'If he will not otherwise confess,' the King had ended by saying, 'the gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, _et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur_.' To us living in the nineteenth century these words are simply horrible. As a Scotchman, however, James had long been familiar with the use of torture as an ordinary means of legal investigation, whilst even in England, though unknown to the law, that is to say, to the practice of the ordinary courts of justice, it had for some generations been used not infrequently by order of the Council to extract evidence from a recalcitrant witness, though, according to Bacon, not for the purpose of driving him to incriminate himself. Surely, if the use of torture was admissible at all, this was a case for its employment. The prisoner had informed the Government that he had been at the bottom of a plot of the most sanguinary kind, and had acknowledged by implication that there were fellow-conspirators whom he refused to name. If, indeed, Father Gerard's view of the case, that the Government, or at least Salisbury, had for some time known all about the conspiracy, nothing--not even the Gunpowder Plot itself--could be more atrocious than the infliction of torments on a fellow-creature to make him reveal a secret already in their possession. If, however, the evidence I have adduced be worth anything, this was by no means the case. What it shows is, that on the afternoon of the 6th all that the members of the Government were aware of was that an unknown number of conspirators were at large--they knew not where--and might at that very moment be appealing--they knew not with what effect--to Catholic landowners and their tenants, who were, without doubt, exasperated by the recent enforcement of the penal laws. We may, if we please, condemn the conduct of the Government which had brought the danger of a general Catholic rising within sight. We cannot deny that, at that particular moment, they had real cause of alarm. At all events, no immediate steps were taken to put this part of the King's orders in execution. Some little information, indeed, was coming in from other witnesses. In his first examination, on November 5, Fawkes had stated that in his absence he locked up the powder, and 'one Gibbons' wife who dwells thereby had the charge of the residue of the house.' An examination of her husband on the 5th, however, only elicited that he, being a porter, had with two others carried 3,000 billets into the vault.[31] On the 6th Ellen, the wife of Andrew Bright, stated that Percy's servant had, about the beginning of March, asked her to let the vault to his master, and that she had consented to abandon her tenancy of it if Mrs. Whynniard, from whom she held it, would consent. Mrs. Whynniard's consent having been obtained, Mrs. Bright, or rather Mrs. Skinner--she being a widow remarried subsequently to Andrew Bright[32]--received 2_l._ for giving up the premises.