The Real Guy Fawkes

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I really didn’t know anything about Guy Fawkes besides he was about to blow up British Parliament and got caught. One is about Bill Fairclough (August 2023), characters' identities (September 2021) and Pemberton's People (October 2022).

Nick Holland has also written award winning poetry and his play 'Rudisha' was performed in London in 2012 to coincide with the Olympic games. It's often (inaccurately) dated as starting in 1517, but it took centuries before Christians fully embraced ideals of religious freedom. If you feel the way I do, or if you understand what it meant to be a Catholic in the Reformation era and before the Second Vatican Council, then you will probably agree with me. The repeals and the Emancipation Act (1829) allowed for Irish Catholics to have more rights, which preceded a large Irish immigration into English cities.

Both author's seek explanations for factors that made the plotters embark on such a drastic venture which would have killed thousands in their bid to eliminate the ruling elite of the time.

Peter Brimacombe is an experienced Pitkin author and photographer with numerous titles on history and heritage. In the same series: DAVID BECKHAM THE BEATLES HENRY VIII SHAKESPEARE ELIZABETH I NELSON Forthcoming: BOUDICA "Who said you can't please all of the people all of the time? There are some very interesting and believable hypotheses about his formative years, the driver for his fervent Catholicism, thoughts and feelings. Although the majority of the book focuses on Guy Fawkes, from his birth to his gruesome end, Holland does take time to describe the other plotters and ably details the timeline of the events, people, and places associated with the gunpowder plot. Catesby, like Thomas Percy, met his demise at the end of a musket rather than the prolonged tortures that befell other conspirators.

Combining clear text with a black-and-white line drawing on each page, this exciting book brings a famous historical event to vivid life. Nick Holland was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire and went to University in Huddersfield and, later, San Diego. He shows how Fawkes was deeply affected by the capture and execution of Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow, whose family were known to Fawkes and his parents.

As Holland explains, this was very bad timing for Fawkes, who likely converted to Catholicism after his father died in 1577, possibly the result of his mother's remarriage to a recusant. Always few in number, they were Englishmen trained in Italy or France who came back to minister to their co-religionists here, risking their lives to do so. Unravel these mysteries, discover why the scheme failed and the eventual fate of the doomed plotters in this informative and finely illustrated Pitkin Guide.

It must have been very hard to shed centuries of custom and practice in a few decades, so feelings for the old religion must have persisted longer than official head counts acknowledge.

Tracing the lives of key figures, including the plotters, and using previously undisclosed documents, like the torturing of Guy Fawkes, this book reveals what drove subjects to undertake the biggest home-grown plot. The historical record is not really full or mentions of his early life, but Holland brings together evidence of his contemporaries that paints a very vivid picture of the circumstances that brought the re-known Guy Fawkes into existence. Fawkes was born into an Anglican (Church of England) South Yorkshire family in 1570, just 36 years after King Henry VIII (reigned 1509-47) declared England a Protestant nation. Writing in 2003, Stephen Carver claimed that "Although critics are often scathing of this author, Guy Fawkes Book the Second is a reasonable history lesson". The use of prophecy in the work is related to the act of necromancy, which distinguishes Ainsworth from earlier authors, who incorporated Catholic superstitions in their use of the gothic.The alchemist John Dee tells Fawkes that the plot will not help the Catholic Church, and will only result in the death of the plotters.