What Gunpowder Plot Was

by Samuel Rawson Gardiner

Even if it be credible that Salisbury had invented all this, it is incredible that if he alone had been the depository of the secret, he should not have done something to put other officials on the right track, or have put into the foreground his own clear-sightedness in the matter.

The last question necessary to deal with relates to the unimportant point where Fawkes was when he was arrested.

“To say nothing,” writes Father Gerard, “of the curious discrepancies as to the date of the warning, it is clearly impossible to determine the locality of Guy’s arrest. The account officially published in the ‘King’s Book,’ says that this took place in the street. The letter to the ambassadors assigns it to the cellar and afterwards to the street; that to Parry to the cellar only. Fawkes himself, in his confession of November 5, says that he was apprehended neither in the street nor in the cellar, but in his own room in the adjoining house. Chamberlain writes to Carleton, November 7, that it was in the cellar. Howes, in his continuation of Stowes’ Annals, describes two arrests of Fawkes, one in the street, the other in his own chamber. This point, though seemingly somewhat trivial, has been invested with much importance. According to a time-honoured story, the baffled desperado roundly declared that had he been within reach of the powder when his captors appeared, he would have applied a match and involved them in his own destruction.”[210]

This passage deserves to be studied, if only as a good example of the way in which historical investigation ought not to be conducted, that is to say, by reading into the evidence what, according to preconception of the inquirer, he thinks ought to be there, but is not there at all. In plain language, the words ‘cellar’ and ‘street’ are not mentioned in any one of the documents cited by Father Gerard. There is no doubt a discrepancy, but it is not one between these two localities. The statements quoted by Father Gerard in favour of a capture in the ‘cellar’ merely say that it was effected ‘in the place.’ The letter of the 9th says ‘in the place itself,’[211] and this is copied from the draft of the 6th. Chamberlain says[212] that Fawkes was ‘taken making his trains at midnight,’ but does not say where. Is it necessary to interpret this as meaning the ‘cellar’? There was, as we know, a door out of the ‘cellar’ into the passage, and probably a door opposite into Percy’s house. If Fawkes were arrested in this passage as he was coming out of the cellar and going into the house, or even if he had come out of the passage into the head of the court, he might very well be said to have been arrested ‘in the place itself,’ in contradistinction to a place a few streets off.

The only real difficulty is how to reconcile this account of the arrest, with Fawkes’s own statement on his first examination on November 5, when he said:—

“That he meant to have fired the same by a match, and saith that he had touchwood and a match also, about eight or nine inches long, about him, and when they came to apprehend him he threw the touchwood and match out of the window in his chamber near the Parliament House towards the waterside.”

Fawkes, indeed, was not truthful in his early examinations, but he had no inducement to invent this story, and it may be noted that whenever the accounts which have reached us go into details invariably they speak of two separate actions connected with the arrest. The draft to Parry, indeed, only speaks of the first apprehension, but the draft of the narrative which finally appeared in the King’s Book[213] says that Knyvet ‘finding the same party with whom the Lord Chamberlain before and the Lord Monteagle had spoken newly, come out of the vault, made stay of him.’ Then Knyvet goes into the vault and discovers the powder. “Whereupon the caitiff being surely seized, made no difficulty to confess, &c.”[214] The letter to the ambassadors[215] tells the same story. Knyvet going into the vault ‘found that fellow Johnson newly come out of the vault, and without asking any more questions stayed him.’ Then after the search ‘he perceived the barrels and so bound the caitiff fast.’ The King’s Book itself separates at least the ‘apprehending’ from the searching.

“But before his entry into the house finding Thomas Percy’s alleged man standing without the doors,[216] his clothes and boots on at so dead a time of the night, he resolved to apprehend him, as he did, and thereafter went forward to the searching of the house ... and thereafter, searching the fellow whom he had taken, found three matches, and all other instruments fit for blowing up the powder ready upon him.”

All these are cast more or less in the same mould. On the other hand, a story, in all probability emanating from Knyvet, which Howes interpolated in a narrative based on the official account, gives a possibility of reconciling the usual account of the arrest with the one told by Fawkes. After telling, after the fashion of the King’s Book, of Fawkes’ apprehension and Knyvet’s search, he bursts on a sudden into a narrative of which no official document gives the slightest hint:—

“And upon the hearing of some noise Sir T. Knyvet required Master Edmond Doubleday, Esq.[217] to go up into the chamber to understand the cause thereof, the which he did, and had there some speech of Fawkes, being therewithal very desirous to search and see what books or instruments Fawkes had about him; but Fawkes being wondrous unwilling to be searched, very violently griped M[aster] Doubleday by his fingers of the left hand, through pain thereof Ma[ster] Doubleday offered to draw his dagger to have stabbed Fawkes, but suddenly better bethought himself and did not; yet in that heat he struck up the traitor’s heels and therewithal fell upon him and searched him, and in his pocket found his garters, wherewith M[aster] Doubleday and others that assisted they bound him. There was also found in his pocket a piece of touchwood, and a tinder box to light the touchwood and a watch which Percy and Fawkes had bought the day before, to try conclusions for the long or short burning of the touchwood, which he had prepared to give fire to the train of powder.”