Of the engaging Ambrose Rookwood a contemporary says, “I knew him well and loved him tenderly. He was beloved by all who knew him. He left behind him his lady, who was a very beautiful person and of a high family, and two or three little children, all of whom — together with everything he had in this world — he cast aside to follow the fortunes of this rash and desperate conspiracy.”[32]
Guy Fawkes was also a Yorkshireman, being born in the year 1570, in the City of York.
His baptismal register, dated the 16th day of April, 1570, is still to be seen in the Church of St. Michael-le-Belfrey, hard-by the glorious Minster.
Probably that one of four traditions is true which says that the son of Edward Fawkes, Notary and Advocate of the Consistory Court of York, and Edith, his wife, was born in a house situated in High Petergate. In fact, in the angle formed by the street known as High Petergate and the ancient alley called Minster Gates, leading into the Minster Yard, opposite the South Transept of the Minster, and at the top of the mediæval street called Stonegate.[A]
[A] The house I refer to is occupied by the Governors of St. Peter’s School (where Fawkes was himself educated), by Mr. T. H. Barron, and Mr. Matkins. It is still Minster property. It is a brick Elizabethan house refaced. Fawkes’ grandmother, Mrs. Ellen Fawkes, almost certainly lived in a house in High Petergate, on the opposite side of the road, probably. His father may have had a house also at Bishopthorpe. — See Supplementum I.
Though the property Guy Fawkes inherited was small, his descent and upbringing had made him the equal and companion of the gentry of his native County.
In the thirty-third year of Elizabeth (1592), in a legal document dealing with his property, Guy Fawkes is described as of Scotton, a picturesque village in the ancient Parish of Farnham, between Knaresbrough and Ripley, in Nidderdale.
Fawkes was a tall athletic man, with brown hair and an auburn beard. He was modest, self-controlled, and very valiant. He left England for Flanders most likely in 1593 or 1594. At the time of the conspiracy he was about thirty-five years of age. He was unmarried.
Fawkes was highly intelligent, direct of purpose, simple of heart, well-read, and, as a soldier of fortune in the Netherlands, not only “skilful in the wars,” but, apart from his fanaticism, which seems to have grown by degrees into a positive monomania, possessed of many attractive, and even endearing, moral qualities.
Fawkes held a post of command in the Spanish Army when Spain took Calais in 1596, and gave promise of becoming, like his friend and patron, Sir William Stanley, an ideal “happy warrior,” and one of England’s greatest generals.[A]