03/11/2026
In November 1605, a York man was found in the undercroft beneath the House of Lords with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. His name was Guy Fawkes, and he had grown up a few minutes’ walk from our door.
Fawkes was born in York in 1570 and baptised at St Michael le Belfrey, beside the Minster, where his father Edward worked as a lawyer in the Archbishop’s church courts. Edward died when Guy was eight and was buried in York Minster in 1579. The boy went to St Peter’s School alongside John and Christopher Wright, who would one day join him in the plot.
Across the Minster Close, this house belonged to the Young family. Archbishop Thomas Young had enforced the Protestant settlement in the north, and his son George made the house his home in 1588, when he married.
The two men’s lives went very different ways. Fawkes turned to the Catholic faith, sold the land his father had left him in 1591 and went to fight for Spain in the Low Countries. George Young stayed in York and was knighted in 1604. On the night of 4 to 5 November 1605, Fawkes was arrested beneath Parliament, said to be carrying the iron lantern that survives today in the Ashmolean Museum. Sir George, three years his senior, was master of this house.
Twelve years later, on 12 April 1617, James I, the king the plot had been meant to kill, was entertained here by Sir George Young.
Explore our full history at grayscourtyork.com
