The Real Guy Fawkes

by Nick Holland

  One thing that unified all these plots, in addition to their failure and the execution of their ringleaders, was that they were all foiled due to infiltration by government spies, or information passed on to spymasters. These masters of the dark arts of subterfuge, first Francis Walsingham, and then the Cecils, William and Robert, wielded great power in the Elizabethan court. They were the natural successors to Thomas Cromwell, men to be feared, men to be avoided whenever possible. It’s often thought today that Robert Cecil not only foiled many of these plots, he also sowed the seeds of the plots as a way of furthering his own cause or harming the causes of others. Spies could be anywhere in Elizabeth’s England, and the reward for being an informant was high. Plotters and dissenters never knew whether they were talking to a comrade in arms, or an agent provocateur who would at an opportune moment send them to their doom.

  As Guy Fawkes grew up in York during this tumultuous and bloody period, he would see first-hand the result of being out of favour with Queen Elizabeth, whether that meant actively plotting against her or simply daring to practise a different faith.

  Chapter 3

  A School for Sedition

  This age thinks better of a gilded fool

  Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school

  Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus

  Edward and Edith Fawkes must have been relieved to see their young son Guy growing up strong and healthy, especially after the loss of his elder sister Anne. Nurtured by parental affection, he was crawling, toddling, and then striding through the childhood months that were typically the most dangerous in a person’s life in the late sixteenth century.

  Infectious diseases were rife in urban areas, from tuberculosis to typhoid, and children who had not yet built up any natural resistance to the pathogens were particularly vulnerable. Sweating sickness was a common killer of the young. Striking rich and poor, it had claimed Prince Arthur and almost accounted for his young bride Catherine of Aragon, who was lucky to survive both the sickness and a marriage to Arthur’s brother Henry. What was then called sweating sickness may have been a variety of influenza, but without modern knowledge and medication it was frequently fatal.

  Poor sanitation meant that dysentery and cholera were rife, and smallpox was another unseen killer that was ever present, and one which nearly claimed the life of Queen Elizabeth herself in 1562. A measure of the medical knowledge at that time is that the young Queen was wrapped in a red blanket throughout her illness as a potential cure.1

  There was one disease that was even more rife, and it cast a shadow over York throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century: the plague. It struck York in 1550 and 1551, and again in 1604, greatly reducing the city’s population on each occasion. Areas particularly affected by the plague were placed under a form of quarantine, and goods could only be bought using coins which had first been washed in vinegar – then seen as a plague-repelling disinfectant.2

  One by-product of these epidemics was that the city guilds which controlled trade in York relaxed their erstwhile stringent regulations, inviting tradesmen from across the country to come and replace those who had been carried away by the plague and other diseases.

  While Guy’s parents were not wealthy or aristocratic, the Fawkes family of Stonegate were solidly middle class. They would have been able to afford to eat well, buying fresh produce from the butcher’s shops that ran up and down the Shambles, such as that owned by John Clitherow, and that gave them some protection against illnesses that preyed upon the poorer members of York society.

  Little is known of the house that Guy, his parents, and later his sisters Anne and Elizabeth, grew up in. Edith Fawkes may have had some assistance in running the household. The neighbour of the Fawkes’, John Brocket,3 is recorded as having had a servant,4 so the same may also have been true of the Fawkes household.

  John Brocket, like Guy’s father Edward, was a public notary of the ecclesiastical court, a man who oversaw the swearing of oaths, and ruled upon the validity of wills and other important documents. As the two men not only worked together but lived side by side, it seems likely that they were friends, maybe on occasion sharing a drink at one of the many inns that were to be found on Stonegate and nearby Petergate. John Brockett and his wife Isabel had young children of their own, so it’s easy to imagine the infant Guy playing with them.

  One game Guy and his friends are certain to have played is Nine Men’s Morris, a strategic board game that dates back to at least Roman times. It had become incredibly popular in the late sixteenth century and is even mentioned in one of Shakespeare’s dramas.5 It is played on a target-shaped grid containing twenty-four points. At the outset each player has nine pieces, and the aim is to create a horizontal or vertical line of three pieces which allows the player to remove one piece from his opponent. One advantage of Nine Men’s Morris is that it could be played just about anywhere, with the game board being drawn on the street or in mud, and stones or other counters used as the pieces. While the rules are simple, the strategy can become complex, and subterfuge and forward thinking are essential; skills that Guy would put into practice in his later life.

  We can assume that Edward and Edith Fawkes would have been highly protective of their son, striving to shield him from the lurking threat of disease and death that haunted the cobbled streets that had channels of effluent running down them. There was one other ever present threat to life in York however, and it was man-made rather than disease born.

  On 22 August 1572, a large crowd gathered at a place known as The Pavement in York. The Pavement was so called because in the fourteenth century it became the first street in York to be paved, and that made it the focal point of one of the city’s markets. On that August day in 1572, a different trade was being carried out.

  A masked executioner stood in the centre of a crowd, a large axe in his hand, and beneath him, with his head on the block, was Sir Thomas Percy, the 7th Earl of Northumberland. Northumberland, along with his fellow ringleader of the Northern Rebellion the Earl of Westmorland, had escaped to Scotland, but he was betrayed by the Scottish government who handed him over to England in exchange for £2,000.

  At his trial, Percy was sentenced to death, but given a chance to spare his life if he would denounce his Catholic faith and become a Protestant. He refused, unwilling to be used as a tool to persuade other recusants and dissenters to do the same. Before his public execution at The Pavement, the Chancellor of York Minster, William Palmer, asked him to recant his faith and pray with him. Percy refused again and made his final speech:

  ‘I should have been content to meet my death in silence, were it not that I see it is the custom for those who undergo this kind of punishment to address some words to the bystanders as to the cause of their being put to death. Know, therefore, that from my earliest years down to this present day, I have held the faith of that church which, throughout the whole Christian world, is knit and bound together; and in that same faith I am about to end this unhappy life. But as for this new English church, I do not acknowledge it.’6

  His speech finished, the axe was brought swiftly down, and to a gasp from the crowd his severed head was held up before them. While the body was interred, the head was displayed on a large spike on Micklegate Bar. The 2-year-old Guy was too young to see the execution, but he would have heard the story many times as he grew up and would have seen the evidence with his own eyes – Percy’s head remained on its spike for many years, until it was eventually stolen away by those sympathetic to his cause and buried. As for Percy, execution ran in the family – his father the sixth earl, also called Thomas Percy, had been executed on the orders of Henry VIII for his role in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Three decades later Guy Fawkes’ fate would become entwined with yet another Thomas Percy who would be judged a traitor and lose his life.

  While Guy’s childhood included time for games such as Nine Men’s Morris, and other activities based upon running and hiding from friends, his father Edward would have kept a stric
t household, and Guy would have been compelled to attend regular Church of England services at St. Michael-le-Belfrey church.

  Some people find it surprising that Guy Fawkes, the man who played such a central role in a Catholic terror plot, was born and raised into a Protestant family, but as we shall see this is just one of the things that many of the gunpowder plotters had in common.

  Guy was expected to follow his father and grandfather into the life of an ecclesiastical lawyer, a staunch upholder of the Protestant faith, and to do this he would need a solid educational background. While Guy’s sisters were given rudimentary lessons at home, at the age of 8 he was sent to school.

  Earlier in the century, chantry schools closely tied to churches and monasteries were the destination for boys from middle or upper class families, but the reformation saw these schools closed along with the monasteries in the 1540s. In their place came grammar schools, or free schools, and York’s very own grammar school opened its doors in 1557.

  St. Peter’s School, York, is still in existence today, although it no longer stands outside the city as it did then, in a street known as the Horse Fayre. The free school can trace its ancestry back even further, to York’s first St. Peter’s School founded by St. Paulinus in the year 627, making it the fourth oldest school in the world.7

  York was a city in turmoil during Guy’s childhood, much of it hidden away, as Catholics sought to hide their true beliefs and activities to escape fines and worse, and the same could be said of St. Peter’s School. When Guy arrived it was under the jurisdiction of a headmaster called John Pulleyn, but the previous headmaster was John Fletcher, a man relieved of his post in 1575 and then imprisoned for twenty years for the crime of being a Catholic.8

  Guy would have found life at school harsh and regimented, but it was intended that way as an excellent training for the life that he and many of his fellow pupils would have in their adult lives. Early lessons focused on learning Latin by rote, an essential skill for someone hoping to be a lawyer or notary like Guy, as well as instruction in Hebrew and Greek. In later years, the boys (and of course it was an exclusively male school) were taught literature and composition, and mathematics. There were also music and drama lessons, as headmaster Pulleyn was known to like the arts, and indeed staged a play featuring his pupils in January 1584, for which the school received the sum of forty shillings.9 It is also known that many of the pupils played at football, at that time a rough-and-tumble game that was strictly prohibited.10

  The school had an excellent academic reputation, with pupils being attracted from far afield. In 1589, the Archbishop of York reported that St. Peter’s had around two hundred pupils in attendance, and that it was ‘the only good school in this great city’.11 Lessons were taught six days a week, beginning at 6.30 or 7 in the morning and continuing until 5 or 6 at night (depending upon the time of year). There were only two masters, so senior pupils would have been expected to help with the discipline – discipline that was dispensed regularly and with the aid of a birch or switch.

  Religion, too, played a large part in the repetitive routine of Guy’s school. Daily Church of England services were compulsory, and after the embarrassment of John Fletcher, the school had taken no risks when it came to appointing John Pulleyn. The Archbishop of York had insisted that the new headmaster must be of good and sincere religion, and that he should use no vain or profane books or teach anything contrary to the teachings of the Church of England. Pulleyn passed this test, and seemed to be an exemplary Protestant, but all was not as it appeared.

  Pulleyn was without doubt a learned man who had perfected his trade as a master of Mary Bishophill Junior School, and who helped the school flourish, but he was almost certainly a secret Catholic.

  John Pulleyn was wise enough to know what would happen to him if he professed his Catholicism openly, after all he only had to look at the example of his predecessor John Fletcher. Rather than being openly recusant, with all the dangers that entailed, he was a Church Catholic – a person who attended Church of England services and was outwardly Protestant, and yet inwardly believed in the Catholic faith. Pulleyn retired in 1591, and it is believed he then joined a Catholic order, but even while headmaster he may have had the chance to disseminate some of his beliefs in the old religion. Certainly, a look at some of his pupils at St. Peter’s School is very revealing.

  Alongside Guy Fawkes himself, in his year was Christopher Wright, commonly called Kit. His brother John, known as Jack, was also at the school, two years above Guy and Kit. The Wrights were the sons of John and Ursula Wright of Plowland Hall, Holderness, and were born Protestants but in their 30s they, along with Guy, would find themselves plotters in the gunpowder treason.

  Another pupil at the school was Robert Middleton, who converted to Catholicism and was executed for his faith in 1601. Edward Oldcorne was at the school too and later became a Catholic priest; although it is doubtful that he knew much if anything of the gunpowder plot, he was linked to it at the time and executed in 1606.

  Yet another was Oswald Tesimond, who became a Jesuit priest and went under the alias of Father Greenway. He too was a wanted man after the discovery of Guy Fawkes and the unravelling of the plot in 1605, but he escaped to the haven of the continent by covering himself with a cargo of dead pigs that were being transported by boat to France.12 From the safety of Italy, Oswald Tesimond later wrote an account of what he knew of the gunpowder plot (although he may have played down what he and some of his fellow Jesuit priests really knew). In his testimony he gives a glowing account of his old schoolmaster John Pulleyn and remembers Guy Fawkes as highly intelligent and well-read.

  While at St. Peter’s School, Guy was not only excelling at lessons, he was also learning about the Catholic religion from other boys and adolescents who were making a similar journey. These fellow pupils were by now like family to Guy, and it is possible that Guy looked up to John Pulleyn as a father figure, because by this time tragedy had struck at the heart of Guy’s life.

  Chapter 4

  Changed Forever

  Death hath a thousand doors to let out life

  Philip Massinger, A Very Woman

  We know of Guy Fawkes’ attendance at St. Peter’s School, and indeed it’s still celebrated by the school, with the headmaster Leo Winkley having publicly stated that it is time to forgive Guy’s role in the gunpowder plot: ‘We like him as a former boy, but we don’t regard him as a role model1... Time to move on and let the poor soul rest... You could argue that he’s an icon of the complex and flawed nature of human beings.’2 That’s the official line taken by the historic school, with a bonfire being lit every fifth of November, but with no Guy placed upon it.

  While we know some salient points of Guy’s time at school, the curricular and extra-curricular activities that made up his school days, his academic qualities attested for by fellow pupils, and the somewhat controversial company he would have kept there, other details often remain tantalisingly out of reach.

  Unfortunately, St. Peter’s School has changed location more than once since the late sixteenth century, and the majority of its records dating back to this time have long since been lost or destroyed. One thing that we can’t say for sure is when Guy started to attend the school, but it would have been usual for children of Guy’s background to attend a grammar school at around the age of 6 or 7 when one was available.

  So it seems reasonable to suggest that Guy entered St. Peter’s School some time between 1576 and 1578, and this latter year was a very important one in Guy’s life as an event happened that would change his life forever – the sudden death of his father, Edward Fawkes.

  Life was precarious for all classes in the Tudor and Stuart periods, thanks to the combination of rampant disease and medical ignorance. Injuries or ailments that would be nothing but an inconvenience in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II could prove fatal in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the average life expectancy in England was around forty yea
rs, with approximately twenty per cent of children dying in their first year, as did Guy’s older sister Anne, and a third of all deaths occurring to those under the age of twenty.3

  These all-too-common early mortalities created a sense of fatalism in Guy and in many others of his generation: when death was so close at hand, holding onto life seemed less important. Was it better to fight to be a free man and die upon the gallows, or live a life of subservience and die of the plague or sleeping sickness? This conundrum must have crossed Guy’s mind at many pivotal moments in his life, and he would always have the example of his father to look back upon.

  Edward Fawkes was an educated and well respected man, with significant social and financial advantages over many other citizens of York, yet he was still struck down at the age of just 45, leaving a wife and three children behind him. He was buried on 17 January 1578,4 bringing a devastating start to the year for the Fawkes household. Edith was left wondering how to provide for her young family, the youngest child Elizabeth being just 2 years old, and worrying over a less than certain future. From enjoying a life of relative comfort, was poverty now to be her lot? As the oldest surviving child, Guy was particularly hard hit; he was old enough to realise that although a young boy he was now the man of the house and expectations would have weighed upon his shoulders.