What was the Gunpowder Plot? The Traditional Story Tested by Original EvidenceGerard, John
History
What was the Gunpowder Plot? The Traditional Story Tested by Original Evidence
Gerard, John
Gunpowder Plot, 1605
In the _Gentleman's Magazine_, February, 1783, is a remarkable
description of a summer house, in a garden at Newton Hall, near
Kettering, Northamptonshire, in which the plotters used to meet and
conspire, the place then belonging to the Treshams; "and for greater
security, they placed a conspirator at each window, Guy Faukes, the arch
villain, standing in the doorway, to prevent anybody overhearing them."
According to a wide-spread belief Guy Faukes was a Spaniard.[461] He has
also been called a Londoner, and his name being altered to Vaux, has
been said to have a family connection with Vauxhall. He was in fact a
Yorkshireman of good family, though belonging to a younger branch of no
great estate. His father, Edward Faukes, was a notary at York, where he
held the office of registrar and advocate of the cathedral church. Guy
himself was an educated man, more than commonly well read. He is always
described in the process as "Guido Faukes, Gentleman."
Another most extraordinary example of an obvious myth, which was
nevertheless treated as sober history, is furnished by the absurd
statement that the astute and wily Jesuits not only contrived the Plot,
but published its details to the world long before its attempted
execution, in order to vindicate to themselves the credit of so glorious
a design. Thus Bishop Kennet, in a fifth of November sermon, preached at
St. Paul's before the Lord Mayor, in 1715, tells us:[462]
"It was a general surmise at least among the whole Order of Jesuits in
foreign parts: or else one of them could hardly have stated the case so
exactly some four or five years before it broke out. Father Del-Rio, in
a treatise printed An. 1600, put the case, as if he had already looked
into the Mine and Cellars, and had surveyed the barrels of powder in
them, and had heard the whole confessions of Faux and Catesby."
This "general surmise" does not appear to have been confined to the
Jesuits themselves. Another ingenious writer, nearly a century
earlier,[463] tells a wonderful story concerning the sermon of a
Dominican, preached in the same year, 1600, wherein it was related how
there was a special hell, beneath the other, for Jesuits, so thick and
fast did they arrive as to need extra accommodation. The preacher avowed
that he had, in his vision of the place, given warning to the demon in
charge of it, "to search them with speed, for fear that they had
conveyed hither some gunpowder with them, for they are very skilfull in
Mine-workes, and in blowing up of whole States and Parliament-houses,
and if they can blow you all up, then the Spanyards will come and take
your kingdom from you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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