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On the morning of the day that the new Parliament meets for business—the day on which the King’s Speech is read—the corridors, vaults and cellars of the Palace of Westminster are searched to see that all is well with the building and safe for the King, Lords and Commons to assemble within it—a ceremony (for it is now only that) which is repeated on the opening day of every session. It recalls the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up the Parliament in 1605.
The Commons possess but one memento of Guy, that most notorious of all anti-parliamentarians. In a glass case in the Members’ Library may be seen a long, narrow key with a hinge in the centre for folding it up—so that it might be carried more conveniently in the pocket—which was found on Fawkes when he was captured. It was the key to the cellar of gunpowder extending under the House of Lords, though it was really part of an adjoining empty house which the conspirators had taken for their purpose. The custom of searching the Houses of Parliament is popularly supposed to date from the Gunpowder Plot, but it did not commence until eighty-five years later. According to a document preserved in the House of Lords, an anonymous warning received in 1690 by the Marquess of Carmarthen, setting forth, “There is great cause to judge that there is a second Gunpowder Plot, or some other such great mischief, designing against the King and Parliament by a frequent and great resort of notorious ill-willers at most private hours to the house of one Hutchinson in the Old Palace Yard, Westminster, situate very dangerous for such purpose,” led to a thorough examination of the buildings, and though nothing was then found, from that time to this the search appears to have been regularly made year after year.
The search party consists of twelve Yeomen of the Guard from the Tower in all the picturesque glory of their Tudor uniforms, accompanied by representatives of the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Office of Works, and the two police inspectors of the Houses of Lords and Commons. They tramp through the miles of corridors and lobbies, looking carefully into every nook and corner, and down in the equally extensive basements they examine everything with the utmost minuteness, going among gas pipes, steam pipes, hot-water pipes, electric-light conductors, to make sure that no explosives have been deposited there. When the search was first ordered, years and years ago, the Yeomen of the Guard were directed to carry lanterns to light their way through the dark passages. The corridors and cellars are now flooded with electric light. But the search party, still obeying the old order, march along swinging their lanterns. And still the solemn function ends up with service of cake and wine to the old Beefeaters, and the drinking of long life to the King, with a hip-hip hurrah! Only in one respect is there a departure from the old procedure. At one time it was customary, when the inspection was over, for the Lord Great Chamberlain to send a mounted soldier with the message “All’s well” to the Sovereign. The mounted soldier no longer rides post-haste to the King at Buckingham Palace; but every year the Vice-Chamberlain lets his Majesty know, by private wire, that everything is ready for his coming to meet the Lords and Commons in the House of Lords to announce from the Throne the business for which he has summoned Parliament to meet.