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.