square-headed aperture in Smith's view agrees so well with that in the
view at p. 89, that it can be accepted without doubt as the one in which
Percy's new door was substituted for a grating, and which led out of the
covered passage opening from the court leading from Parliament Place.
[Illustration: Four walls of the so-called cellar under the House of
Lords. From Smith's _Antiquities of Westminster_, p. 39.]
Though it is possible that Whynniard might, if he chose, come into the
plotters' 'cellar,' we are under no compulsion to accept Father Gerard's
assertion that Winter declared 'that the confederates so arranged as to
leave the cellar free for all to enter who would.'[182] "It is stated,"
writes Father Gerard, in another place, "in Winter's long declaration on
this subject, that the barrels were thus completely hidden 'because we
might have the house free to suffer anyone to enter that would,' and we
find it mentioned by various writers, subsequently, that free ingress
was actually allowed to the public."[183] As the subsequent writers
appear to be an anonymous writer, who wrote on _The Gunpowder Plot_
under the pseudonym of L., in 1805, and Hugh F. Martyndale, who wrote _A
Familiar Analysis of the Calendar of the Church of England_ in 1830, I
am unable to take them very seriously. The extraordinary thing is that
Father Gerard does not see that his quotation from Winter is fatal to
his argument. Winter says that Fawkes covered the powder in the cellar
'because we might have the house free to suffer anyone to enter that
would.[184] The cellar was not part of the house; and, although the
words are not entirely free from ambiguity, the more reasonable
interpretation is that Fawkes disposed of the powder in the cellar, in
order that visitors might be freely admitted into the house. Winter, in
fact, makes no direct statement that the powder was moved, and it is
therefore fair to take this removal as included in what he says about
the faggots.
As for the quantity of the gunpowder used, the opinion of the writer
discussed in the _Edinburgh Review_ (January, 1897), appears reasonable
enough:--
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