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blue plaque · York

Guy Fawkes

Photograph at the Guy Fawkes blue plaque

Guy Fawkes, born and raised in York, became known for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. After his father's passing, his mother remarried into a Catholic family, and Guy himself converted to Catholicism. He later travelled to mainland Europe, where he served with the Spanish forces during the Eighty Years' War.

Upon returning to England, Fawkes joined a clandestine group intending to overthrow the ruling monarch. He was entrusted with guarding a significant quantity of gunpowder stored beneath the House of Lords. However, an anonymous warning led to the discovery of the explosives and Fawkes's arrest on 5 November. Following interrogation, he admitted his part in the conspiracy to destroy the House of Lords.

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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