Guy Fawkes was born in 1570, in the English town of York, where he also was educated. His father died when Fawkes was eight years old, which lead to his mother’s second marriage – with a recusant Catholic. Therefor Guy Fawkes later converted to Catholicism and left to fight for the continent, in the ‘Eighty Years’ War - he fought for the Catholic Spain against Protestant Dutch reformers. I am going to talk about Guy Fawkes involvement in the famous Gunpowder Plot.
Fawkes was introduced to Robert Catesby after serving ten years in the military fighting for the Catholic Spain. Robert Catesby was in charge of a plot that was being planned against King James I, in order to restore a Catholic monarch in Britain. They wanted King James dead and for his daughter to replace the throne in order to have a Catholic Britain. Also involved in the plot, there were 13 English catholic men. Their goal was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder.
Beneath the House of Lords, the plotters had leased to an undercroft. One of the plotters: Thomas Percy had gained access to a room in the House of Lords who belonged to the Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe. Fawkes was placed there as a guard to secure the gunpowder they had stocked. One of the men involved in the plot later claimed that the plan was to dig an underground tunnel from the House of Lords to the Parliament - but there have never been any evidence to prove this. The Palace of Westminster in London, consists both of the House of the Lords and of the Parliament.
From an anonymous, the authorities received a letter and caught a suspicion about the plot. They therefor searched Westminster Palace, and on the 5th of November they found Fawkes guarding the explosives. Over the next couple of days he was both tortured and questioned until he eventually broke and told the authorities about the plot.
Seconds before he was to be executed on the 31st of January 1606, he jumped from the scaffold where he was