Many people know Guy Fawkes was born and raised in York. If you’re local to the city, you probably also know he went to St Peter’s School. But how much do you know about the many other Yorkshire connections to the Gunpowder Plot? Here are a few to start…
Two of Guy Fawkes’ schoolmates in York were the brothers. Christopher (or Kit) and John (or Jack) Wright, who hailed from Welwick in the East Riding of Yorkshire. They came from a family of recusants (Catholics who refused to attend the Protestant Church).
Both were recruited by the Plot’s leader Robert Catesby, and both were killed alongside him and a number of the other Plotters at Holbeache House in Stafffordshire in the days following Fawkes’ arrest beneath Parliament in November 1605.
Another member of the core group of Plotters was Thomas Percy. This was the man who rented the undercroft cellar beneath Parliament which Guy Fawkes and his companions had filled with gunpowder. Percy was another man with strong Yorkshire connections. For example, he was married to John and Christopher Wright’s sister Martha. In 1605, Thomas Percy was shot dead at Holbeache House, alongside his brothers-in-law and their leader Robert Catesby.
The main group of Plotters included a second pair of brothers, Thomas and Robert Wintour. Although they were both raised in Worcestershire, their mother Jane was an Ingleby from Ripley Castle, near Knaresborough in Yorkshire.
Jane’s brother Francis Ingleby had been a Catholic priest. After training and ordination in the Catholic priesthood on the continent, he returned undercover to Yorkshire. After this, Francis gave secret Catholic masses and lived in a series of secret rooms in York (in the house of Margaret Clitherow amongst others). Francis Ingleby was arrested, found guilty of treason and executed in York in 1586. This was just a few months after the execution of Margaret Clitherow on Ouse Bridge. Guy was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in the city at the time.
After their arrest for their role in the Gunpowder Plot, Francis’s nephews Thomas and Robert Wintour spent two months in the Tower of London, alongside Guy Fawkes and a small group of fellow prisoners, before suffering a similar fate as their uncle. Both were hanged, drawn and quartered in London in January 1606. The last of the men to die on the Westminster scaffold was York’s Guy Fawkes.
What other connections exist between Yorkshire and the Gunpowder Plot?
Tony Morgan 