“Thirty-six.” This was true.
“Where were you born?”
“In Netherdale, in the county of York.”
“How have you lived hitherto?”
“By a farm of thirty pounds a year.”
“How came those wounds in your breast?”
“They are scars from the healing of a pleurisy.”
The treatment of pleurisy in the seventeenth century was apparently rather severe.
Fawkes went on to reply to the articles demanded, that he had never served any man but Percy—though he had been in the service of Anthony Browne, Lord Montague, a few months before: that he obtained Percy’s service “only by his own means, being a Yorkshire man”; that he had learned French in England, and increased it when abroad; that he was born a Papist, and not perverted—which was false.
Being asked why he was addressed as “Mr Fauks” in a letter (as he alleged) from Mrs Colonel Bostock, which was found in his pocket, Mr “Johnson” replied with the coolest effrontery, that it was because he had called himself so in Flanders, where Mrs Bostock resided. This letter was subsequently discovered to come from Anne Vaux.