a petition addressed to him conceived thus: "Good Medor, we beg you to speak to his Majesty, who hears you every day and does not listen to us, that he may kindly return to London to his business, for our provisions are exhausted, and we shall have nothing left to give him to eat." The king laughed and remained where he was; but matters were preparing in London to recall him. {14} Among the Catholics ruined by the successive exactions which they had suffered was Robert Catesby, a renegade in his youth, but who returned with zeal to the faith of his fathers, and had since then engaged in all the Catholic intrigues. Weary of persecution, and seeing no hope of relief either in the anterior promises of the king, or in the influence of Spain which had been counted upon to some extent, he conceived the atrocious project of causing all the persecutors to perish at a blow--King, Lords, and Commons, upon the opening of Parliament convoked for the 7th of February, 1605. Prudent and circumspect, he sought accomplices. Thomas Winter, a gentleman and a Catholic like himself, formerly employed by Spain in the Low Countries, only consented to enter into the plot after having asked the Spaniards if they had no longer any hope. Upon his return from Ostend, with a reply in the negative, he brought back a former comrade, Guy Fawkes, a soldier of fortune, resolute and fanatical like the two other conspirators. Seven persons in all were bound by the most solemn oath, and the plotters set to work in a house which they had taken beside Whitehall, under the name of Percy, one of the conspirators, an officer of the royal household. They reckoned upon digging a mine which was to extend beneath the Houses of Parliament. "No one set to work to dig or to transport the powder who was not a gentleman," said Fawkes, in his examination. "While the others worked I acted as sentinel, and the work was stopped if any passer-by appeared." The stores were deposited at Lambeth, on the other side of the river. They were brought in small quantities as the subterranean passage progressed. [Image] The Gunpowder Plot Discovered. {15}