Hold on World: John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band, Fifty Years On by John Kruth

Author:John Kruth [Kruth, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781493052356
Google: i3nrzAEACAAJ
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 2021-06-15T23:50:16.611811+00:00

Guy Fawkes

On a mission to restore Catholic Sovereignty to Great Britain, Guido “Guy” Fawkes (April 13, 1570–January 31, 1606) hatched a scheme that famously became known as “The Gunpowder Plot.” As a young man, Fawkes joined the Spanish forces as a mercenary to fight the Protestant Dutch in the Eighty Years’ War in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. But as Spain began to lose control of the lowlands, Fawkes headed for Madrid to seek support to instigate a Catholic uprising in his English homeland; he would return disgruntled and empty-handed. Along with Thomas Wintour and Robert Catesby, Fawkes plotted the assassination of King James I (who later claimed to admire his would-be killer’s stout “Roman resolution”). Securing a cellar beneath the House of Lords, Fawkes and his ad-hoc rebel crew managed to smuggle in thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, which were discovered on the morning of November 5th, 1605, after Lord Mounteagle had been alerted to the devious plot. Imprisoned and tortured, Guy Fawkes quickly confessed. But in the end he managed to have the last laugh, when on January 31, 1606, as he ascended the scaffold where he was to be hung and then drawn and quartered, Fawkes lost his footing. He fell from the platform and broke his own neck, thus denying his executioners the satisfaction of their grim trade.

Critic/author Johnny Rogan interpreted Lennon’s use of a loud, sudden explosion to end “Remember” as a romanticized recasting of history, as if the failed Gunpowder Plot had actually succeeded and Fawkes was, in turn, to be celebrated for blowing those “Scotch beggars back to [their] native mountains.”

Written circa 1870, the poem commemorating Guy Fawkes’s epic failure that every English schoolboy once was expected to memorize begins:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot

I know of no reason

why gunpowder treason

should ever be forgot

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes

’twas his intent to blow up

the King and the Parliament

Three score barrels of powder below

Poor old England to overthrow

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