Guy Fawkes was a British soldier and best-known participant in the Gunpowder Plot. Its object was to blow up the palace at Westminster during the state opening of Parliament, while James I and his chief ministers met within, in reprisal for increasing oppression of Roman Catholics in England.
Background
Fawkes was born on April 13, 1570, in the town of Stonegate in England's Yorkshire region. He had two sisters, Anne and Elizabeth. His father, Edward Fawkes (sometimes spelled Faux), was a judicial court official. As such, he was required, under the state Church of England religion (now known as Anglicanism, with the Episcopal Church as its American branch), to swear an oath pledging that he was a Protestant, and there was nothing in his own family background to suggest that he was anything else. Fawkes's mother, Edith, was another story. She, like many other Catholics, put up a Protestant facade, but her nephew became a Jesuit priest and some of her relatives were recusants - English Catholics who refused to attend Protestant church services.
Edward Fawkes died when Guy was eight, and his mother showed her true sympathies by marrying another recusant, Denis (or Dionysus) Bainbridge, described by an acquaintance (according to the Gunpowder Plot Society) as "more ornamental than useful." The family moved to a home near the village of Scotton in North Yorkshire.
Education
Fawkes attended St. Peter's School in the city of York (which still exists, and notes Fawkes as an alumnus if not as a role model).
After leaving school Fawkes entered the service of Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu. The Viscount took a dislike to Fawkes and after a short time dismissed him, he was subsequently employed by Anthony-Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount Montagu. In October 1591 Fawkes sold the estate in Clifton that he had inherited from his father. He travelled to the continent to fight in the Eighty Years War for Catholic Spain against the new Dutch Republic and, from 1595 until the Peace of Vervins in 1598, France. In 1604 Fawkes became involved with a small group of English Catholics, led by Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate the Protestant King James and replace him with his daughter, third in the line of succession, Princess Elizabeth. Fawkes was not the originator of the Gunpowder Plot. His perceived primacy has been due to a confluence of several factors, first and foremost being that it was he who actually tried to execute the plan, and was tortured afterwards to make him give up the names of his coconspirators.
The Gunpowder Plot was a chapter in the long history of conflict between Britain's Protestants and Catholics, and the religious dichotomy was present in Guy Fawkes's own family background.
The first meeting of the five central conspirators took place on Sunday 20 May 1604, at an inn called the Duck and Drake, in the fashionable Strand district of London.
Fawkes was eventually recruited to join a group of conspirators organized by nobleman Robert Catesby, whose aim was to blow up Parliament during its opening session on November 5, 1605. The Gunpowder Plot, as it became known, would result in an explosion intended to kill the king, his oldest son, and members of the House of Lords and House of Commons. The group also planned to kidnap James’s daughter Elizabeth and have her wed a Catholic ruler from abroad, thus re-establishing Catholicism in England.
The conspirators were able to obtain a plot of space directly under the parliamentary building, and Fawkes, using the name John Johnson in his guise as caretaker, was charged with watching and manning the gathered barrels of gunpowder. After an anonymous letter was sent to a Catholic parliamentarian warning him to not be present on the day of the planned attack, the plot was discovered, and on the night of November 4, Fawkes was arrested.
After two days of torture, Fawkes revealed his co-conspirators, most of whom were found. On January 31, 1606, Fawkes avoided being hanged, and drawn and quartered alive - the tradition at the time for those convicted of treason. As Fawkes climbed the ladder to the hanging platform to meet his fate, he jumped and broke his neck, dying instantly. He was later drawn and quartered nonetheless.
Guy Fawkes, a devout and militant Catholic in an age when the Protestant Church of England had solidified its hold on British religious life, is remembered as the individual who tried to perpetrate what is thought to have been one of history's most notorious terrorist acts. The Gunpowder Plot, also known as the Powder Treason, was a failed conspiracy to blow up Britain's Houses of Parliament on November 5, 1605. Fawkes, lurking in a cellar below the Parliament buildings, was arrested as he prepared to ignite the explosion.
Religion
Guy Fawkes was baptized in the Protestant faith at York early in 1570 but later converted into Roman Catholicism.
Fawkes likely began to come in contact with devout Catholics who were working through official channels and also by underground means to safeguard and advance the rights of Catholics under the country's increasingly entrenched Anglican regime.
He likely received another dose of this underground Catholicism when he attended St. Peter's School in the city of York. The school's headmaster, John Pulleine (or Pulleyn), was nominally Protestant, but St. Peter's was likely a hotbed of Catholic resistance; its former headmaster had been imprisoned for 20 years as a convicted recusant, and Pulleine's entire family was sympathetic to the Catholic cause.
Personality
Guy Fawkes has made quite a few appearances in pop culture. His essence was memorialized in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s 1988 graphic novel V for Vendetta, in which the main character is an anarchist revolutionary who wears a Fawkes mask and plots to bring down a fictional fascist state. The story was adapted in 2006 into a film of the same name starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman.
The iconic Guy Fawkes mask from the comic has since been used as a symbol by mass protests and anti-establishment movements. The hacktivist collective Anonymous adopted the mask around the time of the group’s 2008 attacks on the Church of Scientology - supporters wore it during demonstrations across the country. The mask was also used by the Occupy Movement.
While Guy Fawkes may once have been labeled a traitor or terrorist, he (or at least the mask) now stands for action against government corruption or corporate greed.
Connections
Fawkes, according to one source, was married to Pulleine's daughter Maria and had a son, named Thomas, in 1591.
The Real Guy Fawkes
This fresh new biography of Guy's life removes the layers of complexity that can cloud the British history of this time: an era when fearful Catholics hid in tiny priest holes, government spies were everywhere, and even your closest friends could send you to be hung, drawn and quartered.
2017
Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot
In a narrative that reads like a gripping detective story, Antonia Fraser has untangled the web of religion, politics, and personalities that surrounded that fateful night of November 5. And, in examining the lengths to which individuals will go for their faith, she finds in this long-ago event a reflection of the religion-inspired terrorism that has produced gunpowder plots of our own time.
