WHAT GUNPOWDER PLOT WAS

[Larger Image]

View of the River Front of the House occupied by Whynniard

The words ‘Prince’s Chamber, House of Lords,’ in the foreground
can only mean that those buildings are behind the house.

WHAT GUNPOWDER PLOT WAS

BY

SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER, D.C.L., LL.D.

FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
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1897

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CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHRONOLOGICAL NOTES

(Political events in italics)

WHAT GUNPOWDER PLOT WAS

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

In ‘What was the Gunpowder Plot? The Traditional Story tested by Original Evidence,’[1] Father Gerard has set forth all the difficulties he found while sifting the accessible evidence, and has deduced from his examination a result which, though somewhat vague in itself, leaves upon his readers a very distinct impression that the celebrated conspiracy was mainly, if not altogether, a fiction devised by the Earl of Salisbury for the purpose of maintaining or strengthening his position in the government of the country under James I. Such, at least, is what I gather of Father Gerard’s aim from a perusal of his book. Lest, however, I should in any way do him an injustice, I proceed to quote the summary placed by him at the conclusion of his argument:—

“The evidence available to us appears to establish principally two points: that the true history of the Gunpowder Plot is now known to no man, and that the history commonly received is certainly untrue.

“It is quite impossible to believe that the Government were not aware of the Plot long before they announced its discovery.

“It is difficult to believe that the proceedings of the conspirators were actually such as they are related to have been.

“It is unquestionable that the Government consistently falsified the story and the evidence as presented to the world, and that the points upon which they most insisted prove upon examination to be the most doubtful.

“There are grave reasons for the conclusion that the whole transaction was dexterously contrived for the purpose which in fact it opportunely served, by those who alone reaped benefit from it, and who showed themselves so unscrupulous in the manner of reaping.”

No candid person, indeed, can feel surprise that any English Roman Catholic, especially a Roman Catholic priest, should feel anxious to wipe away the reproach which the plot has brought upon those who share his faith. Not merely were his spiritual predecessors subjected to a persecution borne with the noblest and least self-assertive constancy, simply in consequence of what is now known to all historical students to have been the entirely false charge that the plot emanated from, or was approved by the English Roman Catholics as a body, but this false belief prevailed so widely that it must have hindered, to no slight extent, the spread of that organisation which he regards as having been set forth by divine institution for the salvation of mankind. If Father Gerard has gone farther than this, and has attempted to show that even the handful of Catholics who took part in the plot were more sinned against than sinning, I, for one, am not inclined to condemn him very harshly, even if I am forced to repudiate alike his method and his conclusions.

Erroneous as I hold them, Father Gerard’s conclusions at least call for patient inquiry. Up to this time critics have urged that parts at least of the public declarations of the Government were inconsistent with the evidence, and have even pointed to deliberate falsification. Father Gerard is, as far as I know, the first to go a step farther, and to argue that much of the evidence itself has been tampered with, on the ground that it is inconsistent with physical facts, so that things cannot possibly have happened as they are said to have happened in confessions attributed to the conspirators themselves. I can only speak for myself when I say that after reading much hostile criticism of Father Gerard’s book—and I would especially refer to a most able review of it, so far as negative criticism can go, in the Edinburgh Review of January last—I did not feel that all difficulties had been removed, or that without further investigation I could safely maintain my former attitude towards the traditional story. It is, indeed, plain, as the Edinburgh Review has shown, that Father Gerard is unversed in the methods of historical inquiry which have guided recent scholars. Yet, for all that, he gives us hard nuts to crack; and, till they are cracked, the story of Gunpowder Plot cannot be allowed to settle down in peace.

It seems strange to find a writer so regardless of what is, in these days, considered the first canon of historical inquiry, that evidence worth having must be almost entirely the evidence of contemporaries who are in a position to know something about that which they assert. It is true that this canon must not be received pedantically. Tradition is worth something, at all events when it is not too far removed from its source. If a man whose character for truthfulness stands high, tells me that his father, also believed to be truthful, seriously informed him that he had seen a certain thing happen, I should be much more likely to believe that it was so than if a person, whom I knew to be untruthful, informed me that he had himself witnessed something at the present day. The historian is not bound, as the lawyer is, to reject hearsay evidence, because it is his business to ascertain the truth of individual assertions, whilst the lawyer has to think of the bearing of the evidence not merely on the case of the prisoner in the dock, but on an unrestricted number of possible prisoners, many of whom would be unjustly condemned if hearsay evidence were admitted. The historian is, however, bound to remember that evidence grows weaker with each link of the chain. The injunction, “Always leave a story better than you found it,” is in accordance with the facts of human nature. Each reporter inevitably accentuates the side of the narrative which strikes his fancy, and drops some other part which interests him less. The rule laid down by the late Mr. Spedding, “When a thing is asserted as a fact, always ask who first reported it, and what means he had of knowing the truth,” is an admirable corrective of loose traditional stories.

A further test has to be applied by each investigator for himself. When we have ascertained, as far as possible, on what evidence our knowledge of an alleged fact rests, we have to consider the inherent probability of the allegation. Is the statement about it in accordance with the general workings of human nature, or with the particular working of the nature of the persons to whom the action in question is ascribed? Father Gerard, for instance, lavishly employs this test. Again and again be tells us that such and such a statement is incredible, because, amongst other reasons, the people about whom it was made could not possibly have acted in the way ascribed to them. If I say in any of these cases that it appears to me probable that they did so act, it is merely one individual opinion against another. There is no mathematical certainty on either side. All we can respectively do is to set forth the reasons which incline us to one opinion or another, and leave the matter to others to judge as they see fit.

It will be necessary hereafter to deal at length with Father Gerard’s attack upon the evidence, hitherto accepted as conclusive, of the facts of the plot. A short space may be allotted to the reasons for rejecting his preliminary argument, that it was the opinion of some contemporaries, and of some who lived in a later generation, that Salisbury contrived the plot in part, if not altogether. Does he realise, how difficult it is to prove such a thing by any external evidence whatever? If hearsay evidence can be taken as an argument of probability, and, in some cases, of strong probability, it is where some one material fact is concerned. For instance, I am of opinion that it is very likely that the story of Cromwell’s visit to the body of Charles I. on the night after the King’s execution is true, though the evidence is only that Spence heard it from Pope, and Pope heard it, mediately or immediately, from Southampton, who, as is alleged, saw the scene with his own eyes. It is very different when we are concerned with evidence as to an intention necessarily kept secret, and only exhibited by overt acts in such form as tampering with documents, suggesting false explanation of evidence, and so forth. A rumour that Salisbury got up the plot is absolutely worthless; a rumour that he forged a particular instrument would be worth examining, because it might have proceeded from some one who had seen him do it.

For these reasons I must regard the whole of Father Gerard’s third chapter on ‘The Opinion of Contemporaries and Historians’ as absolutely worthless. To ask Mr. Spedding’s question, ‘What means had they of knowing the truth?’ is quite sufficient to condemn the so-called evidence. Professor Brewer, Lodge, and the author of the ‘Annals of England,’[2] to whose statements Father Gerard looks for support, all wrote in the nineteenth century, and had no documents before them which we are unable to examine for ourselves. Nor is reliance to be placed on the statements of Father John Gerard, because though he is a contemporary witness he had no more knowledge of Salisbury’s actions than any indifferent person, and had far less knowledge of the evidence than we ourselves possess. Bishop Talbot, again, we are told, asserted, in 1658, ‘that Cecil was the contriver, or at least the fomenter, of [the plot],’ because it ‘was testified by one of his own domestic gentlemen, who advertised a certain Catholic, by name Master Buck, two months before, of a wicked design his master had against Catholics.’[3] Was Salisbury such an idiot as to inform his ‘domestic gentleman’ that he had made up his mind to invent Gunpowder Plot? What may reasonably be supposed to have happened—on the supposition that Master Buck reported the occurrence accurately—is that Salisbury had in familiar talk disclosed, what was no secret, his animosity against the Catholics, and his resolution to keep them down. Even the Puritan, Osborne, it seems, thought the discovery ‘a neat device of the Treasurer’s, he being very plentiful in such plots’; and the ‘Anglican Bishop,’ Goodman, writes, that ‘the great statesman had intelligence of all this, and because he would show his service to the State, he would first contrive and then discover a treason, and the more odious and hateful the treason were, his service would be the greater and the more acceptable.’[4] Father Grene again, in a letter written in 1666, says that Bishop Usher was divers times heard to say ‘that if the papists knew what he knew, the blame of the Gunpowder Treason would not be with them.’ “In like manner,” adds Father Gerard, citing a book published in 1673, “we find it frequently asserted, on the authority of Lord Cobham and others, that King James himself, when he had time to realise the truth of the matter, was in the habit of speaking of the Fifth of November as ‘Cecil’s holiday.’”[5]

Lord Cobham (Richard Temple) was created a peer in 1669, so that the story is given on very second-hand evidence indeed. The allegation about Usher, even if true, is not to the point. We are all prepared now to say as much as Usher is represented as saying. The blame of the Gunpowder Treason does not lie on ‘the papists.’ It lies, at the most, on a small body of conspirators, and even in their case, the Government must bear a share of it, not because it invented or encouraged the plot, but because, by the reinforcement of the penal laws, it irritated ardent and excitable natures past endurance. If we had Usher’s actual words before us we should know whether he meant more than this. At present we are entirely in the dark. As for the evidence of Goodman and Osborne, it proves no more than this, that there were rumours about to the effect that the plot was got up by Salisbury. Neither Osborne nor Goodman are exactly the authorities which stand high with a cautious inquirer, and they had neither of them any personal acquaintance with the facts. Yet we may fairly take it from them that rumours damaging to Salisbury were in circulation. Is it, however, necessary to prove this? It was inevitable that it should be so. Granted a Government which conducted its investigations in secret, and which when it saw fit to publish documents occasionally mutilated them to serve its own ends; granted, too, a system of trial which gave little scope to the prisoner to bring out the weakness of the prosecution, while it allowed evidence to be produced which might have been extracted under torture, and what was to be expected but that some people, in complete ignorance of the facts, should, whenever any very extraordinary charge was made, assert positively that the whole of the accusation had been invented by the Government for political purposes?

Once, indeed, Father Gerard proffers evidence which appears to bring the accusation which he has brought against Salisbury nearer home. He produces certain notes by an anonymous correspondent of Anthony Wood, preserved in Fulman’s collection in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

“These remarkable notes, he tells us,[6] have been seen by Fulman, who inserted in the margin various questions and objections, to which the writer always supplied definite replies. In the following version this supplementary information is incorporated in the body of his statement, being distinguished by italics.”[7]

The paper is as follows:—

“I should be glad to understand what your friend driveth at about the Fifth of November. It was without all peradventure a State plot. I have collected many pregnant circumstances concerning it.

“’Tis certain that the last Earl of Salisbury[8] confessed to William Lenthall it was his father’s contrivance; which Lenthall soon after told one Mr. Webb (John Webb, Esq.), a person of quality, and his kinsman, yet alive.

“Sir Henry Wotton says, ’twas usual with Cecil to create plots that he might have the honour of the discovery, or to such effect.

“The Lord Monteagle knew there was a letter to be sent to him before it came. (Known by Edmund Church, Esq., his confidant.)

“Sir Everard Digby’s sons were both knighted soon after, and Sir Kenelm would often say it was a State design to disengage the king of his promise to the Pope and the King of Spain to indulge the Catholics if ever he came to be king here; and somewhat to his[9] purpose was found in the Lord Wimbledon’s papers after his death.

“Mr. Vowell, who was executed in the Rump time, did also affirm it so.

“Catesby’s man (George Bartlet) on his death-bed confessed his master went to Salisbury House several nights before the discovery, and was always brought privately in at a back door.”

Father Gerard, it is true, does not lay very great stress on this evidence; but neither does he subject it to the criticism to which it is reasonably open. What is to be thought, for instance, of the accuracy of a writer, who states that ‘Sir Everard Digby’s two sons were both knighted soon after,’ when, as a matter of fact, the younger, Kenelm, was not knighted till 1623, and the elder, John, not till 1635? Neither Sir Kenelm’s alleged talk, nor that of Wotton and Vowell, prove anything. On the statement about Catesby I shall have something to say later, and, as will be seen, I am quite ready to accept what is said about Monteagle. The most remarkable allegation in the paper is that relating to the second Earl of Salisbury. In the first place it may be noted that the story is produced long after the event. As the words imply that Lenthall was dead when they were written down, and as his death occurred in 1681, they relate to an event which occurred at least seventy-six years before the story took the shape in which it here reaches us. The second Earl of Salisbury, we are told, informed Lenthall that the plot was ‘his father’s contrivance,’ and Lenthall told Webb. Are we quite sure that the story has not been altered in the telling? Such a very little change would be sufficient. If the second Earl had only said, “People talked about my father having contrived the plot,” there would be nothing to object to. If we cannot conceive either Lenthall or Webb being guilty of ‘leaving the story better than they found it,’—though Wood, no doubt a prejudiced witness, says that Lenthall was ‘the grand braggadocio and liar of the age in which he lived’[10]—our anonymous and erudite friend who perpetrated that little blunder about the knighthood of Sir Everard Digby’s sons was quite capable of the feat. The strongest objection against the truth of the assertion, however, lies in its inherent improbability. Whatever else a statesman may communicate to his son, we may be sure that he does not confide to him such appalling guilt as this. A man who commits forgery, and thereby sends several innocent fellow creatures to torture and death, would surely not unburden his conscience to one of his own children. Maxima debetur pueris reverentia. Moreover the second Earl, who was only twenty-one years of age at his father’s death, was much too dull to be an intellectual companion for him, and therefore the less likely to invite an unprecedented confidence.

It is not only on the reception of second-hand evidence that I find myself at variance with Father Gerard. I also object to his criticism as purely negative. He holds that the evidence in favour of the traditional story breaks down, but he has nothing to substitute for it. He has not made up his mind whether Salisbury invented the whole plot or part of it, or merely knew of its existence, and allowed its development till a fitting time arrived for its suppression. Let me not be misunderstood. I do not for an instant complain of a historian for honestly avowing that he has not sufficient evidence to warrant a positive conclusion. What I do complain of is, that Father Gerard has not started any single hypothesis wherewith to test the evidence on which he relies, and has thereby neglected the most potent instrument of historical investigation. When a door-key is missing, the householder does not lose time in deploring the intricacy of the lock, he tries every key at his disposal to see whether it will fit the wards, and only sends for the locksmith when he finds that his own keys are useless. So it is with historical inquiry, at least in cases such as that of the Gunpowder Plot, where we have a considerable mass of evidence before us. Try, if need be, one hypothesis after another—Salisbury’s guilt, his connivance, his innocence, or what you please. Apply them to the evidence, and when one fails to unlock the secret, try another. Only when all imaginable keys have failed have you a right to call the public to witness your avowal of incompetence to solve the riddle.

At all events, this is the course which I intend to pursue. My first hypothesis is that the traditional story is true—cellar, mine, the Monteagle letter and all. I cannot be content with merely negativing Father Gerard’s inferences. I am certain that if this hypothesis of mine be false, it will be found to jar somewhere or another with established facts. In that case we must try another key. Of course there must be some ragged ends to the story—some details which must be left in doubt; but I shall ask my readers to watch narrowly whether the traditional story meets with any obstacles inconsistent with its substantial truth.

Before proceeding further, it will be well to remind my readers what the so-called traditional story is—or, rather, the story which has been told by writers who have in the present century availed themselves of the manuscript treasures now at our disposal, and which are for the most part in the Public Record Office. With this object, I cannot do better than borrow the succinct narrative of the Edinburgh Reviewer.[11]

Early in 1604, the three men, Robert Catesby, John Wright, and Thomas Winter, meeting in a house at Lambeth, resolved on a Powder Plot, though, of course, only in outline. By April they had added to their number Wright’s brother-in-law, Thomas Percy, and Guy Fawkes, a Yorkshire man of respectable family, but actually a soldier of fortune, serving in the Spanish army in the Low Countries, who was specially brought over to England as a capable and resolute man. Later on they enlisted Wright’s brother Christopher; Winter’s brother Robert; Robert Keyes, and a few more; but all, with the exception of Thomas Bates, Catesby’s servant, men of family, and for the most part of competent fortune, though Keyes is said to have been in straitened circumstances, and Catesby to have been impoverished by a heavy fine levied on him as a recusant.[12] Percy, a second cousin of the Earl of Northumberland, then captain of the Gentleman Pensioners, was admitted by him into that body in—it is said—an irregular manner, his relationship to the earl passing in lieu of the usual oath of fidelity. The position gave him some authority and license near the Court, and enabled him to hire a house, or part of a house, adjoining the House of Lords. From the cellar of this house they proposed to burrow under the House of Lords; to place there a large quantity of powder, and to blow up the whole when the King and his family were there assembled at the opening of Parliament. On December 11, 1604, they began to dig in the cellar, and after a fortnight’s labour, having come to a thick wall, they left off work and separated for Christmas.

Early in January they began at the wall, which they found to be extremely hard, so that, after working for about two months,[13] they had not got more than half way through it. They then learned that a cellar actually under the House of Lords, and used as a coal cellar, was to be let; and as it was most suitable for their design, Percy hired it as though for his own use. The digging was stopped, and powder, to the amount of thirty-six barrels, was brought into the cellar, where it was stowed under heaps of coal or firewood, and so remained under the immediate care of Guy Fawkes,[14] till, on the night of November 4, 1605—the opening of Parliament being fixed for the next day—Sir Thomas Knyvet, with a party of men, was ordered to examine the cellar. He met Fawkes coming out of it, arrested him, and on a close search, found the powder, of which a mysterious warning had been conveyed to Lord Monteagle a few days before. On the news of this discovery the conspirators scattered, but by different roads rejoined each other in Warwickshire, whence, endeavouring to raise the country, they rode through Worcestershire, and were finally shot or taken prisoners at Holbeche in Staffordshire.

It is this story that I now propose to compare with the evidence. When any insuperable difficulties appear, it will be time to try another key. To reach the heart of the matter, let us put aside for the present all questions arising out of the alleged discovery of the plot through the letter received by Monteagle, and let us take it that Guy Fawkes has already been arrested, brought into the King’s presence, and, on the morning of the 5th, is put through his first examination.

CHAPTER II

GUY FAWKES’S STORY

First of all, let us restrict ourselves to the story told by Guy Fawkes himself in the five[15] examinations to which he was subjected previously to his being put to the torture on November 9, and to the letters, proclamations, &c., issued by the Government during the four days commencing with the 5th. From these we learn, not only that Fawkes’s account of the matter gradually developed, but that the knowledge of the Government also developed; a fact which fits in very well with the ‘traditional story,’ but which is hardly to be expected if the Government account of the affair was cut-and-dried from the first.

Fawkes’s first examination took place on the 5th, and was conducted by Chief Justice Popham and Attorney-General Coke. It is true that only a copy has reached us, but it is a copy taken for Coke’s use, as is shown by the headings of each paragraph inserted in the margin in his own hand. It is therefore out of the question that Salisbury, if he had been so minded, would have been able to falsify it. Each page has the signature (in copy) of ‘Jhon Jhonson,’ the name by which Fawkes chose to be known.

The first part of the examination turns upon Fawkes’s movements abroad, showing that the Government had already acquired information that he had been beyond sea. Fawkes showed no reluctance to speak of his own proceedings in the Low Countries, or to give the names of persons he had met there, and who were beyond the reach of his examiners. As to his movements after his return to England he was explicit enough so far as he was himself concerned, and also about Percy, whose servant he professed himself to be, and whose connection with the hiring of the house could not be concealed. Fawkes stated that after coming back to England he ‘came to the lodging near the Upper House of Parliament,’ and ‘that Percy hired the house of Whynniard for 12l. rent, about a year and a half ago’; that his master, before his own going abroad, i.e., before Easter, 1605, ‘lay in the house about three or four times.’ Further, he confessed ‘that about Christmas last,’ i.e., Christmas, 1604, ‘he brought in the night time gunpowder [to the cellar under the Upper House of Parliament.]’[16] Afterwards he told how he covered the powder with faggots, intending to blow up the King and the Lords; and, being pressed how he knew that the King would be in the House on the 5th, said he knew it only from general report and by the making ready of the King’s barge; but he would have ‘blown up the Upper House whensoever the King was there.’ He further acknowledged that there was more than one person concerned in the conspiracy, and said he himself had promised not to reveal it, but denied that he had taken the sacrament on his promise. Where the promise was given he could not remember, except that it was in England. He refused to accuse his partners, saying that he himself had provided the powder, and defrayed the cost of his journey beyond sea, which was only undertaken ‘to see the country, and to pass away the time.’ When he went, he locked up the powder and took the key with him, and ‘one Gibbons’ wife, who dwells thereby, had the charge of the residue of the house.’

Such is that part of the story told by Fawkes which concerns us at present. Of course there are discrepancies enough with other statements given later on, and Father Gerard makes the most of them. What he does not observe is that it is in the nature of the case that these discrepancies should exist. It is obvious that Fawkes, who, as subsequent experience shows, was no coward, had made up his mind to shield as far as possible his confederates, and to take the whole of the blame upon himself. He says, for instance, that Percy had only lain in the house for three or four days before Easter, 1605; a statement, as subsequent evidence proved, quite untrue; he pretends not to know, except from rumour and the preparations of the barge, that the King was coming to the House of Lords on the 5th, a statement almost certainly untrue. In order not to criminate others, and especially any priest, he denies having taken the Sacrament on his promise, which is also untrue. What is more noticeable is that he makes no mention of the mine, about which so much was afterwards heard, evidently—so at least I read the evidence—because he did not wish to bring upon the stage those who had worked at it. If indeed the passage which I have placed in square brackets be accepted as evidence, Fawkes did more than keep silence upon the mine. He must have made a positive assertion, soon afterwards found to be untrue, that the cellar was hired several months before it really was.[17] This passage is, however, inserted in a different hand from the rest of the document. My own belief is that it gives a correct account of a statement made by the prisoner, but omitted by the clerk who made the copy for Coke, and inserted by some other person. Nobody that I can think of had the slightest interest in adding the words, whilst they are just what Fawkes might be expected to say if he wanted to lead his examiners off the scent. At all events, even if these words be left out of account, it must be admitted that Fawkes said nothing about the existence of a mine.

Though Fawkes kept silence as to the mine, he did not keep silence on the desperate character of the work on which he had been engaged. “And,” runs the record, “he confesseth that when the King had come to the Parliament House this present day, and the Upper House had been sitting, he meant to have fired the match and have fled for his own safety before the powder had taken fire, and confesseth that if he had not been apprehended this last night, he had blown up the Upper House, when the King, Lords, Bishops, and others had been there, and saith that he spake for [and provided][18] those bars and crows of iron, some in one place, some in another, in London, lest it should be suspected, and saith that he had some of them in or about Gracious Street.”[19]

After this it will little avail Father Gerard to produce arguments in support of the proposition that the story of the plot was contrived by the Government as long as this burning record is allowed to stand. Fawkes here clearly takes the whole terrible design, with the exception of the incident of the mine, on his own shoulders. He may have lied to save his friends; he certainly would not lie to save Salisbury.

So far, however, there is no proof that Salisbury was not long ago cognisant of the plot through one of the active conspirators. Yet, in that case, it might be supposed that the accounts that he gave of his discoveries would be less dependent than they were on the partial revelations which came in day by day. There is, however, no hint of superior knowledge in the draft of a letter intended to be sent by Salisbury to Sir Thomas Parry, the English ambassador in Paris, and dated on November 6, the day after that on which Fawkes’s first examination was taken:

Sir Thomas Parry, it hath pleased Almighty God, out of his singular goodness, to bring to light the most cruel and detestable practice against the person of his Majesty and the whole estate of this realm, that ever was conceived by the heart of man at any time or in any place whatsoever, by which practice there was intended not only the extirpation of the King’s Majesty and his issue royal, but the whole subversion and downfal of this estate, the plot being to take away at an instant the King, Queen, Prince, Council, Nobility, Clergy, Judges, and the principal gentlemen of this realm, as they should have been yesterday altogether assembled at the Parliament House, in Westminster, the 5th of November, being Tuesday. The means how to have compassed so great an act, was not to be performed by strength of men or outward violence, for that might have be espied and prevented in time; but by a secret conveying of a great quantity of gunpowder into a vault under the Upper House of Parliament, and so to have blown up all at a clap, if God out of his mercy and his just revenge against so great an abomination had not destined it to be discovered, though very miraculously even some twelve hours before the matter should have been put into execution. The person that was the principal undertaker of it, is one Johnson, a Yorkshire man, and servant to one Thomas Percy, a gentleman pensioner to his Majesty, and a near kinsman and a special confidant to the Earl of Northumberland. This Percy had about a year and a half ago hired a part of Whynniard’s house in the old palace, from whence he had access into this vault to lay his wood and coal, and as it seemeth now, taken this place of purpose to work some mischief in a fit time. He is a Papist by profession, and so is this his man Johnson, a desperate fellow, whom of late years he took into his service.

Into this vault Johnson had, at sundry times, very privately conveyed a great quantity of powder, and therewith filled two hogsheads and some thirty-two small barrels; all which he had cunningly covered with great store of billets and faggots, and on Tuesday[20] at midnight, as he was busy to prepare the things for execution was apprehended in the place itself with a false lantern, booted and spurred.[21]

There is not much knowledge here beyond what Salisbury had learnt from Fawkes’s own statement with all its deceptions. Nor, if there had been any such knowledge, was it in any way revealed by the actions of the Government on the 5th or on the morning of the 6th. On the 5th a proclamation was issued for the apprehension of Percy alone.[22] On the same day Archbishop Bancroft forwarded to Salisbury a story, afterward known to be untrue, that Percy had been seen riding towards Croydon; whilst Popham sent another untrue story that he had been seen riding towards Gravesend.[23] A letter from Waad, the Lieutenant of the Tower, of the same date, revealed the truth that Percy had escaped northwards. Of course, Percy’s house was searched for papers, but those discovered were of singularly little interest, and bore no relation to the plot.[24] An examination of a servant of Ambrose Rokewood, a Catholic gentleman afterwards known to have been involved in the plot, and of the landlady of the house in London in which Rokewood had been lodging, brought out the names of persons who had been in his company, some of whom were afterwards found to be amongst the conspirators; but there was nothing in these examinations to connect them with the plot, and there is no reason to suppose that they were prompted by anything more than a notion that it would generally be worth while to trace the movements of a noted Catholic gentleman. On the same day a letter from Chief Justice Popham shows that inquiries were being directed into the movements of other Catholics, and amongst them Christopher Wright, Keyes, and Winter; but the tone of the letter shows that Popham was merely acting upon general suspicion, and had no special information on which to work.[25] Up to the morning of November 6th, the action of Government was that of men feeling in the dark, so far as anything not revealed by Fawkes was concerned.

Commissioners were now appointed to conduct the investigation further. They were—Nottingham, Suffolk, Devonshire, Worcester, Northampton, Salisbury, Mar, and Popham, with Attorney-General Coke in attendance.[26] This was hardly a body of men who would knowingly cover an intrigue of Salisbury’s:—Worcester is always understood to have been professedly a Catholic, Northampton was certainly one, though he attended the King’s service, whilst Suffolk was friendly towards the Catholics;[27] and Nottingham, if he is no longer to be counted amongst them,[28] was at least not long afterwards a member of the party which favoured an alliance with Spain, and therefore a policy of toleration towards the Catholics. It is not the least of the objections to the view which Father Gerard has taken, that it would have been impossible for Salisbury to falsify examinations of prisoners without the connivance of these men.

Before five of these Commissioners—Nottingham, Suffolk, Devonshire, Northampton, and Salisbury—Fawkes was examined a second time on the forenoon of the 6th. In some way the Government had found out that Percy had had a new door made in the wall leading to the cellar, and they now drew from Fawkes an untrue statement that it was put in about the middle of Lent, that is to say, early in March 1605.[29] They had also discovered a pair of brewer’s slings, by which barrels were usually carried between two men, and they pressed Fawkes hard to say who was his partner in removing the barrels of gunpowder. He began by denying that he had had a partner at all, but finally answered that ‘he cannot discover the party, but’—i.e. lest—‘he shall bring him in question.’ He also said that he had forgotten where he slept on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday in the week before his arrest.[30]

Upon this James himself intervened, submitting to the Commissioners a series of questions with the object of drawing out of the prisoner a true account of himself, and of his relations to Percy. A letter had been found on Fawkes when he was taken, directed not to Johnson, but to Fawkes, and this amongst other things had raised the King’s suspicions. In his third examination, on the afternoon of the 6th, in the presence of Northampton, Devonshire, Nottingham, and Salisbury, Fawkes gave a good deal of information, more or less true, about himself; and, whilst still maintaining that his real name was Johnson, said that the letter, which was written by a Mrs. Bostock in Flanders, was addressed to him by another name ‘because he called himself Fawkes,’ that is to say, because he had acquired the name of Fawkes as an alias.

‘If he will not otherwise confess,’ the King had ended by saying, ‘the gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur.’ To us living in the nineteenth century these words are simply horrible. As a Scotchman, however, James had long been familiar with the use of torture as an ordinary means of legal investigation, whilst even in England, though unknown to the law, that is to say, to the practice of the ordinary courts of justice, it had for some generations been used not infrequently by order of the Council to extract evidence from a recalcitrant witness, though, according to Bacon, not for the purpose of driving him to incriminate himself. Surely, if the use of torture was admissible at all, this was a case for its employment. The prisoner had informed the Government that he had been at the bottom of a plot of the most sanguinary kind, and had acknowledged by implication that there were fellow-conspirators whom he refused to name. If, indeed, Father Gerard’s view of the case, that the Government, or at least Salisbury, had for some time known all about the conspiracy, nothing—not even the Gunpowder Plot itself—could be more atrocious than the infliction of torments on a fellow-creature to make him reveal a secret already in their possession. If, however, the evidence I have adduced be worth anything, this was by no means the case. What it shows is, that on the afternoon of the 6th all that the members of the Government were aware of was that an unknown number of conspirators were at large—they knew not where—and might at that very moment be appealing—they knew not with what effect—to Catholic landowners and their tenants, who were, without doubt, exasperated by the recent enforcement of the penal laws. We may, if we please, condemn the conduct of the Government which had brought the danger of a general Catholic rising within sight. We cannot deny that, at that particular moment, they had real cause of alarm. At all events, no immediate steps were taken to put this part of the King’s orders in execution. Some little information, indeed, was coming in from other witnesses. In his first examination, on November 5, Fawkes had stated that in his absence he locked up the powder, and ‘one Gibbons’ wife who dwells thereby had the charge of the residue of the house.’ An examination of her husband on the 5th, however, only elicited that he, being a porter, had with two others carried 3,000 billets into the vault.[31] On the 6th Ellen, the wife of Andrew Bright, stated that Percy’s servant had, about the beginning of March, asked her to let the vault to his master, and that she had consented to abandon her tenancy of it if Mrs. Whynniard, from whom she held it, would consent. Mrs. Whynniard’s consent having been obtained, Mrs. Bright, or rather Mrs. Skinner—she being a widow remarried subsequently to Andrew Bright[32]—received 2l. for giving up the premises. The important point in this evidence is that the date of March 1605, given as that on which Percy entered into possession of the cellar, showed that Fawkes’s statement that he had brought powder into the cellar at Christmas 1604 could not possibly be true. On the 7th, Mrs. Whynniard confirmed Mrs. Bright’s statement, and also stated that, a year earlier, in March 1604, ‘Mr. Percy began to labour very earnestly with this examinate and her husband to have the lodging by the Parliament House, which one Mr. Henry Ferris, of Warwickshire, had long held before, and having obtained the said Mr. Ferris’s good will to part from it after long suit by himself and great entreaty of Mr. Carleton, Mr. Epsley,[33] and other gentlemen belonging to the Earl of Northumberland, affirming him to be a very honest gentleman, and that they could not have a better tenant, her husband and she were contented to let him have the said lodging at the same rent Mr. Ferris paid for it.’[34] Mrs. Whynniard had plainly never heard of the mine; and that the Government was in equal ignorance is shown by the endorsement on the agreement of Ferris, or rather Ferrers, to make over his tenancy to Percy. ‘The bargain between Ferris and Percy for the bloody cellar, found in Winter’s lodging.’ Winter’s name had been under consideration for some little time, and doubtless the discovery of this paper was made on, or more probably before, the 7th. The Government, having as yet nothing but Fawkes’s evidence to go upon, connected the hiring of the house with the hiring of the cellar, and at least showed no signs of suspecting anything more.

On the same day, the 7th, something was definitely heard of the proceedings of the other plotters, who had either gathered at Dunchurch for the hunting-match, or had fled from London to join them, and a proclamation was issued for the arrest of Percy, Catesby, Rokewood, Thomas Winter, Edward[35] Grant, John and Christopher Wright, and Catesby’s servant, Robert Ashfield. They were charged with assembling in troops in the counties of Warwick and Worcester, breaking into stables and seizing horses.[36] Fawkes, too, was on that day subjected to a fourth examination.[37] Not very much that was new was extracted from him. He acknowledged that his real name was Guy Fawkes, that—which he had denied before—he had received the Sacrament not to discover any of the conspirators, and also that there had been at first five persons privy to the plot, and afterwards five or six more ‘were generally acquainted that an action was to be performed for the Catholic cause, and saith that he doth not know that they were acquainted with the whole conspiracy.’ Being asked whether Catesby, the two Wrights, Winter, or Tresham were privy, he refused to accuse any one.

The increase of the information received by the Government left its trace on Salisbury’s correspondence. Whether the letter to Parry, from which a quotation has already been given, was sent away on the 6th, is unknown; but it was copied and completed, with sundry alterations, for Cornwallis and Edmondes, the ambassadors at Madrid and Brussels, and signed by Salisbury on the 7th, though it was kept back and sent off with two postscripts on the 9th, and it is likely enough that the letter to Parry was treated in the same way. One of the alterations concerns Fawkes’s admission that he had taken the Sacrament as well as an oath to keep the secret. What is of greater significance is, that there is absolutely no mention of a mine in the letter. If it had really been written on the 9th, this silence would have gone far to justify Father Gerard’s suspicions, as the existence of the mine was certainly known to the Government at that date. On the 7th the Government knew nothing of it.[38]

That Fawkes had already been threatened with torture is known,[39] and it may easily be imagined that the threats had been redoubled after this last unsatisfactory acknowledgment. On the morning of the 8th, however, Waad, who was employed to worm out his secrets, reported that little was to be expected. “I find this fellow,” he wrote, “who this day is in a most stubborn and perverse humour, as dogged as if he were possessed. Yesternight I had persuaded him to set down a clear narration of all his wicked plots from the first entering to the same, to the end they pretended, with the discourses and projects that were thought upon amongst them, which he undertook [to do] and craved time this night to bethink him the better; but this morning he hath changed his mind and is [so] sullen and obstinate as there is no dealing with him.”[40]

The sight of the examiners, together with the sight of the rack,[41] changed Fawkes’s mind to some extent. He was resolved that nothing but actual torture should wring from him the names of his fellow plotters, who so far as was known in London were still at large.[42] He prepared himself, however, to reveal the secrets of the plot so far as was consistent with the concealment of the names of those concerned in it. His fifth examination on the 8th, the last before the one taken under torture on the 9th, gives to the inquirer into the reality of the plot all that he wants to know.

“He confesseth,” so the tale begins, “that a practice was first broken unto him against his Majesty for the Catholic cause, and not invented or propounded by himself, and this was first propounded unto him about Easter last was twelvemonth, beyond the seas in the Low Countries, by an English layman,[43] and that Englishman came over with him in his company, into England, and they two and three more[44] were the first five mentioned in the former examination. And they five resolving to do somewhat for the Catholic cause (a vow being first taken by all of them for secrecy), one of the other three[45] propounded to perform it with powder, and resolved that the place should be (where this action should be performed and justice done) in or near the place of the sitting of the Parliament, wherein Religion had been unjustly suppressed. This being resolved, the manner of it was as followeth:—

“First they hired the house at Westminster, of one Ferres, and having his house they sought then[46] to make a mine under the Upper House of Parliament, and they began to make the mine in or about the 11 of December, and they five first entered into the works, and soone after took an other[47] to[48] them, having first sworn him and taken the sacrament for secrecy; and when they came to the wall (that was about three yards thick) and found it a matter of great difficulty, they took to them an other in like manner, with oath and sacrament as aforesaid;[49] all which seven were gentlemen of name and blood, and not any[50] was employed in or about this action (no, not so much as in digging and mining) that was not a gentleman. And having wrought to the wall before Christmas, they ceased until after the holidays, and the day before Christmas (having a mass of earth that came out of the mine), they carried it into the garden of the said house, and after Christmas they wrought the wall till Candlemas, and wrought the wall half through; and saith that all the time while the other[51] wrought, he stood as sentinel, to descry any man that came near, and when any man came near to the place upon warning given by him, they ceased until they had notice to proceed from him, and sayeth that they seven all lay in the house, and had shot and powder, and they all resolved to die in that place, before they yielded or were taken.

“And, as they were working, they heard a rushing in the cellar, which grew by one[52] Bright’s selling of his coals,[53] whereupon this examinant, fearing they had been discovered, went into the cellar, and viewed the cellar[54] and perceiving the commodity thereof for their purpose, and understanding how it would be letten,[55] his master, Mr. Percy, hired the cellar for a year for 4l. rent; and confesseth that after Christmas twenty barrels of powder were brought by themselves to a house, which they had on the Bankside in hampers, and from that house removed[56] the powder to the said house near the Upper House of Parliament; and presently, upon hiring the cellar they themselves removed the powder into the cellar, and covered the same with fagots which they had before laid into the cellar.

“After, about Easter, he went into the Low Countries (as he before hath declared in his former examination) and that the true purpose of his going over was, lest, being a dangerous man, he should be known and suspected, and in the mean time he left the key of the cellar with Mr. Percy, who, in his absence caused more billets to be laid into the cellar, as in his former examination he confessed, and returned about the end of August, or the beginning of September, and went again to the said house, near to the said cellar, and received the key of the cellar again of one of the five,[57] and then they brought in five or six barrels of powder more into the cellar, which also they covered with billets, saving four little barrels covered with fagots, and then this examinant went into the country about the end of September.

“It appeareth the powder was in the cellar placed as it was found the 5 of November, when the Lords came to prorogue the Parliament, and sayeth that he returned again to the said house near the cellar on Wednesday the 30 of October.

“He confesseth he was at the Earl of Montgomery’s marriage, but, as he sayeth, with no intention of evil having a sword about him, and was very near to his Majesty and the Lords there present.[58]

“Forasmuch as they knew not well how they should come by the person of the Duke Charles, being near London, where they had no forces (if he had not been also blown up) he confesseth that it was resolved among them that, the same day that this detestable act should have been performed, the same day should other of their confederacy have surprised the person of the Lady Elizabeth, and presently have proclaimed her Queen, to which purpose a proclamation was drawn, as well to avow and justify the action, as to have protested against the Union, and in no sort to have meddled with religion therein, and would have protested also against all strangers, and this proclamation should have been made in the name of the Lady Elizabeth.

“Being demanded why they did not surprise the King’s person, and draw him to the effecting of their purpose sayeth that so many must have been acquainted with such an action as it[59] would not have been kept secret.

“He confesseth that if their purpose had taken effect, until they had had power enough, they would not have avowed the deed to be theirs; but if their power (for their defence and safety) had been sufficient, they themselves would then[60] have taken it upon them. They meant also to have sent for the prisoners in the Tower to have come to them, of whom particularly they had some consultation.

“He confesseth that the place of rendezvous was in Warwickshire, and that armour was sent thither, but[61] the particular thereof[62] he knows not.

“He confesseth that they had consultation for the taking of the Lady Mary into their possession, but knew not how to come by her.

“And confesseth that provision was made by some of the conspiracy of some armour of proof this last summer for this action.

“He confesseth that the powder was bought by the common purse of the confederates.

Father Gerard, who has printed this examination in his Appendix,[64] styles it a draft, placing on the opposite pages the published confession of Guy Fawkes on November 17. That later confession, indeed, though embodying many passages of the earlier one, contains so many new statements, that it is a misapplication of words to speak of the one as the draft of the other. A probable explanation of the similarity is that when Fawkes was re-examined on the 17th, his former confession was produced, and he was required to supplement it with fresh information.

In one sense, indeed, the paper from which the examination of the 8th has been printed both by Father Gerard and myself, may be styled a draft, not of the examination of the 17th, but of a copy forwarded to Edmondes on the 14th.[65] The two passages crossed out and printed above[66] in italics have been omitted in the copy intended for the ambassadors. All other differences, except those of punctuation, have been given in my notes, and it will be seen that they are merely the changes of a copyist from whom absolute verbal accuracy was not required. Father Gerard, indeed, says that in the original of the so-called draft five paragraphs were ‘ticked off for omission.’ He may be right, but in Winter’s declaration of November 23, every paragraph is marked in the same way, and, at all events, not one of the five paragraphs is omitted in the copy sent to Edmondes.

In any other sense to call this paper a draft is to beg the whole question. What we want to know is whether it was a copy of the rough notes of the examination, signed by Fawkes himself, or a pure invention either of Salisbury or of the seven Commissioners and the Attorney-General. Curiously enough, one of the crossed out passages supplies evidence that the document is a genuine one. The first, indeed, proves nothing either way, and was, perhaps, left out merely because it was thought unwise to allow it to be known that the King had been so carelessly guarded that Percy had been admitted to his presence with a sword by his side. The second contains an intimation that the conspirators did not intend to rely only on a Catholic rising. They expected to have on their side Protestants who disliked the union with Scotland, and who were ready to protest ‘against all strangers,’ that is to say, against all Scots. We can readily understand that Privy Councillors, knowing as they did the line taken by the King in the matter of the union, would be unwilling to spread information of there being in England a Protestant party opposed to the union, not only of sufficient importance to be worth gaining, but so exasperated that even these gunpowder plotters could think it possible to win them to their side. Nor is this all. If it is difficult to conceive that the Commissioners could have allowed such a paragraph to go abroad, it is at least equally difficult to think of their inventing it. We may be sure that if Fawkes had not made the statement, no one of the examiners would ever have committed it to paper at all, and if the document is genuine in this respect, why is it not to be held genuine from beginning to end?

Father Gerard, indeed, objects to this view of the case that the document ‘is unsigned; the list of witnesses is in the same handwriting as the rest, and in no instance is a witness indicated by such a title as he would employ for his signature. Throughout this paper Fawkes is made to speak in the third person, and the names of accomplices to whom he refers are not given.’[67] All this is quite true, and unless I am much mistaken, are evidences for the genuineness of the document, not for its fabrication. If Salisbury had wished to palm off an invention of his own as a copy of a true confession by Fawkes, he surely would not have stuck at so small a thing as an alleged copy of the prisoner’s signature, nor is it to be supposed that the original signatures of the Commissioners would appear in what, in my contention, is a copy of a lost original. As for the titles Lord Admiral and Lord Chamberlain being used instead of their signatures, it was in accordance with official usage. A letter, written on January 21, 1604-5, by the Council to the Judges, bears nineteen names at the foot in the place where signatures are ordinarily found. The first six names are given thus:—‘L. Chancellor, L. Treasurer, L. Admirall, L. Chamberlaine, E. of Northumberland, E. of Worcester.’[68] Fawkes is made to speak in the third person in all the four preceding examinations, three of which bear his autograph signature. That the names of accomplices are not given is exactly what one might expect from a man of his courage. All through the five examinations he refused to break his oath not to reveal a name, except in the case of Percy in which concealment was impossible. It required the horrible torture of the 9th to wring a single name from him.

Moreover, Father Gerard further urges what he intends to be damaging to the view taken by me, that a set of questions formed by Coke upon the examination of the 7th, apparently for use on the 8th, is ‘not founded on information already obtained, but is, in fact, what is known as a “fishing document,” intended to elicit evidence of some kind.’[69] Exactly so! If Coke had to fish, casting his net as widely as Father Gerard correctly shows him to have done, it is plain that the Government had no direct knowledge to guide its inquiries. Father Gerard’s charge therefore resolves itself into this: that Salisbury not only deceived the public at large, but his brother-commissioners as well. Has he seriously thought out all that is involved in this theory? Salisbury, according to hypothesis, gets an altered copy of a confession drawn up, or else a confession purely invented by himself. The clerk who makes it is, of course, aware of what is being done, and also the second clerk,[70] who wrote out the further copy sent to Edmondes. Edmondes, at least, received the second copy, and there can be little doubt that other ambassadors received it also. How could Salisbury count on the life-long silence of all these? Salisbury, as the event proved, was not exactly loved by his colleagues, and if his brother-commissioners—every one of them men of no slight influence at Court—had discovered that their names had been taken in vain, it would not have been left to the rumour of the streets to spread the news that Salisbury had been the inventor of the plot. Nay, more than this. Father Gerard distinctly sets down the story of the mine as an impossible one, and therefore one which must have been fabricated by Salisbury for his own purposes. The allegation that there had been a mine was not subsequently kept in the dark. It was proclaimed on the house-tops in every account of the plot published to the world. And all the while, it seems, six out of these seven Commissioners, to say nothing of the Attorney-General, knew that it was all a lie—that Fawkes, when they examined him on the 8th, had really said nothing about it, and yet, neither in public, nor, so far as we know, in private—either in Salisbury’s lifetime or after his death—did they breathe a word of the wrong that had been done to them as well as to the conspirators!

CHAPTER III.

THE LATER DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE.

Having thus, I hope, established that the story of the mine and cellar is borne out by Fawkes’s own account, I proceed to examine into the objections raised by Father Gerard to the documentary evidence after November 8, the date of Fawkes’s last examination before he was subjected to torture. In the declaration, signed with his tortured hand on the 9th, before Coke, Waad and Forsett,[71] and acknowledged before the Commissioners on the 10th, Fawkes distinctly refers to the examination of the 8th. “The plot,” he says, “was to blow up the King with all the nobility about him in Parliament, as heretofore he hath declared, to which end, they proceeded as is set down in the examination taken (before the Lords of the Council Commissioners) yesternight.” Here, then, is distinct evidence that Fawkes acknowledged that the examination of the 8th had been taken in presence of the Commissioners, and thus negatives the theory that that examination was invented or altered by Salisbury, as these words came on the 10th under the eyes of the Commissioners themselves.[72]

The fact is, that the declaration of the 9th fits the examination of the 8th as a glove does a hand. On the 8th, before torture, Fawkes described what had been done, and gave the number of persons concerned in doing it. On the 9th he is required not to repeat what he had said before, but to give the missing names. This he now does. It was Thomas Winter who had fetched him from the Low Countries, having first communicated their design to a certain Owen.[73] The other three, who made up the original five, were Percy, Catesby, and John Wright. It was Gerard who had given them the Sacrament.[74] The other conspirators were Sir Everard Digby, Robert Keyes, Christopher Wright, Thomas[75] Grant, Francis Tresham, Robert Winter, and Ambrose Rokewood. The very order in which the names come perhaps shows that the Government had as yet a very hazy idea of the details of the conspiracy. The names of those who actually worked in the mine are scattered at hap-hazard amongst those of the men who merely countenanced the plot from a distance.

However this may be, the 9th, the day on which Fawkes was put to the torture, brought news to the Government that the fear of insurrection need no longer be entertained. It had been known before this that Fawkes’s confederates had met on the 5th at Dunchurch on the pretext of a hunting match,[76] and had been breaking open houses in Warwickshire and Worcestershire in order to collect arms. Yet so indefinite was the knowledge of the Council that, on the 8th, they offered a reward for the apprehension of Percy alone, without including any of the other conspirators.[77] On the evening of the 9th[78] they received a letter from Sir Richard Walsh, the Sheriff of Worcestershire:—

“We think fit,” he wrote, “with all speed to certify your Lordships of the happy success it hath pleased God to give us against the rebellious assembly in these parts. After such time as they had taken the horses from Warwick upon Tuesday night last,[79] they came to Mr. Robert Winter’s house to Huddington upon Wednesday night,[80] where—having entered—[they] armed themselves at all points in open rebellion. They passed from thence upon Thursday morning[81] unto Hewell—the Lord Windsor’s house—which they entered and took from thence by force great store of armour, artillery of the said Lord Windsor’s, and passed that night into the county of Staffordshire unto the house of one Stephen Littleton, Gentleman, called Holbeche, about two miles distant from Stourbridge whither we pursued, with the assistance of Sir John Foliot, Knight, Francis Ketelsby, Esquire, Humphrey Salway, Gentleman, Edmund Walsh, and Francis Conyers, Gentlemen, with few other gentlemen and the power and face of the country. We made against them upon Thursday morning,[81] and freshly pursued them until the next day,[82] at which time about twelve or one of the clock in the afternoon, we overtook them at the said Holbeche House—the greatest part of their retinue and some of the better sort being dispersed and fled before our coming, whereupon and after summons and warning first given and proclamation in his Highness’s name to yield and submit themselves—who refusing the same, we fired some part of the house and assaulted some part of the rebellious persons left in the said house, in which assault, one Mr. Robert Catesby is slain, and three others verily thought wounded to death whose names—as far as we can learn—are Thomas Percy, Gentleman, John Wright, and Christopher Wright Gentlemen, and these are apprehended and taken Thomas Winter Gentleman, John Grant Gentleman, Henry Morgan Gentleman, Ambrose Rokewood Gentleman, Thomas Ockley carpenter, Edmund Townsend servant to the said John Grant, Nicholas Pelborrow, servant unto the said Ambrose Rokewood, Edward Ockley carpenter, Richard Townsend servant to the said Robert Winter, Richard Day servant to the said Stephen Littleton, which said prisoners are in safe custody here, and so shall remain until your Honours good pleasures be further known. The rest of that rebellious assembly is dispersed, we have caused to be followed with fresh suite and hope of their speedy apprehension. We have also thought fit to send unto your Honours—according unto our duties—such letters as we have found about the parties apprehended; and so resting in all duty at your Honours’ further command, we take leave, from Stourbridge this Saturday morning, being the ixth of this instant November 1605.

“Your Honours’ most humble to be commanded,
“Rich. Walsh.”

Percy and the two Wrights died of their wounds, so that, in addition to Fawkes, Thomas Winter was the only one of the five original workers in the mine in the hands of the Government. Of the seven others who had been named in Fawkes’s confession of the 9th, Christopher Wright had been killed; Rokewood, Robert Winter, and Grant had been apprehended at Holbeche; Sir Everard Digby, Keyes, and Tresham were subsequently arrested, as was Bates a servant of Catesby.

That for some days the Government made no effort to get further information about the mine and the cellar cannot be absolutely proved, but nothing bearing on the subject has reached us except that, on the 14th, when a copy of Fawkes’s deposition of the 8th was forwarded to Edmondes, the names of the twelve chief conspirators are given, not as Fawkes gave them on the 9th, in two batches, but in three, Robert Winter and Christopher Wright being said to have joined after the first five, whilst Rokewood, Digby, Grant, Tresham, and Keyes are said to have been ‘privy to the practice of the powder but wrought not at the mine.’[83] As Keyes is the only one whose Christian name is not given, this list must have been copied from one now in the Record Office, in which this peculiarity is also found, and was probably drawn up on or about the 10th[84] from further information derived from Fawkes when he certified the confession dragged from him on the preceding day.[84]

What really seems to have been at this time on the minds of the investigators was the relationship of the Catholic noblemen to the plot. On the 11th Talbot of Grafton was sent for. On the 15th Lords Montague and Mordaunt were imprisoned in the Tower. On the 16th Mrs. Vaux and the wives of ten of the conspirators were committed to various aldermen and merchants of London.[85] When Fawkes was re-examined on the 16th,[86] by far the larger part of the answers elicited refer to the hints given, or supposed to have been given, to Catholic noblemen to absent themselves from Parliament on the 5th. Then comes a statement about Percy buying a watch for Fawkes on the night of the 4th and sending it ‘to him by Keyes at ten of the clock at night, because he should know how the time went away.’ The last paragraph alone bears upon the project itself. “He also saith he did not intend to set fire to the train [until] the King was come to the House, and then he purposed to do it with a piece of touchwood and with a match also, which were about him when he was apprehended on the 4th day of November at 11 of the clock at night that the powder might more surely take fire a quarter of an hour after.”

The words printed in italics are an interlineation in Coke’s hand. They evidently add nothing of the slightest importance to the evidence, and cannot have been inserted with any design to prejudice the prisoner or to carry conviction in quarters in which disbelief might be supposed to exist. Is not the simple explanation sufficient, that when the evidence was read over to the examinee, he added, either of his own motion or on further question, this additional information. If this explanation is accepted here, may it not also be accepted for other interlineations, such as that relating to the cellar in the first examination?[87]

That the examiners at this stage of the proceedings should not be eager to ask further questions about the cellar and the mine was the most natural thing in the world. They knew already quite enough from Fawkes’s earlier examinations to put them in possession of the general features of the plot, and to them it was of far greater interest to trace out its ramifications, and to discover whether a guilty knowledge of it could be brought home either to noblemen or to priests, than to attain to a descriptive knowledge of its details, which would be dear to the heart of the newspaper correspondent of the present day. Yet, after all, even in 1605, the public had to be taken into account. There must be an open trial, and the more detailed the information that could be got the more verisimilitude would be given to the story told. It is probably, in part at least, to these considerations, as well as to some natural curiosity on the part of the Commissioners themselves, that we owe the examinations of Fawkes on the 17th and of Winter on the 23rd.

“Amongst all the confessions and ‘voluntary declarations’ extracted from the conspirators,” writes Father Gerard, “there are two of exceptional importance, as having furnished the basis of the story told by the Government, and ever since generally accepted. These are a long declaration made by Thomas Winter, and another by Guy Fawkes, which alone were made public, being printed in the ‘King’s Book,’ and from which are gathered the essential particulars of the story, as we are accustomed to hear it.”

If Father Gerard merely means that the story published by the Government rested on these two confessions, and that the Government publications were the source of all knowledge about the plot till the Record Office was thrown open, in comparatively recent years, he says what is perfectly true, and, it may be added, quite irrelevant. If he means that our knowledge at the present day rests on these two documents, he is, as I hope I have already shown, mistaken. With the first five examinations of Fawkes in our hands, all the essential points of the conspiracy, except the names, are revealed to us. The names are given in the examination under torture, and a day or two later the Government was able to classify these names, though we are unable to specify the source from which it drew its information. If both the declarations to which Father Gerard refers had been absolutely destroyed we should have missed some picturesque details, which assist us somewhat in understanding what took place; but we should have been able to set forth the main features of the plot precisely as we do now.

Nevertheless, as we do gain some additional information from these documents, let us examine whether there are such symptoms of foul play as Father Gerard thinks he can descry. Taking first Fawkes’s declaration of November 17, it will be well to follow Father Gerard’s argument. He brings into collocation three documents: first the interrogatories prepared by Coke after the examination of the 7th, then the examination of the 8th, which he calls a draft, and then the full declaration of the 17th, which undoubtedly bears the signature of Fawkes himself.

That the three documents are very closely connected is undeniable. Take, for instance, a paragraph to which Father Gerard not unnaturally draws attention, in which the repetition of the words ‘the same day’ proves at least partial identity of origin between Coke’s interrogatories and the examination founded on them on the 8th.[88]

“Was it not agreed,” asks Coke, “the same day that the act should have been done, the same day, or soon after, the person of the Lady Elizabeth should have been surprised?” “He confesseth,” Fawkes is stated to have said, “that the same day this detestable act should have been performed the same day should other of their confederacy have surprised the Lady Elizabeth.” Yet before setting down Fawkes’s replies as a fabrication of the Government, let us remember how evidence of this kind is taken and reported. If we take up the report of a criminal trial in a modern newspaper we shall find, for the most part, a flowing narrative put into the mouths of witnesses. John Jones, let us say, is represented as giving some such evidence as this: “I woke at two o’clock in the morning, and, looking out of window, saw by the light of the moon John Smith opening the stable door,” &c. Nobody who has attended a law court imagines John Jones to have used these consecutive words. Questions are put to him by the examining counsel. When did you wake? Did you see anyone at the stable door? How came you to be able to see him, and so forth; and it is by combining these questions with the Yes and No, and other brief replies made by the witness, that the reporter constructs his narrative with no appreciable violation of truth. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the same practice prevailed in 1605? Fawkes, I suppose, answered to Coke’s question, “Yes, others of the confederates proposed to surprise her,” or something of the sort, and the result was the combination of question and answer which is given above.

What, however, was the relation between the examination of the 8th and the declaration of the 17th? Father Gerard has printed them side by side,[89] and it is impossible to deny that the latter is founded on the former. Some paragraphs of the examination are not represented in the declaration, but these are paragraphs of no practical importance, and those that are represented are modified. The modifications admitted, however, are all consistent with what is a very probable supposition, that the Government wanted to get Fawkes’s previous statements collected in one paper. He had given his account of the plot on one occasion, the names of the plotters on another, and had stated on a third that they were to be classified in three divisions—those who worked first at the mine, those who worked at it afterwards, and those who did not work at all. If the Government drew up a form combining the three statements and omitting immaterial matter, and got Fawkes to sign it, this would fully account for the form in which we find the declaration. At the present day, we should object to receive evidence from a man who had been tortured once and might be tortured again; but as this declaration adds nothing of any importance to our previous knowledge, it is unnecessary to recur to first principles on this occasion.[90]

Winter’s examination of the 23rd, as treated by Father Gerard, raises a more difficult question. The document itself is at Hatfield, and there is a copy of it in the ‘Gunpowder Plot Book’ in the Public Record Office. “The ‘original’ document,” writes Father Gerard,[91] “is at Hatfield, and agrees in general so exactly with the copy as to demonstrate the identity of their origin. But while, as we have seen, the ‘copy’ is dated November 23rd, the ‘original’ is dated on the 25th.” In a note, we are told ‘that this is not a slip of the pen is evidenced by the fact that Winter first wrote 23, and then corrected it to 25.’ To return to Father Gerard’s text, we find, “On a circumstance so irregular, light is possibly thrown by a letter from Waad, the Lieutenant of the Tower, to Cecil[92] on the 20th of the same month. ‘Thomas Winter,’ he wrote, ‘doth find his hand so strong, as after dinner he will settle himself to write that he hath verbally declared to your Lordship, adding what he shall remember.’ The inference is certainly suggested that torture had been used until the prisoner’s spirit was sufficiently broken to be ready to tell the story required of him, and that the details were furnished by those who demanded it. It must, moreover, be remarked that, although Winter’s ‘original’ declaration is witnessed only by Sir E. Coke, the Attorney-General, it appears in print attested by all those whom Cecil had selected for the purpose two days before the declaration was made.”

Apparently Father Gerard intends us to gather from his statement that the whole confession of Winter was drawn up by the Government on or before the 23rd, and that he was driven on the 25th by fears of renewed torture to put his hand to a tissue of falsehoods contained in a paper which the Government required him to copy out and sign. The whole of this edifice, it will be seen, rests on the assertion that Winter first wrote 23 and then corrected it to 25.

So improbable did this assertion appear to me, that I wrote to Mr. Gunton, the courteous secretary of the Marquis of Salisbury, requesting him to examine the handwriting of the date in question. He tells me that the confession itself is, as Father Gerard states, in Winter’s hand, as is also the date ‘23 ^{9 ber} 1605.’ Two changes have been made; in the first place 23 has been altered to 25, and there has been added at the head of the paper: “The voluntary declaration of Thomas Winter, of Hoodington, in the County of Worcester, gent. the 25 of November, 1605.” “This heading,” Mr. Gunton writes, “is so tucked in at the top, that it must, I think, have been written after the confession itself.” He also assures me that the 5 of the substituted date and the 5 in the added heading ‘are exactly alike, and both different from the 5’ at the end of the date of the year, as written by Winter. “The heading,” Mr. Gunton writes, “I believe to be in Coke’s hand. It is more carefully written than he usually writes, and more carefully than his attestation at the end; but as far as my judgment goes, it is decidedly his hand.”

The alleged fact that lies at the basis of Father Gerard’s argument is therefore finally disposed of. Why Coke, if Coke it was, changed the date can be no more than matter for conjecture. Yet an explanation, conjectural though it be, seems to me to be probable enough. We have seen that Fawkes’s confession under torture bears two dates, the 9th, when it was taken before Coke and Waad the Lieutenant of the Tower, together with a magistrate, Edward Forsett; the second, on the 10th, when it was declared before the Commissioners. Why may not this confession of Winter’s have been subjected to a similar process. Winter, I suppose, writes it on the 23rd, and it is then witnessed, as Father Gerard says, by Coke alone. Though no copy with the autograph signatures of the Commissioners exists it is reasonable to suppose that one was made, in which a passage about Monteagle—whom the Government did not wish to connect with the plot except as a discoverer—was omitted, and that this, still bearing the date of the 23rd, may have been brought before the Commissioners on the 25th. They would thus receive a statement from Winter that it was his own, and the signatures of the Commissioners would then be appended to it, together with those of Coke and Waad. This then would be the document from which copies would be taken for the use of individual Commissioners, and we can thus account for Salisbury’s having appended to his own copy now in the Record Office, “Taken before us, Nottingham, Suffolk, &c.” The recognition before the Commissioners would become the official date, and Coke, having access to the original, changes the date on which it was written to that on which it was signed by the Commissioners. This explanation is merely put forward as a possible one. The important point is that Father Gerard’s argument founded on the alteration of the date is inadmissible, now that Mr. Gunton has thrown light on the matter.

Winter’s confession having been thus vindicated is here inserted, partly because it gives the story from a different point of view from that of Fawkes, and partly because it will enable those who read it to see for themselves whether there is internal evidence of its having been manipulated by the Government.

My Most Honourable Lords.

“23 ^{9 ber} 1605.

“Not out of hope to obtain pardon for speaking—of my temporal part I may say the fault is greater than can be forgiven—nor affecting hereby the title of a good subject for I must redeem my country from as great a danger as I have hazarded the bringing her into, before I can purchase any such opinion; only at your Honours’ command, I will briefly set down my own accusation, and how far I have proceeded in this business which I shall the faithfuller do since I see such courses are not pleasing to Almighty God; and that all, or the most material parts have been already confessed.

“I remained with my brother in the country for All-hollantide,[93] in the year of our Lord 1603, the first of the King’s reign, about which time, Mr. Catesby sent thither, entreating me to come to London, where he and other friends would be glad to see me. I desired him to excuse me, for I found not myself very well disposed, and (which had happened never to me before) returned the messenger without my company. Shortly I received another letter, in any wise to come. At the second summons I presently came up and found him with Mr. John Wright at Lambeth, where he brake with me how necessary it was not to forsake my country (for he knew I had then a resolution to go over), but to deliver her from the servitude in which she remained, or at least to assist her with our uttermost endeavours. I answered that I had often hazarded my life upon far lighter terms, and now would not refuse any good occasion wherein I might do service to the Catholic cause; but, for myself, I knew no mean probable to succeed. He said that he had bethought him of a way at one instant to deliver us from all our bonds, and without any foreign help[94] to replant again the Catholic religion, and withal told me in a word it was to blow up the Parliament House with gunpowder; for, said he, in that place have they done us all the mischief, and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment. I wondered at the strangeness of the conceit, and told him that true it was this strake at the root and would breed a confusion fit to beget new alterations, but if it should not take effect (as most of this nature miscarried) the scandal would be so great which the Catholic religion might hereby sustain, as not only our enemies, but our friends also would with good reason condemn us. He told me the nature of the disease required so sharp a remedy, and asked me if I would give my consent. I told him Yes, in this or what else soever, if he resolved upon it, I would venture my life; but I proposed many difficulties, as want of a house, and of one to carry the mine; noise in the working, and such like. His answer was, let us give an attempt, and where it faileth, pass no further. But first, quoth he, because we will leave no peaceable and quiet way untried, you shall go over and inform the Constable[95] of the state of the Catholics here in England, intreating him to solicit his Majesty at his coming hither that the penal laws may be recalled, and we admitted into the rank of his other subjects. Withal, you may bring over some confidant gentleman such as you shall understand best able for this business, and named unto me Mr. Fawkes. Shortly after I passed the sea and found the Constable at Bergen, near Dunkirk, where, by the help of Mr. Owen,[96] I delivered my message, whose answer was that he had strict command from his master to do all good offices for the Catholics, and for his own part he thought himself bound in conscience so to do, and that no good occasion should be omitted, but spake to him nothing of this matter.

“Returning to Dunkirk with Mr. Owen, we had speach whether he thought the Constable would faithfully help us or no. He said he believed nothing less, and that they sought only their own ends, holding small account of Catholics. I told him, that there were many gentlemen in England, who would not forsake their country until they had tried the uttermost, and rather venture their lives than forsake her in this misery; and to add one more to our number as a fit man, both for counsel and execution of whatsoever we should resolve, wished for Mr. Fawkes whom I had heard good commendations of. He told me the gentleman deserved no less, but was at Brussels, and that if he came not, as happily he might, before my departure, he would send him shortly after into England. I went soon after to Ostend, where Sir William Stanley as then was not, but came two days after. I remained with him three or four days, in which time I asked him, if the Catholics in England should do anything to help themselves, whether he thought the Archduke would second them. He answered, No; for all those parts were so desirous of peace with England as they would endure no speach of other enterprise, neither were it fit, said he, to set any project afoot now the peace is upon concluding. I told him there was no such resolution, and so fell to discourse of other matters until I came to speak of Mr. Fawkes whose company I wished over into England. I asked of his sufficiency in the wars, and told him we should need such as he, if occasion required. He gave very good commendations of him; and as we were thus discoursing and I ready to depart for Nieuport and taking my leave of Sir William, Mr. Fawkes came into our company newly returned and saluted us. This is the gentleman, said Sir William, that you wished for, and so we embraced again. I told him some good friends of his wished his company in England; and that if he pleased to come to Dunkirk, we would have further conference, whither I was then going: so taking my leave of both, I departed. About two days after came Mr. Fawkes to Dunkirk, where I told him that we were upon a resolution to do somewhat in England if the peace with Spain helped us not, but had as yet resolved upon nothing. Such or the like talk we passed at Gravelines, where I lay for a wind, and when it served, came both in one passage to Greenwich, near which place we took a pair of oars, and so came up to London, and came to Mr. Catesby whom we found in his lodging. He welcomed us into England, and asked me what news from the Constable. I told him Good words, but I feared the deeds would not answer. This was the beginning of Easter term[97] and about the midst of the same term (whether sent for by Mr. Catesby, or upon some business of his own) up came Mr. Thomas Percy. The first word he spake (after he came into our company) was Shall we always, gentlemen, talk and never do anything? Mr. Catesby took him aside and had speech about somewhat to be done, so as first we might all take an oath of secrecy, which we resolved within two or three days to do, so as there we met behind St. Clement’s, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, Mr. Wright, Mr. Guy Fawkes, and myself, and having, upon a primer given each other the oath of secrecy in a chamber where no other body was, we went after into the next room and heard mass, and received the blessed sacrament upon the same. Then did Mr. Catesby disclose to Mr. Percy,[98] and I together with Jack Wright tell to Mr. Fawkes the business for which they took this oath which they both approved; and then Mr. Percy sent to take the house, which Mr. Catesby, in my absence, had learnt did belong to one Ferris, which with some difficulty in the end he obtained, and became, as Ferris before was, tenant to Whynniard. Mr. Fawkes underwent the name of Mr. Percy’s man, calling himself Johnson, because his face was the most unknown,[99] and received the keys of the house, until we heard that the Parliament was adjourned to the 7 of February. At which time we all departed several ways into the country, to meet again at the beginning of Michaelmas term.[100] Before this time also it was thought convenient to have a house that might answer to Mr. Percy’s, where we might make provision of powder and wood for the mine which, being there made ready, should in a night be conveyed by boat to the house by the Parliament because we were loth to foil that with often going in and out. There was none that we could devise so fit as Lambeth where Mr. Catesby often lay, and to be keeper thereof, by Mr. Catesby’s choice, we received into the number Keyes, as a trusty honest man.[101]

“Some fortnight after, towards the beginning of the term, Mr. Fawkes and I came to Mr. Catesby at Moorcrofts, where we agreed that now was time to begin and set things in order for the mine, so as Mr. Fawkes went to London and the next day sent for me to come over to him. When I came, the cause was for that the Scottish Lords were appointed to sit in conference on the Union in Mr. Percy’s house. This hindered our beginning until a fortnight before Christmas, by which time both Mr. Percy and Mr. Wright were come to London, and we against their coming had provided a good part of the powder, so as we all five entered with tools fit to begin our work, having provided ourselves of baked-meats, the less to need sending abroad. We entered late in the night, and were never seen, save only Mr. Percy’s man, until Christmas-eve, in which time we wrought under a little entry to the wall of the Parliament House, and underpropped it as we went with wood.

“Whilst we were together we began to fashion our business, and discourse what we should do after this deed were done. The first question was how we might surprise the next heir; the Prince happily would be at the Parliament with the King his father: how should we then be able to seize on the Duke?[102] This burden Mr. Percy undertook; that by his acquaintance he with another gentleman would enter the chamber without suspicion, and having some dozen others at several doors to expect his coming, and two or three on horseback at the Court gate to receive him, he would undertake (the blow being given, until which he would attend in the Duke’s chamber) to carry him safe away, for he supposed most of the Court would be absent, and such as were there not suspecting, or unprovided for any such matter. For the Lady Elizabeth it were easy to surprise her in the country by drawing friends together at a hunting near the Lord Harrington’s, and Ashby, Mr. Catesby’s house, being not far off was a fit place for preparation.

“The next was for money and horses, which if we could provide in any reasonable measure (having the heir apparent) and the first knowledge by four or five days was odds sufficient. Then, what Lords we should save from the Parliament, which was agreed in general as many as we could that were Catholics or so disposed. Next, what foreign princes we should acquaint with this before or join with after. For this point we agreed that first we would not enjoin princes to that secrecy nor oblige them by oath so to be secure of their promise; besides, we know not whether they will approve the project or dislike it, and if they do allow thereof, to prepare before might beget suspicion and[103] not to provide until the business were acted; the same letter that carried news of the thing done might as well entreat their help and furtherance. Spain is too slow in his preparations to hope any good from in the first extremities, and France too near and too dangerous, who with the shipping of Holland we feared of all the world might make away with us. But while we were in the middle of these discourses, we heard that the Parliament should be anew adjourned until after Michaelmas, upon which tidings we broke off both discourse and working until after Christmas. About Candlemas we brought over in a boat the powder which we had provided at Lambeth and layd it in Mr. Percy’s house because we were willing to have all our danger in one place. We wrought also another fortnight in the mine against the stone wall, which was very hard to beat through, at which time we called in Kit Wright, and near to Easter[104] as we wrought the third time, opportunity was given to hire the cellar, in which we resolved to lay the powder and leave the mine.

“Now by reason that the charge of maintaining us all so long together, besides the number of several houses which for several uses had been hired, and buying of powder, &c., had lain heavy on Mr. Catesby alone to support, it was necessary for to call in some others to ease his charge, and to that end desired leave that he with Mr. Percy and a third whom they should call might acquaint whom they thought fit and willing to the business, for many, said he, may be content that I should know who would not therefore that all the Company should be acquainted with their names. To this we all agreed.

“After this Mr. Fawkes laid into the cellar (which he had newly taken) a thousand of billets and five hundred of faggots, and with that covered the powder, because we might have the house free to suffer anyone to enter that would. Mr. Catesby wished us to consider whether it were not now necessary to send Mr. Fawkes over, both to absent himself for a time as also to acquaint Sir William Stanley and Mr. Owen with this matter. We agreed that he should; provided that he gave it them with the same oath that we had taken before, viz., to keep it secret from all the world. The reason why we desired Sir William Stanley should be acquainted herewith was to have him with us so soon as he could, and, for Mr. Owen, he might hold good correspondency after with foreign princes. So Mr. Fawkes departed about Easter for Flanders and returned the later end of August. He told me that when he arrived at Brussels, Sir William Stanley was not returned from Spain, so as he uttered the matter only to Owen, who seemed well pleased with the business, but told him that surely Sir William would not be acquainted with any plot as having business now afoot in the Court of England, but he himself would be always ready to tell it him and send him away so soon as it were done.

“About this time did Mr. Percy and Mr. Catesby meet at the Bath where they agreed that the company being yet but few, Mr. Catesby should have the others’ authority to call in whom he thought best, by which authority he called in after Sir Everard Digby, though at what time I know not, and last of all Mr. Francis Tresham. The first promised, as I heard Mr. Catesby say, fifteen hundred pounds. Mr. Percy himself promised all that he could get of the Earl of Northumberland’s rent,[105] and to provide many galloping horses, his number was ten.[106] Meanwhile Mr. Fawkes and myself alone bought some new powder, as suspecting the first to be dank, and conveyed it into the cellar and set it in order as we resolved it should stand. Then was the Parliament anew prorogued until the 5 of November; so as we all went down until some ten days before. When Mr. Catesby came up with Mr. Fawkes to a house by Enfield Chase called White Webbs, whither I came to them, and Mr. Catesby willed me to inquire whether the young Prince[107] came to Parliament, I told him that his Grace thought not to be there. Then must we have our horses, said Mr. Catesby, beyond the water,[108] and provision of more company to surprise the Prince and leave the Duke alone. Two days after, being Sunday[109] at night, in came one to my chamber and told me that a letter had been given to my Lord Monteagle to this effect, that he wished his lordship’s absence from the Parliament because a blow would there be given, which letter he presently carried to my Lord of Salisbury. On the morrow I went to White Webbs and told it to Mr. Catesby, assuring him withal that the matter was disclosed and wishing him in any wise to forsake his country. He told me he would see further as yet and resolved to send Mr. Fawkes to try the uttermost, protesting if the part belonged to myself he would try the same adventure. On Wednesday Mr. Fawkes went and returned at night, of which we were very glad. Thursday[110] I came to London, and Friday[111] Mr. Catesby, Mr. Tresham and I met at Barnet, where we questioned how this letter should be sent to my Lord Monteagle, but could not conceive, for Mr. Tresham forsware it, whom we only suspected. On Saturday night[112] I met Mr. Tresham again in Lincoln’s Inn Walks, where he told such speeches that my Lord of Salisbury should use to the King, as I gave it lost the second time, and repeated the same to Mr. Catesby, who hereupon was resolved to be gone, but stayed to have Mr. Percy come up whose consent herein we wanted. On Sunday night[113] came Mr. Percy, and no ‘Nay,’ but would abide the uttermost trial.

“This suspicion of all hands put us into such confusion as Mr. Catesby resolved to go down into the country the Monday[114] that Mr. Percy went to Sion and Mr. Percy resolved to follow the same night or early the next morning. About five o’clock being Tuesday[115] came the younger Wright to my chamber and told me that a nobleman called the Lord Monteagle, saying “Rise and come along to Essex House, for I am going to call up my Lord of Northumberland,” saying withal ‘the matter is discovered.’ “Go back Mr. Wright,” quoth I, “and learn what you can at Essex Gate.” Shortly he returned and said, “Surely all is lost, for Leyton is got on horseback at Essex door, and as he parted, he asked if their Lordship’s would have any more with him, and being answered “No,” is rode as fast up Fleet Street as he can ride.” “Go you then,” quoth I, “to Mr. Percy, for sure it is for him they seek, and bid him begone: I will stay and see the uttermost.” Then I went to the Court gates, and found them straitly guarded so as nobody could enter. From thence I went down towards the Parliament House, and in the middle of King’s Street found the guard standing that would not let me pass, and as I returned, I heard one say, “There is a treason discovered in which the King and the Lords shall have been blown up,” so then I was fully satisfied that all was known, and went to the stable where my gelding stood, and rode into the country. Mr. Catesby had appointed our meeting at Dunchurch, but I could not overtake them until I came to my brother’s which was Wednesday night.[116] On Thursday[117] we took the armour at my Lord Windsor’s, and went that night to one Stephen Littleton’s house, where the next day, being Friday,[118] as I was early abroad to discover, my man came to me and said that a heavy mischance had severed all the company, for that Mr. Catesby, Mr. Rokewood and Mr. Grant were burnt with gunpowder, upon which sight the rest dispersed. Mr. Littleton wished me to fly and so would he. I told him I would first see the body of my friend and bury him, whatsoever befel me. When I came I found Mr. Catesby reasonable well, Mr. Percy, both the Wrights, Mr. Rokewood and Mr. Grant. I asked them what they resolved to do. They answered “We mean here to die.” I said again I would take such part as they did. About eleven of the clock came the company to beset the house, and as I walked into the court was shot into the shoulder, which lost me the use of my arm. The next shot was the elder Wright struck dead; after him the younger Mr. Wright, and fourthly Ambrose Rokewood. Then, said Mr. Catesby to me (standing before the door they were to enter), “Stand by, Mr. Tom, and we will die together.” “Sir,” quoth I, “I have lost the use of my right arm and I fear that will cause me to be taken.” So as we stood close together Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy and myself, they two were shot (as far as I could guess, with one bullet), and then the company entered upon me, hurt me in the belly with a pike and gave me other wounds, until one came behind and caught hold of both my arms, and so I remain, Your &c.”

“[Taken before us
“Nottingham, Suffolk, Northampton, Salisbury, Mar, Dunbar, Popham.
Edw. Coke,
W. Waad.]”[119]

I have printed this interesting statement in full, because it is the only way in which I can convey to my readers the sense of spontaneity which pervades it from beginning to end. To me, at least, it seems incredible that it was either written to order, or copied from a paper drawn up by some agent of the Government. Nor is it to be forgotten that if there was one thing the Government was anxious to secure, it was evidence against the priests, and that no such evidence can be extracted from this confession. What is, perhaps, still more to the point is, that no candid person can, I imagine, rise from the perusal of these sentences without having his estimate of the character of the conspirators raised. There is no conscious assumption of high qualities, but each touch as it comes strengthens the belief that the men concerned in the plot were patient and loyal, brave beyond the limits of ordinary bravery, and utterly without selfish aims. Could this result have been attained by a confession written to order or dictated by Salisbury or his agents, to whom the plotters were murderous villains of the basest kind?

There is nothing to show that Winter’s evidence was procured by torture. Father Gerard, indeed, quotes a letter from Waad, written on the 21st, in which he says that ‘Thomas Winter doth find his hand so strong as after dinner he will settle himself to write that he hath verbally declared to your Lordship adding what he shall remember.’ Considering that he had a ball through his shoulder a fortnight before, the suggestion of torture is hardly needed to find a cause for his having for some time been unable to use his hand.

Before turning to another branch of the investigation, it will be advisable to clear up one difficulty which is not quite so easy to solve.

“Fawkes,” writes Father Gerard,[120] “in the confession of November 17, mentioned Robert Keyes as amongst the first seven of the conspirators who worked at the mine, and Robert Winter as one of the five introduced at a later period. The names of these two were deliberately interchanged in the published version, Robert Winter appearing as a worker in the mine, and Keyes, who was an obscure man, of no substance, among the gentlemen of property whose resources were to have supported the subsequent rebellion. Moreover, in the account of the same confession sent to Edmondes by Cecil three days before Fawkes signed it—i.e., November 14—the same transposition occurs, Keyes being explicitly described as one of those ‘who wrought not at the mine,’ although, as we have seen, he is one of the three who alone make any mention of it.

“Still more irregular is another circumstance. About November 28, Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General, drew up certain further notes of questions to be put to various prisoners. Amongst these we read: ‘Winter[121] to be examined of his brother, for no man else can accuse him.’ But a fortnight or so before this time the Secretary of State had officially informed the ambassador in the Low Countries that Robert Winter was one of those deepest in the treason, and, to say nothing of other evidence, a proclamation for his apprehension had been issued on November 18th. Yet Coke’s interrogatory seems to imply that nothing had yet been established against him, and that he was not known to the general body of the traitors as a fellow-conspirator.”

If this tangled skein is to be unravelled, the first thing to be done is to place the facts in their chronological order, upon which many if not all the difficulties will disappear, premising that, as a matter of fact, Keyes did work at the mine, and Robert Winter did not.

In his examination of November 7, in which no names appear, and nothing is said about a mine, Fawkes spoke of five original conspirators, and of five or six subsequently joining them, and being generally acquainted with the plot.[122] On the 8th,[123] when the mine was first mentioned, he divided the seven actual diggers into two classes: first, the five who worked from the beginning, and, secondly, two who were afterwards added to that number, saying nothing of the conspirators who took no part in the mining operations. On the 9th, under torture, he gave the names of the first five apart, and then lumped all the other conspirators together, so that both Keyes and Robert Winter appear in the same class. On the 17th he gave, as the names of two, who, as he now said, subsequently worked at the mine, Christopher Wright and Robert Winter, but the surname of the latter is deleted with pen-strokes, and that of Keyes substituted above it; whilst, in the list of the persons made privy to the plot but not engaged in digging, we have the name of Keyes, afterwards deleted, and that of Wynter substituted for it.[124] The only question is, when was the double substitution effected?

As far as the action of the Government is known, we have the list referred to at pp. 47, 48, and probably written on or about the 10th.[125] In this the additional workers are first said to have been John Grant and Christopher Wright. The former name is, however, scratched out, and that of ‘Robyn Winter’ substituted for it, and from this list is taken the one forwarded to Edmondes on the 14th.[126] Even if we could discover any conceivable motive for the Government wishing to accuse Keyes rather than Winter, it would not help us to explain why the name of Winter was substituted for that of Grant at one time, and the name of Keyes substituted for that of Winter at another.

On the other hand, Fawkes, if he had any knowledge of what was going on, had at least a probable motive for putting Winter rather than Keyes in the worse category. Keyes had been seized, whilst Winter was still at large, and Fawkes may have thought that as Winter might make his escape beyond sea, it was better to load him with the burden which really belonged to Keyes. If this solution be accepted as a possible one, it is easy to understand how the Government fixed on Winter as one of the actual diggers. On the 18th, the day after his name had been given by Fawkes, a proclamation is issued for his apprehension as one ‘known to be a principal.’[127] It is not for ten days that any sign is given of a belief that Keyes was the right man. Then, on the 28th, Coke suggests that Thomas Winter may be examined about his brother, ‘for no man else can accuse him,’ a suggestion which would be absurd if Fawkes’s statement had still held good. On the 30th Keyes himself acknowledges that he bought some of the powder and assisted in carrying it to Ferrers’ house, and that he also helped to work at the mine.

I am inclined therefore to assign the alteration of the name which Fawkes gave in his examination of the 17th to some day shortly before the 28th, and to think that the sending of the ‘King’s Book’[128] to press took place on some day between the 23rd, the date of Thomas Winter’s examination, and the 28th. If so, the retention of the name of Robert Winter amongst the diggers, and that of Keyes amongst those made privy afterwards, needs no further explanation.[129] Cromwell once adjured the Presbyterians of Edinburgh to believe it possible that they might be mistaken. If Father Gerard would only believe it possible that Salisbury may have been mistaken, he would hardly be so keen to mark conscious deception, where deception is not necessarily to be found. After all, the Government left the names of Winter and Keyes perfectly legible under the pen-strokes drawn across them, and the change they made was at least the erasure of a false statement and the substitution of a true one.

CHAPTER IV.

STRUCTURAL DIFFICULTIES.

From a study of the documentary evidence, I pass to an examination of those structural conditions which Father Gerard pronounces to be fatal to the ‘traditional’ story. The first step is obviously to ascertain the exact position of Whynniard’s house, part of which was rented by Percy. The investigator is, however, considerably assisted by Father Gerard, who has successfully exploded the old belief that this building lay to the southwest of the House of Lords. His argument, which appears to me to be conclusive, runs as follows:—

“That the lodging hired by Percy stood near the southeast corner of the old House of Lords (i.e. nearer to the river than that building, and adjacent to, if not adjoining the Prince’s Chamber) is shown by the following arguments:—

“1. John Shepherd, servant to Whynniard, gave evidence as to having on a certain occasion seen from the river ‘a boat lie close to the pale of Sir Thomas Parry’s garden, and men going to and from the water through the back door that leadeth into Mr. Percy, his lodging.—[Gunpowder Plot Book, 40, part 2.]

“2. Fawkes, in his examination of November 5, 1605, speaks of the window in his chamber near the Parliament House towards the water-side.

“3. It is said that when digging their mine the conspirators were troubled by the influx of water from the river, which would be impossible if they were working at the opposite side of the Parliament House.”[130]

I think, however, that a still closer identification is possible. On page 80 will be seen a frontage towards the river, marked ‘very old walls, remaining in 1795 & 1800,’ of which the line corresponds fairly with that of the house in the view given as the frontispiece to this volume.

On part of the site behind it is written ‘Very Old House,’ and the remainder is said to have been occupied by a garden for many years. It may, however, be gathered from the view that this piece of ground was covered by part of the house in 1799, and I imagine that the ‘many years’ must have commenced in 1807, when the house was demolished (see view at p. 89). If any doubt remains as to the locality of the front it will be removed by Capon’s pencilled note on the door to the left,[131] stating that it led to Parliament Place.[132]

The house marked separately to the right in the plan, as Mrs. Robe’s house, 1799, is evidently identical with the more modern building in the frontispiece, and therefore does not concern us.

With this comparatively modern plan should be compared the three which follow in succession (pp. 81, 82, 83), respectively dated 1685, 1739, and 1761. They are taken from the Crace Collection of plans in the Print Room of the British Museum, Portfolio xi. Nos. 30, 45, 46.

The first of these three plans differs from the later ones in two important particulars. In the first place, the shaded part indicating buildings is divided by dark lines, and, in the second place, this shaded part covers more ground. I suppose there can be little doubt that the dark lines indicate party walls, and we are thus enabled to understand how it is that, whilst in writing to Parry[133] Salisbury speaks of Percy as having taken a part of Whynniard’s house, Percy is spoken of in all the remaining evidence that has reached us as taking a house. Salisbury, no doubt, was thinking of the whole tenement held by Whynniard as a house, whilst others gave that name to such a part of it as could be separately held by a single tenant. The other difference between the plans is less easy to explain. Neither of the later ones show that excrescence towards the river-bank, abutting on its northern side on Cotton Garden, which is so noted a feature in the plan of 1685. At one time I was inclined to think that we had here the ‘low room new builded,’ that in which Percy at first stored his powder; but this would be to make the house rented by him far larger than it is likely to have been. A more probable explanation is given by the plan itself. It will be seen that the shading includes the internal courtyard, perceptible in the two later plans, and it does not therefore necessarily indicate the presence of buildings. May not the shaded part reaching to the river mean no more than that in 1685 there was some yard or garden specially attached to the House?

[Larger Image]

Part of a Plan of the Ancient Palace of Westminster, by the late Mr. William Capon,
Measured and Drawn between 1793 and 1823.—Vetusta Monumenta, vol. v.
The houses at the edge of the river were not in existence in 1605,
the ground on which they were built having been reclaimed since that date.

From a Plan of part of Westminster, 1685.

A. Probable position of the chamber attached to the House of Lords.
B. Probable position of the house leased to Percy.
These references are not in the original plan.

From a Plan of Part of Westminster, with Intended Improvements of
the Houses of Lords and Commons, by W. Kent, 1739.

A red line showing the ground set apart by Kent for building is omitted.

From a Plan of Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament
as it appeared in 1761

Part of this lettering is in pencil in the original plan.

Before giving reasons for selecting any one part of Whynniard’s block as that rented from him by Percy, it is necessary to face a difficulty raised by Father Gerard:—

“Neither,” he writes, “does the house appear to have been well suited for the purposes for which it was taken. Speed tells us, and he is confirmed by Bishop Barlow, of Lincoln, that it was let out to tenants only when Parliament was not assembled, and during a session formed part of the premises at the disposal of the Lords, whom it served as a withdrawing room. As this plot was of necessity to take effect during a session, when the place would be in other hands, it is very hard to understand how it was intended that the final and all-important operation should be conducted.”[134]

This objection is put still more strongly in a subsequent passage:—

“We have already observed on the nature of the house occupied in Percy’s name. If this were, as Speed tells us, and as there is no reason to doubt, at the service of the Peers during a session for a withdrawing-room, and if the session was to begin on November 5, how could Fawkes hope not only to remain in possession, but to carry on his strange proceedings unobserved amid the crowd of lacqueys and officials with whom the opening of the Parliament by the Sovereign must needs have flooded the premises. How was he, unobserved, to get into the fatal ‘cellar’?”[135]

It is easy enough to brush away Father Gerard’s alleged confirmation by Bishop Barlow,[136] who, writing as he did in the reign of Charles II., carries no weight on such a point. Besides, he did not write a book on the Gunpowder Plot at all. He merely republished, in 1679, an old official narrative of the trial, with an unimportant preface of his own. What Father Gerard quotes here and elsewhere is, however, not even taken from this republication, but from an anonymous pamphlet published in 1678, and reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany, iii. 121, which is avowedly a cento made up from earlier writers, and in which the words referred to are doubtless copied directly from Speed.

Speed’s own testimony, however, cannot be so lightly dismissed, especially as it is found in the first edition of his History, published in 1611, and therefore only six years after the event:—

“No place,” he says, “was held fitter than a certain edifice adjoining the wall of the Parliament House, which served for withdrawing rooms for the assembled Lords, and out of Parliament was at the disposal of the keeper of the place and wardrobe thereunto belonging.”[137]

This is quite specific, and unless Speed’s evidence can be in any way modified, fully justifies Father Gerard in his contention. Let us, however, turn to the agreement for the house in question:—

“Memorandum that it is concluded between Thomas Percy of London Esquire and Henry Ferrers of Bordesley Clinton in the County of Warwick Gentleman the xxiiii day of March in the second year of our Sovereign Lord King James.[138]

“That the said Henry hath granted to the said Thomas to enjoy his house in Westminster belonging to the Parliament House, the said Thomas getting the consent of Mr. Whynniard, and satisfying me, the said Henry, for my charges bestowed thereupon, as shall be thought fit by two indifferent men chosen between us.

“And that he shall also have the other house that Gideon Gibbons dwelleth in, with an assignment of a lease from Mr. Whynniard thereof, satisfying me as aforesaid, and using the now tenant well.

“And the said Thomas hath lent unto me the said Henry twenty pounds, to be allowed upon reckoning or to be repaid again at the will of the said Thomas.

“Henry Ferrers.
“Sealed and delivered in the presence of
Jo: White and Christopher Symons.[139]”

It is therefore beyond question, on the evidence of this agreement, that Speed was right in connecting with Parliament a house rented by Percy. It is, however, also beyond question, on the evidence of the same agreement, that he also took a second house, of which Whynniard was to give him a lease. The inference that Percy would have been turned out of this second house when Parliament met seems, therefore, to be untenable. Whynniard, it may be observed, had, on March 24, 1602, been appointed, in conjunction with his son, Keeper of the Old Palace,[140] so that the block of buildings concerned, which is within the Old Palace, may very well have been his official residence.

Let us now cast our eyes on the plan on p. 81. We find there a long division of the building running between the wall of the House of Lords and the back wall of the remainder of the block. It certainly looks as if this must have been the house, or division of a house, belonging to Parliament, and this probability is turned into something like certainty by the two views that now follow, taken from the Crace Collection; Views, Portfolio xv., Nos. 18, 26.

It will be seen that the first of these two views, taken in 1804 (p. 88), shows us a large mullioned window, inside which must have been a room of some considerable length to require so large an opening to admit light, as its breadth must evidently have been limited. Such a room would be out of place in the rambling building we have been examining, but by no means out of place as a chamber or gallery connected with the House of Lords, and capable of serving as a place of meeting for the Commissioners appointed to consider a scheme of union with Scotland. A glance at the view on page 89, which was taken in 1807, when the wall of the House of Lords was being laid bare by the demolition of the houses abutting on it, shows two apertures, a window with a Gothic arch, and an opening with a square head, which may very well have served as a door, whilst the window may have been blocked up. If such a connection with the House of Lords can be established, there seems no reason to doubt that we have the withdrawing room fixed beyond doubt. Father Gerard mentions an old print representing ‘the two Houses assembled in the presence of Queen Elizabeth,’ and having ‘windows on both sides.’[141] Such a print can only refer to a time before the mullioned chamber was in existence, and therefore—unless this print, like a subsequent one, was a mere copy of an earlier one still—we have fair evidence that the large room was not in existence in some year in the reign of Elizabeth, whilst the plan at p. 80 shows that it was in existence in 1685. That it was there in 1605 is not, indeed, to be proved by other evidence than that it manifestly supplies us with the withdrawing room for the Lords and for the Commissioners for the Union of which we hear so much.

[Larger Image]

East End of the Prince’s Chamber.
Published July 1, 1804, by J. T. Smith.

[Larger Image]

Views of the East Side of the House of Lords, the East End of the Prince’s Chamber, &c.
Taken October 8, 1807.

N.B. From the doorway out of which a man is peeping, nearly in the centre of the print,
Guy Fawkes was to have made his escape. Published Nov. 4, 1807, by J. T. Smith.

That in the early part of the nineteenth century the storey beneath this room was occupied by a passage leading from the court opening on Parliament Place, and Cotton Garden, is shown in the plan at p. 81; and the views at pp. 88, 89, rather indicate that that passage was in existence when the old house, which I call Whynniard’s block, was still undemolished. If this was so, we are able to find a place for the ‘little entry,’ under which, according to Winter, the conspirators worked. This view of the case, too, is borne out by Smith’s statement, that ‘in the further end of that court,’ i.e. the court running up from Parliament Place, ‘is a doorway, through which, and turning to the left through another doorway, is the immediate way out of the cellar where the powder-plot was intended to take effect.’[142] It seems likely that the whole long space under the withdrawing room was used as a passage, though, on the other hand, the part of what was afterwards a passage may have been blocked by a room, in which case we have the ‘low room new builded’—i.e. built in some year in Elizabeth’s reign—in which the powder was stored.

Having thus fixed the position of the house belonging to Parliament, and shown that it probably consisted of a long room in one storey, we can hardly fail to discover the second house as that marked B in the plan on p. 81, since that house alone combines the conditions of being close to the House of Lords, and having a door and window looking towards the river.

According to Father Gerard, however, the premises occupied by Percy were far too small to make this explanation permissible.

“We learn,” he says, “on the unimpeachable evidence of Mrs. Whynniard’s servant that the house afforded accommodation only for one person at a time, so that when Percy came there to spend the night, Fawkes, who passed for his man, had to lodge out. This suggests another question. Percy’s pretext for laying in so much fuel was that he meant to bring up his wife to live there. But how could this be under such conditions?”[143]

Mrs. Whynniard’s servant, however, Roger James, did not use the words here put into his mouth. He said that he had heard from Mrs. Gibbons ‘that Mr. Percy hath lain in the said lodging divers times himself, but when he lay there, his man lay abroad, there being but one bed in the said lodging.’

Fawkes, therefore, lodged out when his master came, not because there was not a second room in the house, but because there was only one bed. If Mrs. Percy arrived alone she would probably find one bed sufficient for herself and her husband. If she brought any maidservants with her, beds could be provided for them without much difficulty. Is it not likely that the plan of sending Fawkes out to sleep was contrived with the object of persuading the Whynniards that as matters stood no more than one person could occupy the house at night, and of thus putting them off the scent, at the time when the miners were congregated in it?

A more serious problem is presented by Father Gerard’s inquiry ‘how proceedings so remarkable’ as the digging of the mine could have escaped the notice, not only of the Government, but of the entire neighbourhood.

“This,” he continues, “it must be remembered, was most populous. There were people living in the very building a part of which sheltered the conspirators. Around were thickly clustered the dwellings of the Keeper of the Wardrobe, auditors and tellers of the Exchequer, and other such officials. There were tradespeople and workmen constantly employed close to the spot where the work was going on; while the public character of the place makes it impossible to suppose that tenants such as Percy and his friends, who were little better than lodgers, could claim the exclusive use of anything beyond the rooms they rented—even when allowed the use of them—or could shut against the neighbours and visitors in general the precincts of so frequented a spot.”[144]

To this is added the following footnote:—

“The buildings of the dissolved College of St. Stephen, comprising those around the House of Lords, were granted by Edward VI. to Sir Ralph Lane. They reverted to the Crown under Elizabeth, and were appropriated as residences for the auditors and tellers of the Exchequer. The locality became so populous that in 1606 it was forbidden to erect more houses.”

This statement is reinforced by a conjectural view of the neighbourhood founded on the ‘best authorities’ by Mr. H. W. Brewer.[145] Mr. Brewer who has since kindly examined with me the drawings and plans in the Crace Collection, on which I rely, has, I think, been misled by those early semi-pictorial maps, which, though they may be relied on for larger buildings, such as the House of Lords or St. Stephen’s Chapel, are very imaginative in their treatment of private houses. In any case I deny the existence of the two large houses placed by him between what I infer to have been Whynniard’s house and the river side.

The history of the land between the wall of the old palace on which stood the river front of Whynniard’s house, and the bank of the Thames, can be traced with tolerable accuracy. It formed part of a larger estate, formerly the property of the dissolved chapel of St. Stephen, granted by Edward VI. to Sir Ralph Fane;[146] Father Gerard’s Sir Ralph Lane being a misprint or a mistake. Fane, however, was hanged shortly afterwards, and the estate, reverting to the Crown, was re-granted to Sir John Gates.[147] Again reverting to the Crown, it was dealt with in separate portions, and the part on which the Exchequer officers’ residences was built was to the north of Cotton Garden, and being quite out of earshot of Whynniard’s house, need not concern us here. In 1588, the Queen granted to John Whynniard, then an officer of the Wardrobe, a lease of several parcels of ground for thirty years.[148] Some of these were near Whitehall, others to the south of Parliament Stairs. The only one which concerns us is a piece of land lying between the wall of the Old Palace, on which the river-front of Whynniard’s house was built, and the Thames. In 1600 the reversion was granted to two men named Evershed and Holland, who immediately sold it to Whynniard, thus constituting him the owner of the land in perpetuity. In the deed conveying it to him, this portion is styled:—

“All that piece of waste land lying there right against the said piece, and lieth and is without the said stone wall, that is to say between the said passage or entry of the said Parliament House[149] on the north part, and abutteth upon the said stone wall which compasseth the said Old Palace towards the West, and upon the Thames aforesaid towards the East, and continueth at length between the passage aforesaid and the sluice coming from the said Parliament House, seventy-five foot.”[150]

On this piece of waste land I place the garden mentioned in connection with the house rented by Percy. This is far more probable than it was where Mr. Brewer has placed it, in the narrow court which leads from Parliament Place to the other side of Percy’s house, and ends by the side of the Prince’s Chamber. If this arrangement be accepted, it gets rid of the alleged populousness of neighbourhood. No doubt people flocked up and down from Parliament Stairs, but they would be excluded from the garden on the river side, and with few exceptions would pass on without turning to the right into the court. Nobody who had not business with Percy himself or with his neighbour on the south[151] would be likely to approach Percy’s door. As far as that side of the house was concerned, it would be difficult to find a more secluded dwelling. The Thames was then the ‘silent highway’ of London, and the sight of a barge unloading before the back door of a house can have been no more surprising than the sight of a gondola moored to the steps of a palace on a canal in Venice. John Shepherd, for instance, was not startled by the sight:—

Memorandum that John Shepherd servant to the said Mr. Whynniard, saith that the fourth of September last being Wednesday before the Queen’s Majesty removed from Windsor to Hampton Court,[152] he being taken suddenly sick, and therefore sent away to London, and coming late to lie at the Queen’s Bridge,[153] the tide being high, he saw a boat lie close by the pale of Sir Thomas Parry’s garden[154] and men going to and fro the water through the back door that leadeth into Mr. Percy’s lodging, which he doth now bethink himself of, though then, being sick and late, he did not regard it.[155]

It thus appears that this final supply of powder was carried in at night, and by a way through the garden—not by the more frequented Parliament Stairs.

The story of the mine, no doubt, presents some difficulties which, though by no means insuperable, cannot be solved with absolute certainty without more information than we possess at present. We may, I think, dismiss the suggestion of the Edinburgh Reviewer that the conspirators may have dug straight down instead of making a tunnel, both because even bunglers could hardly have occupied a fortnight in digging a pit a few feet deep, and because their words about reaching the wall at the end of the fortnight would, on this hypothesis, have no meaning. Thomas Winter’s statement is that he and his comrades ‘wrought under a little entry to the wall of the Parliament House.’[156] The little entry, as I have already argued,[157] must be the covered passage under the withdrawing room; a tunnel leading from the cellar of Percy’s house would be about seven or eight feet long. The main difficulty at the commencement of the work would be to get through the wall of Percy’s house, and this, it may be noticed, neither Fawkes nor Winter speak of, though they are very positive as to the difficulties presented by the wall of the House of Lords. If, indeed, the wall on this side of Percy’s house was, as may with great probability be conjectured, built of brick, as the river front undoubtedly was,[158] the difficulty cannot have been great, as I have been informed by Mr. Henry Ward[159] that the brick used in those days was, both from its composition and from the method in which it was dried, far softer than that employed in building at present. We may, therefore, fairly start our miners in the cellar of their own house with a soft brick wall to penetrate, and a tunnel afterwards to construct, having wood ready to prop up the earth, and appropriate implements to carry out their undertaking.[160]

Here, however, Father Gerard waves us back:—

“It is not easy,” he writes, “to understand how these amateurs contrived to do so much without a catastrophe. To make a tunnel through soft earth is a very delicate operation, replete with unknown difficulties. To shore up the roof and sides there must, moreover, have been required a large quantity of the ‘framed timber’[161] of which Speed tells us, and the provision and importation of this must have been almost as hard to keep dark as the exportation of the earth and stones. A still more critical operation is that of meddling with the foundations of a house—especially of an old and heavy structure—which a professional craftsman would not venture upon except with extreme care, and the employment of many precautions of which these light-hearted adventurers knew nothing. Yet, recklessly breaking their way out of one building, and to a large extent into another, they appear to have occasioned neither crack nor settlement in either.”[162]

I have already dealt with the problem of bringing in articles by night, and of getting through Percy’s wall. For the rest, Father Gerard forgets that though six of the seven miners were amateurs, the seventh was not. Fawkes had been eight years in the service of the Archdukes in the Low Countries, and to soldiers on either side the war in the Low Countries offered the most complete school of military mining then to be found in the world. Though every soldier was not an engineer, he could not fail to be in the way of hearing about, if not of actually witnessing, feats of engineering skill, of which the object was not merely to undermine fortifications with tunnels of far greater length than can have been required by the conspirators, but to conduct the operation as quietly as possible. It must surely have been the habit of these engineers to use other implements than the noisy pick of the modern workman.[163] Fawkes, indeed, speaks of himself merely as a watcher whilst others worked. But he was a modest man, and there can be no reasonable doubt that he directed the operations.

When the main wall was attacked after Christmas the conditions were somewhat altered. The miners, indeed, may still have been able to avoid the use of picks, and to employ drills and crowbars, but some noise they must necessarily have made. Yet the chances of their being overheard were very slight. Having taken the precaution to hire the long withdrawing room and the passage or passage-room beneath it, the sounds made on the lower part of the main wall could not very well reach the ears of the tenants of the other houses in Whynniard’s block. The only question is whether there was any one likely to hear them in the so-called ‘cellar’ underneath the House of Lords, beneath which, again, they intended to deposit their store of powder. What that chamber was had best be told in Father Gerard’s own words:—

“The old House of Lords,”[164] he writes, “was a chamber occupying the first floor of a building which stood about fifty yards from the left bank of the Thames,[165] to which it was parallel, the stream at this point running about due north. Beneath the Peers’ Chamber on the ground floor was a large room, which plays an important part in our history. This had originally served as the palace kitchen, and, though commonly described as a ‘cellar’ or a ‘vault,’ was in reality neither, for it stood on the level of the ground outside, and had a flat ceiling formed by the beams which supported the flooring of the Lords apartment above. It ran beneath the said Peers’ Chamber from end to end, and measured seventy-seven feet in length by twenty-four feet four inches in width.

“At either end the building abutted upon another running transversely to it; that on the north being the ‘Painted Chamber,’ probably erected by Edward the Confessor, and that on the south the ‘Prince’s Chamber,’ assigned by its architectural features to the reign of Henry III. The former served as a place of conference for Lords and Commons, the latter as the robing-room of the Lords. The royal throne stood at the south end of the House, near the Prince’s Chamber.”[166]

According to the story told by Fawkes this place was let to Mrs. Skinner by Whynniard to store her coals in. In an early draft of the narrative usually known as the ‘King’s Book,’[167] we are told that there was ‘some stuff of the King’s which lay in part of a cellar under those rooms’—i.e. the House of Lords, and ‘that Whynniard had let out some part of a room directly under the Parliament chamber to one that used it for a cellar.’ This statement is virtually repeated in the ‘King’s Book’ itself, where Whynniard is said to have stated ‘that Thomas Percy had hired both the house and part of the cellar or vault under the same.’[168] That part was so let is highly probable, as the internal length of the old kitchen was about seventy-seven feet, and it would therefore be far too large for the occupation of a single coalmonger. We must thus imagine the so-called vault divided into two portions, probably with a partition cutting off one from the other. If, therefore, the conspirators restricted their operations to the night-time, there was little danger of their being overheard. There was not much likelihood either that Whynniard would get out of bed to visit the tapestry or whatever the stuff belonging to the King may have been, or that Mrs. Skinner would want to examine her coal-sacks whilst her customers were asleep. The only risk was from some belated visitor coming up the quiet court leading from Parliament Place to make his way to one of the houses in Whynniard’s block. Against this, however, the plotters were secured by the watchfulness of Fawkes.

The precautions taken by the conspirators did not render their task easier. It was in the second fortnight, beginning after the middle of January, when the hard work of getting through the strong and broad foundation of the House of Lords tried their muscles and their patience, that they swore in Christopher Wright, and brought over Keyes from Lambeth together with the powder which they now stored in ‘a low room new-builded.’[169] After a fortnight’s work, reaching to Candlemas (Feb. 2), they had burrowed through about four feet six inches into the wall, after which they again gave over working.[170] Some time in the latter part of March they returned to their operations, but they had scarcely commenced when they found out that it would be possible for them to gain possession of a locality more suited to their wants, and they therefore abandoned the project of the mine as no longer necessary.[171]

Before passing from the story of the mine, the more important of Father Gerard’s criticisms require an answer. How, he asks, could the conspirators have got rid of such a mass of earth and stones without exciting attention?[172] Fawkes, indeed, says that ‘the day before Christmas having a mass of earth that came out of the mine, they carried it into the garden of the said house.’ Then Goodman declares that he saw it,[173] but, even if we assume that his memory did not play him false, it is impossible that the whole of the produce of the first fortnight’s diggings should be disposed of in this way. The shortest length that can be ascribed to the mine before the wall was reached is eight feet, and if we allow five feet for height and depth we have 200 cubical feet, or a mass more than six feet every way, besides the stones coming out of the wall after Christmas. Some of the earth may have been, as Fawkes said, spread over the garden beds, but the greater part of it must have been disposed of in some other way. Is it so very difficult to surmise what that was? The nights were long and dark, and the river was very close.

We are further asked to explain how it was that, if there was really a mine, the Government did not find it out for some days after the arrest of Fawkes. Why should they? The only point at which it was accessible was at its entrance in Percy’s own cellar, and it is an insult to the sharp wits of the plotters, to suppose that they did not close it up as soon as the project of the mine was abandoned. All that would be needed, if the head of the mine descended, as it probably did, would be the relaying of a couple or so of flagstones. How careful the plotters were of wiping out all traces of their work, is shown by the evidence of Whynniard’s servant, Roger James, who says that about Midsummer 1605, Percy, appearing to pay his quarter’s rent, ‘agreed with one York, a carpenter in Westminster, for the repairing of his lodging,’ adding ‘that he would send his man to pay the carpenter for the work he was to do.’[174] Either the mine had no existence, or all traces of it must have been effectually removed before a carpenter was allowed to range the house in the absence of both Percy and Fawkes. I must leave it to my readers to decide which alternative they prefer.

According to the usually received story, the conspirators, hearing a rustling above their heads, imagined that their enterprise had been discovered, but having sent Fawkes to ascertain the cause of the noise, they learnt that Mrs. Skinner (afterwards Mrs. Bright) was selling coals, and having also ascertained that she was willing to give up her tenancy to them for a consideration, they applied to Whynniard—from whom the so-called ‘cellar’ was leased through his wife, and obtained a transfer of the premises to Percy. All that remained was to convey the powder from the house to the ‘cellar,’ and after covering it with billets and faggots, to wait quietly till Parliament met.

Father Gerard’s first objection to this is, that whilst they were mining, ‘ridiculous as is the supposition, the conspirators appear to have been ignorant of the existence of the “cellar,” and to have fancied that they were working their way immediately beneath the Chamber of Peers.’ The supposition would be ridiculous enough if it were not a figment of Father Gerard’s own brain. He relies on what he calls ‘Barlow’s Gunpowder Treason,’[175] published in 1678, and on a remark made by Tierney in 1841, adding that it is ‘obviously implied’ by Fawkes and Winter. What Fawkes says on November 17 is:—

“As they were working upon the wall, they heard a rushing in a cellar of removing of coals; whereupon we feared we had been discovered, and they sent me to go to the cellar, who finding that the coals were a selling, and that the cellar was to be let, viewing the commodity thereof for our purpose, Percy went and hired the same for yearly rent.”[176]

What Winter says is that, ‘near to Easter ... opportunity was given to hire the cellar, in which we resolved to lay the powder and leave the mine.’ What single word is there here about the conspirators thinking that there was no storey intervening between the foundation and the House of Lords? The mere fact of Percy having been in the house close to the passage from which there was an opening closed only by a grating into the ‘cellar’ itself,[177] would negative the impossible supposition. Father Gerard, however, adds that Mrs. Whynniard tells us that the cellar was not to let, and that Bright, i.e. Mrs. Skinner, had not the disposal of the lease, but one Skinner, and that Percy ‘laboured very earnestly before he succeeded in obtaining it.’ What Mrs. Whynniard says is that the cellar had been already let, and that her husband had not the disposal of it. Percy then ‘intreated that if he could get Mrs. Skinner’s good-will therein, they would then be contented to let him have it, whereto they granted it.’[178] Is not this exactly what one might expect to happen on an application for a lease held by a tenant who proves willing to remove?

Father Gerard proceeds to raise difficulties from the structural nature of the cellar itself. Mr. William Capon, he says, examined the foundations of the House of Lords when it was removed in 1823, and did not discover the hole which the conspirators were alleged to have made. His own statement, however, printed in the fifth volume of Vetusta Monumenta,[179] says nothing about the foundations; and besides, as Father Gerard has shown, he had a totally erroneous theory of the place whence he supposes the conspirators to have had access to the ‘cellar.’ Nothing—as I have learnt by experience—is so likely as a false theory to blind the eyes to existing evidence.

Then we have remarks upon the mode of communication between Percy’s house and the cellar. Father Gerard tells us that:—

“Fawkes says (November 6th, 1605) that about the middle of Lent[180] of that year, Percy caused ‘a new door’ to be made into it, that he might have a nearer way out of his own house into the cellar.

“This seems to imply that Percy took the cellar for his firewood when there was no convenient communication between it and his house. Moreover, it is not very easy to understand how a tenant—under such conditions as his—was allowed at discretion to knock doors through the walls of a royal palace. Neither did the landlady say anything of this door-making, when detailing what she knew of Percy’s proceedings.”

Without perceiving it, Father Gerard proceeds to dispose of the objection he had raised.

“In some notes of Sir E. Coke, it is said ‘The powder was first brought into Percy’s house, and lay there in a low room new built, and could not have been conveyed into the cellar but that all the street must have seen it; and therefore he caused a new door out of his house into the cellar to be made, where before there had been a grate of iron.”[181]

To Father Gerard this ‘looks very like an afterthought.’ Considering, however, that every word except the part about the grating is based on evidence which has reached us, it looks to me very like the truth. It is, indeed, useless to attempt to reconcile the position of the doors opening out of the ‘cellar’ apparently indicated on Capon’s plan (p. 80) with those given in Smith’s views (p. 109) of the four walls taken from the inside of the cellar, and I therefore conclude that the apertures shown in the former are really those of the House of Lords on the upper storey, a conjecture which is supported by the insertion of a flight of steps, which would lead nowhere if the whole plan was intended to record merely the features of the lower level. In any case, Smith’s illustration shows three entrances—one through the north wall which I have marked A, another with a triangular head near the north end of the east wall marked B, and a third with a square head near the south end of the same wall marked C. The first of these would naturally be used by Mrs. Skinner, as it opened on a passage leading westwards, and we know that she lived in King Street; the second would be used by Whynniard, whilst, either he or some predecessor might very well have put up a grating at the third to keep out thieves. That third aperture was, however, just opposite Percy’s house, and when he hired Mrs. Skinner’s part of the ‘cellar,’ he would necessarily wish to have it open and a door substituted for the grating. There was no question of knocking about the walls of a royal palace in the matter. If he had not that door opened he must either use Whynniard’s, of which Whynniard presumably wished to keep the key, or go round by Parliament Place to reach the one hitherto used by Mrs. Skinner. It is true that, if the north door was really the one used by Mrs. Skinner, it necessitates the conclusion that there was no insurmountable barrier between Whynniard’s part of the cellar, and that afterwards used by Percy. Moreover, it is almost certainly shown that this was the case by the ease with which the searchers got into Percy’s part of the cellar on the night of November 4th, though entering by another door. In this case the conspirators must have been content with the strong probability that whenever their landlord came into his end of the ‘cellar,’ he would not come further to pull about the pile of wood with which their powder barrels were covered. On the other hand, the entrances knocked in blocked-up arches may not have been the same in 1605 and in 1807. At all events, the square-headed aperture in Smith’s view agrees so well with that in the view at p. 89, that it can be accepted without doubt as the one in which Percy’s new door was substituted for a grating, and which led out of the covered passage opening from the court leading from Parliament Place.

	A
North Side	[Larger Image]	[Larger Image]	South Side
	B	C
	[Larger Image]		East Side
	[Larger Image]		West Side

Four walls of the so-called cellar under the House of Lords.
From Smith’s Antiquities of Westminster, p. 39.

Though it is possible that Whynniard might, if he chose, come into the plotters’ ‘cellar,’ we are under no compulsion to accept Father Gerard’s assertion that Winter declared ‘that the confederates so arranged as to leave the cellar free for all to enter who would.’[182] “It is stated,” writes Father Gerard, in another place, “in Winter’s long declaration on this subject, that the barrels were thus completely hidden ‘because we might have the house free to suffer anyone to enter that would,’ and we find it mentioned by various writers, subsequently, that free ingress was actually allowed to the public.”[183] As the subsequent writers appear to be an anonymous writer, who wrote on The Gunpowder Plot under the pseudonym of L., in 1805, and Hugh F. Martyndale, who wrote A Familiar Analysis of the Calendar of the Church of England in 1830, I am unable to take them very seriously. The extraordinary thing is that Father Gerard does not see that his quotation from Winter is fatal to his argument. Winter says that Fawkes covered the powder in the cellar ‘because we might have the house free to suffer anyone to enter that would.[184] The cellar was not part of the house; and, although the words are not entirely free from ambiguity, the more reasonable interpretation is that Fawkes disposed of the powder in the cellar, in order that visitors might be freely admitted into the house. Winter, in fact, makes no direct statement that the powder was moved, and it is therefore fair to take this removal as included in what he says about the faggots.

As for the quantity of the gunpowder used, the opinion of the writer discussed in the Edinburgh Review (January, 1897), appears reasonable enough:—

“Apart from the hearsay reports, Father Gerard seems to base his computations on the statement that a barrel of gunpowder contained 400 pounds. This is an error. The barrel of gunpowder contained 100 pounds;[185] the last, which is rightly given at 2,400 pounds, contained twenty-four barrels. The quantity of powder stored in the cellar is repeatedly said, both in the depositions and the indictment to have been thirty-six barrels—that is, a last and a half, or about one ton twelve hundredweight; and this agrees very exactly with the valuation of the powder at 200l. In 1588, the cost of a barrel of 100 pounds was 5l. But to carry, and move, and stow, a ton and a half in small portable barrels is a very different thing from the task on which Father Gerard dwells of moving and hiding, not only the large barrels of 400 pounds, but also the hogsheads that were spoken of.”[186]

I will merely add that Father Gerard’s surprise that the disposal of so large a mass of powder is not to be traced is the less justifiable, as the Ordnance accounts of the stores in the Tower have been very irregularly preserved, those for the years with which we are concerned being missing.

Having thus, I hope, shown that the traditional account of the mine and the cellar are consistent with the documentary and structural evidence, I pass to the question of the accuracy of the alleged discovery of the conspiracy.

CHAPTER V

THE DISCOVERY

In one way the evidence on the discovery of the plot differs from that on the plot itself. The latter is straightforward and simple, its discrepancies, where there are any, being reducible to the varying amount of the knowledge of the Government. The same cannot be said of the evidence relating to the mode in which the plot was discovered. If we accept the traditional story that its discovery was owing to the extraordinary letter brought to Monteagle at Hoxton, there are disturbing elements in the case. In the first place, the Commissioners would probably wish to conceal any mystery connected with the delivery of the letter, if it were only for the sake of Monteagle, to whom they owed so much; and, in the second place, when they had once committed themselves to the theory that the King had discovered the sense of the letter by a sort of Divine inspiration, there could not fail to be a certain amount of shuffling to make this view square with the actual facts. Other causes of hesitancy to set forth the full truth there may have been, but these two were undeniably there.

Father Gerard, however, bars the way to the immediate discussion of these points by a theory which he has indeed adopted from others, but which he has made his own by the fulness with which he has treated it. He holds that Salisbury knew of the plot long before the incident of the letter occurred, a view which is by no means inconsistent with the belief that the plot itself was genuine, and, it may be added, is far less injurious to Salisbury’s character than the supposition that he had either partially or wholly invented the plot itself. If the latter charge could have been sustained Salisbury would have to be ranked amongst the most infamous ministers known to history. If all that can be said of him is that he kept silence longer than we should have expected, we may feel curious as to his motives, or question his prudence, but we shall have no reason to doubt his morality.

Father Gerard, having convinced himself that in all probability the Government, or, at least Salisbury, had long had a secret agent amongst the plotters, fixes his suspicions primarily on Percy. Beginning by an attack on Percy’s moral character, he writes as follows:—

“It unfortunately appears that, all the time, this zealous convert was a bigamist, having one wife living in the capital and another in the provinces. When his name was published in connection with the Plot, the magistrates of London arrested the one and those of Warwickshire the other, alike reporting to the secretary what they had done, as may be seen in the State Paper Office.”[187]

The papers in the Public Record Office here referred to prove nothing of the sort. On November 5 Justice Grange writes to Salisbury that Percy had a house in Holborne ‘where his wife is at this instant. She saith her husband liveth not with her, but being attendant on the Right Honourable the Earl of Northumberland, liveth and lodgeth as she supposeth with him. She hath not seen him since Midsummer.[188] She liveth very private and teacheth children. I have caused some to watch the house, as also to guard her until your Honour’s pleasure be further known.’[189] There is, however, nothing to show that Salisbury did not within a couple of hours direct that she should be set free, as she had evidently nothing to tell; nor is there anything here inconsistent with her having been arrested in Warwickshire on the 12th, especially as she was apprehended in the house of John Wright,[190] her brother. What is more likely than that, when the terrible catastrophe befell the poor woman, she should have travelled down to seek refuge in her brother’s house, where she might perchance hear some tidings of her husband? It is adding a new terror to matrimony to suggest that a man is liable to be charged with bigamy because his wife is seen in London one day and in Warwickshire a week afterwards.

The fact probably is that Father Gerard received the suggestion from Goodman, whose belief that Percy was a bigamist rested on information derived from some lady who may very well have been as hardened a gossip as he was himself.[191] His own attempt to bolster up the story by further evidence can hardly be reckoned conclusive.

In any case the question of Percy’s morality is quite irrelevant. It is more to the purpose when Father Gerard quotes Goodman as asserting that Percy had been a frequent visitor to Salisbury’s house by night.[192]

“Sir Francis Moore,” he tells us, “... being the lord keeper Egerton’s favourite, and having some occasion of business with him at twelve of the clock at night, and going then homeward from York House to the Middle Temple at two, several times he met Mr. Percy, coming out of that great statesman’s house, and wondered what his business should be there.”[193]

There are many ways in which the conclusion that Percy went to tell tales may be avoided. In the days of James I., the streets of London were inconceivably dark to the man who at the present day is accustomed to gas and electricity. Not even lanterns were permanently hung out for many a year to come. Except when the moon was shining, the only light was a lantern carried in the hand, and by the light of either it would be easy to mistake the features of any one coming out from a door way. Yet even if Moore’s evidence be accepted, the inference that Percy betrayed the plot to Salisbury is not by any means a necessary one. Percy may, as the Edinburgh Reviewer suggests, have been employed by Northumberland. Nor does Father Gerard recognise that it was clearly Percy’s business to place his connection with the Court as much in evidence as possible. The more it was known that he was trusted by Northumberland, and even by Salisbury, the less people were likely to ask awkward questions as to his reasons for taking a house at Westminster. In 1654 a Royalist gentleman arriving from the Continent to take part in an insurrection against the Protector, went straight to Cromwell’s Court in order to disarm suspicion. Why may not Percy have acted in a similar way in 1605? All that we know of Percy’s character militates against the supposition that he was a man to play the dastardly part of an informer.

Other pieces of evidence against Percy may be dismissed with equal assurance. We are told, for instance,[194] that Salisbury found a difficulty in tracing Percy’s movements before the day on which Parliament was to have been blown up; whereas, ten days before, the same Percy had received a pass issued by the Commissioners of the North, as posting to court for the King’s especial service. The order, however, is signed, not by the Commissioners of the North as a body, but by two of their number, and was dated at Seaton Delaval in Northumberland.[195] As Percy’s business is known to have been the bringing up the Earl of Northumberland’s rents, and he might have pleaded that it was his duty to be in his place as Gentleman Pensioner at the meeting of Parliament, two gentlemen living within hail of Alnwick were likely enough to stretch a point in favour of the servant of the great earl. In any case it was most unlikely that they should have thought it necessary to acquaint the Secretary of State with the terms in which a posting order had been couched.

The supposition that Salisbury sent secret orders to the sheriff of Worcestershire not to take Percy alive is sufficiently disposed of, as the Edinburgh Reviewer has remarked, by Sheriff Walsh’s own letter, and by the extreme improbability that if Salisbury had known Percy to have been a government spy he would have calculated on his being such a lunatic as to join the other conspirators in their flight, apparently for the mere pleasure of getting himself shot.[196] It may be added that it is hard to imagine how Salisbury could know beforehand in what county the rebels would be taken, and consequently to what sheriff he should address his compromising communication. As to the suggestion that there was something hidden behind the failure of the King’s messenger to reach the sheriff with orders to avoid killing the chief conspirators, on the ground that ‘the distance to be covered was about 112 miles, and there were three days to do it in, for not till November 8 were the fugitives surrounded,’ it may fairly be answered, in the first place, that the whereabouts of the conspirators was not known at Westminster till the Proclamation for their arrest was issued on the 7th, and in the second place, that as the sheriff was constantly on the move in pursuit, it must have been hard to catch him in the time which sufficed to send a message to a fixed point at Westminster.[197]

It is needless to argue that Catesby was not the informer. The evidence is of the slightest, depending on the alleged statement by a servant,[198] long ago dead when it was committed to paper, and even Father Gerard appears hardly to believe that the charge is tenable.

There remains the case of Tresham. Since the publication of Jardine’s work Tresham has been fixed on as the author or contriver of the letter to Monteagle which, according to the constant assertion of the Government, gave the first intimation of the existence of the plot, and this view of the case was taken by many contemporaries. Tresham was the last of three wealthy men—the others being Digby and Rokewood—who were admitted to the plot because their money could be utilised in the preparations for a rising. He was a cousin of Catesby and the two Winters, and had taken part in the negotiations with Spain before the death of Elizabeth. During the weeks immediately preceding November 5 there had been much searching of heart amongst the plotters as to the destruction in which Catholic peers would be involved, and it is probable that hints were given to some of them that it would be well to be absent from Parliament on the morning fixed for the explosion. Amongst the peers connected with one or other of the plotters was Lord Monteagle, who had married Tresham’s sister.

That Tresham should have desired to warn his brother-in-law was the most likely thing in the world. We know that he was in London on October 25 or 26, because Thomas Winter received 100l. from him on one of those days at his chambers in Clerkenwell.[199] It was in the evening of the 26th that Monteagle arrived at his house at Hoxton though he had not been there for more than twelve months. As he was sitting down to supper one of his footmen brought him a letter. Monteagle on receiving it, took the extraordinary course of handing it to one of his gentlemen named Ward, and bade him read it aloud. The letter was anonymous, and ran as follows:—

“My Lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament; for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. And think not slightly of this advertisement but retire yourself into your country, where you may expect the event in safety, for though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them. This counsel is not to be contemned, because it may do you good, and can do you no harm, for the danger is past as soon as you have burnt this letter; and I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it, to whose holy protection I commend you.”

Monteagle took the letter to Salisbury, and if the protestations of the Government are to be trusted, this was the first that Salisbury or any one of his fellow councillors heard of the conspiracy. Father Gerard follows Jardine and others in thinking this to be improbable if not incredible.

It may at least be freely granted that it is hardly probable that Monteagle had not heard of the plot before. As Jardine puts it forcibly:—

“The circumstance of Lord Monteagle’s unexpected visit to his house at Hoxton, without any other assignable reason, on the evening in question, looks like the arrangement of a convenient scene; and it is deserving of notice that the gentleman to whom his lordship gave the letter to read at his table was Thomas Ward, an intimate friend of several of the conspirators, and suspected to have been an accomplice in the treason. The open reading of such a letter before his household (which, unless it be supposed to be part of a counterplot, seems a very unnatural and imprudent course for Lord Monteagle to adopt) might be intended to secure evidence that the letter was the first intimation he had of the matter, and would have the effect of giving notice to Ward that the plot was discovered, in order that he might communicate the fact to the conspirators. In truth he did so on the very next morning; and if they had then taken the alarm, and instantly fled to Flanders (as it is natural to suppose they would have done) every part of Tresham’s object would have been attained. This scheme was frustrated by the unexpected and extraordinary infatuation of the conspirators themselves, who, notwithstanding their knowledge of the letter, disbelieved the discovery of the plot from the absence of any search at the cellar, and, omitting to avail themselves of the means afforded for their flight, still lingered in London.”[200]

It is unnecessary to add any word to this, so far as it affects the complicity of Tresham with Monteagle. I submit, however, that the stronger is the evidence that the letter was prearranged with Monteagle the more hopeless is the reasoning of those who, like Father Gerard, hold that it was prearranged with Salisbury. Salisbury’s object, according to Father Gerard’s hypothesis, was to gain credit by springing upon the King and the world a partly or totally imaginary plot. If he was to do this, he must have some evidence to bring which would convince the world that the affair was not a mere imposture; and yet it is to be imagined that he contrives a scheme which threatens to leave him in possession of an obscure letter, and the knowledge that every one of the plotters was safely beyond the sea. As a plan concocted by Monteagle and Tresham to stop the plot, and at the same time secure the escape of their guilty friends, the little comedy at Hoxton was admirably concocted. From the point of view of the Government its advantages are not obvious. Add to this that all Salisbury’s alleged previous knowledge did not enable him to discover that a mine had been dug till Fawkes told him as late as November 8, and that the Government for two or three days after Fawkes was taken were in the dark as to the whereabouts of the conspirators, and we find every reason to believe that the statement of the Government, that they only learnt the plot through the Monteagle letter, was absolutely true.

That the Government dealt tenderly with Tresham in not sending him to the Tower till the 12th, and allowing him the consolation of his wife’s nursing when he fell ill, is only what was to have been expected if they had learnt from Monteagle the source of his information, whilst they surely would have kept his wife from all access to him if he had had reason to complain to her that he had been arrested in spite of his services to the Government. After his death, which took place in the Tower, there was no further consideration of him, and, on December 23, the Council ordered that his head should be cut off and preserved till further directions, but his body buried in the Tower.[201]

It is unnecessary to go deeply into the question of the discrepancy between the different accounts given by the Government of the manner in which the Monteagle letter was expounded. The probable truth is that Salisbury himself interpreted it correctly, and that his fellow-councillors came to the same conclusion as himself. It was, however, a matter of etiquette to hold that the King was as sharp-witted as Elizabeth had been beautiful till the day of her death, and as the solution of the riddle was not difficult, some councillor—perhaps Salisbury himself—may very well have suggested that the paper should be submitted to his Majesty. When he had guessed it, it would be also a matter of etiquette to believe that by the direct inspiration of God his Majesty had solved a problem which no other mortal could penetrate. We are an incredulous race nowadays, and we no more believe in the Divine inspiration of James I. than in the loveliness of Elizabeth at the age of seventy; and we even find it difficult to understand Father Gerard’s seriousness over the strain which the poor councillors had to put upon themselves in fitting the facts to the courtly theory.

Nor is there any reason to be surprised at the postponement by the Government of all action to the night of November 4. It gave them a better chance of coming upon the conspirators preparing for the action, and if their knowledge was, as I hold it was, confined to the Monteagle letter, they may well have thought it better not to frighten them into flight by making premature inquiries. No doubt there was a danger of gunpowder exploding and blowing up not only the empty House of Lords, but a good many innocent people as well; but there had been no explosion yet, and the powder was in the custody of men whose interest it was that there should be no explosion before the 5th. After all, neither the King nor Salisbury, nor indeed any of the other councillors, lived near enough to be hurt by any accident that might occur. Smith’s wildly improbable view that the shock might have ‘levelled and destroyed all London and Westminster like an earthquake,’[202] can hardly be taken seriously.

We now come to the alleged discrepancies between various accounts of Fawkes’s seizure. Father Gerard compares three documents—(a) what he terms ‘the account furnished by Salisbury for the information of the King of France, November 6, 1605,’ (b) the letter sent on November 9 to Edmondes and other ambassadors,[203] and (c) the King’s Book. On the first, I would remark that there is no evidence, I may add, no probability, that, as it stands, it was ever despatched to France at all. It is a draft written on the 6th, which was gradually moulded into the form in which it was, as we happen to know, despatched on the 9th to Edmondes and Cornwallis. If the despatches received by Parry had been preserved, I do not doubt but that we should find that he also received it in the same shape as the other ambassadors.

Having premised this remark as a caution against examining the document too narrowly, we may admit that the three statements differ about the date at which the Monteagle letter was received—(a) says it was some four or five days before the Parliament; (b) that it was eight days; (c) that it was ten days. The third and latest statement is accurate; but the mistakes of the others are of no importance, except to show that the draft was carelessly drawn up, probably by Munck, Salisbury’s secretary, in whose handwriting it is; and that the mistake was corrected with an approach to accuracy three days later, and made quite right further on.

With respect to the more important point raised by Father Gerard that—while (a) does not mention Suffolk’s search in the afternoon, (b) does not mention the presence of Fawkes at the time of the afternoon visit—it is quite true that the hurried draft does not mention Suffolk’s visit; but it is not true that it in any way denies the fact that such a visit had taken place.

Father Gerard abbreviates the story of (a) as follows:—

“It was accordingly determined, the night before, ‘to make search about that place, and to appoint a watch in the Old Palace to observe what persons might resort thereunto.’

“Sir T. Knyvet, being appointed to the charge thereof, going by chance, about midnight, into the vault, by another door,[204] found Fawkes within. Thereupon he caused some few faggots to be removed, and so discovered some of the barrels, ‘merely, as it were, by God’s direction, having no other cause but a general jealousy.’”[205]

The italics are Father Gerard’s own, and I think we are fairly entitled to complain, so far as the first phrase thus distinguished is concerned, because being printed in this manner it looks like a quotation, though as a matter of fact is not so. This departure from established usage is the more unfortunate, as the one important word—‘chance’—upon which Father Gerard’s argument depends, is a misprint or a miswriting for the word ‘change,’ which is to be seen clearly written in the MS. The whole passage as it there stands runs as follows:—

“This advertisement being made known to his Majesty and the Lords, their Lordships found not good, coming as it did in that fashion, to give much credit to it, or to make any apprehension of it by public show, nor yet so to contemn it as to do nothing at all in it, but found convenient the night before under a pretext that some of his Majesty’s wardrobe stuff was stolen and embezzled to make search about that place, and to appoint a watch in the old palace to observe what persons might resort thereabouts, and appointed the charge thereof to Sir Thomas Knyvet, who about midnight going by change into the vault by another door, found the fellow, as is said before,[206] whereupon suspicion being increased, he caused some few faggots to be removed, and so discovered some of the barrels of powder, merely, as it were, by God’s direction, having no other cause but a general jealousy.”[207]

If the word ‘chance’ had been found in the real letter, it could hardly be interpreted otherwise than to imply a negative of the earlier visit said to have been followed by a resolve on the King’s part to search farther. As the word stands, it may be accepted as evidence that an earlier visit had taken place. How could Knyvet go ‘by change’ into the vault by another door, unless he or someone else had gone in earlier by some other approach? It is, however, the positive evidence which may be adduced from this letter, which is most valuable. The letter is, as I said, a mere hurried draft, in all probability never sent to anyone. It is moreover quite inartistic in its harking back to the story of the arrest after giving fuller details. Surely such a letter is better calculated to reveal the truth than one subsequently drawn up upon fuller consideration. What is it then, that stares us in the face, if we accept this as a genuine result of the first impression made upon the writer—whether he were Munck or Salisbury himself? What else than that the Government had no other knowledge of the plot than that derived from the Monteagle letter, and that not only because the writer says that the discovery of the powder was ‘merely as it were, by God’s direction, having no other cause but a general jealousy,’ but because the whole letter, and still more the amplified version which quickly followed, is redolent with uncertainty. Given that Suffolk’s mission in the afternoon was what it was represented to be, it becomes quite intelligible why the writer of the draft should be inclined to leave it unnoticed. It was an investigation made by men who were afraid of being blown up, but almost as much afraid of being made fools of by searching for gunpowder which had no existence, upon the authority of a letter notoriously ambiguous.

“And so,” wrote Salisbury, in the letter despatched to the ambassadors on the 9th,[208] “on Monday in the afternoon, accordingly the Lord Chamberlain, whose office is to see all places of assembly put in readiness when the King’s person shall come, took his coach privately, and after he had seen all other places in the Parliament House, he took a slight occasion to peruse that vault, where, finding only piles of billets and faggots heaped up, which were things very ordinarily placed in that room, his Lordship fell inquiring only who ought[209] the same wood, observing the proportion to be somewhat more than the housekeepers were likely to lay in for their own use; and answer being made before the Lord Monteagle, who was there present with the Lord Chamberlain, that the wood belonged to Mr. Percy, his Lordship straightway conceived some suspicion in regard of his person; and the Lord Monteagle also took notice that there was great profession between Percy and him, from which some inference might be made that it was a warning from a friend, my Lord Chamberlain resolved absolutely to proceed in a search, though no other materials were visible, and being returned to court about five o’clock took me up with him to the King and told him that, although he was hard of belief that any such thing was thought of, yet in such a case as this whatsoever was not done to put all out of doubt, was as good as nothing, whereupon it was resolved by his Majesty that this matter should be so carried as no man should be scandalised by it, nor any alarm taken for any such purpose.”