Guy is a symbol of religious extremism

2:02pm Friday 9th November 2007

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RE: Charles Mann's comments last week that burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes was barbaric.

OH dear. Once again somebody wanting to meddle with things without understanding why they were done.

The burning of an effigy of Guy Fawkes is the opposite of a celebration of a horrific practice (Guy Fawkes was not burned on a bonfire he was hung drawn and quartered).

Similarly the Martyr's Memorial in Oxford was not constructed as a celebration of the burning on a bonfire of the three Protestant Archbishops Latimer, Cranmer and Ridley. The two are connected.

When Archbishop Latimer said to Ridley as they were led to the bonfire "Today we shall light a candle that by the grace of God will never be put out", he did not mean he hoped the burning of Heretics would continue forever.

It was a hope that the burning of high-ranking religious priests by a fundamentalist Romanist religion would create a greater horror than that of burning the 300 or so people before him, including some 60 women and children, under the regime of Mary Tudor, sufficient for it to cease.

After the burning of Cranmer and the death of Mary Tudor it virtually did.

The effigy of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire is a symbolic warning of the inevitable result of religious extremism.

A warning to never let it happen again. That we have forgotten why it is done is probably the reason we cannot see it now when it is happening again under our noses.

If some people want to urge us to forget it and are really so ignorant that they want to replay the last 500 bloody years of English History I would strongly recommend they read it first, very carefully, so they will be aware of exactly what they are letting themselves and their children in for.

P D Somerville, Coningsby Road, High Wycombe