APPENDIX L. (p. 227).
Reading edition
APPENDIX L. (p. 227).
Myths and Legends of the Powder Plot.
Around the Gunpowder Plot has gathered a mass of fabulous embellishment too curious to be passed over in silence. This has chiefly attached itself to Guy Faukes, who, on account of the desperate part allotted to him has impressed the public mind far more than any of his associates, and has come to be erroneously regarded as the moving spirit of the enterprise.
One of the best authenticated facts regarding him is that when apprehended he was booted and spurred for a journey, though it is usually said that he was to have travelled by water.
There is, however, a strange story, told with much circumstantiality, which gives an elaborate but incomprehensible account of a tragic underplot in connection with him. This is related at considerable length in a Latin hexameter poem, Venatio Catholica, published in 1609, in the History of the Popish Sham Plots, and elsewhere. According to this tangled tale the other conspirators wished both to get rid of Faukes, when he had served their purpose, and to throw the suspicion of their deed upon their enemies, the Puritans. To this end they devised a notable scheme. A certain Puritan, named Pickering, a courtier, but a godly man, foremost amongst his party, had a fine horse ("Bucephalum egregium"). This, Robert Keyes, his brother-in-law, purchased or hired, and placed at the service of Faukes for his escape. The steed was to await him at a certain spot, but in a wood hard by assassins were to lurk, who, when Guy appeared, should murder him, and having secured the money with which he was furnished, should leave his mangled corpse beside the Bucephalus, known as Mr. Pickering's. Thus Faukes would be able to tell no tales, and—though it does not appear why—suspicion would be sure to fall on the Puritan, and he would be proclaimed as the author of the recent catastrophe.
"Hoc astu se posse rati convertere in hostes Flagitii infamiam, causamque capessere vulgo Qua Puritanos invisos reddere possent, Ut tantæ authores, tam immanis proditionis. Cognito equo, et facta (pro more) indagine cædis, Aulicus hic sceleris tanquam fabricator atrocis Proclamandus erat, Falso (ne vera referre Et socios sceleris funesti prodere possit) Sublato."
Many curious circumstances have likewise been imported into the history, and many places connected with it which appear to have no claim whatever to such a distinction.
Thus we hear (England's Warning Peece) that the Jesuit Cresswell came over from Spain for the occasion "to bear his part with the rest of his society in a victorial song of thanksgiving." Also that on November 5th, a large body of confederates assembled at Hampstead to see the House of Parliament go up in the air.
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."
"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."
FOOTNOTES:
The following passage is very characteristic of the writer:
"Nou last, ye remember of the crewellie villanouse pasquille yt rayled upon me for ye name of Brittanie. If I remember richt it spake something of harvest and prophecyed my destructi[o about yt tyme. Ye may think of ys, for it is lyke to be by ye Laboure of such a desperate fellow as ys is."