It is, however, more than possible that as a babe in arms Guy Fawkes may have _lived_ at Bishopthorpe. For the Act of Uniformity, whereby the York Court of High Commission had been established, would bring much legal work to his father, Edward Fawkes; and that the latter found it convenient to have a house in close proximity to his Grace the Lord Archbishop of York, a leading member of the High Commission, is one of the likeliest things in the world. In these circumstances, then, the present-day inhabitants of Bishopthorpe may still lay the flattering unction to their souls (if they wish so to do) that Guy Fawkes drank in his mother’s milk in their picturesque Yorkshire village, on the banks of the noble Ouse. Mr. J. W. Knowles, of Stonegate, York, another gentleman well versed in York’s antiquities, informed me in August, 1901, that a Mr. John Robert Watkinson, of Redeness Street, Layerthorpe, York, held a tradition that Guy Fawkes’ birthplace was in the house adjoining the Minster Gates. Accordingly, some little time afterwards, I wrote to Mr. Watkinson, who at once kindly replied in a letter, dated 22nd October, 1901, as follows:—— “My reason for thinking that the house in High Petergate, at the corner of the Minster Gates, ... is the house where Guy Fawkes was born, is this: “Some fifty years ago I was working at the same house when an old Minster mason, named Townsend, told me it was the house where Guy Fawkes was born. Job Knowles, an old bell-ringer and watchman at the Minster at the time Jonathan Martin set the Minster on fire, also told me it was the same house. “It is an Elizabethan[A] house, but it has been re-fronted, which you would see if you went inside and looked at the wainscotting and the carved mantel-piece.” [Footnote A: In a subsequent letter, Mr. Watkinson, who is a Protestant, tells me that he is in the seventieth year of his age, and that he is descended collaterally from Thomas Watkinson, of Menthorpe, near Selby, the father of “the Venerable” Robert Watkinson, priest, who suffered martyrdom at the London Tyburn in 1602, two years before the Gunpowder Plot was hatched.] Edward Fawkes died, aged forty-six, when his son, Guy, was not quite eight years old. He was buried in the Minster on the 17th January, 1578-9. About twenty-seven years afterwards this Yorkshire citizen’s thrice hapless child——by nature a tall, athletic man, but then, by torture of the rack, so crippled “that he was scarce able to go up the ladder”——met on the shameful gallows-tree, and on the quartering block, in the Old Palace Yard, Westminster, over against the Parliament House, the terrible death of a condemned traitor. The whole world knows the reason why.