This Man Tried To Blow Up The King

Guy Fawkes

Born in April 1570 in the shadow of York Minster, Guy Fawkes was the only surviving son of Edward Fawkes, a Protestant church lawyer, and his wife Edith. Following his father's early death, Guy's mother married Dionis Baynbrigge, a member of a prominent Catholic recusant family in North Yorkshire. Attending St Peter's School in York alongside future conspirators John and Christopher Wright, the young Fawkes was steadily drawn to the clandestine Catholic faith. At twenty-one, he sold his modest inheritance, sailed to the continent, and enlisted in the Spanish army to fight in the Eighty Years' War against Protestant Dutch forces. Adopting the Italianate name "Guido," he spent a decade acquiring military discipline and an expert understanding of mining and explosives.

In 1604, English exile Thomas Wintour traveled to Flanders to recruit Fawkes for a daring enterprise orchestrated by charismatic Warwickshire gentleman Robert Catesby. Disillusioned by King James I's refusal to grant religious toleration to English Catholics, Catesby hatched a plan of unprecedented scale: to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament, wiping out the King, his family, and the entire political establishment in a single blast, before placing the young Princess Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic puppet monarch. Fawkes, known for his nerves of iron and total discretion, was chosen as the operational specialist.

Posing as "John Johnson," the servant of fellow conspirator Thomas Percy, Fawkes secured a cellar undercroft situated directly beneath the House of Lords chamber. Over several months, the plotters smuggled thirty-six heavy barrels of gunpowder across the River Thames, concealing them beneath piles of firewood and iron bars. Fawkes's designated task was to wait in the vault until the King took his seat, light a slow-burning fuse, and escape by boat across the river to catch a ship for Flanders.

The conspiracy collapsed in late October 1605 after an anonymous letter warned Lord Monteagle to stay away from Parliament. Alerted to possible danger, royal officials ordered a quiet search of the Palace of Westminster. Around midnight on November 4, searchers led by Sir Thomas Knyvett surprised Fawkes in the cellar, dressed in boots and spurs, carrying a pocket watch, and holding matches and touchwood.

Brought before King James, Fawkes maintained an icy defiance, stating his goal had been to blow the Scots back to Scotland. Transferred to the Tower of London, he was subjected to the rack on the King's personal warrant. For days he withheld the names of his co-conspirators, but agonizing physical torture eventually broke him. His signed confession, preserved in royal archives, reveals his signature "Guido" trailing off into a broken, barely legible scrawl.

On January 31, 1606, Fawkes and his surviving co-conspirators were taken to the Old Palace Yard at Westminster to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Determined to deny the crowd the spectacle of his butchery, the weakened Fawkes climbed the ladder to the gallows and deliberately jumped or fell, snapping his neck instantly on the noose. Though his body was still quartered and sent to the corners of the realm, he cheated the executioner of cutting him open alive, sealing his name forever in the history of British treason.