Gunpowder, treason, and plot,
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason,
Should ever be forgot.
This verse, first recorded in Britain in the mid-1820s, makes a plea for the remembrance of a fifth:
November 5, 1605 – the date of the discovery and suppression of a conspiracy to assassinate
King James I of England; detonate Westminster Palace, the house of Parliament; and
replace the anti-Catholic monarchy of England with a protectorate favoring the Church of Rome.
In early 1606, weeks after the collapse of this plot, the king endorsed and the Parliament passed
“An Act for a Public Thanksgiving to Almighty God Every Year on the Fifth Day of November”;
some sixty years later the legislative assemblies of the American colonies started doing the same.
Thus was the remembrance of “gunpowder, treason, and plot” born on both sides of the Atlantic,
as a deliverance from terrorism in the early modern world, first as Guy Fawkes Day in England
and then as Pope’s Day in America. While the profession gives much attention to the service
that the ritual formula of this anniversary played in the imperial crisis, and the American Revolution,
it stops short: It does not examine what became of the Fifth after the War for Independence.
(The profession does so in part because it assumes that the memory of the Plot died in this fight.)
But this paper will pick up where this old story ends, scrutinizing the re-appropriation of this date
in the early republic. In doing so, it will demonstrate that Pope’s Day remained very much a part
of the political culture of the United States long after the anniversary disappeared from the streets.
For, in the late 1700s and in the early 1800s, people indeed remembered not only the wickedness
of “gunpowder, treason, and plot” but also the model that this holiday had provided in mobilizing
the masses for the Revolution.
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