“My reason for thinking that the house in High Petergate, at the corner of the Minster Gates, ... is the house where Guy Fawkes was born, is this:
“Some fifty years ago I was working at the same house when an old Minster mason, named Townsend, told me it was the house where Guy Fawkes was born. Job Knowles, an old bell-ringer and watchman at the Minster at the time Jonathan Martin set the Minster on fire, also told me it was the same house.
“It is an Elizabethan[A] house, but it has been re-fronted, which you would see if you went inside and looked at the wainscotting and the carved mantel-piece.”
[A] In a subsequent letter, Mr. Watkinson, who is a Protestant, tells me that he is in the seventieth year of his age, and that he is descended collaterally from Thomas Watkinson, of Menthorpe, near Selby, the father of “the Venerable” Robert Watkinson, priest, who suffered martyrdom at the London Tyburn in 1602, two years before the Gunpowder Plot was hatched.
Edward Fawkes died, aged forty-six, when his son, Guy, was not quite eight years old. He was buried in the Minster on the 17th January, 1578-9. About twenty-seven years afterwards this Yorkshire citizen’s thrice hapless child — by nature a tall, athletic man, but then,
by torture of the rack, so crippled “that he was scarce able to go up the ladder” — met on the shameful gallows-tree, and on the quartering block, in the Old Palace Yard, Westminster, over against the Parliament House, the terrible death of a condemned traitor. The whole world knows the reason why.
Mistress Edith Fawkes, Guy’s mother, was married a second time to a gentleman named Dennis Bainbridge. He was connected with the John Pulleyn, Esq., of Scotton, near Knaresbrough, and the probabilities are that Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Bainbridge, and that lady’s children by her first husband, namely Guy, Elizabeth and Ann Fawkes, all lived by the favour of the young squire, John Pulleyn, in patriarchal fashion, at Scotton Hall. The Pulleyns and the Bainbridges were Roman Catholics, and their names (along with the names Walkingham, Knaresborough, and Bickerdyke) occur in Peacock’s “List of Roman Catholics in Yorkshire in 1604,” under the title “Parish of Farnham.” The name Percy, of Percy House, is not found in Peacock’s “List.”
[If the Bainbridges did not live at Scotton Hall, they may have lived at Percy House, hard-by the Hall. Percy House is now owned by Mr. Slater, of Farnham Hall, the property of the relatives of the late Charles Shann, Esquire, of Tadcaster.]
It is, therefore, easy to understand how it came to pass that the mind of young Guy Fawkes became impregnated with Roman Catholicism. For man is a creature of circumstances.
Yorkshire abounded in Roman Catholics in the time of Elizabeth (see the “Hatfield MSS.” and numerous other contemporary records). Such was especially the case with the district round about Knaresbrough and Ripon. And recollecting that many Yorkshiremen had