What was the Gunpowder Plot? Part 13

"For thus the Lord in's all-protecting grace, Ten days before the Parliament began, Ordained that one of that most trayterous race Did meet the Lord Mounteagles Serving-man, Who about Seven a clocke at night was sent Upon some errand, and as thus he went, Crossing the street a fellow to him came, A man to him unknowen, of personage tall, In's hand a Letter, and he gave the same Unto this Serving-man, and therewithall Did strictly charge him to take speciall heede To give it into's Masters hand with speede."

_Mischeefes Mystery_ (1617).

[262] Here again evidence was found of the direct guidance of Heaven:

"And thus with loyall heart away he goes, Thereto resolved whatever should betide, To th' Court he went this matter to disclose, To th' Earle of Salsb'ryes chamber soone he hide, Whither heavens finger doubtless him directed, As the best meanes to have this fact detected."

_Mischeefes Mystery._

[263] In the account forwarded to the amba.s.sadors, there is a curious contradiction. In the general sketch of the discovery with which it opens, it is said that Faukes was captured "in the place itself," with his lantern, "making his preparations." Afterwards, in the detailed narrative of the proceedings, that he was taken outside. The fact is, that the first portion of this letter is taken bodily from that of November 6th to Parry, wherein the arrest of Faukes in the vault was a princ.i.p.al point. Between the 6th and the 9th this part of the story had been altered, but it does not seem to have been noticed that a remnant of the earlier version still existed in the introductory portion.

It will be remarked that the account of November 6th makes no mention of the visit of the chamberlain to the vault, nor that of November 9th to the presence of Faukes at the time of this visit. The minute of November 7th says that Faukes admitted the chamberlain to the vault.

[264] _Criminal Trials_, ii. 3-5.

[265] _Narrative_, p. 100.

[266] This word is cancelled in the original draft.

[267] To Sir T. Edmondes, January 22nd, 1605-6.--Stowe MSS., 168, 73, f.

301.

[268] _Viz._, the complicity of the Jesuits, "not only as being casually acquainted with the Plot," but as having been "princ.i.p.all comforters, to instruct the consciences of some of these wicked Traytors, in the lawfulnesse of the Act and meritoriousnesse of the same."

On this it is enough to remark that when Father Garnet, the chief of the said Jesuits, came afterwards to be tried, no attempt whatever was made to prove any such thing. Cecil therefore wrote thus, and made so grave an a.s.sertion, without having any evidence in his hands to justify it.

[269] That King James alone solved the enigma was put forth as an article of faith. In the preamble to the Act for the solemnization of the 5th of November, Parliament declared that the treason "would have turned to utter ruin of this whole kingdom, had it not pleased Almighty G.o.d, by inspiring the king's most excellent Majesty with a divine Spirit, to discover some dark phrases of a letter...." In like manner, the monarch himself, in his speech to the Houses, of November 9th, informed them: "I did upon the instant interpret and apprehend some dark phrases therein, contrary to the ordinary grammar construction of them, and in another sort, than I am sure any divine or lawyer in any university would have taken them."

This "dark phrase" was the sentence--"For the danger is past as soon as you have burnt the letter," which the royal sage interpreted to mean "as quickly," and that by these words "should be closely understood the suddenty and quickness of the danger, which should be as quickly performed and at an end as that paper should be of blazing up in the fire."

Of this famous interpretation Mr. Gardiner says that it is "certainly absurd;" while Mr. Jardine is of opinion that the words in question "must appear to every common understanding mere nonsense."

When it was proposed in the House of Commons (January 31st, 1605-6,) to pa.s.s a vote of thanks to Lord Monteagle for his share in the "discovery," one Mr. Fuller objected that this would be to detract from the honour of his Majesty, for "the true discoverer was the king."

The reader will perhaps be reminded of Sir Walter Scott's inimitable picture of the king's satisfaction in this notable achievement.

"Do I not ken the smell of pouther, think ye? Who else nosed out the Fifth of November, save our royal selves? Cecil, and Suffolk, and all of them, were at fault, like sae mony mongrel tikes, when I puzzled it out; and trow ye that I cannot smell pouther? Why, 'sblood, man, Joannes Barclaius thought my ingine was in some manner inspiration, and terms his history of the plot, _Series patefacti divinitus parricidii_; and Sponda.n.u.s, in like manner, saith of us, _Divinitus evasit_."--_Fortunes of Nigel_, c. xxvii.

[270] _Relation_ ..., November 7th, 1605 (P.R.O.).

[271] _Narrative_, f. 68 b.--Stonyhurst MSS.

[272] F. 66. It will be remembered that this episode is not mentioned by Cecil in his version of November 6th. Bishop Goodman's opinion is that this and other points of the story were contrived for stage effect: "The King must have the honour to interpret that it was by gunpowder; and the very night before the parliament began it was to be discovered, to make the matter the more odious, and the deliverance the more miraculous. No less than the lord chamberlain must search for it and discover it, and Faux with his dark lantern must be apprehended." (_Court of King James_, p. 105.)

[273] T. Winter, November 23rd, 1605.

[274] There is, of course, abundant contradiction upon this point, as all others, but the balance of evidence appears to point to 2 a.m. or thereabouts.

[275] The customary hour for the meeting of the Houses was 9 a.m., or even earlier. (_Journals of Parliament._)

[276] The list of those present is given in the _Lords' Journals_; it is headed by the Lord Chancellor (Ellesmere), and includes the Archbishop of Canterbury, fourteen bishops, and thirty-one peers, of whom Lord Monteagle was one. In 1598, as Mr. Atkinson tells us in his preface to the lately published volume of the _Calendar of Irish State Papers_, the cellars of the Dublin Law Courts were used as a powder magazine. The English Privy Council, startled to hear of this remarkable arrangement, pointed out that it might probably further diminish the number of loyal subjects in that kingdom, but were quaintly rea.s.sured by the Irish Lords Justices, who explained that, in view of the troublous state of the times, the sittings of the courts had been discontinued, and were not likely to be resumed for the present.

[277] The only allusion to it I have been able to find occurs in the _Politician's Catechism_ (1658), p. 95: "Yet the barells, wherein the powder was, are kept as reliques, and were often shown to the king and his posterity, that they might not entertain the least thought of clemency towards the Catholique Religion. There is not an ignorant Minister or Tub-preacher, who doth not (when all other matter fails) remit his auditors to the Gunpowder Treason, and describe those tubs very pathetically, the only reliques thought fit by them to be kept in memory."

[278] _Journals of the House of Lords_, November 1st and 2nd, 1678.

[279] _Ibid._, November 2nd, 1678.

[280] I have already remarked upon Faukes' statement that he was arrested in quite a different place from any mentioned in the government accounts. It should be added, that as to the person who arrested him, there is a somewhat similar discrepancy of evidence. The honour is universally a.s.signed by the official accounts to Sir T. Knyvet, who in the following year was created a peer, which shows that he undoubtedly rendered some valuable service on the occasion. An epitaph, however, in St. Anne's Church, Aldersgate (printed in Maitland's _History of London_, p. 1065, 3rd ed.), declares that it was Peter Heiwood, of Heywood, Lancas.h.i.+re, "who apprehended Guy Faux, with his dark Lanthorn; and for his zealous Prosecution of Papists, as Justice of Peace, was stabbed, in Westminster Hall, by John James, a Dominican Friar, A.D.

1640." No trace of this a.s.sa.s.sination can be found, nor does the name of John James occur in the Dominican records. It is, however, a curious coincidence that the "Guy Faukes' Lantern," exhibited in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, bears the inscription: "_Laterna ilia ipsa qua usus est, et c.u.m qua deprehensus Guido Faux in crypta subterranea, ubi domo_ [sic] _Parliamenti difflandae operam dabat. Ex dono Robti. Heywood nuper Academiae Procuratoris, Ap. 4^o, 1641._" See the epitaph in full, Appendix I.

[281] To J. Chamberlain, 10th-20th November, 1605. P.R.O. _France_, b.

132, f. 335 b.

[282] The Council appears at this time to have met in the Painted Chamber, and, without at all wis.h.i.+ng to lay too much stress upon this point, I cannot but remark that the supposition that this was the original scene a.s.signed to the operations of Faukes would solve various difficulties:

1. Beneath the Painted Chamber was a vaulted cellar, answering to the description we have so frequently heard, whereas under the House of Lords was neither a cellar nor a vault.

2. This crypt beneath the Painted Chamber has been constantly shown as "Guy Faukes' Cellar."

3. In prints of the period, Faukes is usually represented as going to blow up this chamber, never the House of Lords.

[283] To Chamberlain, November 13th (O.S.), 1605. P.R.O.

[284] Thus M. Bouillet, in the latest edition of his _Dictionnaire d'histoire et geographie_, speaks as follows: "Le ministre cupide et orgueilleux, Cecil, semble avoir ete l'ame du complot, et l'avoir decouvert lui meme au moment propice, apres avoir presente a l'esprit faible de Jacques I. les dangers auxquels il etait en but de la part des Catholiques."

Gazeau and Prampain (_Hist. Mod._, tome i.) speak of the conspiracy as "cette plaisanterie;" and say of the conspirators, "Dans une cave, ils avaient depose 36 barils contenant (ou soi-disant tels) de la poudre."

[285] P.R.O. _Gunpowder Plot Book_, 39 (November 7).

[286] In Herring's _Pietas Pontificia_ (1606) the king is described as coming to the House:

"Magna c.u.m Pompa, stipatorumque Caterva, Palmatisque, Togis, Gemmis, auroque refulgent: Ingens fit Populi concursus, compita complens, Turbis se adglomerant densis, spectantque Triumphum."

[287] Faukes himself says--examination of November 16th--that the touchwood would have burnt a quarter of an hour.

[288] See Appendix K, _Myths of the Powder Plot_.

[289] In connection with this appears an interesting example of the natural philosophy of the time, it being said that Faukes selected this mode of escape, hoping that water, being a non-conductor, would save him from the effects of the explosion.

[290] I am informed on high authority that on the day in question it was high water at London Bridge between five and six p.m. In his _Memorials of the Tower of London_ (p. 136) Lord de Ros says that the vessel destined to convey him to Flanders was to be in waiting for Faukes at the river side close by, and that in it he was to drop down the river with the ebb tide. It would, of course, have been impossible for any sea-going craft to make its way up to Westminster; nor would the ebb tide run to order.

[291] It is frequently said that the testimony of Bishop Goodman, who has been so often cited, is discredited by the fact that he probably died a Catholic, for he was attended on his death-bed by the Dominican Father, Francis a S. Clara (Christopher Davenport), chaplain to Queen Henrietta Maria, a learned man who indulged in the dream of corporate reunion between England and Rome, maintaining that the Anglican articles were in accordance with Catholic doctrine.

In his will Goodman professed that as he lived, so he died, most constant in all the articles of the Christian Faith, and in all the doctrine of G.o.d's holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, "whereof," he says, "I do acknowledge the Church of Rome to be the Mother Church. And I do verily believe that no other church hath any salvation in it, but only so far as it concurs with the faith of the Church of Rome." On this, Mr. Brewer, his editor, observes that a sound Protestant might profess as much, the question being what meaning is to be given to the terms employed. Moreover, the same writer continues, Goodman cannot have imagined that his life had been a constant profession of Roman doctrine, inasmuch as he advanced steadily from one preferment to another in the Church of England, and strongly maintaining her doctrines formally denounced those of Rome. What is certain, however, is this, that in the very work from which his evidence is quoted he speaks in such a manner as to show that whatever were his religious opinions, he was a firm believer in the Royal Supremacy and a lover of King James, whom he thus describes: "Truly I did never know any man of so great an apprehension, of so great love and affection,--a man so truly just, so free from all cruelty and pride, such a lover of the church, and one that had done so much good for the church." (_Court of King James_, i. 91.)