Stephen Lewis delves into the truth behind Guy Fawkes and bonfire night.

JAMES Sharpe is a self-confessed Grumpy Old Man. He remembers once being asked by a scruffy urchin to give him a 'penny for the Guy'.

"I refused on the grounds I had been baptised a Catholic," he recalls in his new book Remember, Remember The Fifth Of November.

The boy's response didn't impress him. What had being a Catholic got to do with it?

"Clearly this child was not equipped to remember very well," the York University history professor writes severely.

Professor Sharpe admits he loved bonfire night as a boy in the 1950s. His mum taught him the famous rhyme about the gunpowder plot:

"Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November,

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot,

I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot."

He clearly still sees no reason why Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot - hence his new book, published to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrest of Guy Fawkes in a gunpowder-filled storeroom beneath the Houses of Parliament in the early hours of November 5 1605.

Prof Sharpe is clearly in some ways an admirer of Fawkes. Yes, today he would have been branded a terrorist for what he did, he admits. But he was a man of considerable integrity: an experienced soldier and committed Catholic who acted out of sincere belief.

"He was massively courageous when he was first caught. It took them a couple of days to break him under torture." Days that, Fawkes must have believed, might have given his co-conspirators time to escape.

As you'd expect of a historian of Prof Sharpe's credentials - his last book, Dick Turpin: The Myth Of The English Highwayman, became a national best-seller - Remember Remember The Fifth Of November is good on detail of the period.

The last 20 years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign, from 1583 to 1603, were hard times for Catholics. Denying that the monarch was supreme over the church in England was illegal. That meant that if you were a Catholic who refused to attend Church of England services, you could be fined. If you were a Catholic priest, or if you were caught aiding a Catholic priest or spreading Catholic propaganda, you could be executed for treason.

There was a lot of anti-Catholic feeling around, Prof Sharpe says - which was only made worse by the invasion of the Catholic Spanish Armada in 1588, and the Pope's announcement that Queen Elizabeth was "not a true monarch." That meant, he says, that "every Catholic could be seen as a traitor."

In that climate, many Catholics must have felt like resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe - ready to die for a cause which seemed hopeless, existing in a world of uncertainty and danger, not knowing who to trust.

When King James I, son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, came to the throne, many Catholics hoped for better times. They were to be disappointed however. King James, Prof Sharpe says, was a staunch Calvinist protestant. The plot to get rid of him and his court by blowing up Parliament was born.

There is some vivid detail in the book about Fawkes' discovery, arrest and torture. Prof Sharpe describes how Fawkes was dragged into the King's presence, where James "asked him how he could conspire so hideous a treason against his children and so many innocent souls which never offended him." Fawkes boldly replied "a dangerous disease required a desperate remedy." He was tortured for two days with the rack and manacles, and eventually broke, giving up the names of his co-conspirators. "The signature on his final confession, compared to that on the first, tells the story of a man who had been physically and mentally broken," Prof Sharpe writes.

It is a gripping story, and makes a great opening to the book - but it is not what the book is really about. The Gunpowder Plot is a story that has already been told better than he can possibly tell it, the Professor says modestly.

What he is interested in is how the foiling of that original conspiracy has come, over the centuries since, to have been celebrated in the way it is today, with a bonfire, fireworks and the ritual burning of a guy.

It is a tale that takes in politics, religion, Guy Fawkes the Victorian pantomime figure, and 19th century riots caused by urban authorities seeking to put a stop to bonfire night celebrations that had got out of hand.

It began with the Protestant belief that the foiling of the Catholic plotters (and the earlier defeat of the Armada) was proof that God was on the side of the Protestants. It ends with little boys who have no inkling of the significance of what they're doing asking for a Penny For The Guy.

It is a great story about the gradual evolution of an idea and an annual tradition: and it will leave you with a much richer appreciation of just what you're doing when you gather around the bonfire with your family this November 5.

Updated: 16:09 Friday, October 14, 2005