The gunpowder conspiracy is a real event in British history. In the play, Jon Nuo plays the mastermind of the gunpowder conspiracy, Robert Gatsby, a radical Catholic.
Bloody Religious War--Whatever is repressed will be released one day
In 1604, it was an eventful time for England. Last year, Queen Elizabeth I passed away, and her nephew, King James I of Scotland, succeeded her because the Queen had no heirs. Marking the end of the Tudor dynasty that ruled Britain for more than a hundred years, the Stuart dynasty has just begun.
From the day the foreign king entered England, it was heralded that the country would be plunged into some unknown turmoil. Because James I was raised as a Puritan since he was a child, and his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was a Catholic, and the United Kingdom has been established by Henry VIII since the establishment of the independent Church of England, after Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth after several kings After several changes, Protestantism gradually became the state religion of England.
What religious policies will this foreign Scottish king adopt, and how will he rule such a powerful kingdom? Doubt and anxiety pervaded London.
James first courted the large number of Protestants, while Cecil, the Secretary of State (played by his brother Cumford, who always tilts his neck), began to arrest and persecute Catholics. Priests and priests who assemble privately to preach will be arrested, and after being tortured, they will hang their heads to show the public. The lower head is inserted on a wooden stick to show the crowd.
Often after hanging the head, the prisoner is deliberately left to breathe. Such a method of death is really extremely painful and cruel. It was as bloody as some scenes in Game of Thrones, and not only that, people who didn't attend a Protestant church for more than a few weeks were tried, fined or whipped, whether it was an old woman or a child.
How can such a mad and bloody suppression of Catholics not arouse hatred and resistance from Catholics? At the beginning of the play, a search operation is underway. Robert Gatsby and others are praying at Mrs. Dorothy's home. The army arrives, and to cover the Catholic priest, Robert's aunt, Mrs. Dorothy, is arrested, as is the young priest Smith, who is hiding in a camera obscura under the bed. Both were later executed with extremely cruel capital punishment.
As Robert said: Our sisters were crushed to death like seeds, our brothers were slaughtered like animals, and we couldn't do anything!
We must do something to let the world know that Catholics in England are no longer patient.
And the priest in the play keeps them patient because the king of Spain is the patron of British Catholics. Spain and England are preparing to sign a peace treaty to end years of Anglo-Spanish war, and the priest believes that Spain must persuade the British king to guarantee the basic rights of Catholics, rather than being massacred as it is now.
Robert and his companions also went to Spain to seek help from Spain, but Spain rejected them because they did not want to destroy the future peace signing between the two countries. But they were specifically shown how they executed Protestants - tied to a stake of fire and burned alive.
Ultimately, dismayed, Robert decided to take revenge with a big vote, and the Gunpowder Project was born.
Anyone who has seen Adjani's "Queen Margot" will know that the persecution of Protestants in Catholic countries such as France and Spain is equally cruel and bloody, especially the massacre of St. Bartholomew in France. Simplicity is slaughter. 3,000 Protestants were killed in Paris alone, and about 20,000 Protestants were killed throughout France.
The Reformation and Religious Wars throughout Western Europe turned from a struggle for political power to an existential war between Protestants and Catholics.
Reformation background
The original Reformation was due to economic factors and various ills of the church. For example, some priests, including the pope's debauchery, sell innocence coupons at will, and sell places of worship. Public dissatisfaction with church taxation and the vast estates of churches in Western Europe can easily irritate people. At the same time, due to the interests of the middle class and the monarchs of the state, they coveted the huge estates of the church and the huge movable property wealth of various gold and silver jewelry, works of art and luxurious furniture, as well as the coveted form of tithes. Taxes flowed into Rome from various nations, funds from the sale of ecclesiastical property, a great deal of litigation fees, royalties, and exemptions.
Therefore, the most important factor in determining the religion of a country is the decision of its king. There are very large interests waiting for the king to choose to support the Protestant church. Had he become head of the national church, instead of accepting the power bestowed by the pope, his political and economic power would have increased, since he could confiscate the church's lands and chattels and cut off the flow of taxes to Rome.
While there are so many benefits, staying loyal is as much as splitting with the Pope. Because if they remained Catholic, they could get from the Pope about the same political and economic concessions as becoming Protestant kings. Therefore, after the death of Martin Luther, the whole of Europe was a mixed situation of various denominations.
Queen Elizabeth's father, the famous Henry VIII, was once a good Catholic, but because he decided to divorce his Aragonese wife Catherine, the Pope did not agree to him, because Catherine was Charles V's aunt, and Charles' army Just washed Rome a few years ago. So Henry VIII chose English Protestantism to become the state religion of England, the king also became the head of the church, and split with the Pope of Rome. To secure the support of the nobles, the king gave them the confiscated church estates.
During the reign of Henry VIII, the Protestant Church still staunchly maintained Catholic teachings and rites, with the only reformation being the translation of the Bible into English. While Edward VI turned to Protestantism, Mary returned to Catholicism, and Elizabeth chose moderate Protestantism.
In this religious revolution, England, Holland, and Germany supported Protestantism, while King Philip of Spain provided human and financial support for Catholics.
In the play, for revenge, Catholic radicals such as Robert Gatsby and Guy Fox agreed that on November 5th, the House of Parliament will be unveiled, and the king, queen, prince, minister of state and many nobles will attend, and they will be in the A huge amount of explosives are placed in the secret passage below the Capitol, and when the explosives are ignited, a king bomb will blow up all the relatives and nobles. At the same time, they will lead the rebel army to establish the king's daughter Elizabeth (who would be in the country at the time) as king, and force the new king to rebuild the church.
Does this sound familiar? Those who love "Game of Thrones" must have discovered that what Robert Gatsby did is the same thing that Cersei did. At that time, Cersei blew up everyone, especially the little rose that I liked so much. At the time, I was very angry with the screenwriter, thinking that the screenwriter was lazy and killed all the actors who were about to get a salary increase. Now I know that the screenwriter is at fault. It's not that people are lazy and mindless, but that it happened in history.
Of course, in real history, this gunpowder conspiracy was unsuccessful. The Spanish delegation leaked the gunpowder plan of Robert et al to the British Secretary of State in order to gain greater benefits in the negotiations. Almost all died.
And Guy Fox, who was about to ignite the fuse in the basement, was arrested. In order to draw out his comrades, Guy Fox was tortured. A tough guy finally failed to withstand the torture and signed a confession. In the end, he was still hanged, Heart digging, beheading, painful and humiliating end of the last journey of life.
At the end of the plot, Robert's cousin Ann took Robert's son away to a foreign country, which also indicates that the faith of the Roberts is not extinct, and there is still hope in the future.
Britain and Spain successfully signed a peace treaty, ending years of war.
This gunpowder conspiracy has several consequences:
1. After this gunpowder murder, in the face of the aggressiveness of Protestant radicals, in order to balance the two major religious disputes, James I proposed an alternative plan, rewriting the Bible, eliminating the language of Catholicism and making it fully adapted to Protestantism, This Bible, which took seven years and was passed down to later generations, is the King James I Bible. This made the Protestants grateful and loyal to him.
2. Every year, November 5th has also become the annual Bonfire Night in the UK.
3. And this failed gunpowder murder and another Catholic ambiguous incident gave Shakespeare inspiration. In this turbulent social torrent, Shakespeare saw a series of social and political problems, people's inner struggles, The flow of good and evil, of desire. So he wrote the famous play "Macbeth".
The religious reformation throughout the Middle Ages also left pain and legacy to Western European society. Needless to say, the pain and bloodshed cannot be forgotten, but the legacy it brings is also huge. The most decisive legacy of the religious reformation is the power The church was transferred to the government, and after years of reformation of the two major religions, the literacy rate of the people increased, the thinking was very active, and the people were awakened. Due to the concentration of government power, it was more conducive to economic expansion and country building. The contemporaneous Confucian and Islamic empires were closed-door and self-isolating, becoming more and more rigid.
After the Renaissance and the Reformation, Europe has ushered in a new type of civilization full of vitality and expansionism—modern civilization.
Finally, a few words: The actor who played cousin Ann was the fairy princess in the Lord of the Rings. The 23-year-old fairy princess has now become a 40-year-old aunt. Time is the knife!
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