracious deliverance” of the Protestant church from the “malignant and devilish papists”, it directed that church services be held every 5 November to commemorate the failure of the “Gunpowder Plot”.
It is one of several documents relating to Britain’s most famous treason plot which are among 4m records transferred from the archives of parliament to the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, a project now complete five years after it first began.
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@AndyD Same thing here on 4th of July. Some of our dogs were completely oblivious to the noise, but one in particular, our golden retriever Maggie, was freaked out by bottle rockets. The high pitched whistle that a bottle rocket makes before it explodes must have hurt her sensitive ears. She also hated thunderstorms, getting nervous well ahead of any actual thunder or rain.
She was the one that went crazy one day, frantically pawing open the sliding door on the front hall closet so she could hide. We heard on the news shortly after that there had been a minor earthquake in central Illinois, several hundred miles south of us. Almost no one around here felt it, but Maggie sure as heck knew something was happening.
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