As I have shown, it may pretty safely be assumed that he was at Gothurst early in October 1605, just after Sir Everard Digby had been initiated into the plot; and, as the hiding-places at Gothurst about to be described are believed to have been made between his initiation and the discovery, with a view to concealment in connection with the gunpowder plot, the work must in that case have been done during October.
GOTHURST
The mark * shows the position of the secret room
Lipscomb thus describes them:—[209] “In one of the apartments was formerly shewn a movable floor, which, to ordinary observers, offered nothing remarkable in its appearance, but was made to revolve on a pivot, which, by a secret bolt, disclosed underneath it another room (receiving light from the lower part of a mullioned window, not discoverable exteriorily, unless at a very great distance).”From this secret room, he says “there were private passages of ingress and egress,”“almost impossible of detection, even by the occupiers of the Mansion. Here were also some remarkably ingenious cabinets and drawers, for the deposit of papers, &c.”Mr Walter Carlile, the son of the owner, and the occupier of Gothurst, or Gayhurst, as it is now called, informs me that Lipscomb’s description of the secret room is perfectly correct; that, although it was demolished twenty years ago, greatly to his own regret, there are still all the traces of where it was and how it was managed; and that the “priest’s hole”and some secret passages are yet in existence.
The secret room was not in the principal front, with its picturesque porch and gables; but at the end, at the right; that is to say, on the right as one stood facing the front. In the middle of this end of the house was a solid, square-headed projection, and it was the upper half of the room on the first floor of this projection which was converted into the secret room. The result was that, in this secret chamber the window came down to the floor, but did not rise to the top of the room, being in fact the upper half of the window which lighted the room beneath it. As the entire window was almost twice as high as it was broad, and divided into two equal parts, it was very well adapted for the purpose.
Lipscomb was probably right in calling this “a very artful contrivance for the concealment of the parties to the Gunpowder Plot”; there is certainly a tradition to the same effect, and, as will have been observed, I have adopted it; at the same time I will say candidly that I sometimes ask myself whether, after all, the “contrivance,”with its pivotted floor, may not have been only intended as a hiding-place for priests, and not for conspirators, a theory which is somewhat supported by the knowledge that Sir Everard Digby was going to leave and shut up Gothurst a few days before the explosion was to take place, and even still earlier was going to send his wife and children to Mr Throgmorton’s house at Coughton, which he had taken for them.
The energies of the conspirators, especially those of such an earnest Catholic as Sir Everard Digby, would be stimulated during October by the news that, that very month, two priests and a layman had been put to death for their religion.[210] “They were executed together with sixteen thieves and eight other malefactors; and their heads were placed on London Bridge.”A Spanish lady of high birth, who had come to England in the preceding May, wrote:—[211] “We can hardly go out to walk without seeing the heads and limbs of some of our dear and holy ones stuck up on the gates that divide the streets, and the birds of the air perching upon them; which makes me think of the verse in the Psalms, ‘They have given the dead bodies of thy servants to be meat for the fowls of the air,’”etc. Admitting that there may have been some exaggeration in this statement, it was by no means devoid of foundation in fact. The reports of such things would give the conspiracy the colour of a crusade, to men anxious to see it assume that hue.
We shall presently see that Sir Everard intended to turn his steps towards Wales, when the blow should have been struck, making sure of the support of Catholics so persecuted as the Welsh and the inhabitants of the border counties. Here is something about them. Less than five months before the attempt to blow up the houses of parliament, the Protestant Bishop of Hereford wrote to Salisbury:—[212] “On Wednesday last, at evening, Sir James Scudamore and other justices of the peace, with such aid as I could give them, went unto the Darren and other places adjoining to make search and apprehend Jesuits and priests ... and did make diligent search all that night and day following, from village to village, from house to house, about thirty miles compass, near the confines of Monmouthshire, where they found altars, images, books of superstition, relics of idolatry, but left all desolate of men and women. Except here and there an aged woman or a child, all were fled into Wales, and but one man apprehended; all that circuit of rude barbarous people carried headlong into these desperate courses by priests (whereof there is great store) and principal gentlemen, lords of towns and manors there. They are all fled into the woods, and there they will lurk until the assizes be past.”Rumours of the searches on the part of the “justices of the peace,” “with such aid”as the Bishop of Hereford “could give them,”would reach Gothurst and provoke Sir Everard. They remind one of the remark made by Cardinal Bellarmine on the Gunpowder Plot:—[213] “I excuse not the crime, I loathe unnatural murders, I execrate conspiracies, but no one can deny that provocation was given.”
The plan of campaign was doubtless discussed at great length at Gothurst during the early part of the month of October. Parliament was to meet at the beginning of November, and the great attempt was intended to be made about the 5th. No time, therefore, was to be lost in making provision for every contingency. Sir Everard was still anxious as to whether all the Catholic peers, and those peers who were friendly to Catholics, could, with any certainty, be induced to absent themselves from the House at the time of the explosion.
“Assure yourself,”said Catesby to him, “that such of the nobility as are worth saving shall be preserved, and yet know not of the matter.”[214] As to the remainder of the lords, he declared that he regarded them as “atheists, fools, and cowards, and that lusty bodies would be better for the commonwealth than they.”[215] There was considerable wrangling as to which of the peers were to be saved, and there was some diversity of opinion on the question—whether this or that Protestant lord was well-enough disposed towards Catholics and their religion to be worth rescue. For instance, some would have it that the Earl of Northumberland was likely to become a Catholic; but his relative, Percy the conspirator, said that[216] “for matters of relligion”he “trobled not much himselfe.”Notwithstanding this statement, Percy earnestly begged that he might be one of the peers to be spared,[217] which was indeed only fair, considering that his rents were to be stolen for the purposes of the plot. Francis Tresham pleaded for his two brothers-in-law, Stourton and Mounteagle, both of whom were Catholics; Keyes for his great friend, Mordaunt; Fawkes for Montague, several for Arundel, and so on.