Gunpowder, Treason and losing the Plot.

The last man to enter the English parliament with honest intent was Guy Fawkes, so the old joke says.  His intent was to blow up the Parliament. He failed.

So Guy Fawkes (Guido to his mates, John Johnson before they tortured his real name out of him) was one of a group of provincial Catholics who planned the gunpowder plot of 1605. The group was led by Robert Catesby and their aim was to assassinate the Protestant King James and replace him with his daughter, Princess Elizabeth.

                                          

                                   James 1st and 6th. The first king of the union.

Guy had denounced James 1st as a “heretic" who would drive all the Catholics out of England if he had the chance. Guy also denounced Scotland, and the King's favourites among the Scottish nobles.   

                                      

Guido!

The conspirators 

The five central conspirators first met on Sunday 20 May 1604, at a pub called the Duck and Drake in the Strand in London, near the current Penguin offices. One of the conspirators, Thomas Percy had been promoted in June 1604, and  gained access to the house of the keeper of the King's Wardrobe. They installed Fawkes (now called John Johnson)  as a caretaker,  they  used  this access 'maybe' to start tunnelling from that house to Parliament. No tunnel was ever found and Fawkes only admitted it on day five of his torture so he might have been saying anything by then. There are no records of any tunnel existing.

The conspirators noticed that a widow was clearing out a nearby under croft that just happened to be directly beneath the House of Lords. They bought the lease of the under croft and filled the cellar with 36 barrels of gunpowder. They were ready to go at the scheduled opening date of Parliament but the threat of the plague delayed the event until Tuesday, 5 November. Otherwise bonfire night might have been a midsummer event.

                                      

                                                             drawing and quartering

Guy's job was to light the fuse then escape across the Thames. They had planned a simultaneous revolt in the Midlands to capture Princess Elizabeth.  Wikipedia is the master of understatement  “Acts of regicide were frowned upon”.  So Fawkes was going to go abroad and claim that the murder of the king was his holy duty.

There was a few Catholics in parliament at the time and they would be present at the opening. One of them, Lord Monteagle received an anonymous letter on 26th October warning him to stay away. The letter was eventually shown to King James who ordered a search of the cellars underneath Parliament. Fawkes was found leaving the cellar and the barrels of gunpowder were discovered hidden under piles of firewood and coal. What do you think they said? Who the Fawkes is that?

                                    

                                                             Yer nicked mate!

When asked by one of the lords what he was doing in possession of so much gunpowder, Fawkes answered that his intention was "to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains." Fawkes admitted his intention to blow up the House of Lords, and expressed regret at his failure to do so. His steadfast manner earned him the admiration of King James, who described Fawkes as possessing "a Roman resolution". James's ordered his torture anyway. They wanted the names of the 12 co-conspirators. He directed that the torture be light at first, referring to the use of manacles, then the rack. After five days, Fawkes broke and confessed.

                                           

                                           Guy's signature before and after torture.

At the trial all the defendants were found guilty. Their sentences was to be drawn backwards by a horse, his head near the ground.  Their genitals would be cut off and burnt before their eyes, and their bowels and hearts removed. They would then be decapitated, and the dismembered parts of their bodies displayed.

On 31 January 1606, Fawkes and three others were pulled by horse from the tower of London to the Old Palace Yard at Westminster. The other three were hanged and quartered, Fawkes was the last to stand on the scaffold. He is reported to have asked forgiveness of both king and state while crossing himself as he climbed to the noose. He then jumped from the gallows, breaking his neck in the fall. His lifeless body was nevertheless quartered and, as was the custom, his body parts were then distributed to "the four corners of the kingdom", to be displayed as a warning to other would-be traitors.

He was about 35 years old at the time he died.

There is a description of him by Antonia Fraser ‘A tall powerfully built man, with thick reddish-brown hair, a flowing moustache in the tradition of the time, and a bushy reddish-brown beard", and that he was "a man of action ... capable of intelligent argument as well as physical endurance, somewhat to the surprise of his enemies."

                                     

An act of Parliament designated each 5 November as a day of thanksgiving for "the joyful day of deliverance", and remained in force until 1859. We don’t really do the Guy Fawkes as in the penny for a Guy thing but we do excel in the fireworks and party aspect of it. 

                                         

The English are better at making an effigy of the poor guy (sorry!), then flinging it on a bonfire and rejoicing. In some parts they burn an effigy of whoever is annoying them at that particular moment ...... 

                                  

                                     

                                       

Caro GB 15/11/2013

It's Time for Greece to Thaw.

When I started this piece my intention was to write about the centimeters of atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals that have been falling in light white flakes upon Greece this past week.   Yes, snow. 

But that got me to thinking of “snow-job”—urban slang for “an effort to deceive, overwhelm or persuade someone with elaborate often insincere talk.”  And the next thing I knew my mind had wandered to Greece’s Parliament and all the “snow” churning out of that august institution in what can only be described as frantic efforts by the current three-party governing coalition (and a lot of other folks) scrambling about for cover and scapegoats as they scream, “Beware of French bearing gifts!”

Christine Lagarde with gift in background.

It all started with a solitary Swiss bank employee living in France suspected by his bank of stealing details about 24,000 non-Swiss customers with Swiss accounts.   The culprit lived in France and so the Swiss asked the French to arrest him.  They did, but they also decided to keep the information and use it to track down those on the list who owed France taxes.  Their efforts netted 4000 depositors who paid 1.2 billion euros in unpaid taxes when French authorities gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse:  We’ll give you the opportunity to come forward and pay what you owe—or else.

The French did not keep the list to themselves.  Through France’s then Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde (now Chairman of the International Monetary Fund), France shared the list as a “gift” to other European Union member states, including Greece.  That led to a mixed bag of collection successes by those who followed the French example of contacting suspected tax evaders.  For example, EU Mediterranean members Spain and Italy used the list to successfully collect six billion and 570 million euros, respectively.     

As for Greece, well, that’s another story.  More like a major Greek drama.  One with every spoken line peppered by the word “alleged” as each suspect disputes every fact and every fact is suspect in a plot inexorably percolating along toward a murky, far from predictable end.  

In October 2010 Minister Lagarde delivered a CD to Greece’s then finance minister (let’s call him “Former Minister”) naming approximately 2000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts who might or might not have paid their taxes on amounts in those accounts.  That CD was never officially logged in by the Former Minister and all that he did with it during his time as finance minister was to copy the CD onto a memory stick and ask Greece’s Financial Crimes Squad (“SDOE”) to conduct a preliminarily investigation into twenty names on the list.  According to Former Minister, he never actually looked at the list but rather had an aide (whom he refuses to identify) review the list to come up with the names of those who “justified further investigation.” 

Legarde, Former Minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou, and Successor Minister Evangelos Venizelos

His replacement (“Successor Minister”) claimed he did nothing with the list because he was told by the head of SDOE that as the list was obtained illegally it could not be used against those named on it—a conclusion viewed as suspect by many in the face of Greece’s desperate need for tax revenues and the successful efforts of colleague EU states at employing the list in their own tax collection efforts.  But, be that as it may, nothing happened with the list for almost two years.

In September 2012, after Successor Minister had moved on to head his party (in what is now part of the fragile three-party coalition governing Greece), Greece’s new minister of finance learned of the list and, when informed that neither Former nor Successor Minister had any idea what happened to it, announced that he’d ask the French for another copy.

That’s when Successor Minister suddenly remembered that the memory stick was in his secretary’s desk drawer.

A few weeks later, in late October, a Greek journalist version of Guy Fawkes decided to blow up Parliament by publishing a copy of the Lagarde List he’d received “anonymously.”  The journalist, Kostas Vaxevanis, was promptly arrested for that act and prosecuted by the government, but found innocent after a three-day trial.  The prosecutor didn’t like that verdict and is retrying him for the same crime.

Guy Fawkes failed in his plan to blow up English Parliament on November 5, 1605

But by then the names were out, and though being on the list did not mean that one was a tax evader or had done anything unlawful, to the millions of Greeks suffering though their Great Depression, it was all the proof they needed that their government was allowing the rich and connected to play by different rules when it came to paying taxes.  And the mysterious deaths within days of each other of two high-ranking Greeks named on the list, added fuel to the ever-present conspiracy theorists’ fires.

A few days after Christmas the government made a startling announcement:  A comparison of the list on the memory stick with a copy of the original Lagarde List (obtained earlier that month from France) revealed that three names had been deleted—all relatives of the Former Minister.

The media went wild.  Successor Minister immediately threw Former Minister out of their party and Parliament pressed for an investigation of Former Minister.  In response, Former Minister implied that, if the memory stick were tampered with, Successor Minister was behind it in an effort to make Former Minister the scapegoat, and take pressure off the current government for what might be its part in the scandal.

Of course that prompted opposition parties in Parliament to jump in with a demand that Parliament also investigate Successor Minister, a move he and the governing coalition vigorously opposed. 

The story had more legs than a centipede.

And this week came the latest twist: SDOE—remember, that’s Greece’s Financial Crimes Squad—analyzed the doctored memory stick and determined it was altered after Former Minister left office and before Successor Minister assumed the position. 

In other words, no one did it. 

Ahh, political farce.  Who does it better than the Greeks?

But this is not a play.  The Lagarde List has become a symbol for what is wrong with Greece and a rallying point for the anger of the disenchanted.  According to data released this week by the Hellenic Statistical Authority the number of Greeks living in conditions of poverty jumped by nearly 400,000 from 3.031 million in 2010 to 3.403 million in 2011.  That’s almost a third of the country.  And it’s 2011 figures.  I can’t imagine things got better in 2012.

At the same time, Greece’s Prime Minister sees a “wave of confidence” that the country can ride to better times, and some in the media see “harbingers of hope” in the form of Greeks now willing to take on the “vested interests” that have ruled Greece for so long and driven its “economy and households to bankruptcy.”

I hope they’re right, but it’s hard to imagine how things can truly get better if the Greek people don’t trust their government to be fair, evenhanded, and transparent.  Greeks do not want more snow.  They’re buried in it.  What they need is heat applied where it will do the most good. 

They need to thaw. 

Jeff—Saturday