in August 1604 and earl of Salisbury in May 1605; and James had already, more than 16 months before the discovery of the plot, consented to return to the repressive measures against the Romanists. The success with which the conspirators concealed their plot from Salisbury’s spies is indeed astonishing, but is probably explained by its very audacity and by the absence of incriminating correspondence, the medium through which the minister chiefly obtained his knowledge of the plans of his enemies.
On the arrest of Fawkes the other conspirators, except Tresham, fled in parties by different ways, rejoining each other in Warwickshire, as had been agreed in case the plot had been successful. Catesby, who with some others had covered the distance of 80 m. between London and his mother’s house at Ashby St Legers in eight hours, informed his friends in Warwickshire, who had been awaiting the issue of the plot, of its failure, but succeeded in persuading Sir Everard Digby, by an unscrupulous falsehood, to further implicate himself in his hopeless cause by assuring him that both James and Salisbury were dead; and, according to Father Garnet, this was not the first time that Catesby had been guilty of lies in order to draw men into the plot. He pushed on the same day with his companions in the direction of Wales, where, it was hoped, they would be joined by bands of insurgents. They arrived at Huddington at 2 in the afternoon. On the morning of the 7th the band, numbering about 36 persons, confessed and heard Mass, and then rode away to Holbeche, 2 m. from Stourbridge, in Staffordshire, the house of Stephen Littleton, who had been present at the hunting at Danchurch (see Digby, Everard), where they arrived at 10 o’clock at night, having on their way broken into Lord Windsor’s house at Hewell Grange and taken all the armour they found there. Their case was now desperate. None had joined them: “Not one came to take our part,” said Sir Everard Digby, “though we had expected so many.” They were being followed by the sheriff and all the forces of the county. All spurned them from their doors when they applied for succour. One by one their followers fled from the house in which the last scene was to be played out. They now began to feel themselves abandoned not only by man but by God; for an explosion of some of their gunpowder, on the morning of the 8th, by which Catesby and some others were scorched, struck terror into their hearts as a judgment from heaven. The assurance of innocence and of a just cause which till now had alone supported them was taken away. The greatness of their crime, its true nature, now struck home to them, and the few moments which remained to them of life were spent in prayer and in repentance. The supreme hour had now arrived. About 11 o’clock the sheriff and his men came up and immediately began firing into the house. Catesby, Percy and the two Wrights were killed, Winter and Rokewood wounded and taken prisoners with the men who still adhered to them. In all eight of the conspirators, including the two Winters, Digby, Fawkes, Rokewood, Keyes and Bates, were executed, while Tresham died in the Tower. Of the priests involved, Garnet was tried and executed, while Greenway and Gerard succeeded in escaping.
So ended the strange and famous Gunpowder Plot. However atrocious its conception and its aims, it is impossible not to feel, together with horror for the deed, some pity and admiration for the guilty persons who took part in it. “Theirs was a crime which it would never have entered into the heart of any man to commit who was not raised above the lowness of the ordinary criminal.” They sinned not against the light but in the dark. They erred from ignorance, from a perverted moral sense rather than from any mean or selfish motive, and exhibited extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of what seemed to them the cause of God and of their country. Their punishment was terrible. Not only had they risked and lost all in the attempt and drawn upon themselves the frightful vengeance of the state, but they saw themselves the means of injuring irretrievably the cause for which they felt such devotion. Nothing could have been more disastrous to the cause of the Roman Catholics than their crime. The laws against them were immediately increased in severity, and the gradual advance towards religious toleration was put back for centuries. In addition a new, increased and long-enduring hostility was aroused in the country against the adherents of the old faith, not unnatural in the circumstances, but unjust and undiscriminating, because while some of the Jesuits were no doubt implicated, the secular priests and Roman Catholic laity as a whole had taken no part in the conspiracy.
Bibliography.—The recent controversy concerning the nature and origin of the plot can be followed in What was the Gunpowder Plot? by John Gerard, S.J. (1897); What Gunpowder Plot was, by S. R. Gardiner (a rejoinder) (1897); The Gunpowder Plot . . . in reply to Professor Gardiner, by John Gerard, S.J. (1897); Thomas Winter’s Confession and the Gunpowder Plot, by John Gerard, S.J. (with facsimiles of his writing) (1898); Eng. Hist. Rev. iii. 510 and xii. 791; Edinburgh Review, clxxxv. 183; Athenaeum 1897, ii. 149, 785, 855; 1898, i. 23, ii. 352, 420; Academy, vol. 52 p. 84; The Nation, vol. 65 p. 400. A considerable portion of the controversy centres round the question of the authenticity of Thomas Winter’s confession, the MS. of which is at Hatfield, supported by Professor Gardiner, but denied by Father Gerard principally on account of the document having been signed “Winter” instead of “Wintour,” the latter apparently being the conspirator’s usual style of signature. The document was deposited by the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury for inspection at the Record Office, and was pronounced by two experts, one from the British Museum and another from the Record Office, to be undoubtedly genuine. The cause of the variation in the signature still remains unexplained, but ceases to have therefore any great historical importance. The bibliography of the contemporary controversy is given in the article on Henry Garnet in the Dictionary of National Biography and in The Gunpowder Plot by David Jardine (1857), the latter work still remaining the principal authority on the subject; add to these Gardiner’s Hist. of England, i., where an excellent account is given; History of the Jesuits in England, by Father Ethelred Taunton (1901); Father Gerard’s Narrative in Condition of the Catholics under James I. (1872), and Father Greenway’s Narrative in Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, 1st series (1872), interesting as contemporary accounts, but not to be taken as complete or infallible authorities, of the same nature being Historia Provinciae Anglicanae Societatis Jesu, by Henry More, S.J. (1660), pp. 309 et seq.; also History of Great Britain, by John Speed (1611), pp. 839 et seq.; Archaeologia, xii. 200, xxviii. 422, xxix. 80; Harleian Miscellany (1809), iii. 119-135, or Somers Tracts (1809), ii. 97-117; M. A. Tierney’s ed. of Dodd’s Church History, vol. iv. (1841); Treason and Plot, by Martin Hume (1901); Notes and Queries, 7 ser. vi., 8 ser. iv. 408, 497, v. 55, xii. 505, 9 ser. xi. 115; Add. MSS. Brit. Mus. 6178; State Trials, ii.; Calendar of State Pap. Dom. (1603–1610), and the official account, A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings against the late most Barbarous Traitors (1606), a neither true nor complete narrative however, now superseded as an authority, reprinted as The Gunpowder Treason . . . with additions in 1679 by Thomas Barlow, bishop of Lincoln. A large number of letters and papers in the State Paper Office relating to the plot were collected in one volume in 1819, called the Gunpowder Plot Book; these are noted in their proper place in the printed calendars of State Papers, Domestic Series; see also articles on Fawkes, Guy; Tresham, Francis; Monteagle, William Parker, 4th Baron; Percy, Thomas; Catesby, Robert; Garnet, Henry; Digby, Sir Everard. (P. C. Y.)
GUN-ROOM, a ship cabin occupied by the officers below the
rank of lieutenant, but who are not warrant officers of the class of
the boatswain, gunner or carpenter. In the wooden sailing ships
it was on the lower deck, and was originally the quarters of the
gunner.
GUNTER, EDMUND (1581–1626), English mathematician, of
Welsh extraction, was born in Hertfordshire in 1581. He was
educated at Westminster school, and in 1599 was elected a student
of Christ Church, Oxford. He took orders, became a preacher
in 1614, and in 1615 proceeded to the degree of bachelor in
divinity. Mathematics, however, which had been his favourite
study in youth, continued to engross his attention, and on the
6th of March 1619 he was appointed professor of astronomy in
Gresham College, London. This post he held till his death on the
10th of December 1626. With Gunter’s name are associated
several useful inventions, descriptions of which are given in his
treatises on the Sector, Cross-staff, Bow, Quadrant and other
Instruments. He contrived his sector about the year 1606, and
wrote a description of it in Latin, but it was more than sixteen
years afterwards before he allowed the book to appear in English.
In 1620 he published his Canon triangulorum (see Logarithms).
There is reason to believe that Gunter was the first to discover
(in 1622 or 1625) that the magnetic needle does not retain the
same declination in the same place at all times. By desire of
