Gunpowder Plots_A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night

by Antonia Fraser

  transformed in brilliancy after 1860 by the European addition of magnesium and aluminium.

  A knowledge of gunpowder-making was carried to the West as part of the diffusion of Chinese learning in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries, but a focus on the path to Europe places us in danger of overlooking China’s nearer neighbour, India. There have been claims as to the primacy of India in the making of gunpowder but, unlike China, India’s largely oral traditions were set within a mythical period of time and are therefore difficult to substantiate. But there are written accounts of firework displays in the fifteenth century, and lists of the materials used to produce special effects. A poem of 1570 refers to rockets and other fireworks producing garlands of flowers, sprays of fiery sparks, the effect of moonlight, and hissing noises. Of greatest significance, however, is the fact that after its ‘launch’ in China it was in India rather than Europe that the rocket came to prominence, despite its abortive use as a weapon in the naval battle between Venice and its rival Genoa at Chioggia in 1380. In China, the rocket was an aerial adaptation in the later twelfth century of the ‘earth rat’. When a carton of gunpowder was attached to an upright bamboo cane, or the cane itself filled with gunpowder, the lighting of the fuse transformed the ground-sizzling version, which had caused panic at court, into a ‘meteoric ground rat’, a rocket. These were used in festive ceremonies, where as well as leaving the ground they could also travel along wires to light a glittering display of fireworks; but by the mid-fourteenth century a more serious military purpose was also being served, in campaigns to protect boundaries and control inland rebels and coastal pirates.

  Despite this, rockets achieved their greatest early prominence when they were adopted in India, being employed there in battle from the fifteenth century. As an eye-witness of the battle of Samugarh of 1658 suggests, the damaging effect of this ‘granado fastened to a stick, that may be cast very far through the cavalry, and which extremely terrifieth horse, and even hurts and kills’ was great, but it was the later use of heavier rockets against British troops in Mysore at the end of the eighteenth century that led to their incorporation into Western warfare. They were described in 1790 by a Scotsman, Quintin Craufurd, as an eight-inch tube of iron, one and a half inches in diameter, closed at one end, and packed with powder in which a ‘match’ or fuse has been inserted. This cylinder was strapped to one end of a four-foot length of bamboo, pointed with iron. The effectiveness of this weapon depended not only on the speed with which it went off, but also on its own deficiencies, for ‘By the irregularity of its motion, it is difficult to be avoided.’ So impressed was Craufurd that he showed these rockets on the title page of his book on Hindu history and learning.

  In Europe, the early and rapid development of the gun meant that the rocket, this lightweight, transportable weapon of war, was largely overlooked, although simple rockets were making their contribution to firework displays. The use of the rocket for both festive and military/scientific uses came together through the efforts of Benjamin Robins in London in 1749, at the celebration of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. In the previous year Robins had received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London for his work in the new science of ballistics, and he now took the opportunity presented by the massed flights of several thousand rockets to try to measure the altitude reached by these great formations. A colleague was stationed on top of a house some 4,000 feet away, and together they were able to calculate that, as Robins reported to the Royal Society some weeks later, the crest of the arch formed by the rockets was over 600 yards (1,800 feet) in altitude. Robins went to India in 1750 as the engineer general of the British East India Company, but died of a fever a year later. His scientific research was cut short, but one of his colleagues at the peace celebrations, the military engineer and army officer Thomas Desaguliers, appointed chief fire-master at the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich in 1748 and later its superintendent, undertook much valuable research there, including the earliest experiments with military rockets. However, he died in 1780, before the use of rockets in Mysore in the 1790s that so impressed the British soldiers.

  The challenge of developing rockets for military use was shouldered by William Congreve the younger. He was to succeed to both a baronetcy and the post of Controller of the Royal Laboratory on his father’s death in 1814, but in 1804, holding no official position yet having his father’s support and royal approval, he began privately to experiment with rockets. These quickly went into production at Woolwich, where in 1806 the pasteboard tube of the firework was replaced by the iron casing or carcass observed in India. The rockets were initially put to use for ship-to-shore bombardment, perhaps most dramatically against Copenhagen in 1807 during the Napoleonic Wars, when the capital city of Denmark was greatly damaged by a flight of 25,000 rockets; and against Washington, DC, and Fort McHenry, Baltimore, during the Anglo-American War of 1812–15. Still a novelty, Congreve’s impressive device gained the accolade of inclusion in the American national anthem with its reference to ‘the rockets’ red glare, the bomb bursting in air’. The difficulty of achieving accuracy by controlling the trajectory of individual rockets, instead of impressing by mass-effect, meant that the military career of the Congreve rocket was chequered. Yet it remained in service until the 1860s, and proved a life-saver in many shipwreck dramas.

  After this example of pyrotechnical diffusion via India, we turn to a second route by which the knowledge of gunpowder and fireworks reached the Western world, through Arab intermediaries. Here the great treatise on the subject is that by Hasan al-Rammāh, written c. 1280 but drawing on the knowledge of earlier generations. It includes more than a hundred recipes for gunpowder, suitable for military use and civilian fireworks. The latter in particular show Chinese influence, with references to ‘wheels of China’ and ‘flowers of China’, the inclusion of arsenic sulphide, lacquer and camphor in the mixtures, and the use of expendable birds to carry incendiaries. From the thirteenth century the knowledge and use of gunpowder spread in the Mamluk kingdom (Syria and Egypt), along North Africa, and across to the southern European borders of the Mediterranean world, especially the Moorish kingdom of Andalusia, and so into Christian Spain. Fireworks were a familiar part of festivities in Arab cities, and it is even reported in a treatise written in the second part of the thirteenth century that at Hama in central Syria, Christians and Muslims together celebrated the birth of Jesus with fireworks. These occasions have remained a very vivid part of celebrations in rural Spain, with fireworks made locally by craftsmen using ancient techniques.

  A third route of transmission concerns the traffic between Europe and China, especially those travellers who returned with treasures including information on the making of gunpowder and perhaps specimens of the powder itself. They were not many, but they are significant for the story of fireworks in the West. They included military men, craftsmen such as goldsmiths, merchants and churchmen – and it is likely that the friar Roger Bacon of Oxford, the first person in Europe to write about gunpowder, gained this information from a returning cleric whom he met in mid-thirteenth-century Paris, then the leading centre of culture and learning. His treatises, Opus Maius (1267) and Opus Tertium (1268), reveal his practical knowledge, and, although he refers disarmingly to children’s toys, the fact that he writes of the violence of a combination of saltpetre, sulphur and willow charcoal shows his anticipation of trouble ahead. He notes that, placed in a parchment container no bigger than one’s thumb, the roar as of strong thunder and the flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning would be very alarming. If the powder was placed in a larger container this noise and light would be difficult to withstand; and if a more solid receptacle was used the violence of the explosion would be even greater.

  This was clearly written by someone who knew what he was talking about, which means that the interpretation of encoded information in his Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, the Letter on the Secret Workings of Art and Nature, should have raised no problems. Instead, as wel
l as questions of date and authenticity – certain passages may have been added later by a different hand – the proportions revealed when the code was cracked at the beginning of the twentieth century present another difficulty: saltpetre 41.2% : sulphur 29.4% : charcoal 29.4%. The low level of saltpetre may have made it difficult to achieve even a weak explosion, but this inadequacy can be turned to advantage as an argument in favour of authenticity, for some early recipes are known to have had a low nitrate content, later increased by practice and to suit different purposes. Was this information written in code to protect mankind from the perils of gunpowder, or was the need for secrecy a more personal matter? The latter was probably the case because Roger Bacon’s interest in experimental science and technology led perhaps inevitably to brushes with papal authority, and the years before his death in about 1291 were spent under some kind of house arrest. Perhaps early gunpowder’s association with alchemy and the references to its manufacture as the ‘Black Art’ did not soothe the worries of the papacy. The image of a powder-maker in the late-fifteenth-century Frankfurt Rust und feuerwerck buych (one of the many copies of the medieval German Firework Book), suggests that more than two hundred years later the alchemist still had the power to unsettle. The master is shown in a striped ‘lab coat’, surrounded by the apparatus of his craft and the signs of the seven metals. Although the text of the Firework Book is not mysterious, for it simply sets out clearly the system of question and answer by which the apprentice learned the craft of making and using gunpowder, the image is arcane, and it may have been the association with alchemy that led the Church to put an end to Roger Bacon’s active interest in pyrotechnics. However, this third avenue by which the knowledge of gunpowder-making had been carried from China to the West, was by then becoming well established.

  Until the middle of the nineteenth century no distinction was drawn in British administration between military fireworks to serve the national purpose on the battlefield, and festive fireworks for national celebrations – the Board of Ordnance was responsible for both, those ‘for Real’ and those ‘for Triumph’. This was appropriate, because the grand public displays in honour of royal occasions and military victories marked dynastic and national success in a way that echoed, through the bangs and flashes of gunpowder, the same message of power as that conveyed by the gun on the battlefield. Not only were these public displays on an immense scale, so that great resources of technical expertise, artistry and design, finance and manpower, had to be brought to bear upon them, but they were also, unlike the pure spectacle of modern displays, designed to convey a message. Like theatrical productions they had a ‘script’, a story to tell.

  One of the earliest of these great stage sets in Europe was created in Stuttgart in 1609, in celebration of a dynastic coup: the marriage of the duke of Württemburg, a small duchy, part of the Holy Roman Empire, to the margravine of Brandenburg. A mock-fortress was placed on top of a small and specially constructed mound. Flames rose above it and fireworks filled the sky, but the sanctuary remained intact, protected by its position and by one figure from the rustic past, a ‘wild man’, and by two from the classical tradition, Mars and Venus, on lofty columns. The marriage would provide safety and security, the ‘script’ appeared to say. But as time went on the celebratory pieces lost their freshness and became so heavily allegorical that ‘programme notes’ were needed for their interpretation. By the time of the celebration in 1730 of the birth of the French dauphin a year earlier, the single mound had become two mountains, each eighty feet high, built in the space between the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal in Paris. Given as a tribute by Philip V of Spain, these represented the Pyrenees: above them rose the sun, symbolic of the birth of the great grandson of the Sun King, and linking them was a rainbow on which sat the goddess Iris. This was a spectacle with action, for in the course of the display fireworks erupted around and between the mountains and sea monsters cavorted. If the omens of birth seemed obscure, no doubt all was made clear by the accompanying programme.

  But the most skilled fire-workers over these years were Italian, and the most stylish firework displays were in the Italian cities, especially Rome. Vannoccio Biringuccio, quoted in the epigraph to this essay, was able to refer to the displays in Siena, his birthplace; Florence, where his shifting fortunes took him at one time; and Rome, where he was familiar with one of the city’s great specialities, the ‘girandole’. This was a spectacularly large wooden frame to which many rockets and other fireworks were attached, often so placed that they quickly lit each other in turn. In Rome the opportunities for powerful displays were even greater than elsewhere, because the presence of the Holy See and the international network of diplomats, churchmen and scholars in attendance made this the greatest religious and secular city in Europe. The many celebrations included not only those of the Christian year, especially Easter, but also the annual display from Castel Sant’Angelo, which was so closely associated with stunning displays of rocketry that it became known itself as the ‘Girandola’. The English painter Joseph Wright of Derby, famous for his depiction of light and luminosity, was drawn to paint this ‘sublime’ spectacle several times on his only visit to Italy in the mid-1770s, and his work shows smoke erupting as from a volcano, fireworks bursting and cannons firing. These displays were truly projections of great but graceful power.

  England was not lacking in the opportunities for similar but smaller events, and after Queen Elizabeth showed her pleasure at the display commemorating her visit in 1572 to Warwick Castle, home of the Master General of the Ordnance, such occasions were repeated. This informal association between royal firework displays and the office of the Ordnance became well established, so it was appropriate that, after the disruption caused by the Civil War, the celebration of the coronation of Charles II in April 1661 should be designed by military engineers including Martin Beckman, a Swedish captain with Dutch forebears. Samuel Pepys noted that ‘the City had a light like a glory round about it, with bonefyres’ on the night of the coronation; he was sorry to miss the fireworks the next evening, but he was at home ‘writing up three days’ diary’. The coronation of James II in 1685 presented another major opportunity, and Beckman now mounted a water-borne display: there were barges on the Thames supporting mortars for firing ‘balloons’, musket barrels for firing ‘stars’, and ‘triumph guns’, as well as pyramids decked with fireworks; and there were ‘water works’ in the Thames, fireworks designed to impress by burning in the water. The occasion was a great success but it lacked the finesse and scale of the Continental displays, organized by men for whom pyrotechnics had become their sole profession. Beckman, on the other hand, as well as negotiating his way around the changing allegiances required by the return of the monarchy in 1660, the accession of James II in 1685 and of William and Mary in 1689, with all that this implied in dynastic and religious choices, was also much involved in making and using fireworks for war as well as for celebration. He served several times in Tangier, part of the dowry of Charles II’s queen, and was closely involved in the establishment of this early British foothold outside Europe in the 1660s, as well as the destruction of its fortifications in the 1680s when the outpost could no longer be sustained. Appointed engineer to the Ordnance in 1670 (and living in the Tower of London from that time), Beckman became Chief Engineer in 1685 although he had fulfilled that role in all but name since 1677, touring the country and recommending and rebuilding its neglected defences. He was knighted for these services in 1686.

  As another national crisis loomed through the efforts of James II to extend the Roman Catholic influence, a son and heir was born to the king in 1688, displacing his elder daughter, Mary, princess of Orange, and ending hopes of a peaceful Protestant succession. Beckman was called upon to produce a firework display to mark the birth of the baby who was never to become king, but would be known instead as the ‘Old Pretender’. It took place in June, on the Thames, and the centrepiece was a statue of Cupid bearing aloft the three feathers of the prince of
Wales. The landing of Mary’s husband, William of Orange, in November, and departure of James and his family in December, threatened Beckman’s position. But the Lutheran, having resisted the pressure to convert to Roman Catholicism, now felt it wise to ally himself to the Church of England. Perhaps his Dutch origins also helped, and he survived to present what must have been a hastily organized firework display on the Thames in November 1688, to welcome William, the new master. Contemporary prints suggest this was a splendid but orderly affair, in contrast to the more lavish display organized by the English merchants in Amsterdam, whose exuberance must have reflected their conviction that the Glorious Revolution was going to be good for them and for business.

  Beckman’s display may have been more tentative because he had much to lose. In addition to his role at the Board of Ordnance, he had also in August 1688 been made ‘Comptroller of the Fireworks as well for war as for triumph and of all the fireworkers… in the Laboratory’ at Greenwich, an appointment which placed him in charge of the establishment where military and display fireworks were produced, and where he had already given long service as a firemaster since 1661. He retained both posts and received fresh warrants, proving his loyalty to the new regime by the active service he undertook, in Ireland in 1691 and in the bombardment of the French coast between 1692 and 1697.