The Real Guy Fawkes

by Nick Holland

  Just what was it that killed Edward Fawkes? There is no record to say whether he had suffered a long illness or whether he had been plucked from his family without warning, but the harsh winter days in the northern city could be particularly hazardous to health so it may be that a short illness had hastened his end.

  Stress may also have contributed to his death. The role of an ecclesiastical advocate changed greatly in the years he spent in the job. While being a practising Catholic had in effect been illegal since the Act of Uniformity of May 1559,5 it was initially lightly enforced in York, a city which was known to be largely sympathetic to the old faith. The Rebellion of the North had shown Elizabeth and her courtiers how dangerous this laissez-faire attitude could be; York’s Catholics had been practising their faith with relative impunity, although by necessity in secret, and yet at the first opportunity they had gathered together to rebel against their Queen. It could not be allowed to continue.

  Thomas Young took up his position as Archbishop of York in May 1561,6 and as well as being the figurehead at the top of the consistory court for which Edward Fawkes worked, he also served for a time as Lord President of the Council of the North. While he was a committed Protestant, he showed little zeal for clamping down on the Catholics within the city, even though he was legally able, and indeed ordered, to do so. His successor as Lord President, the Earl of Sussex, also favoured a soft touch, but the next man to take the job was very different.

  Henry Hastings, the Earl of Huntingdon, was appointed Lord President of the Council of the North, by then headquartered in York, in 1572. He was a Protestant of the puritan kind, and despised Catholicism, with all its ceremony and statues, saints and intercessions, more than anything else. To Hastings, Catholicism was based upon idolatry, it was a heresy that must be stamped out, and those who professed it must be brought back to Protestantism or pay a heavy price.

  In this endeavour he was assisted by a new Archbishop of York, Edmund Grindal. Grindal had previously served as Bishop of London, where he too gained a reputation as a zealous Puritan. Within a month of taking over as London’s Bishop he had ordered that all candlesticks and crosses be removed and destroyed, and the altar stones were taken away as well, to be replaced by a plain and simple table. He was later made Archbishop of Canterbury, but his excessive puritanism saw him suspended from his post before he was eventually reinstated.7

  Archbishop Grindal was a man who liked to exercise supreme control, as shown by his appointment of William Palmer and Edmund Bunney to the role of preachers at York Minster. Palmer and Bunney were as puritanical as their master, and preached long sermons full of hellfire and damnation. Bunney was made Chancellor of the Minster, but he was far from popular with more conventional Protestants, who claimed that his fiery extempore preaching did more harm than good.8 Taking into account Archbishop Grindal’s zeal and temperament, it seems likely that he would have taken a keen interest in the proceedings of the consistory court, encouraging advocates to take a stronger line against Catholicism and other contraventions of church law.

  With Grindal and Hastings occupying York’s two positions of power, life for the city’s Catholic population quickly became much harder. Fines were imposed without mercy, and those who could not or would not pay found themselves imprisoned at York Castle or at smaller prisons such as the Kidcote on Ouse Bridge. Around a third of those committed to York’s prisons for prolonged periods of time would not leave alive.

  Under these circumstances, one might expect that the Catholic population of the city would decline rapidly. That was the aim of the archbishop and the earl, but did that actually happen?

  The number of Catholics in York in the latter decades of the seventeenth century is hard to estimate. Some commentators say it was as little as two per cent of the population, but that is highly unlikely given the popular support within the city for both the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Northern Uprising. One method that could be used to determine how many Catholics were in York at the time is to look at recusancy levels, with the names of recusants and the fines levelled against them being recorded, initially in what were called ‘pipe rolls’ and from 1592 onwards ‘recusancy rolls’. These records show that far from diminishing, official levels of recusancy increased under the jurisdiction of Henry Hastings, and an exhaustive study made by Father Hugh Aveling in 1960 concluded that there were approximately 1,200 adult recusants in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the 1580s.9

  Looking solely at the official recusancy statistics, however, can be misleading on two counts. Firstly, the rise when Hastings became Lord President could have simply been because he and his men were more zealous in rooting them out, recording them, and fining them. Secondly, the majority of Catholics in York and across the country as a whole were not recusants at all.

  The Pope had decreed that Catholics could not take part in Church of England services, but many took a more pragmatic approach. The fines for recusancy could destroy a family, especially after the fines were raised and then levied on a recurring basis. In later years, being a recusant also meant that you were barred from taking any legal action or seeking legal redress of any kind whatsoever. Under these circumstances, it’s little wonder that many Catholics followed the path of least resistance.10

  Across the country, and especially in traditionally Catholic areas such as Yorkshire and Lancashire, many opted to become ‘Church Papists’. These were adults who attended Church of England services and yet still saw themselves as Catholics in their hearts: Guy’s headmaster John Pulleyn is one example.

  It is impossible to estimate how many church Catholics there were, but it is likely that they were of a considerable number; this had been the faith of their parents and grandparents, and it may have been the one that they themselves were brought up in. It could even be that some of those in positions of power associated with the Church of England were church Catholics, as again exemplified by John Pulleyn, and also by William Hunt, an Anglican churchwarden in York who was later arrested after being caught during the raid of a Catholic mass.

  As anti-Catholic legislation and brutality increased during the reign of Elizabeth I, many Catholic priests and scholars fled to mainland Europe. One such man, and a pivotal figure in the Catholic struggles that led to the gunpowder plot and similar plans, was William Allen.

  William Allen was born near Fleetwood, on the Lancashire coast, in 1532, and soon showed himself to be a brilliant scholar. By 1556 he was Proctor of Saint Mary’s Hall college at Oxford, and in 1558 he was a canon at York Minster11 (then a Catholic church under the reign of Queen Mary). After Elizabeth’s accession, he became one of many leading Catholics to leave the country, although he occasionally returned on clandestine missions designed to convert others to Catholicism.

  Allen’s defining moment came on 29 September 1568, when, with the encouragement of the Vatican, he founded his English College at Douai in north eastern France. This college was formed to welcome exiled English Catholics and train them to be priests who would then return to their native land in secret and spread their teachings.

  The first wave of seminary priests, as those educated at Allen’s seminary in Douai were called, arrived in England in 1574, and by 1580 another influx of priests, this time hard-line Jesuit priests, began to circulate across the country as well. Recusants were emboldened, and church Catholics found a new focal point for their beliefs, as well as opportunities to attend secret Catholic masses held by priests that were simply not available in previous years.

  One result of this surreptitious Catholic invasion was a further crackdown on Catholics, and a vastly increased effort to find priests and those who were hiding them. This in turn put increased pressure on ecclesiastical lawyers such as Edward Fawkes. Could this stress have led to his early grave?

  One sign that Edward’s death may have been sudden is that he died intestate, without a will, which is a very strange outcome for a man who worked as an advocate and a proctor overseeing oaths and wills. It would take mo
re than a decade for Guy’s inheritance to be awarded to him, but as we shall see, when it came it completely changed the course of his life. (The loss of his father wasn’t the only loss that Guy endured as a young boy. His grandmother Ellen Fawkes, who lived nearby on High Petergate, died when Guy was in his infancy, leaving him an angel of gold and her best whistle12).

  At a time when life could be so precarious, Tudor life often revolved around the extended family, and so it’s likely that Guy’s Uncle Thomas would have played a greater role in his life after the death of Edward. He would have provided much needed financial assistance to the family as well. But Thomas Fawkes himself died in 1581. In his will, he left his nephew Guy a gold ring, his bed and a set of bedsheets.13 If the latter bequest seems a little odd to us today, it should be remembered that a bed was a symbol of prestige, and leaving it to someone in a will was a sign of affection; William Shakespeare famously left his ‘second best bed’ to his wife Anne in his will.14

  With the death of his father and then uncle at an impressionable age, Guy turned to his masters and fellow pupils at St. Peter’s School for company. They became more than friends and companions, they became role models. Role models like Jack and Kit Wright, who in 1586 saw their Uncle Francis Ingleby publicly executed for being a seminary priest.15 Role models who would be further angered in the same year as they saw Margaret Clitherow imprisoned and then sentenced to a particularly horrific death in York, for refusing to renounce or implicate other Catholics. It was a moment that shook York to its roots, and one that changed Guy Fawkes forever.

  Chapter 5

  The Pearl of York

  ’Tis time to die, when ’tis a shame to live

  Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling

  Shortly after the arrest of Guy Fawkes in 1605 his questioning in the Tower of London began. For as long as he could under the physical and mental strains of torture he resisted giving answers that could implicate others in the gunpowder plot, and which would send them to the fate he knew awaited him.

  With some questions he was prepared to give honest answers from the start of his interrogation, whereas with others he changed his response as instruments of torture broke down his resistance and his ability to prevaricate. One such revised answer reveals Guy’s state of mind as he progressed through his teenage years in York.

  Guy was brought up a Protestant by his father Edward, so what made him become not only a Catholic, which brought with it financial and bodily dangers even for those who hid their faith, but a man prepared to kill and ready to die for the cause?

  On 6 November, his interrogators asked Guy a question set down by King James himself: ‘If he ever was a Papist, and, if so, who brought him up in it?’1

  While originally stating that he had been raised a Catholic, a later statement from the Earls of Nottingham, Suffolk, Northampton and Salisbury (the King’s chief minister Robert Cecil) reveals: ‘He confesseth he hath been a Recusant about this twenty years’.2

  This would date Guy’s conversion to 1585 or 1586, when he was 15 or 16, a time when he would have been expected to leave his carefree childhood ways behind and make his own way in the world as a man.

  Just what was it that made Guy convert to Catholicism in the mid-1580s, thus turning his back on a potential career as an ecclesiastical advocate and instead opening up an uncertain and challenging future? Rejecting the Church of England was a huge step away from a society that would have welcomed him with open arms. As a Protestant who had performed creditably at his grammar school he could have been expected to graduate from Oxford or Cambridge, find a job that would supply him with a steady income, and settle into a middle-class life with a suitable wife. Guy chose another path in life, and it’s not one he would have taken lightly.

  As his later actions show, Guy was a stubborn man who was prepared to stand by his beliefs whatever the consequences, and so it is likely that he’d been brooding on his conversion to Catholicism for some years. He had the examples of his fellow pupils like the Wright brothers to encourage him, and that of his head master John Pulleyn. He would also have heard of the execution of Sir Thomas Percy in York’s marketplace, and as a young child would have seen the Earl’s rotting head on a spike. As the years progressed he would hear more and more tales of aggressions carried out against the Catholics of York, of property being confiscated, women being jailed and separated from their families, and, after repressive acts of 1581 and 1585, when being a Catholic priest or harbouring one became punishable by death, an increasing number of executions.3

  Henry Hastings, as ever, was keen to see the new anti-Catholic legislation enacted with its full ferocity, and five Catholic priests were captured and publicly executed at York Tyburn, a place of execution on the Knavesmire, in the first year. The priests were dressed in their vestments on their way to the gallows, made to carry their own coffins, and hung from a triangular gallows known as the ‘three legged mare’. Crowds gathered to jeer and spit at those who had become thought of as the enemies of the people. Others watched and prayed with heavy hearts, and a growing thirst for revenge.

  The Knavesmire executions of 1582, including the double execution of Fathers William Lacey and Richard Kirkman on 22 August, would have been well known to Guy Fawkes and all the people of York. He may even have seen some of the executions carried out – it would have been considered fitting for pupils of the city’s leading school to attend them.4

  These horrific, bloody spectacles, combined with Guy’s introspection and examination of the faith he was raised in, led to a growing sense of injustice within him: how could he reconcile these acts with the word of God that he read and listened to? One event above all others secured Guy’s conversion and led to his future actions, and it involved a butcher’s wife who was well known to Guy and his mother Edith.

  Margaret Middleton was born in York in 1556 (the exact date is unknown) to parents Thomas and Jane. Thomas Middleton was a respectable gentleman, becoming Sheriff of York eight years after Margaret’s birth.5 He was a chandler by trade, however, which meant that his business was in decline. Chandlers were candle makers, and their products were in high demand for use as devotional tools during the reign of Queen Mary and prior to the reformation, but the changing face of churches during the time of Edward VI and Elizabeth meant that ornate and well made candles were now largely surplus to requirements.

  Thomas died when Margaret was 14, and her mother Jane quickly remarried out of financial necessity. Her choice of husband was Henry May, a man who had been born in the south of England but had come to York because of its heightened economic prospects, thanks to its position at the heart of the Council of the North. Henry May was a vintner, or wine seller, an occupation that had been strictly controlled and licensed by the city’s guilds in recent years, but which was now welcoming people like Henry from outside the city. He was an astute businessman and proved to be socially adept as well, being selected as one of the eight Chamberlains of York in 1568, not long after taking up residence in the city.6

  Margaret was also looking to secure a better future for herself, which is why at the age of 15 she married John Clitherow, a man much older than her and already widowed with two sons. Such marriages were perfectly acceptable at the time, with John securing a mother for his children, and Margaret obtaining security and a position within York society at a young age.

  John Clitherow was a sheep farmer of some standing, who had inherited land and a large house at Cornborough, ten miles to the north east of York. His main residence, which also doubled as a butcher’s shop, was on the Shambles, and it was here that Margaret Clitherow started her new life in July 1571.

  The Shambles is now one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city of York, with its ancient timber framed buildings still intact and leaning over until they almost touch in the middle of the street, but it was very different in the late sixteenth century. The Shambles takes its name from an old Saxon phrase meaning ‘flesh shelves’, a reference to t
he butchers’ slabs running up and down the street. It was an established tradition in York that butcher’s shops could only be situated on this street. With refrigeration still centuries away at the time that the Clitherows held court, animals had to be brought to the premises, slaughtered there, butchered, displayed and then sold as quickly as possible.

  It is to the Shambles then that Edith Fawkes, sometimes with her daughters or her son Guy, would have come to buy her lamb and mutton. As John Clitherow was one of the wealthiest of the street’s vendors, and therefore with a reputation for excellent produce, it’s likely that families who could afford meat of good quality, such as the Fawkes family, would have gravitated towards his shop at number ten.

  Both Margaret and John Clitherow would certainly have been known to the people who lived in the city of York, and the young mistress of the shop proved to be adept at running it and looking after both her staff and her two step-children. The Shambles was a close-knit community, with William and Millicent Calvert (née Clitherow, John’s sister) at one side of the Clitherow shop, and Michael and Ellen Mudd (a relative of John’s first wife) on the other.7 It was another neighbour, however, that was to transform Margaret’s life: Dorothy Vavasour.

  The gunpowder plot of 1605 is a perfect example of how interconnected life at the turn of the seventeenth century was, particularly for the Catholic community of England. Many of the plotters knew each other beforehand, as with Guy Fawkes and the Wrights, and many were related to each other by marriage (for example Robert Catesby, Robert Wintour, Thomas Wintour and John Grant were all related in this way, and the plotter Thomas Percy married Martha Wright, sister of Jack and Kit8). Similarly if Margaret Clitherow had not grown to know Dorothy Vavasour, would she have been spared the dread fate that awaited her, and would that have prevented the Wrights and Guy Fawkes from embarking upon new courses in their lives?