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GUY FAWKES

Ellie, Chiara, Ahmed, Vittorio ed Alessandro

THE TRADITION

HIS STORY

The plotters leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords; Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder that they stockpiled there. The authorities were prompted by an anonymous letter to search Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and they found Fawkes guarding the explosives. He was questioned and tortured over the next few days and confessed to wanting to blow up the House of Lords.

Guy Fawkes, also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. He was born and educated in York; his father died when he was eight years old.Fawkes converted to Catholicism and left for Europe, where he fought for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years' War against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Low Countries. He travelled to Spain to support a Catholic rebellion without success. He later met Thomas Wintour, with who he returned to England. Wintour introduced him to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne.

To celebrate the narrow escape of the Gunpowder Plot and the failure of this attack on English democracy, every year in the United Kingdom and in the former British colonies the puppet of Guy Fawkes is burned in a large bonfire. There is no respectable celebration without some culinary tradition.The one for Guy Fawkes night is quite simple: Baked potatoes filled with butter and cheese (the Jacket Potatoes) and for the little ones caramelised apples and slices of Parkin, a cake associated with the Leeds area, made of oatmeal and blackstrap molasses.