Guy Fawkes
was born in April 1570 in York. Although his immediate family were all
Protestants, in keeping with the accepted religious practice in England at the
time, his maternal grandparents were 'recusant' Catholics, who refused to
attend Protestant services. When Guy was eight, his father died and his widowed
mother married a Catholic, Dionis Baynbrigge. It was these early influences
that were to forge Fawkes' convictions as an adult.
By the time
he was 21 he had sold the estate his father had left him and gone to Europe to
fight for Catholic Spain against the Protestant Dutch republic in the Eighty
Years War. His military career went well and by 1603 he had been recommended
for a captaincy.
It was
while on campaign fighting for Spain in Flanders that Fawkes was approached by
Thomas Wintour, one of the plotters, and asked to join what would become known
as the Gunpowder Plot, under the leadership of Robert Catesby.
His
expertise with gunpowder gave him a key role in the conspiracy, to source and
ignite the explosive. But 18 months of careful planning was foiled with just
hours to go, when he was arrested at midnight on 4 November 1605 beneath the
House of Lords. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were found stacked in the
cellar directly below where the king would have been sitting for the opening of
parliament the next day.
The foiling
of the plot had been expertly engineered by James I's spymaster, Robert Cecil.
Fawkes was subjected to various tortures, including the rack. Torture was
technically illegal, and James I was personally required to give a licence for
Fawkes to endure its ravages.
Fawkes was
sentenced to the traditional traitors' death - to be 'hanged, drawn and
quartered'. In the event, he jumped from the gallows, breaking his own neck and
thereby avoiding the horror of being cut down while still alive, having his
testicles cut off and his stomach opened and his guts spilled before his eyes.
His lifeless body was hacked into quarters and his remains sent to "the
four corners of the kingdom" as a warning to others.
Guy Fawkes
instantly became a national bogeyman and the embodiment of Catholic extremism.
It was a propaganda coup for the Protestant English and served as a pretext for
further repression of Catholics that would not be completely lifted for another
200 years.
It is
perhaps surprising that Fawkes and not the charismatic ring-leader Robert
Catesby is remembered, but it was Fawkes who was caught red-handed under the
Houses of Parliament, Fawkes who refused to speak under torture, and Fawkes who
was publicly executed. Catesby, by contrast, was killed evading capture and was
never tried.
Through the
centuries the Guy Fawkes legend has become ever-more entrenched, and by the
19th Century it was his effigy that was being placed on the bonfires that were
lit annually to commemorate the failure of the plot.