From a Plan of Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament
as it appeared in 1761
Part of this lettering is in pencil in the original plan.
Before giving reasons for selecting any one part of Whynniard’s block as that rented from him by Percy, it is necessary to face a difficulty raised by Father Gerard:—
“Neither,” he writes, “does the house appear to have been well suited for the purposes for which it was taken. Speed tells us, and he is confirmed by Bishop Barlow, of Lincoln, that it was let out to tenants only when Parliament was not assembled, and during a session formed part of the premises at the disposal of the Lords, whom it served as a withdrawing room. As this plot was of necessity to take effect during a session, when the place would be in other hands, it is very hard to understand how it was intended that the final and all-important operation should be conducted.”[134]
This objection is put still more strongly in a subsequent passage:—
“We have already observed on the nature of the house occupied in Percy’s name. If this were, as Speed tells us, and as there is no reason to doubt, at the service of the Peers during a session for a withdrawing-room, and if the session was to begin on November 5, how could Fawkes hope not only to remain in possession, but to carry on his strange proceedings unobserved amid the crowd of lacqueys and officials with whom the opening of the Parliament by the Sovereign must needs have flooded the premises. How was he, unobserved, to get into the fatal ‘cellar’?”[135]
It is easy enough to brush away Father Gerard’s alleged confirmation by Bishop Barlow,[136] who, writing as he did in the reign of Charles II., carries no weight on such a point. Besides, he did not write a book on the Gunpowder Plot at all. He merely republished, in 1679, an old official narrative of the trial, with an unimportant preface of his own. What Father Gerard quotes here and elsewhere is, however, not even taken from this republication, but from an anonymous pamphlet published in 1678, and reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany, iii. 121, which is avowedly a cento made up from earlier writers, and in which the words referred to are doubtless copied directly from Speed.
Speed’s own testimony, however, cannot be so lightly dismissed, especially as it is found in the first edition of his History, published in 1611, and therefore only six years after the event:—
“No place,” he says, “was held fitter than a certain edifice adjoining the wall of the Parliament House, which served for withdrawing rooms for the assembled Lords, and out of Parliament was at the disposal of the keeper of the place and wardrobe thereunto belonging.”[137]