[274] There is, of course, abundant contradiction upon this point, as all others, but the balance of evidence appears to point to 2 a.m. or thereabouts. [275] The customary hour for the meeting of the Houses was 9 a.m., or even earlier. (_Journals of Parliament._) [276] The list of those present is given in the _Lords' Journals_; it is headed by the Lord Chancellor (Ellesmere), and includes the Archbishop of Canterbury, fourteen bishops, and thirty-one peers, of whom Lord Monteagle was one. In 1598, as Mr. Atkinson tells us in his preface to the lately published volume of the _Calendar of Irish State Papers_, the cellars of the Dublin Law Courts were used as a powder magazine. The English Privy Council, startled to hear of this remarkable arrangement, pointed out that it might probably further diminish the number of loyal subjects in that kingdom, but were quaintly reassured by the Irish Lords Justices, who explained that, in view of the troublous state of the times, the sittings of the courts had been discontinued, and were not likely to be resumed for the present. [277] The only allusion to it I have been able to find occurs in the _Politician's Catechism_ (1658), p. 95: "Yet the barells, wherein the powder was, are kept as reliques, and were often shown to the king and his posterity, that they might not entertain the least thought of clemency towards the Catholique Religion. There is not an ignorant Minister or Tub-preacher, who doth not (when all other matter fails) remit his auditors to the Gunpowder Treason, and describe those tubs very pathetically, the only reliques thought fit by them to be kept in memory." [278] _Journals of the House of Lords_, November 1st and 2nd, 1678. [279] _Ibid._, November 2nd, 1678.