[271] Narrative, f. 68 b.—Stonyhurst MSS.
[272] F. 66. It will be remembered that this episode is not mentioned by Cecil in his version of November 6th. Bishop Goodman's opinion is that this and other points of the story were contrived for stage effect: "The King must have the honour to interpret that it was by gunpowder; and the very night before the parliament began it was to be discovered, to make the matter the more odious, and the deliverance the more miraculous. No less than the lord chamberlain must search for it and discover it, and Faux with his dark lantern must be apprehended." (Court of King James, p. 105.)
[273] T. Winter, November 23rd, 1605.
[274] There is, of course, abundant contradiction upon this point, as all others, but the balance of evidence appears to point to 2 a.m. or thereabouts.
[275] The customary hour for the meeting of the Houses was 9 a.m., or even earlier. (Journals of Parliament.)
[276] The list of those present is given in the Lords' Journals; it is headed by the Lord Chancellor (Ellesmere), and includes the Archbishop of Canterbury, fourteen bishops, and thirty-one peers, of whom Lord Monteagle was one. In 1598, as Mr. Atkinson tells us in his preface to the lately published volume of the Calendar of Irish State Papers, the cellars of the Dublin Law Courts were used as a powder magazine. The English Privy Council, startled to hear of this remarkable arrangement, pointed out that it might probably further diminish the number of loyal subjects in that kingdom, but were quaintly reassured by the Irish Lords Justices, who explained that, in view of the troublous state of the times, the sittings of the courts had been discontinued, and were not likely to be resumed for the present.
[277] The only allusion to it I have been able to find occurs in the Politician's Catechism (1658), p. 95: "Yet the barells, wherein the powder was, are kept as reliques, and were often shown to the king and his posterity, that they might not entertain the least thought of clemency towards the Catholique Religion. There is not an ignorant Minister or Tub-preacher, who doth not (when all other matter fails) remit his auditors to the Gunpowder Treason, and describe those tubs very pathetically, the only reliques thought fit by them to be kept in memory."
[278] Journals of the House of Lords, November 1st and 2nd, 1678.
[279] Ibid., November 2nd, 1678.
[280] I have already remarked upon Faukes' statement that he was arrested in quite a different place from any mentioned in the government accounts. It should be added, that as to the person who arrested him, there is a somewhat similar discrepancy of evidence. The honour is universally assigned by the official accounts to Sir T. Knyvet, who in the following year was created a peer, which shows that he undoubtedly rendered some valuable service on the occasion. An epitaph, however, in St. Anne's Church, Aldersgate (printed in Maitland's History of London, p. 1065, 3rd ed.), declares that it was Peter Heiwood, of Heywood, Lancashire, "who apprehended Guy Faux, with his dark Lanthorn; and for his zealous Prosecution of Papists, as Justice of Peace, was stabbed, in Westminster Hall, by John James, a Dominican Friar, A.D. 1640." No trace of this assassination can be found, nor does the name of John James occur in the Dominican records. It is, however, a curious coincidence that the "Guy Faukes' Lantern," exhibited in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, bears the inscription: "Laterna ilia ipsa quâ usus est, et cum qua deprehensus Guido Faux in cryptâ subterraneâ, ubi domo [sic] Parliamenti difflandae operam dabat. Ex dono Robti. Heywood nuper Academiae Procuratoris, Ap. 4o, 1641." See the epitaph in full, Appendix I.