Page:Guy Fawkes, or, The history of the gunpowder plot.pdf/19

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THE GUNPOWDER PLOT.
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courage which he had displayed throughout the transaction, took up his station in the cellar. Thus they passed three days of anxiety and suspense.

On the Monday afternoon, the Lord Chamberlain, whose duty it was to see that all the arrangements for the meeting of Parliament were complete, went to the Parliament House, accompanied by Lord Mounteagle, who, it was said, expressed a desire to be present at the search. They first went into the Parliament Chamber, and remained there a considerable time; and then, for the alleged purpose of looking for some stuff of the King’s, they visited the vaults and cellars under the house. They remarked the great store of coals and wood there, and perceived Fawkes standing in a corner. The Lord Chamberlain, with affected carelessness, inquired to whom this unusually large provision of fuel belonged; and being informed that the cellar and its contents belonged to Percy, and that he had rented it for about a year and a half, retired without making any more particular search, to report his observations to the King. On their way, Lord Mounteagle expressed his fears and suspicions on the ground, that, though he was an intimate friend of Percy, and had lived with him for many years on terms of familiarity, he had not the least notion that he ever inhabited this house. Upon hearing the statement of the Lord Chamberlain, who declared the store of coals and wood to be beyond all proportion to the wants of a person who dwelt so little in the house as Percy, and that the man (Fawkes) in the cellar looked like ‘a very tall and desperate fellow’ it was determined by the King, with