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. [210] _Before and after the Gunpowder Plot._ By E. Healy Thompson, p. 4. [211] _Life of Luisa de Carvajal._ By Lady Georgiana Fullerton, p. 226.