Bonfire Night? It’s different for me…

Is it possible to enjoy the Fifth of November when your relatives were put to death for it, asks Hazel Southam

a sparkler and gaze up at the sky and say my “ooh”s and “aah”s. But I am also a direct descendant of two of the gunpowder plotters, so it’s less a case of “Remember, remember…”, more that it’s a job to escape what Thomas Winter (or Wintour) – my great-greatgreat-great-great-great-great-greatgrandfather – and his brother, Robert, got up to on that fateful day.

As co-conspirators in the 1605 gunpowder plot, the Winter brothers – along with their cousin, Robert Catesby, half-brother John Winter and explosives expert Guy Fawkes, among several others – committed to killing James I after he threatened to outlaw Catholicism. By blowing up the House of Lords during the state opening of Parliament, they hoped to end the growing persecution of Catholics and manoeuvre the king’s nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, into position as his successor.

Much of what we know today about the plot is based on Thomas’s confessions. The brothers were tried in January 1606, and hanged, drawn and quartered soon after. Their story, known to all schoolchildren, has been graphically brought to life in recent weeks by the BBC’s drama, Gunpowder. Shot through with visceral violence – the first episode saw a woman being executed beneath a giant flagstone, and a priest being disembowelled – viewers have been rightly critical of its goriness.

In the finale, shown last night, the would-be assassins got their grisly comeuppance. My forebears were in their mid-30s when they were put to death for high treason. They were tied to a wooden hurdle and drawn by a horse from the Tower of London to the Old Palace Yard in Westminster, a stone’s throw from the building they had hoped to destroy. They were hanged by the neck, emasculated and disembowelled, before finally being decapitated and ceremoniously sliced into four pieces.

Meanwhile, Robert Catesby (played in the TV adaptation by his descendant, Game of Thrones star Kit Harington) escaped to the Midlands, only to be shot during a stand-off at Holbeach House. Once decapitated, his head was placed on a spike outside Parliament.

Having found the first 20 minutes of Gunpowder’s first episode difficult to watch, I steered well clear of the bloody finale. Where is the joy in seeing your relatives’ gruesome deaths?

Like all of our family, I grew up knowing that we were related to the Winter brothers. As a child, this conferred huge kudos: who would not be proud to be associated with the most fun evening of the year? Back then, Bonfire Night meant rockets in the garden, baked potatoes and home-made toffee apples around a blazing pyre. Without any sense of irony, I was allowed to make a Guy by stuffing my dad’s old clothes with dead leaves and scrunched-up newspaper.

In 2005, I was invited to the Houses of Parliament for the 400th anniversary commemorations. “I’m here for the Gunpowder Plot,” I said to the policeman on the gate, who smiled and let me in. It was a whole lot easier for me to pass than for my forefathers.

I used to mention my association with the Winter brothers freely. But more recently – certainly, since the 7/7 attacks on London – I’ve stopped talking about it. “Aren’t you ashamed to have terrorists in your family?” someone once asked me.

That brought me up with a start, never having considered the Winters to have been terrorists. I still don’t, even though the dictionary definition is someone who “uses unlawful violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims”. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think it’s an unhelpful term, applying to our society and politics, but not those of 1605. Either way, the world in which Robert and Thomas lived was very different from our own.

For her part, my 89-year-old mother wasn’t able to watch a single minute of Gunpowder. “They were driven to it,” she says. “That was the problem. There was so much intolerance at the time. The trouble is, there still is today.”

This would seem to me to be the key to this story. The villains of the piece are not the plotters, but the intolerance and religious persecution that marked their era.

The plotters failed. They paid for their attempt at terrible violence with their lives and the futures of their families. Looking back 400 years, my heart goes out to Thomas and Robert Winter.

Pity and compassion surely have to be the starting point to a more peaceable future.

‘What child would not be proud to have links with the most fun night of the year?’