November 5th is Bonfire Night in Britain, one of our favourite holidays. Not that you get the day off work, now that I think about it. Bastards. The word bonfire has been shortened from bone fire, which in the context seems appropriate enough.

For it's on Bonfire Night that we celebrate one of our guiding national myths, the myth that on this day in 1605 a man was burnt to death. His preferred name was Guido Fawkes, in the Spanish fashion, but we know him as Guy Fawkes. As with so many of Britain's grand narratives, and for that matter everybody else's, the story is rather better known than the truth.

Traditionally, children are supposed to make Guys, man-shaped effigies wrapped in old cloth and bound together with string, and wheel them round the streets shouting 'Penny for the Guy!', while we toss pennies at them in recognition of their patriotic zeal. On Bonfire Night, the Guys are burnt. There are fireworks, and for some reason baked potatoes.

It's all part of our rich history of religious bigotry. Fawkes was a Catholic, and burning him in effigy symbolised the desire of any upright citizen to do the same to all the others. We may look at Ulstermen and wonder how they can keep the sectarian flame burning for so many centuries, but over on this side of the Irish Sea we've done our bit too. Do you know who Britain's first Catholic Prime Minister was? We've never had one. Tony Blair recently converted, but waited until he'd left office to do it. We've had a smorgasbord of Protestant spinoffs - Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist - but there are still people who would never vote for a Catholic. To this day, in Lewes, Sussex, they still have to guard the local Catholic church against vandalism on Bonfire Night. Some poor sod of a copper is out there right now, freezing his bollocks off because of the seventeenth century.

Even worse, the reigning British monarch is legally required to be a Protestant. As long as they change to Protestantism when they succeed, they can follow any religion they like in their earlier life. Except Catholicism. Any royal who once converts to Catholicism is forever barred from the monarchy. The same applies if they marry a Catholic. The law that contains this provision was passed in 1689, and still applies today. In an early expression of the art of irony, it was called the Bill of Rights.

Our story is from nearly a century before that. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, Catholics hoped that the new king, James, would introduce a policy of religious toleration. By this time, though, Catholics were so unpopular that James realised he could make more political capital out of continuing the persecution than he could by ending it, so he declared that the policy would be continued, and all captured Catholic priests would still be executed. A few frustrated Catholics decided he had to die, and drew up plans to kill him by blowing up Parliament at its opening, when the king would be present.

The plot was led by a man called Robert Catesby, and is often referred to as the Catesby Plot. Fawkes was brought in because of his military experience, fighting for Catholic Spain in the Netherlands. They packed the basement of the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder, but were discovered in advance when one of the conspirators sent a warning letter to a Catholic nobleman, who handed it on to the authorities. On November the fifth, Fawkes was captured in the basement, while the others made their escape to the Midlands, a Catholic stronghold. There, they went from house to house, trying to whip up a rebellion.

No-one wanted to know, and the conspirators were all shot or captured. Fawkes, meanwhile, was being tortured. After three days on the rack, he cracked, and confessed. By this time his limbs had literally been pulled from their sockets.

After a show trial, four of the conspirators were executed in St Paul's Churchyard on January the 30th. Coincidentally, it was on that day in 1649 that Charles I was beheaded, but one's attention is drawn more to the mindset that elects to execute people in a churchyard.

The others, including Fawkes, were executed the next day. Fawkes was due to be hung, drawn and quartered, but managed to leap from the gallows and break his neck. His fellow conspirators weren't so lucky.

Hanging, drawing and quartering was the traditional English punishment for treason. The victim was dragged to the place of execution tied to a wooden frame, and hung for a bit until he was quite poorly but not actually dead. Then he (and it always was a he - women were burnt instead) was cut down, and disembowelled. His innards were burnt in front of him, his head was cut off and his body was split into four pieces. All the remaining chunks of him were put on public display, to encourage people not to be quite so treasonous in the future.

The main legacy of the plot was a visceral hatred of Catholics. The poem I started with has an extra verse, often neglected in our backsliding liberal age.

Charming. Not that I'd piss on him if he was on fire. Come to think of it, the Pope not being on fire is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for pissing on him. Still, in the context that hardly seems the point.