Constant communications went on with Henry Dudley, the Ashtons, and other gentlemen abroad; with the “Pirates” and the leaders of the movement in the West, and with the French King, for a convoy. The conspirators had progressed so far that they had entered the Treasure House on the 6th of March, and finding the box too heavy had planned to force it open, and take the treasure in portable packages through Rossey’s garden to the boat that would await them on the river by the steps on the 17th of March. On the 16th they took the final solemn oath to hold by each other, and John Throgmorton, the real leader of the London party “said he wished his dagger was in the Queen’s heart, and in that of her Council.” On the 17th twenty of the chief of them were arrested, and conveyed to the Tower. I know that Mr. Froude gives it as the 18th, following Machyn and others. But the “Tower accounts” of the year contain the expenses for boarding Throgmorton, Daniell, Peckham and others, and are dated from the 17th.[43] I suppose therefore the arrest took place on the evening of the 17th, and became known to the people on the morning of the 18th. The name of Hunnis does not appear in this bill, but that only proves that he did not pay for extra diet. His name is given in Machyn’s list under the spelling Heneges, which Froude misrendered into Thomas Heneage. His name appears twice on the first list of conspirators. He was captured about the same time, and lodged near the others in the Tower; his conversations upon “prudence” and “purgatory,” spoken through the walls of cubicles and subdivided cells, are recorded among the confessions of Peckham. It must have been a trying time. The heat of action and the hope of success had died out of him, the certainty of danger, the dread of torture and of destruction surrounded him. Four days after his incarceration he would hear (for jailers then spoke to their prisoners) of the burning of Cranmer, while one after the other of his fellow prisoners was tortured. On the 21st of April his friend and leader, the one brave man among all the batch of prisoners, John Throgmorton, was tried at Southwark, along with Uvedale, Governor of the Isle of Wight, and they were executed together at Tyburn on the 28th. On the 5th of May, Hunnis himself was arraigned at Guildhall in company with Henry Peckham, John Daniell, William Stanton and Edward Turnour; on the 7th Peckham and Daniell were condemned, and the others afterward.
But Hunnis now disappears from historical notes. Whether he appealed to any rights on technical points; whether he owed his life to his being arraigned as “Thomas,” instead of “William,” or to the unusually difficult writing of the clerk who took down his depositions; whether his youth, beauty, popularity, talents, or frank confessions moved the hearts of his judges; or whether he was remanded through the interest of his old master the Earl of Pembroke, I know not. He may have been forgotten as being too insignificant. For two years he languished, neglected in the Tower, only to be delivered on the death of Mary. He may have been released shortly before that date through influence. That the terrors and discomforts of prison life had entered into his soul, that fears of rack and execution had aged his youth, we can see from two sets of verses in “The Paradise of Dainty devices” (ed. 1596), “Being asked the occasion of his white head,” No. 4 and No. 93. In the latter, in feeble verse, and many incomprehensible phrases, he certainly gives a chapter from his life’s experience, and asserts his belief in the righteousness of his cause and in the reward of his faith in God.
(93) Being in trouble he writeth thus.
In terrours trap with thraldome thrust,
Their thorny thoughts to taste and trie;
in conscience cleare from cause uniust,
With carping teares did call and crye,
and saide O God yet thou art he,
that can and will deliver me. Bis.
Thus trembling there with teares I trod,