Betrayal can be defined as the act of deliberate disloyalty. The disloyalty to a nation, a mentor, a religion, or a friend. The betrayed face the sometimes painful consequences of the selfish desires of the betrayer. The betrayed become broken from the pain and disbelief that a countryman, a student, a follower, or a friend could hurt them so. To quote “All a man can betray is his conscience” is to quote a lie.
Guy Fawkes contributed to one of the largest acts of betrayal in English history. Fawkes, a young Englishman, abandoned his Protestant faith and converted to Catholicism. Guy Fawkes left England for sometime to partake in the Eighty Years’ War on the side of the Spanish Catholics. When he returned, he met with Thomas Wintour and Robert Catesby to plot a perverse plan to assassinate the Protestant King James I and his government. They planned to achieve this malicious feat by blowing up the Parliament building. The authorities exposed this “Gunpowder Plot” because an anonymous letter prompted them to search underneath the House of Lord. Below the building, authorities found Guy Fawkes defending thirty-six barrels of gunpowder. Sentenced to death, Guy Fawkes took his own life to escape the misery of death by hanging (10 Notable Traitors in History). In this
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In the narrow coastal pass in Greece known as Thermopylae in the year 480 BC, the Persian army, numbering near one million, battled with the Greek battalion of a meager several hundred. The Greeks, led Leonidas, valiantly held off the Persians for two days but then came Ephialtes’ deceit. Ephialtes, the local shepherd, revealed a path that gave access behind Greek lines. On the third day, Xerxes took advantage of his knowledge of the path and surrounded the Greeks, slaughtering every last one of them (10 Notable Traitors in History). For a reward that was never received, Ephialtes betrayed his country and his