Gunpowder Plots_A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night

by Antonia Fraser

  As chief engineer, Beckman’s prime task was to shore up the home defences, so his visit to Ireland was brief, but as Comptroller of the Laboratory he was to spend several years working on ‘bomb vessels’ sent to ‘insult the coast of France’. He saw service at sea in 1692, and again in 1694 in an expedition to Brest, but his ‘machines’, fireships designed to explode near other vessels or harbour walls, were not a success. In 1695 he played his part in attacks on Dieppe, Le Havre and Calais, with bombs fired from ships at sea. Getting close enough inshore was difficult, but Beckman had an unorthodox success in 1696 when he hoisted French colours while manoeuvring ten ‘bomb vessels’ into position, to bombard Saint-Martin on the Île de Ré. The action lasted for two days and was followed by a further bombardment along the coast at Olonne. In all, ‘4,200 bombs and carcasses were thrown to good purpose.’

  What were these ‘fireworks’? Reference has already been made to ‘bombs’ fired in festive displays – hollow canvas shells filled with powder and a garniture of sparkling effects. In military service the bomb, also known later as a ‘shell’, was a hollow iron shot carrying a pyrotechnic composition, fired from a mortar. It had a fuse-hole about an inch in diameter, through which the powder was loaded and the fuse placed. The flash, as the mortar was fired and the shell expelled, carried to the fuse, igniting the powder in the shell and causing it to burst, as timed, against sea or shore defences. The ‘carcass’ was also a hollow iron shot, but oval in shape, and with up to five holes primed with powder and ‘quick match’. Inside its ribs of iron it carried a highly explosive and incendiary mix including mealed powder, broken glass and such inflammable materials as pitch and turpentine. Discharged against a town, it created an intense fire, difficult to put out. Alongside this deadly work, Beckman served the king with a firework display to mark his safe return from the Continent in November 1695 after the capture of Namur, and rounded this off in 1697 with an extravaganza to celebrate the Peace of Ryswick and the successful conclusion of the Nine Years War.

  The death of Sir Martin Beckman in June 1702 ushered in a quieter period of firework activity that lasted for more than forty years. There was no great public display at the coronation of Queen Anne in April 1702 – perhaps Beckman was already ailing at his home in the Tower. The ships at Spithead made a brave show at night, ‘hanging out candles [in lanterns] as thick as possibly they could be hung and some firing several sky rockets’, but as at the later coronations of George I in 1714 and George II in 1727 there seems to have been no national focus, although there were reports in the London Gazette of ‘bonfires, illuminations, ringing of bells and other demonstrations of a general satisfaction and joy’. On the Continent, royal events continued to be handsomely celebrated, but in Britain, during the generally peaceful years of Sir Robert Walpole’s administration, the principle of ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ ruled, and activity at the Laboratory in particular was greatly reduced. When national interests were felt to be threatened by Spain, leading to the conflict in 1739 which merged into the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), steps were taken to remedy the Laboratory’s ‘defective state’, although not until 1746 was it again placed under a ‘Comptroller’.

  Charles Frederick was the young man appointed, and he had yet to prove himself because unlike Beckman he had no successful military career to call upon as evidence of his abilities. Like Beckman, however, he was to hold positions for nearly forty years at both the Laboratory and the Board of Ordnance, where he was appointed Surveyor General. He was similarly to be associated with military success, for it was on his ‘watch’ that Britain emerged in the course of the Seven Years War (1756–63) onto the world stage as a naval, colonial and trading power. A Member of Parliament with influential friends, Frederick’s personal advantages were a practical and well-organized mind and a willingness to learn about gunpowder-making. By Order in Council from the Court of St James, February 1746, he was appointed Comptroller of the Laboratory so that ‘the Art of making Fireworks for real use as well as for Triumph may again be recovered.’ His staff was to include a chief firemaster, firemaster’s mate, clerk and workmen – especially the matrosses, who were to produce fireworks and cartridges and to charge bombs, carcasses and grenadoes at what, having moved downriver from Greenwich in 1696, was to become known as the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich.

  Two years after Frederick became Comptroller the War of Austrian Succession was over, and, having been appointed to make fireworks for war rather than triumph, he was now required to change his priorities. It was decided to hold a firework display of previously unmatched splendour in London to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, but just as the country had lagged behind its Continental neighbours in acquiring the skills of gunpowder-making, so also the staging of displays lacked the flair and intensity of meaning of those in mainland Europe. Italians were therefore invited to design the framework (Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, architect and fireworks master) and the fireworks (Gaetano Ruggieri, forebear of the famous pyrotechnic firm), but the supply of gunpowder and the making of the fireworks was to be in the hands of Charles Frederick and the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich. He threw himself into the project with great vigour, working in an office set up for him at Green Park where the spectacle was to be held. He was described by gunpowder-makers who had dealings with him, as a man who had ‘studied his Art [in this context, his technical skills] more than any Man in England, and made more Experiments’. Those who knew him socially marvelled at his intense commitment to the task: his sister-in-law reported that ‘He is in the Green Park from 8 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon… The rest of the day he gives audiences and worries his spirits and his person till ’tis reduced to a shadow’; and a visitor to his office described him, alarmingly, as ‘bronzed over with a patina of gunpowder’. While Frederick tackled the fireworks, ably assisted by Captain Thomas Desaguliers, the chief firemaster, the Italian pyrotechnicians worked on the setting, an edifice of wood and canvas, 410 feet long and 114 feet high, whitewashed and sized so that it looked like the finest stone. This was known as the Temple, or more technically the ‘Machine’. The chosen site was close to St James’s Palace, then the home of the Royal Family. Along Constitution Hill, the Royal Train of Artillery was to be drawn up to add the boom of cannons to the bangs of fireworks. As well as the myriads of ground-based fireworks, a great flight of over 10,500 rockets was to be deployed, serving, as already noted, a scientific as well as a festive purpose, for their trajectory over London was to be calculated.

  The preparations begun in November 1748 culminated in the display on 27 April 1749. At seven o’clock in the evening the king led out the royal party, and, to a background of music played by George Frederick Handel and his orchestra (later to give his specially composed ‘grand overture on warlike instruments’, accompanied by a hundred brass cannon), he inspected the arrangements and distributed bags of gold in what were to prove premature rewards. At half past eight a signal rocket was fired, setting off a response from the guns in the enclosure, the cannons on the more distant hill, and then the fireworks themselves in great and rapid profusion. There were some mishaps, especially when one of the rockets struck a young woman spectator who had to be stripped to her ‘stays and petticoat’ so she should not be burned, and the thought that Charles Frederick may have ‘over-egged the pudding’ comes to mind as the problems of conflicting lines of command and methods of approach began to emerge. He was in overall charge, but the Italian experts were responsible for lighting the fireworks on the machine, and this they chose to do by laying a trail of corned gunpowder rather than the ‘quick match’ favoured by the home team as a safer and more rapid approach. Perhaps due to this confusion there was an explosion at the northern end of the machine, which burst into flames. Water engines were brought to the scene and the fire was eventually extinguished and the display resumed, but not before the

  Cavaliere Servandoni, incensed at the spoiling of his machine, had drawn his sword and confronted Charles Frederi
ck in anger. He was disarmed and dispatched to the Tower, to be released the following morning after apologizing to Frederick.

  Firing was resumed after these incidents, but by midnight the crowd was drifting away and the celebrations came to an end with many fireworks left unused. These were employed a few weeks later in a second display at the Thames-side home of the duke of Richmond. There is a dramatic series of engravings of the calamity in Green Park, but the Richmond print has a special attraction for around the edges it shows and names the various fireworks used. They include a ‘Fixed Sun’, a ‘Regulated Piece of 5 Munitions’, a ‘Buitoni’, which looks like a bundle of fireworks on a stick, a ‘Vertical Wheel’, a ‘Spiral with Horizontal Wheel’, a ‘Vertical Sun’, a ‘Battery of Maro[o]ns’, ‘Pots d’Aigretts with Fountains’, ‘Corded Mortars with Air Balloons’, ‘Do. With Saucissons’, ‘Flights of Sky Rocketts’, ‘Pots de Brin’, ‘Water Rocketts’, ‘Jatte d’eau’, ‘Water Balloons with 3 Stages of Lights’ and ‘Vertical Illuminations’ – this last referring to four very substantial obelisks packed with fireworks.

  As a spectacle the Green Park extravaganza was clearly flawed and there were few attempts to repeat a display on this scale, but it was a bravura performance that marked a revival in the fortunes of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich and the Board of Ordnance. For more than half a century the emphasis would be on fireworks for real rather than triumph, as Britain began to assert its pre-eminence on the world scene, and supplies were pre-empted by the coming struggles for European, colonial, naval and trading power. There were celebrations to come, honouring for example, on the evening of 1 August 1814, not only the signing of the Treaty of Paris on 30 May that year (concluding, it was hoped, the struggle with Napoleon), but also the centenary of the House of Hanover on the British throne, and the sixteenth anniversary of the battle of the Nile; and Queen Victoria’s many anniversaries were celebrated over the years following her coronation in 1838. But those of 1856 marking the end of the Crimean War were to be a ‘last hurrah’ for the military pyrotechnicians, who seem to have thrown everything they had into this final display. With four separate shows to accommodate the crowds, that at Green Park seems to have had a particularly spectacular conclusion, an eye-witness describing a complicated centrepiece which, ‘amid all its fantastic blazing and revolving, exhibited the words “God Save the Queen” ’. He continued,

  Language fails to convey a vivid idea of the deafening, roaring, crashing and grand appearance of the termination, during which the proud fortifications of Sebastopol were supposed to succumb. Then rose up into the blackness… rapidly one after another, six flights of rockets, comprising altogether no less than ten thousand of these beautiful and brilliant instruments… It was such a spectacle as a man could not reasonably expect to witness more than once in his life.

  This echo of Sir Charles Frederick’s similar grand flights of rockets in Green Park a century earlier marks the successful conclusion of one hundred years of international rivalry. Indeed, as the remnants of the firework displays were returned to Woolwich by the waggon load, the Royal Laboratory found that it was being placed on a peacetime footing with the loss of 300 workers. Not only that, the long-standing link between the Ordnance Department and public fireworks was to be severed. It was perhaps in an act of neat but unsuspecting symbolism that much of the now redundant equipment, such as the special ‘wire wound mortars’, was to be sold to the fireworks firm of C. T. Brock & Co. The Victorian public was not to be deprived of its pyrotechnical joys.

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  The mid-nineteenth-century acquisition of first-rate fireworks equipment by the Brock family firm was particularly appropriate, as they had been associated with these celebratory materials from the early eighteenth century. Indeed, the death by fireworks of an ancestor, John Brock of Clerkenwell, in an explosion at his house on 5 November 1720, is particularly significant, for the date indicates both the long-standing family interest in this dangerous business, and the availability of gunpowder for private celebrations on Bonfire Night. This raises the question of the sale of powder for such purposes, and the legality of its non-military use.

  The evidence is patchy, but it seems that from the sixteenth century there was a growing use of fireworks that were, in the words of the mayor of Bristol in 1574 when anticipating a visit by the queen, ‘devised for plesure’. The date is of interest because this is only two years after the display at Warwick that had so pleased Elizabeth and which, through its association with the Ordnance, was interpreted earlier as setting a pattern for future state celebrations. But perhaps her enthusiasm also set the scene for civic displays such as that at Bristol, which lasted three days and involved artificial forts and mock battles, the purchase of corned and serpentine powder, and the casting of seven mortars of brass with the necessary pestles, presumably for the better incorporation of the ingredients of gunpowder. And it was not only the queen who enjoyed gunpowder displays on her tours of the kingdom; there is also evidence of the purchase of smaller quantities of gunpowder by colleges, guilds and borough councils for use in their various pageants and processions, such as that still associated with the Lord Mayor of London’s Show.

  The availability of gunpowder for these ‘plesures’ in the sixteenth century presents a problem, for this was a time when the government was still heavily dependent on northern Europe for supplies of gunpowder materials and expertise. There was such a lack of home competence in the production of saltpetre that a contract was entered into in 1561 to gain this knowledge from Gerard Honrick, a captain of ‘Almayne’; and it was only from this time that the supply of gunpowder by contractors began to be organized. Even then, production was limited and largely confined to the London area, which suggests that the provincial guilds and boroughs may have bought supplies from illicit powder-makers, like those known to have operated in Bristol, or have ‘acquired’ them from royal castles in the country. With the sailing of the Spanish Armada in 1588 the shortages of supply became dangerously evident, and in January 1589 royal letters patent for gunpowder-making and saltpetre production were granted to a partnership led by the Evelyn family and held by renewal for almost fifty years. Given the Spanish challenge, it is no surprise to learn that in 1587–8 the merchants of the Mercers Guild in York had difficulty buying corned powder and match for their Midsummer Show. It is also no surprise that the goods were then purchased in Hamburg, and that this or another order was brought in on board the Elizabetha of Hull, for the wealthy merchants of the time were familiar with such overseas markets. The fact that similar displays were recorded at Bristol, Chester, Canterbury and Maidstone suggests that similar conditions existed there. Many of these pleasurable diversions were celebrations of English themes, often including St George and the Dragon, spitting fire from throat, nostrils and eyes, propelled by rockets and enlivened by an assortment of other fireworks. Nevertheless, this pyrotechnical freedom in the provinces sits oddly with the problems of supply in the metropolis and the perceived dangers to the state.

  The middle decades of the seventeenth century were a difficult time for the pursuit of pyrotechnical pleasures, not through

  gunpowder shortages but because of the condemnation of such frivolous activities by the new Puritan rulers. With the return of the monarchy in 1660 the theatres flourished once more, and the idea of ‘Pleasure Gardens’ began to take root, in London particularly. Here the shows were enlivened by fireworks, sometimes used cruelly – the 1710 programme at the aptly named Bear Garden in Clerkenwell, for example, refers to bull- and bear-baiting, and the dressing up of a dog with fireworks. The more ‘select’ establishments, such as the Mulberry Gardens, later the site of Buckingham Palace, and the Marylebone Gardens, would celebrate the king’s birthday with firework displays. Cuper’s Gardens south of the Thames also became a very fashionable resort where Handel’s compositions were performed, and where in 1749 and 1750 a miniature version of the Green Park ‘machine’ for the peace celebrations was reproduced. Perhaps the most fash
ionable were the Ranelagh Gardens, which flourished from the 1740s until their closure in 1803, their grounds becoming part of the Chelsea Hospital; and the Vauxhall south of the river, probably the ‘Foxhall Spring Gardens’ known to Pepys. The Vauxhall closed in 1859, with the words ‘Farewell for Ever’ appearing in the final display in letters of fire. The opening of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1854 had challenged the old London gardens and many could not survive the competition, especially when this was followed by the development from 1865 of purely pyrotechnic rather than scenic displays there. In the provinces there were a number of gardens famous for their firework displays, especially the Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester, the Spa in Scarborough and gardens such as the Sydney and Grosvenor in Bath, where a dreadful accident showed the price to be paid if things went wrong. Giovanni Invetto was a skilful and inventive pyrotechnician from Milan, but in 1789 a fireworks explosion at his lodgings in Bath caused the death of his wife and son.

  Accidents highlighted the need for legislation and its enforcement. This was slow to come, but in the course of the eighteenth century regulations were introduced to govern the storage and carriage of powder and even the method of production when, as noted earlier, stamps used to pound the ingredients were outlawed in 1772. But it was not until 1875 that the control of explosives was placed on a proper footing, and even then the continuing exclusion of Crown property left workers at factories where military explosives were made, such as the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, in a vulnerable position. Action was taken more quickly to control what might be regarded as the lesser hazard of letting off fireworks in public, perhaps because this could lead to disturbances that were difficult to control. At the end of the seventeenth century the sentiments were anti-popish, though these may equally have been expressed on Queen Elizabeth’s Day, 17 November, the anniversary of her accession, rather than on Guy Fawkes Night, 5 November – which as a further complication was also sometimes celebrated as the day on which ‘The Deliverer’, the Protestant William of Orange, had landed in 1688. In 1685, troubles on 5 November were sufficient to cause the authorities to promulgate an Order in Council on the 6th, warning against bonfires and public fireworks on any festival or other day without permission. The troubles must have continued, because this Order was reinforced in 1697 by an Act of Parliament whose prohibitions included not only the firing and throwing of ‘Squibbes, Rockets, Serpents or other Fire-works’ in public streets, but also the making and selling of the same. The Act remained on the Statute Book until 1860, yet it was possible during that time for gentlemen of means to buy books of instruction such as that by Robert A. Howlett, entitled The School of Recreation: or a Guide to the Most Ingenious Exercises… Published in 1696 and reprinted in 1710 and 1736, it