Shades of Guy Fawkes

Never had there been such extreme security measures to guard Queen Elizabeth in her own capital. Some 6,000 extra police stood duty in the center of London. Police launches and even frogmen guarded the Thames river approaches to Parliament. The building entrance was encircled by wire netting, and police made four separate searches through the underground tunnels in which, exactly 366 years ago, Guy Fawkes' plot to blow up Parliament had been discovered.

A bomb had gone off just two days earlier in the 39-story Post Office Tower, London's tallest building. The blast caused no injuries but sent glass and masonry crashing almost 500 feet to the street. A telephone caller claimed that the explosion had been set off by a London faction of the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A. leaders in Dublin denied responsibility) and that "the next one will be the Victoria Tower [of Parliament]."

Nothing came of the threat. Queen Elizabeth drove up to the House of Lords and opened the new session of Parliament by reading the Speech from the Throne. "My ministers are determined," she said, "that violence in Northern Ireland shall be brought to an end."

For the present, nothing seems likely to come of that either. Last week:

P:Three terrorists, trying to blow up a police station in a Belfast suburb, planted bombs in an adjoining pub. "You have ten seconds to get out!" they shouted toward the bar, but that was not enough. The toll: three killed, 35 injured (13 of them women). The police station was virtually unscathed.

P:In another Belfast suburb, terrorists waved customers out of a pharmacy and a grocery on either side of a police station and then set off a bomb that killed a police inspector.

P:Terrorists machine-gunned two plain-clothes detectives who were investigating a burglary in the Catholic district of An-dersonstown. That brought the toll of slain police to six in 16 days, and the army retaliated by sealing off Andersonstown and searching every house. They arrested 28 suspects and seized 3,000 rounds of ammunition, eight guns and a cache of explosive chemicals.

P:In a sweep through a Catholic section of Londonderry, troops came under fire from two snipers. During the exchange, a housewife was shot to death.

As the violence keeps spreading, there are repeated rumors, officially denied in London, that Prime Minister Edward Heath will soon impose direct rule from London on the embattled province. This would hardly change the realities in Belfast. "We're already so restricted," one Ulster official complained, "that we have almost to phone London for permission to flush the toilets." But direct rule would amount to a confession that efforts at political reform had not worked as effectively as had violence.

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