What Gunpowder Plot Was

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’160 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.”161

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.162 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,”163 he writes, “was a chamber occupying the first floor of a building which stood about fifty yards from the left bank of the Thames,164 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.”165

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,’166 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.’167 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.’168 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.169 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.170

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?171 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,172 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.’173 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,’174 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.”175

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,176 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.’177 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,178 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 Lent179 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.”180

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.

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.’181 “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.”182 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.183 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;184 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.”185

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.”186

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.187 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.’188 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,189 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.190 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.191

“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.”192

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.