The Real Guy Fawkes
Page 1
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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Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1. By the Grace of God
Chapter 2. The Glorious Queen
Chapter 3. A School for Sedition
Chapter 4. Changed Forever
Chapter 5. The Pearl of York
Chapter 6. A Picturesque Scene
Chapter 7. By Fire and Water, Thy Line Shall Come to an End
Chapter 8. Spies, Secrets and Sundry other Places
Chapter 9. A Man Highly Skilled in Matters of War
Chapter 10. An Open Enemy, and an Enemy of their Beliefs
Chapter 11. The Spanish Treason
Chapter 12. A Gentleman of Good Family
Chapter 13. Six Men in the Duck and Drake
Chapter 14. This is the Gentleman
Chapter 15. The Unknown Servant
Chapter 16. An End to Tunnelling
Chapter 17. God’s Lunatics
Chapter 18. A Terrible Blow
Chapter 19. A Traitor in the Brotherhood
Chapter 20. A Very Tall and Desperate Fellow
Chapter 21. The Devil of the Vault
Chapter 22. By Steps, Proceeding to the Worst
Chapter 23. A Prey for the Fowls of the Air
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
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. I’d 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 I’ve 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 York’s St. Michael-le-Belfrey church.
Many thanks also go to the British Library, the National Archives, St. Peter’s 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 winter’s 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 they’d 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 today’s 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.
Today’s 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,1 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 man’s face as a crowd cheers.
This is the world that Guy lived in, but if we look below the surface we may find it’s not so different to our world after all. Tracing Guy’s 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).
It’s 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 mother’s chiefest gladness
After sh’as 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 bat
tles, 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.
York had long been famous for its woollen trade, with the hills and dales surrounding it proving perfect sheep pastures, and the rivers Ouse and Foss that flow through the city being ideal conduits to carry produce in and out. In Tudor times, however, smaller scale wool trading centres began to gain popularity across Yorkshire and Lancashire. They were less cumbersome, with smaller overheads and offering cheaper prices.
Tudor York was also famous for its cathedral, the Minster. Then, as now, it dominated the heart of the city, but to many York dwellers by the mid-sixteenth century it had become a symbol of oppression rather than a source of pride. Even before its completion in 1472 it had been used as a centre of Catholic worship, with liturgies read in Latin that few of the congregation could understand, and an emphasis placed upon mysteries that had been passed down from generation to generation. In 1517, in a city over eight hundred miles away, an act took place that would change that for ever, and set in motion events that would lead to an attempt on the life of the King and all of England’s ruling class.
Tradition states that on 31 October 1517, a priest nailed a letter to the door of All Saints’ Church in Germany.1 The priest was Martin Luther and the letter became known as the ‘ninety-five theses’. In short, Luther was proclaiming his desire to see the Roman Catholic church reformed, and replaced by a new kind of worship that placed scripture at its centre rather than one person in the shape of the Pope.
This simple act proved a catalyst for what we call the Reformation, and the splitting of the church into Catholic and Protestant factions. The reformation was quickly championed by England’s king, Henry VIII, who proclaimed himself head of the church in England, and took steps to remove much of the power, and especially the riches, that the Catholic church in England had amassed.
This English reformation was entrusted by Henry to one official in particular: Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell was a power-hungry man, and one who did not baulk when it came to cruelty, setting a trend that would be followed later by Queen Elizabeth’s chief courtiers such as Robert Cecil, who would become so important to Guy Fawkes’ story. By 1535 Cromwell, already Lord Privy Seal, was also made Vicar General by King Henry, and given the important job of driving the reformation onwards.
To Cromwell this meant one thing above all else: crushing the Catholics. In 1536 he published ‘An Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome’, which was intended to end the ‘pretended power and usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, by some called the Pope’.2 If Cromwell found the subjugation and conversion of Catholics in southern England easy, he encountered much greater resistance in northern England, a resistance that had its first outpouring in York in an event known as ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace.’
While there were staunchly Catholic areas in East Anglia, Wales and the Midlands, it was Yorkshire and Lancashire that clung most ferociously onto their previous beliefs. By 1536 many of the people of these counties had a litany of complaints against the reformation, against the destruction of their churches and monasteries, against the fines being imposed upon them, and particularly against the increasingly violent edicts of Thomas Cromwell.
After an earlier revolt in Louth, Lincolnshire, a wealthy lawyer called Sir Robert Aske, originally of London, raised a band of around ten thousand men and occupied the city of York. Under Aske’s rule, the Catholic way of life was restored, and priests, monks and nuns returned.
The Duke of Norfolk was sent by King Henry to meet and negotiate with the protesters, or pilgrims as they called themselves. Upon meeting them near Doncaster with his army of around five thousand, Norfolk was dismayed to find that Aske had around ten times that number of men, and that leading northern nobles including Sir Thomas Percy were backing the rebellion.
A peaceful settlement was made and the men were dispersed, but it’s unclear whether Norfolk had the authority to make the concessions that he promised. What is clear is that within two years the deal and any amnesty that came with it was broken. Aske was executed in York, hung from gallows at the top of the castellated Clifford’s tower before his lifeless body was suspended in chains from the wall.3 By 1538, 216 people associated with the uprising had also been killed.
In the decades which followed the Pilgrimage of Grace’s defeat, the new Protestant religion gained supremacy in York, officially at least. During the last years of Henry’s reign, under the auspices of Cromwell, and in the later reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, acts of parliament encouraged their subjects to become good and loyal Protestants. Where the heart couldn’t be won over voluntarily, financial punishments were invoked so that people who chose not to attend Protestant church services, those who became known as recusants, were often worn down by fines and the confiscation of their land and property. The 1552 Second Act of Uniformity4 made it compulsory to attend official Church of England services, and from 1559 onwards a fine of twelve pence would be imposed on those who failed to attend. This fine would rise sharply in succeeding decades.
The reformation ensured that the Church of England became not only a spiritual movement, but also one that took an increasingly active role in legal administration, and therefore a money-making operation thanks to its system of fines and punishments. It was an ideal time to be an ecclesiastical lawyer, and one such man who served the city of York in the mid-sixteenth century was William Fawkes, a member of the Fawkes family of Farnley near Leeds.
William Fawkes had married well: his wife Ellen was from York’s prestigious Harrington family, and her father had served as the Sheriff of York for five years before becoming Mayor in 1536. It is an irony, therefore, that it was Mayor Harrington, the great-grandfather of Guy Fawkes, who received Sir Robert Aske’s demands at the start of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and who helped ensure its defeat.5
William Fawkes and other ecclesiastical lawyers were in even higher demand from 1561 onwards, as Queen Elizabeth I chose the city as headquarters for two major organisations: the Council of the North, and the Ecclesiastical Commission for the Northern Province.6 This served two purposes for the Queen: firstly it would attract more people to the city that had been losing population thanks to increased competition in the wool trade, secondly it would help to prop up the authority of the Church of England in York, a city that she and her courtiers knew still housed a significant number of people sympathetic to the old Roman faith.
While the first child of William and Ellen Fawkes, Thomas, became a wool trader, their second son Edward followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a lawyer in York’s ecclesiastical court. Edward’s talents were soon recognised, and he became a proctor of the Ecclesiastical Court,7 and then an advocate in the Consistory Court of the Archbishop of York, based in Minster Yard next to the towering York Minster itself.
As an advocate in the Consistory Court, Edward Fawkes would play a major role in upholding church law, by which we mean the law of the Church of England. This would have involved him in civil matters, such as the settlement of debts or disputes between individuals, but it also placed him at the forefront of the battle against Catholics, and especially against recusants.
While never a wealthy man, Edward Fawkes did own land in several locations across York, and his job and background would have given him the undoubted status of a gentleman. With this status to his name it would have been expected that he’d marry a woman from
a similarly respectable background, but instead, in 1567 or 1568, he married Edith Blake. Little is known of Edith’s early background, indeed some earlier commentators conjectured that her surname may have been Jackson based upon one of Guy’s confessions in the Tower of London.8 Her family were merchants from the Scotton area, around twenty miles to the east of York, and it seems that she was less well educated than her husband, as recordings of her signature show a less than assured hand. This may have led to the Fawkes family looking down on the union, and it may also be pertinent that when her brother-in-law Thomas died in 1578, he made provisions for Guy and other relatives but made no mention at all of Edith in his will.
If the Fawkes family felt that Edward had married beneath him, there is no reason to think that they didn’t enjoy a happy marriage. Indeed, it may have been a love marriage rather than one arranged for reasons of social standing as was common at the time. We know that Edith quickly became pregnant (and of course we could conjecture that this may have led to their marriage, rather than occurring afterwards). On 3 October 1568, Edith gave birth to a daughter who was named Anne. Unfortunately, tragedy soon struck and Anne was buried just seven weeks later.