by Nick Holland
As was traditional then, the name was passed on to their next daughter, who was born on 12 October 1572, and Anne Fawkes gained a sister Elizabeth on 27 May 1575. These were the younger sisters of the only son of Edward and Edith Fawkes: born on 13 April 1570, they named him Guy.
Guy’s exact date of birth is unrecorded, but we can estimate it with confidence because we know that he was baptised on 16 April at St. Michael-le-Belfrey church in York, and baptisms usually took place three days after a child was born.9
St. Michael-le-Belfrey is a large and beautiful church in its own right, although it is towered over by York Minster lying adjacent to it. It was the parish church for much of the centre of York, and so would have been the regular place of worship for many of its citizens, rather than the grander cathedral alongside it. The church hasn’t forgotten its infamous son, and a display on Guy’s life is today situated at the rear of the building, along with a copy of his entry of baptism.
Directly across from St. Michael-le-Belfrey, on High Petergate, is the Guy Fawkes Inn. It’s a charming place to eat and drink, and draws in many of York’s tourists partly thanks to its blue plaques stating that this was the spot on which Guy Fawkes was born, and the magnificent gunpowder plot mural across an outside wall.
While the Guy Fawkes Inn of today dates from a period after Guy’s life, it is a separate building to the rear of the inn that is of interest to Fawkes historians. This white coloured cottage bears the name of ‘Guy Fawkes Cottage’, and it has often been said that this was the building that saw him take his first breath on that April morning in 1570. The cottage is of the right age, and it seems likely that it’s the building referred to in a document of 8 July 1579, when Edith Fawkes signed for the continuation of a lease for a High Petergate building from Matthew Hutton, Dean of York Minster.
Is this then the actual birthplace of Guy Fawkes? Like much in Guy’s life, it is not certain, with two other spots in and around York claiming to be the place where he was born. The outlying district of Bishopthorpe has a long-standing tradition that Guy Fawkes was born there, in a house that no longer exists but which stood opposite St. Andrew’s church. The question has to be asked why Guy was baptised in the centre of York if he was born in Bishopthorpe? Nevertheless, I firmly believe that oral traditions that have lasted for centuries have to be respected – and they often contain some element of the truth even if they aren’t wholly truthful. Bishopthorpe was and is the traditional seat of the Archbishop of York, so it doesn’t stretch the imagination to conjecture that the village may also have attracted lawyers from the Archbishop’s court – such as Guy’s father, Edward Fawkes.
My opinion is that Guy may well have lived for a while in Bishopthorpe during his childhood, and he probably also lived for a time on the site of what is now the Guy Fawkes Inn. Historian Katherine Longley, however, argues convincingly that the true birthplace of Guy Fawkes was a house on Stonegate in York, a short walk from High Petergate, the Minster, and St. Michael-le-Belfrey,10 and that is what is now generally accepted.
Edward and Edith must have been overjoyed as they watched Guy grow up to be a strong and inquisitive boy, especially after the loss of their first child. Here was a boy who would grow into the man to carry the Fawkes name on into future generations. They might have dreamt that their son would follow his father and grandfather and become a lawyer. Unfortunately for them, the boy grew up to have other plans. The York that Guy came to know was very different to that of his parents’ generation, and Guy’s childhood and adolescence spent within its close, claustrophobic streets would change his life forever.
Guy’s York was a city full of paranoia and treachery, a city where people kept a close watch on their neighbours, and where husbands would be forced to betray their wives; a city where justice was becoming increasingly violent, increasingly arbitrary. It was a city where, even as a young boy advancing in years, you felt that you were being spied upon. You were being watched not only by your neighbours and playmates, but by the all-seeing eye of Queen Elizabeth herself.
Chapter 2
The Glorious Queen
Her berth was of the wombe of morning dew,
And her conception of the joyous Prime
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
Guy Fawkes’ life was full of turmoil and change, yet for all but his last two and a half years there was one constant: the rule of Queen Elizabeth, also known as the Virgin Queen, the Fairie Queen, or simply Gloriana – the glorious ruler – as long as you didn’t find yourself on the wrong side of her.
During her forty-five-year reign, Elizabeth changed from a cautious, hesitant ruler easily swayed by her counsellors, to a dictator in all but name, a ruthless leader who would stop at nothing to preserve her power and promote her beliefs.
There were many contemporary portraits of the Queen, but one in particular, painted in her final years, shows what she had become. The ‘Rainbow Portrait’ was painted at the turn of the seventeenth century by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, the Flemish born artist who had become the most celebrated portraitist to Tudor society (although some claim it as the work of Gheeraerts’ brother-in-law Isaac Oliver1). Whoever painted it, the overall effect is stunning. The Queen looks younger than her years, a timeless beauty who is at once both alluring and aloof. Her magnificent red hair is topped by an elaborate crown with a large ruby at its centre, and she is draped in a huge number of pearls. On her left arm is a serpent and in her right hand she holds a rainbow, above which is the inscription, Non sine sole iris, or ‘no rainbow without the sun’.
Elizabeth is proclaiming herself as the sun that nourishes everything good in her kingdom. But there is an odd and even more striking piece of symbolism in the portrait. She wears an orange cloak upon which are a succession of ears and eyes. Elizabeth is saying that she sees everything and hears everything, and by the time the portrait was commissioned by her chief courtier Sir Robert Cecil, he had made sure that it was a reality.
Copies of portraits like this would have been displayed in public and civic buildings, such as the Consistory Court in York where Guy’s father Edward Fawkes worked, and their main purpose was to instil devotion and awe in those who saw them, and failing that, fear.
Life could be precarious for many of her subjects, but then from her earliest days, life for Elizabeth was fraught with threats and danger too. Elizabeth Tudor was born in 1533, the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. At the time of her birth she was second in line to the throne behind her older half sister Mary, the only one of six children of Henry and Catherine of Aragon to survive childhood. As the royal line of succession favoured males (as it continued to do until recently) Elizabeth was pushed down to third in line to the throne when her half-brother Edward was born in 1537. During her childhood, she may have set aside thoughts of the crown, and imagined a life as a princess married to some foreign prince, but she would also have known there were precedents for the throne being taken by those who weren’t born as the natural heir.
Her father Henry only gained the crown because his older brother Arthur died of the ‘sweating sickness’ aged 15 (for diplomatic reasons Henry also inherited Arthur’s wife, Catherine of Aragon). Indeed the founder of the ruling Tudor dynasty, Henry VII who snatched the crown from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, had only a tenuous claim to the throne via former royal servant Owen Tudor.
Elizabeth’s half-brother duly ascended the throne as King Edward VI in 1547, and although just 9 years old he soon proved to be a strong-willed monarch, particularly on matters of religion. He was determined to see through the English reformation started by his father, becoming the first Protestant king of England (Henry had always considered himself a Catholic, despite his reforms) and making it compulsory to attend Church of England services.
Six years into his reign, the teenage Edward was suddenly struck by a dreadful illness that left him wasted and bed-bound, and he died on 6 July 1553. While the cause of his death is today ac
cepted as tuberculosis, rumours of poisoning spread across the court and the nation. Some said the Duke of Northumberland, who had acted as regent to Edward and held the real reins of power in the kingdom, had poisoned the young king, and others that Catholics from noble families were behind it, hoping to sweep away the monarch and his new religion with him.
To everyone’s surprise, Edward had named not one of his half-sisters, but Lady Jane Grey, whose mother Frances was the Duchess of Suffolk and a niece of King Henry, as his legitimate heir. This was in opposition to a ruling made by his father King Henry, but in accordance with an earlier statement of Henry’s that his two daughters, the ladies Mary and Elizabeth, were both illegitimate and therefore had no place in the line of succession. Northumberland’s plotting was undoubtedly behind Edward’s deathbed change to the line of succession, as he knew the more obvious successor Mary would remove him from power and likely return England to Catholicism.
Lady Jane Grey was pronounced Queen and taken to the Tower of London to await her coronation, as per the usual procedures of the time. The Tower was to become her prison, however, as Mary Tudor insisted that she was the rightful heir and gathered a large army behind her. Lady Jane Grey was to rule for just thirteen days before Mary took the throne2 and, realising that while she lived she remained a threat to her authority, Queen Mary reluctantly had her rival, and cousin-once-removed, beheaded in February 1554.
Queen Mary was a devout Catholic, and set about reversing the reforms that Edward had brought in. She was also ruthless when it came to wiping out those who opposed her, especially those she thought were agitating against Catholicism. Bloody Mary, as she has become known to history, reigned for just over five years, but in that time she and the Bishop of London, Edward Bonner,3 had 280 Protestants put to death, many of them burned alive.
Understandably, many Protestant nobles were greatly worried by the excesses and violence of Mary’s rule, and their thoughts turned to her half-sister Elizabeth, a woman who professed the Protestant faith. This made Lady Elizabeth’s position precarious, particularly when a rebellion organised by Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1554 aimed to prevent Mary from marrying King Philip II of Spain. Wyatt’s unstated aim was to replace Mary with Elizabeth, and this led Mary to place her half-sister under house arrest for more than a year. Only Elizabeth’s protestations of innocence saved her from being executed as a traitor.4
The half-sisters were eventually reconciled, and after two phantom pregnancies, Queen Mary was forced to concede that Elizabeth was her natural heir. Elizabeth ascended the throne on 17 November 1558 after Mary’s death from uterine cancer, and soon, once again, the reforms of the previous monarch were themselves repealed and rescinded.
Queen Elizabeth I began her long reign at the age of 25. She had already survived being implicated in a plot against the previous monarch, seen her mother taken away from her to be executed when she was just 2 years old, and witnessed her half-sister die seemingly from failures in her attempts to secure a child and a successor. These events greatly shaped Elizabeth’s character; she saw herself as a true successor to her father Henry – a monarch chosen by God against all odds, and she would exercise divine rule, believing herself to be God’s representative in England. Seeing what effect marriage and the inevitably ensuing quest for children had had on Anne Boleyn and Mary Tudor, she declared that she would never marry. Her kingdom would be her husband.
At first, Elizabeth took a more relaxed view towards religion, but as the years progressed she grew more confident in her own authority, and as she became more aware of threats against it, she enacted a succession of laws against the Catholic religion and its adherents.
Being a ruler at that time was fraught with danger, from both within and without the court. Spain was the dark shadow hanging over Elizabeth during her reign, particularly as Queen Mary’s widow, King Philip II, did little to hide his desire to return England and Ireland to Catholicism.
In 1569 a group of Catholic nobles, led by the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, rose up in what was known as ‘The Northern Rebellion’ or ‘The Rising of the North’, in a similar way to the earlier Pilgrimage of Grace. Taking their lead from Robert Aske’s example, they planned to besiege and conquer York, but they were soon chased into Scotland; the uprising failed and its leaders, including Thomas Percy the 7th Earl of Northumberland, were killed. Just a year before the birth of Guy Fawkes, York was once again the centre of a vanquished rebellion.
Tensions escalated further when Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I in an official pronouncement (a Papal Bull) issued in 1570. This was partly in support of the Northern Rebellion, and a similar rebellion that had failed in Ireland, and partly a response to the 1559 Act of Supremacy which made the Church of England independent from the Pope’s authority.
Pope Pius pulled no punches, referring to Elizabeth as a ‘pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime’.5 He also declared the Queen a heretic and freed Catholics from her authority.
Even before the Papal Bull, most Catholics of the time considered Elizabeth to be illegitimate as they didn’t recognise Henry VIII’s divorce and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn. An example of these attitudes can be found in the exiled Cardinal William Allen’s ‘Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland’, in which he refers to Elizabeth as ‘taken and known for an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin, of an infamous courtesan Anne Boleyn’6 (one of the charges that led to Anne’s beheading was that she’d consummated an affair with her own brother, George Boleyn, who was also executed).
The Papal Bull was issued just two months before Guy Fawkes’ birth, and the fallout from it was to cast a shadow over his life and lead directly to the gunpowder plot of 1605. If Pope Pius had intended to improve the lot of Catholics in England, his plan went disastrously wrong. Already existing divisions were increased, as Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers now saw Catholics as the enemy within: a fifth column more willing to serve Spain than England.
The Pope’s pronouncement enraged the Queen. A copy of the bull was pinned to the doors of the Bishop of London’s Palace by John Felton, a Catholic lawyer, in mockery of Martin Luther’s action at Wittenberg.7 His execution was to be the first of many in the decades that followed.
Gone were the uneasy days of semi-toleration towards Catholics, and Elizabeth enacted a series of new laws directed against the religion and its followers. In 1581 the fine for being a recusant, that is a person who refused to attend Church of England services, was raised from its original twelve pence to an exorbitant twenty pounds. In 1587 this was made even more draconian, with twenty pounds being charged monthly, and two thirds of a nobleman’s estate forfeited if he defaulted or refused to pay the fine.
The effect on the Catholic nobility was twofold. Many of them saw their fortunes decimated within a short space of time, with Lord Vaux of Harrowden for example having to pawn the robes that he wore in parliament. Other members of the gentry had to sell their land and stately homes, one such example being Sir William Catesby, who also spent time in prison accused of harbouring priests.8 A ruling of 1585 banished all Catholic priests ordained after 1559, or ordained abroad, from the kingdom; if they were found they were to be adjudged a traitor and executed.
As the Catholic nobility became poorer and more oppressed they also became angrier, and the second half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign was studded by a succession of plots against her life, many of them connected with Mary, Queen of Scots.
Just as Queen Mary of England had seen her relatives Lady Jane Grey and Elizabeth Tudor as potential rivals to her authority, so Elizabeth was to see a rival in Mary Stuart, her first cousin once removed. Mary Stuart became Queen of Scotland when she was just 6 years old, and she was also for a short time the Queen Consort of France, but many English Catholics championed her as the legitimate Queen of England too. Mary had a turbulent life that saw her deposed as Scotland’s Queen in 1567, with the crown handed to her 1-year-old son James. She fled
to England asking for protection from Elizabeth, but instead found herself imprisoned in a succession of castles and manor houses. Quite simply, Mary was too much of a threat to be allowed to roam free, especially as she was a Catholic and had the potential to become a figurehead for those who wished to see the end of Elizabeth’s increasingly authoritarian reign.
A reminder of this, not that the always-astute Queen needed one, came in 1571 in the shape of the Ridolfi Plot. The leader of the plot was Florentine banker Roberto Ridolfi, who had also been involved in the Northern Uprising two years before. Implicitly backed by Pope Pius V and King Philip II of Spain, Ridolfi planned to kill Queen Elizabeth and place Mary Stuart on the throne, who would then shore up her position by marrying Elizabeth’s cousin Thomas Howard, the staunchly Catholic Duke of Norfolk. The plot was discovered and the Duke executed, although Ridolfi himself escaped punishment and lived out his days as a Florentine senator.
Other plots against Elizabeth followed in quick succession, including the Throckmorton Plot of 1583 that centred upon a proposed invasion by Mary’s French relative the Duke of Guise. The 1586 Babington Plot was another attempt to assassinate Elizabeth and then replace her with Mary, who this time paid with her life. The Spanish Armada of 1588 was sent largely in response to Mary’s execution, but it only served to strengthen Elizabeth’s enmity against Catholics.
One particularly odd attempt on Elizabeth’s life was the plot of the poisoned pommel, of 1598. A man named Edward Squires attempted to kill the Queen by rubbing poison onto the saddle she used for riding her horse, and her favourite courtier the Earl of Essex by rubbing the same poison onto the seat of his chair. The poisons failed, and only Squires lost his life.9
The precarious nature of life in Elizabethan England, and especially in the court, was demonstrated by no-one better than the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux himself. Essex had become the undoubted favourite of the Queen, but in doing so he fatally angered another leading courtier Robert Cecil.10 Cecil, like his father William Cecil before him, was a cunning master of machinations, and eventually turned the Queen’s favour against Essex, so that he was placed firstly under house arrest and then banished from the court, after which he had his lucrative sweet wine licence taken away from him. A desperate Essex launched his own rebellion in 1601, but as with earlier plots it failed, and the Earl of Essex was beheaded.10 Although not overtly Catholic himself, many Catholics had supported Essex in his rebellion, and young men including Robert Catesby and Francis Tresham found themselves with punitive fines and time in jail for their supporting roles in the plot.11