Today is Guy Fawkes Day in Britain and allied places. There is a good bit of fireworks, parading, bonfires and general carrying-on, all to celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Bonfires are big. In fact, the holiday is often referred to as Bonfire Night It seems a bunch of English Catholics got fed up with the rough deal they were having under the Reformed Church and decided to make England Catholic again. This required overcoming one or two obstacles. But these guys were motivated and they thought big. The king, James I, who succeeded Elizabeth I, was scheduled to open Parliament. The plotters had stashed barrels and barrels of gunpowder in the basement of the Parliament building and would set it off when the ceremonies were in progress. This would take out the King, most or all of the nobility and high clergy, opening the way, the plotters figured, for a Catholic counterstoke. Well, it didn’t go off….no pun. Somebody betrayed the plot and a letter warning of it prompted a search of the basement which turned up…. you guessed it. Some historians say it was all a set-up, designed to justify the more energetic persecution of Catholics, and it all does look a little tidy, especially the Eleventh Hour rescue. Religious people, God bless ‘em, often play very rough, and what’s the life of a King and a couple hundred other dorks, when you’re on a mission from God? Fawkes was caught in the building, in the very room where the powder was stashed. That must have been a very, very awkward interview, but was nothing to what he got later; “Mild” torture, on the King’s orders. The plotters were rounded up, tortured, tried and executed and the whole country was told to give thanks for this miraculous intervention. Which it has been doing ever since.