GUY FAWKESARTOKOLORO QUINT LOX LIMITED/ALAMY/LEBRECHT HISTORY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
A
round midnight on
4 November 1605 a
search party led by Sir
Thomas Knyvett, keeper
of Westminster Palace, discovered
a man coming out of a storeroom:
situated directly beneath the
chamber where, the following day,
MPs and Lords would gather for
the opening of Parliament by King
James I. In the flickering lamplight a
violent struggle ensued and the tall,
bearded, redheaded fellow, claiming
to be John Johnson, a servant of
Thomas Percy, was overpowered.
Inside the storeroom 36 barrels of gunpowder were found hidden
beneath firewood; fuses were found in Johnson’s pockets. Hauled
before King James that very same night, Johnson boldly admitted
he had intended to blow up Parliament and obliterate Lords,
Commons and monarch in one horrific blast.
Johnson, of course, was none other than Guy Fawkes whose
effigy crackles atop modern bonfires in Britain every 5 November,
while our annual commemoration of the thwarting of the mass
murder has turned into a revel of fireworks, fun and chants:“Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot;
I see no reason, why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.”But was Fawkes a traitor or a fall guy? How did a well-raised son
of Protestant parents end up playing a pivotal role in a group of
Catholic conspirators intent on toppling a government that denied ³Lost the
PLOT
As the 450th anniversary of Guy Fawkes
approaches, Diana Wright asks: was the
Gunpowder Plot conspirator a traitor or just a
scapegoat for a canny king?them their religious freedoms?
Who tipped off King James’ men
about the plot? As we mark Bonfire
Night this November, and with
the 450th anniversary of Fawkes’
birth in just a few months’ time, the
moment is ripe to take another look
at the infamous story.
One of the three surviving
children of Edward and Edith
Fawkes, Guy was born in York in
early April 1570. He was baptised at
St Michael le Belfrey Church on
16 April and he attended St Peter’s
School; likely he was expected
to follow an establishment career like his father, a proctor and an
advocate of the Consistory Court of the Archbishop of York, whose
work would have included upholding Church of England law.
But Guy was growing up in difficult times as the Reformation
continued to stir religious strife. With Protestantism in the
ascendancy during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603),
England’s Roman Catholics suffered much persecution, their priests
banned and hunted by government spies. In York itself in 1586,
Margaret Clitherow, possibly the aunt of one of Guy’s schoolfellows
Christopher Wright, was notoriously pressed to death beneath
stones for her Catholic beliefs. (The ‘Pearl of York’ was canonised in
1970; her shrine is in The Shambles – an old street in the city – and
her severed hand is kept in the chapel of The Bar Convent.)
Despite such dangers, Guy’s mother, following the death of her
husband in 1578, proceeded to marry a Catholic, Dionis Baynbrigge
(Denis Bainbridge), who brought connections to significant Catholic
families like the Percys. For whatever motives – a sense of injustice,
a personal revelation – at some time Guy became a Catholic and