Again, on Monday, the 4th instant, Mounteagle offered to accompany his
distant connection, the Earl of Suffolk, to make the search in the cellar.
Whyneard, keeper of the King’s wardrobe, declared to the two noble
searchers that Thomas Percy had hired the house and part of the cellar or
vault under the same, and that “the wood and coale” therein were “the said
gentleman’s own provision.”
Mounteagle, on hearing Percy named, let drop——probably in an unguarded
moment——words to the effect that perhaps Thomas Percy had sent the Letter.
Now, guarded or unguarded, to my mind, the fact that Mounteagle, in any
shape or form, mentioned Percy’s name on that momentous occasion tends to
show that Mounteagle knew all the material facts and particulars of the
Plot, including even the names of the conspirators.[95]
But Mounteagle, I hold, was resolved to do his duty to his King and his
country on the one hand, and to his friends——his reprobate, insane, but
(he full well knew) grievously provoked friends——on the other.
He was determined, spurred on, I suggest, by Thomas Ward, to save the King
and Parliament from bloody destruction by gunpowder on the one hand, and
to save his own kith and kin and boon companions on the other: of whose
guilt, or otherwise, he did not constitute himself the judge, still less
the executioner.
To this end the young peer watched and measured the relative value and
effect of every move on the part of the Government like a vigilant
commander, bent, indeed, on securing what he deemed to be the rights and
interests of the wronged and the wrong-doers alike.
And, most probably, being driven into a corner at the last and compelled
so to do by the imperious exigencies of his _primary and supreme duty_,
namely, the saving of the King and Parliament from being rent and torn to
pieces in a most hellish fashion, truly “barbarous and savage beyond the
examples of former ages,” Mounteagle actually himself told Salisbury to
inform Sir Thomas Knevet and his band of armed men to keep a sharp lookout
for a certain tall, soldierly figure, “booted and spurred,” in the
neighbourhood of the cellar, before the clock struck the hour of midnight
of Monday, November the 4th. If this were so, it accounts for the efforts
of Knevet, Doubleday, and others being so speedily crowned with success.
Fawkes was probably _taken into custody_ in the court adjoining Percy’s
house and the House of Lords’ cellar, and a few moments afterwards
_secured_ by being bound with such things in the nature of cords as Knevet
and his men had with them.——See Gardiner’s “_Gunpowder Plot_,” pp.
132-136.
The dark lantern, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, was left burning
in the cellar by Fawkes.