threw open the door and looked in. "Who
are you, friend?" said they. "Why", said
Fawkes, "I am Mr. Percy's servant, and am
looking after his store of fuel here". "Your
master has laid in a pretty good store",
they returned, and shut the door, and went
away. Fawkes, upon this, posted off to the
other conspirators to tell them all was quiet,
and went back and shut himself up in the
dark black cellar again, where he heard the
bell go twelve o'clock and usher in the fifth
of November. About two hours afterwards,
he slowly opened the door, and came out to
look about him, in his old prowling way. He
was instantly seized and bound, by a party of
soldiers under SIR THOMAS KNEVETT. He had
a watch upon him, some touchwood, some
tinder, some slow matches; and there was a
dark-lantern with a candle in it, lighted,
behind the door. He had his boots and spurs
on—to ride to the ship, I suppose—and it was
well for the soldiers that they took him so
suddenly; for if they had left him but a
moment's time to light a match, he certainly
would have tossed it in among the powder,
and blown himself and them to perdition.

They took him to the King's bed-chamber
first of all; and there the King (causing him
to be held very tight, and keeping a good
way off) asked him how he could have had
the heart to intend to destroy so many
innocent people? "Because", said Guy Fawkes,
"desperate diseases need desperate remedies."
To a little Scotch favourite, with a face like a
terrier, who asked him (with no particular
wisdom) why he had collected so much
gunpowder, he replied, because he had meant to
blow Scotchmen back to Scotland, and it
would take a good deal of powder to do
that. Next day he was carried to the Tower,
but would make no confession. Even after
being horribly tortured he confessed nothing
that the Government did not already know,
though he must have been in a fearful state
—as his signature, still preserved, in contrast
with his natural hand-writing before he was
put upon the dreadful rack, most frightfully
allows. Bates, a very different man, soon
said the Jesuits had had to do with the plot,
and probably, under the torture, would have
soon said anything. Tresham, taken and put
in the Tower too, made confessions and
unmade them, and died of an illness that
was heavy upon him. Rookwood, who had
stationed relays of his own horses all the
way to Dunchurch, did not mount to escape
until the middle of the day, when the news of
the plot was all over London. On the road,
he came up with the two Wrights, Catesby,
and Percy; and they all galloped together
into Northamptonshire. Thence to
Dunchurch, where they found the proposed party
assembled. Finding, however, that there had
been a plot, and that it had been discovered,
the party disappeared in the course of the
night, and left them alone with Sir Everard
Digby. Away they all rode again, through
Warwickshire and Worcestershire, to a house
called Holbeach on the borders of Staffordshire.
They tried to raise the Catholics on
their way, but were indignantly driven off
by them. All this time they were hotly
pursued by the sheriff of Worcester, and a
fast increasing concourse of riders. At last,
resolving to defend themselves at Holbeach,
they shut themselves up in the house, and
put some wet powder before the fire to dry.
But it blew up, and Catesby was singed and
blackened, and almost killed, and some of the
others were sadly hurt. Still, knowing that
they must die, they resolved to die there, and
with only their swords in their hands
appeared at the windows to be shot at by the
sheriff and his assistants. Catesby said to
Thomas Winter, after Thomas had been hit
in the right arm which dropped powerless by
his side, "Stand by me, Tom, and we will
die together!"—which they did, being shot
through the body by two bullets from one
gun. John Wright, and Christopher Wright,
and Percy, were also shot. Rookwood and
Digby were taken: the former with a broken
arm and a wound in his body too.

It was the fifteenth of January before the
trial of Guy Fawkes, and such of the other
conspirators as were left alive, came on. They
were all found guilty, all hanged, drawn and
quartered: some in St. Paul's Churchyard,
on the top of Ludgate Hill: and some before
the Parliament House. A Jesuit priest,
named HENRY GARNET, to whom the bloody
design was said to have been communicated,
was taken and tried, and two of his servants,
as well as a poor priest who was taken with
him, were tortured without mercy. He
himself was not tortured, but was surrounded in
the Tower by tamperers and traitors, and so
made unfairly to convict himself out of his
own mouth. He said, upon his trial, that he
had done all he could to prevent the deed, and
that he could not make public what had been
told him in confession—though I am afraid
he knew of the plot in other ways. He was
found guilty and executed, after a manful
defence, and the Catholic Church made a
saint of him; some rich and powerful persons,
who had had nothing to do with the project,
were fined and imprisoned for it by the Star
Chamber. The Catholics, in general, who
had recoiled with horror from the idea of the
infernal contrivance, were unjustly put under
more severe laws than before; and this was
the end of the Gunpowder Plot.

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