November 5 in Church History

England’s two great anti-Catholic anniversaries fall on the same day. In the night of November 4, 1605, officers searching the cellars under Parliament found Guy Fawkes and a large store of gunpowder. A small band of Catholic conspirators had planned to kill James I at the opening of Parliament. The plot failed, and November 5 became a day of national thanksgiving, with bonfires and sermons. The burden on English Catholics grew heavier, and the day kept its anti-Catholic edge for centuries.

Eighty-three years later the same date gained a second meaning. The story begins with the Restoration of 1660, when Charles II drove some two thousand Presbyterian, Independent and Baptist pastors from their churches in the Great Ejection. He declared himself a Catholic on his deathbed. His brother James II was an open Catholic, and he pressed the Scottish Covenanters harder still. When James’s wife bore a son in 1688, Protestant nobles saw a Catholic dynasty ahead. They invited James’s daughter Mary and her Dutch Calvinist husband, William of Orange, to take the throne.

William sailed on November 1. The same wind that carried his fleet down the Channel kept many English ships pinned in the Thames, and he landed unopposed in the southwest on the 5th. James fled to France, and the Toleration Act of 1689 gave Protestant Dissenters legal protection for the first time.