Today is Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated in England with bonfires and with stuffed effigies that children use to extort money and sweets.
On November 5th 1605 Guy Fawkes was caught leaving a rented cellar adjacent to the Houses of Parliament where a subsequent search discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder, enough explosives to break all the windows within a kilometer's radius and exterminate the Mother of Parliaments and King James I during the State Opening scheduled for that day. The Catholic conspirators also planned to kidnap the royal children. They expected a popular uprising to follow that would restore the kingdom to the Catholic faith. If they had succeeded the King James Bible would, like the breed of spaniels, have been named after James's son Charles instead. Unless, of course, the kidnapping had succeeded as well; in that event, who knows. History is a mare's nest of causes and effects.
James I appears once in A Book of Ages. Charles I also appears once. Fawkes doesn't appear at all, but does feature prominently in the film "V for Vendetta." Some consider Guy Fawkes the patron saint of anarchists and pyromaniacs. What the anarchists couldn't achieve, Parliament achieved, at least partly, by legal means, when they beheaded Charles I in 1649.
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About Me
- Er-H
- Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
- Eric Hanson has been an illustrator and writer for more than twenty years. His artwork has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Spy, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Gourmet, the Believer and other publications. His work has appeared regularly in juried annuals from Communication Arts, Society of Publication Designers, Luerzer’s Archive (200 Best Illustrators Worldwide,) Print, I.D., A.I.G.A., and American Illustration. Design clients include, Aesthetic Apparatus, Duffy, Robert Valentine, Pentagram, Ogilvy, Stoltze Design, AirConditionedLA, Fallon, Paul Davis, Louise Fili, Kate Spade, Barney's, Tolleson, Landor, Willams Sonoma, Barneys, Nordstrom, Target, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York Review Books, Chronicle, Random House and Pantheon. The illustrations and text on this blog are the property of Eric Hanson, who holds the copyright©. His fiction and satire have been published by McSweeney's, the Atlantic, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, The Paris Review, and others. He is the author of A Book of Ages, which was published by Random House in 2008.
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