certainly ejected as solids or become solids at the moment of contact
with air.
Brown Powders.—About the middle of the 19th century guns and projectiles were made much larger and heavier than previously, and it was soon found that the ordinary black powders of the most dense form burnt much too rapidly, straining or bursting the pieces. Powders were introduced containing about 3% sulphur and 17-19% of a special form of charcoal made from slightly charred straw, or similar material. This “brown charcoal” contains a considerable amount of the hydrogen and oxygen of the original plant substance. The mechanical processes of manufacture of these brown powders is the same as for black. They, however, differ from black by burning very slowly, even under considerable pressure. This comparative slowness is caused by (1) the presence of a small amount of water even when air-dry; (2) the fact that the brown charcoal is practically very slightly altered cellulosic material, which before it can burn completely must undergo a little further resolution or charring at the expense of some heat from the portion of charge first ignited; and (3) the lower content of sulphur. An increase of a few per cent in the sulphur of black powder accelerates its rate of burning, and it may become almost a blasting powder. A decrease in sulphur has the reverse effect. It is really the sulphur vapour that in the early period of combustion spreads the flame through the charge.
Many other powders have been made or proposed in which nitrates or chlorates of the alkalis or of barium, &c., are the oxygen providers and substances as sugar, starch, and many other organic compounds as the combustible elements. Some of these compositions have found employment for blasting or even as sporting powders, but in most cases their objectionable properties of fouling, smoke and mode of exploding have prevented their use for military purposes. The adoption by the French government of the comparatively smokeless nitrocellulose explosive of Paul Vieille in 1887 practically put an end to the old forms of gunpowders. The first smokeless powder was made in 1865 by Colonel E. Schultze (Ding. Pol. Jour. 174, p. 323; 175, p. 453) by nitrating wood meal and adding potassium and barium nitrates. It is somewhat similar in composition to the E. C. sporting powder. F. Uchatius, in Austria, proposed a smokeless powder made from nitrated starch, but it was not adopted owing to its hygroscopic nature and also its tendency to detonate.
Bibliography.—Vanucchio Biringuccio, De la pirotechnia (Venice, 1540); Tartaglia, Quesiti e invenzioni diversi (lib. iii.) (Venice, 1546); Peter Whitehorne, How to make Saltpetre, Gunpowder, &c. (London, 1573); Nic. Macchiavelli, The Arte of Warre, trans. by Whitehorne (London, 1588); Hanzelet, Recueil de plusiers machines militaires (Paris, 1620); Boillet Langrois, Modelles artifices de feu (1620); Kruger, Chemical Meditations on the Explosion of Gunpowder (in Latin) (1636); Collado, On the Invention of Gunpowder (Spanish) (1641); The True Way to make all Sorts of Gunpowder and Matches (1647); Hawksbee, On Gunpowder (1686); Winter, On Gunpowder (in Latin); Robins, New Principles of Gunnery (London, 1742) (new ed. by Hutton, 1805); D’Antoni, Essame della polvere (Turin, 1765) (trans. by Captain Thomson, R. A., London, 1787); Count Rumford, “Experiments on Fired Gunpowder,” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. (1797); Charles Hutton, Mathematical Tracts, vol. iii. (1812); Sir W. Congreve, A Short Account of Improvements in Gunpowder made by (London, 1818); Bunsen and Schiskoff, “On the Chemical Theory of Gunpowder,” Pogg. Ann., 1857, vol. cii.; General Rodman, Experiments on Metal for Cannon, and Qualities of Cannon Powder (Boston, 1861); Napoleon III., Études sur le passé et l’avenir de l’artillerie, vol. iii. (Paris, 1862); Von Karolyi, “On the Products of the Combustion of Gun Cotton and Gunpowder,” Phil. Mag. (October 1863); Captain F. M. Smith, Handbook of the Manufacture and Proof of Gunpowder at Waltham Abbey (London, 1870); Noble and Abel, Fired Gunpowder (London, 1875, 1880); Noble, Artillery and Explosives (1906); H. W. L. Hime, Gunpowder and Ammunition, their Origin and Progress (1904); O. Guttmann, The Manufacture of Explosives (1895), Monumenta pulveris pyrii (1906); Notes on Gunpowder and Gun Cotton, published by order of the secretary of state for war (London, 1907). (See also Explosives.) (W. R. E. H.)
GUNPOWDER PLOT, the name given to a conspiracy for
blowing up King James I. and the parliament on the 5th of
November 1605.
To understand clearly the nature and origin of the famous conspiracy, it is necessary to recall the political situation and the attitude of the Roman Catholics towards the government at the accession of James I. The Elizabethan administration had successfully defended its own existence and the Protestant faith against able and powerful antagonists, but this had not been accomplished without enforcing severe measures of repression and punishment upon those of the opposite faith. The beginning of a happier era, however, was expected with the opening of the new reign. The right of James to the crown could be more readily acknowledged by the Romanists than that of Elizabeth: Pope Clement VIII. appeared willing to meet the king half-way. James himself was by nature favourable to the Roman Catholics and had treated the Roman Catholic lords in Scotland with great leniency, in spite of their constant plots and rebellions. Writing to Cecil before his accession he maintained, “I am so far from any intention of persecution as I protest to God I reverence their church as our mother church, although clogged with many infirmities and corruptions, besides that I did ever hold persecution as one of the infallible notes of a false church.” He declared to Northumberland, the kinsman and master of Thomas Percy, the conspirator, “as for the Catholics, I will neither persecute any that will be quiet and give but an outward obedience to the law, neither will I spare to advance any of them that will be of good service and worthily deserved.” It is probable that these small but practical concessions would have satisfied the lay Roman Catholics and the secular priests, but they were very far from contenting the Jesuits, by whom the results of such leniency were especially feared: “What rigour of laws would not compass in so many years,” wrote Henry Tichborne, the Jesuit, in 1598, “this liberty and lenity will effectuate in 20 days, to wit the disfurnishing of the seminaries, the disanimating of men to come and others to return, the expulsion of the society and confusion as in Germany, extinction of zeal and favour, disanimation of princes from the hot pursuit of the enterprise.... We shall be left as a prey to the wolves that will besides drive our greatest patron [the king of Spain] to stoop to a peace which will be the utter ruin of our edifice, this many years in building.” Unfortunately, about this time the Jesuits, who thus thrived on political intrigue, and who were deeply implicated in treasonable correspondence with Spain, had obtained a complete ascendancy over the secular priests, who were for obeying the civil government as far as possible and keeping free from politics. The time, therefore, as far as the Roman Catholics themselves were concerned, was not a propitious one for introducing the moderate concessions which alone James had promised: James, too, on his side, found that religious toleration, though clearly sound in principle, was difficult in practice. During the first few months of the reign all went well. In July 1603 the fines for recusancy were remitted. In January 1604 peaceable Roman Catholics could live unmolested and “serve God according to their consciences without any danger.” But James’s expectations that the pope would prevent dangerous and seditious persons from entering the country were unfulfilled and the numbers of the Jesuits and the Roman Catholics greatly increased. Rumours of plots came to hand. Cecil, though like his master naturally in favour of toleration, with his experience gained in the reign of Elizabeth, was alarmed at the policy pursued and its results, and great anxiety was aroused in the government and nation, which was in the end shared by the king. It was determined finally to return to the earlier policy of repression. On the 22nd of February 1604 a proclamation was issued banishing priests; on the 28th of November 1604, recusancy fines were demanded from 13 wealthy persons, and on the 10th of February 1605 the penal laws were ordered to be executed. The plot, however, could not have been occasioned by these measures, for it had been already conceived in the mind of Robert Catesby. It was aimed at the repeal of the whole Elizabethan legislation against the Roman Catholics and perhaps derived some impulse at first from the leniency lately shown by the administration, afterwards gaining support from the opposite cause, the return of the government to the policy of repression.
It was in May 1603 that Catesby told Percy, in reply to the latter’s declaration of his intention to kill the king, that he was “thinking of a most sure way.” Subsequently, about the 1st of November 1603, Catesby sent a message to his cousin Robert Winter at Huddington, near Worcester, to come to London, which the latter refused. On the arrival of a second urgent summons shortly afterwards he obeyed, and was then at a house at Lambeth, probably in January 1604, initiated by Catesby together with John Wright into the plot to blow up the parliament house. Before putting this plan into execution, however,
