What Gunpowder Plot Was

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

“All that piece of waste land lying there right against the said piece, and lieth and is without the said stone wall, that is to say between the said passage or entry of the said Parliament House[149] on the north part, and abutteth upon the said stone wall which compasseth the said Old Palace towards the West, and upon the Thames aforesaid towards the East, and continueth at length between the passage aforesaid and the sluice coming from the said Parliament House, seventy-five foot.”[150]

On this piece of waste land I place the garden mentioned in connection with the house rented by Percy. This is far more probable than it was where Mr. Brewer has placed it, in the narrow court which leads from Parliament Place to the other side of Percy’s house, and ends by the side of the Prince’s Chamber. If this arrangement be accepted, it gets rid of the alleged populousness of neighbourhood. No doubt people flocked up and down from Parliament Stairs, but they would be excluded from the garden on the river side, and with few exceptions would pass on without turning to the right into the court. Nobody who had not business with Percy himself or with his neighbour on the south[151] would be likely to approach Percy’s door. As far as that side of the house was concerned, it would be difficult to find a more secluded dwelling. The Thames was then the ‘silent highway’ of London, and the sight of a barge unloading before the back door of a house can have been no more surprising than the sight of a gondola moored to the steps of a palace on a canal in Venice. John Shepherd, for instance, was not startled by the sight:—

Memorandum that John Shepherd servant to the said Mr. Whynniard, saith that the fourth of September last being Wednesday before the Queen’s Majesty removed from Windsor to Hampton Court,[152] he being taken suddenly sick, and therefore sent away to London, and coming late to lie at the Queen’s Bridge,[153] the tide being high, he saw a boat lie close by the pale of Sir Thomas Parry’s garden[154] and men going to and fro the water through the back door that leadeth into Mr. Percy’s lodging, which he doth now bethink himself of, though then, being sick and late, he did not regard it.[155]

It thus appears that this final supply of powder was carried in at night, and by a way through the garden—not by the more frequented Parliament Stairs.

The story of the mine, no doubt, presents some difficulties which, though by no means insuperable, cannot be solved with absolute certainty without more information than we possess at present. We may, I think, dismiss the suggestion of the Edinburgh Reviewer that the conspirators may have dug straight down instead of making a tunnel, both because even bunglers could hardly have occupied a fortnight in digging a pit a few feet deep, and because their words about reaching the wall at the end of the fortnight would, on this hypothesis, have no meaning. Thomas Winter’s statement is that he and his comrades ‘wrought under a little entry to the wall of the Parliament House.’[156] The little entry, as I have already argued,[157] must be the covered passage under the withdrawing room; a tunnel leading from the cellar of Percy’s house would be about seven or eight feet long. The main difficulty at the commencement of the work would be to get through the wall of Percy’s house, and this, it may be noticed, neither Fawkes nor Winter speak of, though they are very positive as to the difficulties presented by the wall of the House of Lords. If, indeed, the wall on this side of Percy’s house was, as may with great probability be conjectured, built of brick, as the river front undoubtedly was,[158] the difficulty cannot have been great, as I have been informed by Mr. Henry Ward[159] that the brick used in those days was, both from its composition and from the method in which it was dried, far softer than that employed in building at present. We may, therefore, fairly start our miners in the cellar of their own house with a soft brick wall to penetrate, and a tunnel afterwards to construct, having wood ready to prop up the earth, and appropriate implements to carry out their undertaking.[160]

Here, however, Father Gerard waves us back:—

“It is not easy,” he writes, “to understand how these amateurs contrived to do so much without a catastrophe. To make a tunnel through soft earth is a very delicate operation, replete with unknown difficulties. To shore up the roof and sides there must, moreover, have been required a large quantity of the ‘framed timber’[161] of which Speed tells us, and the provision and importation of this must have been almost as hard to keep dark as the exportation of the earth and stones. A still more critical operation is that of meddling with the foundations of a house—especially of an old and heavy structure—which a professional craftsman would not venture upon except with extreme care, and the employment of many precautions of which these light-hearted adventurers knew nothing. Yet, recklessly breaking their way out of one building, and to a large extent into another, they appear to have occasioned neither crack nor settlement in either.”[162]

I have already dealt with the problem of bringing in articles by night, and of getting through Percy’s wall. For the rest, Father Gerard forgets that though six of the seven miners were amateurs, the seventh was not. Fawkes had been eight years in the service of the Archdukes in the Low Countries, and to soldiers on either side the war in the Low Countries offered the most complete school of military mining then to be found in the world. Though every soldier was not an engineer, he could not fail to be in the way of hearing about, if not of actually witnessing, feats of engineering skill, of which the object was not merely to undermine fortifications with tunnels of far greater length than can have been required by the conspirators, but to conduct the operation as quietly as possible. It must surely have been the habit of these engineers to use other implements than the noisy pick of the modern workman.[163] Fawkes, indeed, speaks of himself merely as a watcher whilst others worked. But he was a modest man, and there can be no reasonable doubt that he directed the operations.

When the main wall was attacked after Christmas the conditions were somewhat altered. The miners, indeed, may still have been able to avoid the use of picks, and to employ drills and crowbars, but some noise they must necessarily have made. Yet the chances of their being overheard were very slight. Having taken the precaution to hire the long withdrawing room and the passage or passage-room beneath it, the sounds made on the lower part of the main wall could not very well reach the ears of the tenants of the other houses in Whynniard’s block. The only question is whether there was any one likely to hear them in the so-called ‘cellar’ underneath the House of Lords, beneath which, again, they intended to deposit their store of powder. What that chamber was had best be told in Father Gerard’s own words:—

“The old House of Lords,”[164] he writes, “was a chamber occupying the first floor of a building which stood about fifty yards from the left bank of the Thames,[165] to which it was parallel, the stream at this point running about due north. Beneath the Peers’ Chamber on the ground floor was a large room, which plays an important part in our history. This had originally served as the palace kitchen, and, though commonly described as a ‘cellar’ or a ‘vault,’ was in reality neither, for it stood on the level of the ground outside, and had a flat ceiling formed by the beams which supported the flooring of the Lords apartment above. It ran beneath the said Peers’ Chamber from end to end, and measured seventy-seven feet in length by twenty-four feet four inches in width.