Indeed, the whole ceremony of burning Guy Faux, or the Pope, as he is indifferently called, is a sort of Treason Travestie, and admirably adapted to lower our feelings upon this memorable subject. The printers of the little duodecimo Prayer Book, printed by T. Baskett,[45] in 1749, which has the effigy of his sacred Majesty George II. piously prefixed, have illustrated the service (a very fine one in itself) which is appointed for the Anniversary of this Day, with a print, which it is not very easy to describe, but the contents appear to be these:—The scene is a room, I conjecture, in the king's palace. Two persons,—one of whom I take to be James himself, from his wearing his hat while the other stands bareheaded,—are intently surveying a sort of speculum, or magic mirror, which stands upon a pedestal in the midst of the room, in which a little figure of Guy Faux with his dark lantern approaching the door of the Parliament House is made discernible by the light proceeding from a great eye which shines in from the topmost corner of the apartment, by which eye the pious artist no doubt meant to designate Providence. On the other side of the mirror, is a figure doing something, which puzzled me when a child, and continues to puzzle me now. The best I can make of it is, that it is a conspirator busy laying the train,—but then, why is he represented in the king's chamber?—Conjecture upon so fantastical a design is vain, and I only notice the print as being one of the earliest graphic representations which woke my childhood into wonder, and doubtless combined with the mummery before-mentioned, to take off the edge of that horror which the naked historical mention of Guido's conspiracy could not have failed of exciting.
[45] The same, I presume, upon whom the clergyman in the song of the Vicar and Moses, not without judgment, passes this memorable censure—
Here, Moses, the King:—
'Tis a scandalous thing
That this Baskett should print for the Crown.
Now that so many years are past since that abominable machination was happily frustrated, it will not, I hope, be considered a profane sporting with the subject, if we take no very serious survey of the consequences that would have flowed from this plot if it had had a successful issue. The first thing that strikes us, in a selfish point of view, is the material change which it must have produced in the course of the nobility. All the ancient peerage being extinguished, as it was intended, at one blow, the Red-Book must have been closed for ever, or a new race of peers must have been created to supply the deficiency; as the first part of this dilemma is a deal too shocking to think of, what a fund of mouth-watering reflections does this give rise to in the breast of us plebeians of A.D. 1823. Why you or I, reader, might have been Duke of —— or Earl of ——: I particularize no titles, to avoid the least suspicion of intention to usurp the dignities of the two noblemen whom I have in my eye:—but a feeling more dignified than envy sometimes excites a sigh, when I think how the posterity of Guido's Legion of Honour (among whom you or I might have been) might have rolled down "dulcified," as Burke expresses it, "by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring."[46] What new orders of merit, think you, this English Napoleon would have chosen? Knights of the Barrel, or Lords of the Tub, Grand Almoners of the Cellar, or Ministers of Explosion. We should have given the Train couchant, and the Fire rampant in our arms; we should have quartered the dozen white matches in our coats;—the Shallows would have been nothing to us.
[46] Letter to a Noble Lord.
Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contemplate its effects upon the other house, for they were all to have gone together,—King, Lords, Commons.——
To assist our imagination, let us take leave to suppose,—and we do it in the harmless wantonness of fancy,—to suppose that the tremendous explosion had taken place in our days;—we better know what a House of Commons is in our days, and can better estimate our loss;—let us imagine, then, to ourselves, the United Members sitting in full conclave above—Faux just ready with his train and matches below; in his hand a "reed tipt with fire"—he applies the fatal engine——
To assist our notions still further, let us suppose some lucky dog of a reporter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. Stephen's benches, and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Abbey, from whence descending, at some neighbouring coffee-house, first wiping his clothes and calling for a glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he had heard and seen (quorum pars magna fuit) for the Morning Post or the Courier,—we can scarcely imagine him describing the event in any other words but some such as these:—
"A Motion was put and carried, That this House do adjourn: That the Speaker do quit the Chair. The House ROSE amid clamours for Order."
In some such way the event might most technically have been conveyed to the public. But a poetical mind, not content with this dry method of narration, cannot help pursuing the effects of this tremendous blowing up, this adjournment in the air sine die. It sees the benches mount,—the Chair first, and then the benches, and first the Treasury Bench, hurried up in this nitrous explosion; the Members, as it were, pairing off; Whigs and Tories taking their friendly apotheosis together, (as they did their sandwiches below in Bellamy's room). Fancy, in her flight, keeps pace with the aspiring legislators, she sees the awful seat of order mounting till it becomes finally fixed a constellation, next to Cassiopeia's chair,—the wig of him that sat in it taking its place near Berenice's curls. St. Peter, at Heaven's wicket,—no, not St. Peter,—St. Stephen, with open arms, receives his own.——