[A] It is interesting and instructive to compare the Forty Years’ War between Spain and the Netherlands with the present unhappy strife in South Africa between Britons and the descendants of those that repelled the arms of the once greatest soldiery in the world. The war between Spain and the Dutch was not a religious war at the commencement of the struggle. It arose out of a chafing under the sovereignty of Spain, and a dispute about tenths. In fact, many Catholics fought against Philip II. in this war at the beginning.
I visited Scotton for the first time on the day set apart in York as a general holiday for the Relief of Mafeking (19th May, 1900).
It is said by an old writer, “Winter and Fawxe are men of excellent good natural parts, very resolute and universally learned.”[33] In the days of their joyous youth these two gifted men may have many a time and oft played and sported together in Nidderdale, with its purple moors, its rock-crowned fells, its leafy woods, its musical streams, its flowery ghylls, its winding river.
Guy Fawkes was a son of destiny, a product of his environment, a creature of circumstances — always saving his free-will and moral responsibility.
But, dying, he must have remembered his dear York and sweet Scotton.
CHAPTER IX.
Let us deal with the inferences from the Evidence, and ascertain to what further suggestions those inferences give rise.
Now, among the first things that must strike the reader of the list of actors in the Gunpowder tragedy is the large number that were, directly or indirectly, connected with the far-stretching, prolific province of Yorkshire. Of the whole thirteen conspirators, four first drew the breath of life in that grandest and fairest of English Counties, namely: Thomas Percy, John Wright, Christopher Wright, and Guy (or Guido) Fawkes. While five of the other intending perpetrators of an action which, if consummated, would have indeed “damned them to everlasting fame,” indirectly had relations with it.