The Real Guy Fawkes
The Real Guy Fawkes
Nick Holland
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
PEN AND SWORD HISTORY
an imprint of
Pen and Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire S70 2AS
Copyright Nick Holland, 2017
ISBN 978 1 52670 508 2
eISBN 978 1 52670 510 5
Mobi ISBN 978 1 52670 509 9
The right of Nick Holland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Acknowledgements
Writing a book is never a solitary endeavour, and there are many people and organisations I would like to thank for making The Real Guy Fawkes possible. Id like to give particular thanks to my family and friends for their unflinching support and encouragement. Fulsome thanks must also go to everyone at Pen and Sword Books, particularly Jonathan Wright and Lauren Burton, who have been a pleasure to write for, and my editor Barnaby Blacker.
In addition to the above I would like to single out the generous help and advice Ive had from Sister Ann Stafford and everyone at the Bar Convent, York; Liesbeth Corens of the Catholic Record Society; Michael Baxter and the Caro Archaeological Society; Ruth Somerville and the team at Yorks St. Michael-le-Belfrey church.
Many thanks also go to the British Library, the National Archives, St. Peters School, York, the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, Historic Royal Palaces, the Royal Archives, Brussels, City of York Council Libraries and Archives, York Minster, Hatfield House, Coombe Abbey (whose afternoon teas I particularly recommend), and the Guy Fawkes Inn, York.
Final, and heartfelt, thanks go to you the reader. I hope you enjoy reading the story of Guy Fawkes as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it.
Prologue
Dark clouds hung overhead on a cold winters afternoon, but little could dampen the enthusiasm of those assembled in Westminster Yard. Approaching them, led by the arms, was a man who had once been tall, now stooped and walking with great difficulty. A man who had once been proud and defiant, now humble and defeated. This was the star attraction of the day: the devil in human form theyd come to see and jeer. It is 31 January 1606. The crowd are about to witness the final moments of a man who would have torn down the fabric of English society, one who would have killed the King, his heir, and all his lords and bishops: the man who would have reduced Parliament itself, and all it stood for, to dust and ashes, Guy Fawkes.
The capture of Guy Fawkes on a famous November night in 1605 led to celebrations across the country, and these celebrations continue today over four centuries later. November the fifth will forever be Guy Fawkes Night, with todays bonfires a reminder of ones that were spontaneously lit across the capital four centuries ago, and with the explosion of fireworks an echo of the explosion that Guy was within hours of creating beneath the House of Lords.
Todays fireworks, however, bear little relation to the explosion Guy would have wrought. He had assembled enough gunpowder to blow up the House of Lords twenty-five times, and the blast would have devastated the Westminster area costing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives. What kind of man would willingly light a fuse and bring about human suffering on such a scale?
Guy Fawkes remains a controversial and in many ways misunderstood character, so just what was he: a fanatic, a fool, or a freedom fighter? He was certainly a product of his time, and many of the events of his day, which will be related in this book, seem almost too barbarous for a modern mind to comprehend: heads sliced off and left to rot for years in a public marketplace; a woman stripped naked and crushed to death under sharp stones; genitals cut away and burned in front of a mans face as a crowd cheers.
This is the world that Guy lived in, but if we look below the surface we may find its not so different to our world after all. Tracing Guys life, and examining his role in the gunpowder plot, was a difficult task but one that I found thrilling and rewarding. Many documents have been lost or destroyed, and some events were deliberately obscured. Nevertheless, by looking at source materials that are still extant, and examining the confessions and letters of Guy and his fellow conspirators, we can get a fascinating insight into the man.
The gunpowder plot can be a confusing story, but my aim in this book is to cut through the complexity and make it accessible to all. To aid this, I have modernised some of the spellings contained within Tudor and Stuart documents and letters, and standardised the use of names (the spelling of names could vary from one document to another in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so that we see Rokewood and Rookwood, and Faux and Fawkes for example).
Its time to step back to the year 1570 on the mud-strewn streets of York, where we begin our search for the real Guy Fawkes.
Chapter 1
By the Grace of God
Thy sight was never yet more precious to me;
Welcome, with all the affection of a mother,
That comfort can express from natural love:
Since thy birth-joy a mothers chiefest gladness
After shas undergone her curse of sorrows
Thou wast not more dear to me, than this hour
Presents thee to my heart
Thomas Middleton , Women Beware Women
York is a beguiling city with a long history, one filled with conquest, bloody battles, and rebellion. Today it is a hive of activity, its charming streets full of tourists, students, families and workers, but if we look closely we can still catch glimpses of the Tudor city that Guy Fawkes grew up in.
By the late sixteenth century, the population of York stood at between ten and twelve thousand souls, a slight increase on the number living there a century earlier. With the population of England as a whole increasing substantially at this time, it could be expected that York would have grown more dramatically than that, as it was to do in later centuries building up to a figure of around two hundred thousand today, but in fact it was a city that had entered decline.
