What Gunpowder Plot Was

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.

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.

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:—

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.