"In some notes of Sir E. Coke, it is said 'The powder was first
brought into Percy's house, and lay there in a low room new built,
and could not have been conveyed into the cellar but that all the
street must have seen it; and therefore he caused a new door out of
his house into the cellar to be made, where before there had been a
grate of iron."[181]
To Father Gerard this 'looks very like an afterthought.' Considering,
however, that every word except the part about the grating is based on
evidence which has reached us, it looks to me very like the truth. It
is, indeed, useless to attempt to reconcile the position of the doors
opening out of the 'cellar' apparently indicated on Capon's plan (p. 80)
with those given in Smith's views (p. 109) of the four walls taken
from the inside of the cellar, and I therefore conclude that the
apertures shown in the former are really those of the House of Lords on
the upper storey, a conjecture which is supported by the insertion of a
flight of steps, which would lead nowhere if the whole plan was intended
to record merely the features of the lower level. In any case, Smith's
illustration shows three entrances--one through the north wall which I
have marked A, another with a triangular head near the north end of the
east wall marked B, and a third with a square head near the south end of
the same wall marked C. The first of these would naturally be used by
Mrs. Skinner, as it opened on a passage leading westwards, and we know
that she lived in King Street; the second would be used by Whynniard,
whilst, either he or some predecessor might very well have put up a
grating at the third to keep out thieves. That third aperture was,
however, just opposite Percy's house, and when he hired Mrs. Skinner's
part of the 'cellar,' he would necessarily wish to have it open and a
door substituted for the grating. There was no question of knocking
about the walls of a royal palace in the matter. If he had not that door
opened he must either use Whynniard's, of which Whynniard presumably
wished to keep the key, or go round by Parliament Place to reach the one
hitherto used by Mrs. Skinner. It is true that, if the north door was
really the one used by Mrs. Skinner, it necessitates the conclusion that
there was no insurmountable barrier between Whynniard's part of the
cellar, and that afterwards used by Percy. Moreover, it is almost
certainly shown that this was the case by the ease with which the
searchers got into Percy's part of the cellar on the night of November
4th, though entering by another door. In this case the conspirators must
have been content with the strong probability that whenever their
landlord came into his end of the 'cellar,' he would not come further to
pull about the pile of wood with which their powder barrels were
covered. On the other hand, the entrances knocked in blocked-up arches
may not have been the same in 1605 and in 1807. At all events, the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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