Gunpowder’s blown real history to pieces
RONAN BENNETT, writer of the new TV drama Gunpowder, about the Guy Fawkes plot, said in October 2000 that he would not turn in the Omagh bombers to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, if he knew who they were. This is a historical fact, unlike many of the events shown in the drama itself. And I hope it causes you to wonder a bit about who and what this programme is for. I am one of the last few surviving Britons who was brought up as a Protestant patriot, to revere the first Queen Elizabeth as our greatest monarch and Sir Francis Drake as the saviour of his country against the Armada in 1588. How fortunate we were, I thought then, and think now. Oddly enough, I was taught this period of our history by a proud Roman Catholic, an excellent teacher whose lessons I still recall more than 55 years later. There was no hint of bigotry in those lessons. Why should there have been? We were told that the Queen’s Roman Catholic subjects were, by the standards of their times, treated generously. The problem (here’s another fact) was that Pope Pius V had instructed them all in a decree of 1570 (‘Regnans in Excelsis’) to engage in treason against Queen Elizabeth, whom the Pope denounced as a ‘servant of crime’. And his church then sent priests into the country to foment that treason, allied with everpresent threats of foreign invasion.
Most Roman Catholics sensibly ignored this foolish foreign plotting. Those few who sheltered such priests were (quite reasonably, in my view) considered equivalent to those who today shelter the agents of Islamic State.
They were not burned to death for holding to their faith, as Protestants had been under the appalling and intolerant Queen Mary. The whole picture of the era in Gunpowder is wrong, including the fictional scene in which a woman is stripped naked before being crushed to death.
As for the graphic disembowelling of a captured priest, it is interesting that the BBC is ready to show this gruesome thing but remains reluctant to show the equally grisly truth about what happens in an abortion.
It is propaganda, which is why nearly all the major actors on the rebel side, such as Liv Tyler, are good-looking, and nearly all the main characters on the Protestant side are ugly or otherwise despicable.
I would love to know the process by which its interesting author came to be chosen.