He commenced rather in the shape of innuendos, by hinting that he wished the Parliament further, and he thought he knew a mode of despatching all the Members at once, by a special train. As his associates did not take the hint immediately, he proceeded to expatiate on the expediency of a regular blow up, and getting rid of the whole Parliament "slap bang;" accompanying his observation by dealing on the deal table a tremendous thump, that made a noise resembling the explosion of gunpowder. The action seemed to strike a light in in the eyes of all present, and by putting this and that together, they perceived that Catesby's intention was to act the last scene of the Miller and his Men, beneath the walls of Parliament. Percy, who was a gentleman pensioner—though he seems to have been rather more of the pensioner than the gentleman—had an opportunity of banging about the Court, and watching the movements of his intended victims. The first care of the conspirators was to take a house in the neighbourhood; but no one of the lot, except Percy, had sufficient credit to justify his acceptance as a tenant, by any prudent landlord. At length they got hold of a dwelling by the water side, which was occupied by one Ferris—probably a ferryman—who, for a small consideration, vacated the premises in Percy's favour. The back of the house abutted—by means of a water-butt—on the Parliamentary party wall, and they began picking a hole in the wall as soon as they obtained possession. At every move they renewed their oath of secrecy, as if they were mutually better known than trusted among themselves, and a secret which, even in ordinarily honest hands, is tolerably sure to get wind; was very soon known to twenty people at least, through the leakiness of one or more of the conspirators.
Emboldened by their success, they took a coal shed on the Lambeth side of the river, where one of them, under pretence of going into the potato business, accumulated as large a quantity of coals, coke, and wood, as he could with the small means upon which he was enabled to speculate. The chief scene of their operations was, of course, the house at Westminster, where they laid in a large supply of hard boiled eggs; "the better," says Strype, "to be enabled to hatch their scheme, and to avoid suspicion, by not being compelled to send out for food." The wall offering considerable resistance to their projects it was found advisable to send for the keeper of the potato shed, over the way, to aid in the work, and young Wright, a brother of the same Wright that never would admit himself to be wrong, was admitted to a partnership in the secret.
Vainly did these ninny-hammers go hammering on at the walls of Parliament, which stuck together in a manner very characteristic of bricks, and no impression seemed to be made upon them; while the mine from Lambeth, by means of which they intended under-mining the British Constitution, made scarcely any progress at all. One morning, in the midst of their labours, they were startled by a rumbling noise overhead, when Guido Fawkes, who acted as sentinel, ran to ascertain the cause of the alarming sound. It seemed that one Bright, who carried on the coal business in a cellar immediately below the Parliament, was clearing out his stock, at "an alarming sacrifice," with the intention of moving his business to some more fashionable neighbourhood. Perhaps he was a bad tenant, and being on the eve of ejection, removed his coals in revenge for having got the sack from his landlord; but, at all events, he had a cart into which he was shooting the Wallsend, though he may have had no intention of shooting the moon at the expense of his creditors.
Percy, knowing the cellar must be vacant, went to look at it, and pronounced it the very thing; though it might, naturally, have excited some surprise that one who had hitherto been considered a man of ton should become a man of chaldrons and hundredweights by going into the coal business, on a scale somewhat limited. A tenancy was nevertheless effected, and several barrels of gunpowder were carried into the vault, under the pretence that the small-beer and bloater business was about to be commenced by the new lessee, in a style of unusual liberality.
Guy Fawkes was despatched to Flanders, to obtain adherents to the scheme, but he got no further than to obtain a promise from Owen that he would speak to Stanley, which seems to have been merely equivalent to an extension of the secret, without any beneficial result to the conspirators. On the return of Guido, he found that while he had been extending the secret abroad, his colleagues had been blabbing—of course confidentially—at home, so that the secret was becoming a good deal like an "aside" in a melo-drama, which comes to the ears of every one but the person most interested in being made acquainted with its purport.
Every arrangement was now made for blowing up the Parliament sky-high, when a prorogation, until the 5th of November, was suddenly announced, and the conspirators began to fear that the secret, which had experienced as many extensions as a railway line, had found its way, by some disagreeable deviation, to the ears of the intended victims. The expense of the conspiracy had hitherto been borne by Catesby, who paid for all the hard-boiled eggs, the rent of the coal-cellar, with the wood and the coals that had been had in; for, the rest being soldiers of fortune, which means that they were soldiers of no fortune at all, would not have got credit for even the bull's-eye lanthorn, which has since cut such a conspicuous figure in the history of the period. Catesby had, however, spent so much in new-laid eggs and new-laid gunpowder—for he had to support a numerous train—that he was obliged to take in fresh capital, and Sir Edward Digby, with Francis Tresham, were admitted as shareholders in the dangerous secret. Digby put down £1500 on the allotment of a slice of the mystery to himself, and Francis Tresham, who did not much like the speculation, though he consented to enter into it, gave his cheque for £2000, saying that he considered the money thrown away as completely as if he had wasted it in horse-chestnuts, Venetian grog, or raspberry vinegar. His givings were accompanied by fearful misgivings, and he never expected to see the hour when he should have the honour of being sent up to posterity on the wings of a barrel of gunpowder.
The 5th of November was the day that the conspirators had agreed to immortalize, for the benefit of future dealers in squibs, crackers, Catharine-wheels, and all the other "wheels within wheels," that are so completely in character with this complicated project. They used to take blows on the river preliminary to the great blow they had in their eye, and a house at Erith was their frequent place of rendezvous. They also held consultations at White Webbs—not Webb's the White Bear—near Enfield, and here they arranged that Guido Fawkes, after putting matters in train, should set fire to it, by a slow burning match, which would give him time to escape, though he often said, half jestingly, that to find his match would be exceedingly difficult. As the scheme drew near its intended execution, the "secret" had become so fearfully divided that every one who possessed a share of it had some friend or other he wanted to save; and if each had been allowed to withdraw his man, the residue of the Parliament would scarcely have been worth the powder and shot it had been determined to devote to them. Tresham, for example, was seized with a sudden fit of benevolence towards old Lord Monteagle; while Kay, the seedy and needy gentleman in charge of the house at Lambeth, wanted to save Lord Mordaunt, who had cashed for poor K. an I O U, when the money was of great use to him. Catesby, who was not so tender-hearted, declared it was all very well, but if they were to go on saving and excepting one after the other, there could be no explosion at all, unless they could procure some of that celebrated discriminating gunpowder, which blows up all the villains, in the last scene of a melo-drama, and spares the virtuous characters. He insisted, therefore, on the necessity of leaving the result to a toss-up, in which all would have an equal chance of winning or losing.
Tresham, who combined the wavering of the weathercock with the tremulousness of the tee-to-tum, was still intent on giving a sort of general warning to a number of his friends, and when his blabbing was objected to, he declared the affair had better be put off, as he could find no more money to carry on the conspiracy. Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes objected to delay; whereupon it is supposed that Tresham not only ratted but let the cat out of the bag in a most unwarrantable manner. Lord Monteagle, who had a country box at Hoxton, was giving a petit souper to a few friends on the 26th of October, and he was just finishing the leg of a Welsh rabbit, when his page presented him a letter that had just been left by a tall man who had refused to leave his name or wait for an answer. Lord Monteagle, thinking it might be a bill, desired one of his guests to read it out, when it proved to be a letter written in the characteristic spelling of the period. "I would advyse yowe, as yowe tender yower lyf, to devyse some excuse to shift of vower attendance at this Parleament," said the anonymous scribbler, which threw Monteagle into such alarm that he took the Hoxton 'bus, and went off to Whitehall the same evening to see Cecil. The king was "hunting the fearful hare at Royston," in the most hare-um scare-um style, and it was resolved that nothing could, would, or should be done until the return of the sovereign.
Notwithstanding the letter having been delivered as early as the 26th of October, nothing seems to have been done to stop the conspiracy, for Fawkes went regularly once a day to the cellar, to count the coals, snuff the rushlight, and do any other little odd job that the progress of the conspiracy might require. Cecil and Suffolk having laid their heads together on the subject of the letter, at last fancied they had found the solution of the riddle, which for the convenience of the student, we will throw into the form of a charade, after an approved model.
My first is a sort of peculiar tea;
My second a lawn or a meadow might be;
My whole's a conspiracy likely to blow
King, Commons, and Lords to a place I don't know.