🔥 REMEMBER, REMEMBER, THE 5TH NOVEMBER …
It started as a plot to kill a king and ended as a bonfire of myths — a powder-fueled anthem that still crackles through the streets every Fifth of November.
The famous verse and rhyme has no single credited author — it’s a piece of anonymous English doggerel dating from the early 17th century, passed along in oral tradition. The earliest printed version appears around 1740, though the tradition of reciting it during Guy Fawkes Night (Bonfire Night) goes back to at least the 1620s.
It was part nursery rhyme, part political propaganda — a reminder to celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot and to despise “Popish” conspirators, in a time when religious paranoia was practically a national sport.
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What’s the story behind the rhyme?
THE FUSE
A cold bastard of a night in London, 1605 – The Thames runs thick and filthy, reflecting torchlight and suspicion.
This is a city marinated in paranoia — Protestant kings and Catholic plotters glaring at each other through a fog of incense and fear.
Enter Guy Fawkes, soldier of fortune, religious zealot, professional man of explosives. He’s the muscle for a gang of conspirators who think the best way to fix England’s politics is to turn Parliament into fireworks.
Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder sit in a cellar beneath Westminster, enough to send King James and his aristocratic cronies to meet God personally. It’s elegant in its simplicity: light the fuse, change the world.
But nothing stays secret for long in a country where every priest, prostitute, and pub owner’s got an informant’s ear. A letter gets sent — a whispered warning to “stay away from Parliament on the Fifth.” Within hours, royal guards are prowling the undercroft, lanterns swaying like slow ghosts.
There sits Fawkes, hand on the match, eyes burning with conviction. History freezes, then shatters.
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THE INTERROGATION
They drag him to the Tower of London — England’s most exclusive torture chamber — where the King’s men work with all the enthusiasm of a Renaissance dentist. They rack him until his joints sing hymns, stretch him until the truth drips out like candle wax.
The confession comes, written in a shaking hand that looks like it’s been signed by someone else entirely.
Fawkes breaks, as every man does when the machinery of empire gets to work on the human frame. They hang him, draw and quarter him, burn what’s left.
But the story doesn’t die. It smolders.
THE BONFIRE
From the ashes rises a national ritual — Bonfire Night. Every November 5th, England lights up the sky in state-sanctioned catharsis. They burn effigies of Fawkes, toast the King, and pretend they’re celebrating loyalty. But deep down, it’s something older, something wilder — a secret nod to the idea that maybe, just maybe, the bastard had a point.
Beer flows. Fireworks explode. Kids chant the rhyme:
| Remember, remember! The fifth of November, The Gunpowder treason and plot; I know of no reason Why the Gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot! Guy Fawkes and his companions Did the scheme contrive, To blow the King and Parliament All up alive. Threescore barrels, laid below, To prove old England’s overthrow. But, by God’s providence, him they catch, With a dark lantern, lighting a match! A stick and a stake For King James’s sake! If you won’t give me one, I’ll take two, The better for me, And the worse for you. A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope, A penn’orth of cheese to choke him, A pint of beer to wash it down, And a jolly good fire to burn him. Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! Make the bells ring! Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! God save the King! Hip hip hoorah! Hip hip hoorah! |
It’s part history, part hypnosis. The empire took an act of rebellion and turned it into entertainment. Every crackle of the bonfire is both a warning and a whisper of unfinished business.
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THE MASK
Four centuries later, another fire catches. Comic writer Alan Moore resurrects Guy Fawkes as V — a shadow in a mask, fighting tyranny in a dystopian future that looks suspiciously like the present.
When the Wachowskis bring V for Vendetta to the screen, the mask becomes an icon.
Anonymous — the faceless collective of hackers and rebels — adopts it as their sigil. Suddenly, Fawkes’ smirk stares out from protests in London, Wall Street, Hong Kong. Governments see it and flinch.
What began as a failed explosion becomes a living symbol — not of violence, but of resistance, anonymity, and the dangerous idea that power is only borrowed, never owned.
🕯️ THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK
Guy Fawkes (1570–1606)
Before he became an icon for digital-age rebellion, Guy Fawkes was just a Yorkshire boy with a flint in his soul and a flair for explosives. Born in York in 1570, he was raised Catholic in a time when that was practically an act of treason. England had torn itself in two — one half loyal to the Protestant crown, the other clinging to Rome — and young Guy grew up on the losing side of history.
He joined the Spanish army in Flanders, learned the fine art of blowing things up, and returned home just in time to meet Robert Catesby, the mastermind of the Gunpowder Plot — a bold, mad plan to turn Parliament into dust and give the throne back to a Catholic monarch. Fawkes’ military expertise made him the obvious choice to guard the powder.
On November 5, 1605, he was discovered in the undercroft beneath the House of Lords, holding a slow match and a very bad poker face. The capture saved King James I and cemented Fawkes’ place in history — as the villain who failed, and the legend who wouldn’t die.
He endured days of torture in the Tower of London, his signature on his confession shrinking from strong script to a desperate scrawl. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but leapt from the gallows and broke his neck — his last act of rebellion.
THE ECHO
“Remember, remember” isn’t just a nursery rhyme. It’s a ticking reminder that beneath every system of control lies a cellar full of powder and discontent.
The real explosion didn’t happen in 1605. It’s still humming in the circuits, still flickering behind every Guy Fawkes mask in the crowd. A quiet, collective reminder: you can’t arrest an idea.
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