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bronze plaque · York

Guy Fawkes

Photograph at the Guy Fawkes bronze plaque

Guy Fawkes is remembered for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Educated in York, he later converted to Catholicism and travelled to mainland Europe. There, he joined the Spanish army and fought in the Eighty Years' War. He returned to England and became part of a conspiracy aimed at assassinating King James I and reinstating a Catholic ruler.

The plotters prepared by storing gunpowder in an undercroft below the House of Lords, with Fawkes entrusted with its safekeeping. On 5 November, an anonymous warning led authorities to search the location. They discovered Fawkes guarding the explosives. Following his capture, he was interrogated and confessed his intention to destroy the House of Lords by detonation.

Original summary by TributeLegacy, informed by public sources.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

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Data sources

Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

  • Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
  • Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) - never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

Editorial descriptions, photography and tribute links are original TributeLegacy work, layered on top of the open data.

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