It might have been, by Emily Sarah Holt.
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This book is mainly about the treasonable plot to blow up Parliament, by
mining through to its lowest floor, or basement, from an adjacent house.
This plot was hatched by a number of Catholic gentlemen, and was quite
ingenious. These people came from a wide area of England, and numbered
about thirty. One point of interest to your reviewer is that one of the
places where they met, or retreated to when not personally involved in
mining, was a house called White Webbs, just on what is now the northern
limit of London. This house is now in use as a very nice and popular
restaurant, well known to me. It was at the time a disused hunting
lodge in Enfield Chase.
The discovery of the plot, and the execution of its participants is
celebrated every year in Britain, with great displays of fireworks, on a
day (5th November) named after one of the plotters, Guy Fawkes. It is
interesting to learn so much more about the background of this plot.
Emily Holt wrote a large number of books with a historical background.
This book is the third of a series involving a family from Derwent-water
in the north of England. The link with the Gunpowder plot is rather
weak, but worth reading if you enjoyed the first two books of the
series. On the other hand the majority of the book deals with the plot,
and is very well researched, and told in a very plausible manner.
As usual with this author you will find that there are a good many
footnotes, which we have done our best to make available but not
intrusive. There is a great deal of conversation in Elizabethan
English, but this will not bother you if you are used to reading the
plays of Shakespeare. Finally, there are a few short extracts from
contemporary letters, in which the spelling would not pass muster these
days, but there were no real standards of spelling in those times. In
a very few cases in these letters we have adjusted the spelling to give
you, the reader, greater ease in comprehending them.
You may care to make this book into an audiobook, in which case it will
take about 12.5 hours to play. We hope you will do this because it will
make it much easier for you to enjoy the book.
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IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, BY EMILY SARAH HOLT.