Yet more remarkable is the fact that it would appear to have remained undiscovered ever afterwards, and that no marks seem to have been left upon the wall which had been so roughly handled. It is certainly impossible to find any record that such traces were observed when the building was demolished, though they could scarcely have failed to attract attention and interest. On this subject we have the important evidence of Mr. William Capon, who carefully examined every detail connected with the old palace, and evidently had the opportunity of studying the foundations of the House of Lords when, in 1823, that building was removed.[188] He does, indeed, mention what he conceives to be the traces of the conspirators' work, of which he gives the following description:
"Adjoining the south end of the Cellar, or more properly the ancient Kitchen, to the west, was a small room separated only by a stone doorway, with a pointed head, and with very substantial masonry joined to the older walls.... At the North side [of this] there had been an opening, a doorway of very solid thick stonemasonry, through which was a way seemingly forced through by great violence.... In 1799 it was asserted that this was always understood to have been the place where the conspirators broke into the vault which adjoined that called Guy Vaux's cellar."[189]
But against such a supposition there are three fatal objections. (1) This places the conspirators on the wrong side of the house, for they most certainly worked from the east, or river side, not from the west.[190] (2) It makes the mine above ground instead of below. (3) The conspirators never broke into the cellar at all, but hired it in the ordinary way of business.
Such considerations as the above may well make us sceptical in regard to the mine, and if this element of the story, upon which so much stress has always been laid, prove to be untrustworthy, it must needs follow that grave suspicion will be cast upon the rest.
There are, likewise, various problems in connection with the "cellar," especially as concerns the means of ingress to it, and its consequent privacy or publicity.
(a) Faukes says (November 6th, 1605) that about the middle of Lent of that year Percy caused "a new dore" to be made into it, "that he might have a neerer way out of his own house into the cellar."
This seems to imply that Percy took the cellar for his firewood when there was no convenient communication between it and his house. Moreover it is not very easy to understand how a tenant under such conditions as his was allowed at discretion to knock doors through the walls of a royal palace. Neither did the landlady say anything of this door-making, when detailing what she knew about Percy's proceedings.
(b) In some notes by Sir E. Coke,[191] it is said: "The powder was first brought into Percy's house, and lay there in a low room new built, and could not have been conveyed into the cellar by the old door but that all the street must have seen it; and therefore he caused a new door out of his house into the cellar to be made, where before there had been a grate of iron."
This, it must be confessed, looks very like an afterthought to explain away a difficulty, but failing to do so. When the door is said to have been made, the powder was already on the premises, having been brought there in sight of the whole street and the river. It could hardly, in so small a tenement, escape the observation of the workmen,[192] while the operations of these latter in breaking through the wall would have served yet farther to attract the attention of the neighbourhood.