The plotters have purchased the lease to…
July 1605 CE
The plotters have purchased the lease to an undercroft belonging to John Whynniard.
The Palace of Westminster in the early seventeenth century is a warren of buildings clustered around the medieval chambers, chapels, and halls of the former royal palace that houses both Parliament and the various royal law courts.
The old palace is easily accessible; merchants, lawyers, and others, live and work in the lodgings, shops, and taverns within its precincts.
Whynniard's building is along a right-angle to the House of Lords, alongside a passageway called Parliament Place, which itself leads to Parliament Stairs and the River Thames.
Undercrofts are common features at this time, used to house a variety of materials including food and firewood.
Whynniard's undercroft, on the ground floor, is directly beneath the first-floor House of Lords, and may once have been part of the palace's medieval kitchen.
Unused and filthy, it is considered an ideal hiding place for the gunpowder the plotters plan to store there.
In the second week of June, Catesby meets in London the principal Jesuit in England, Father Henry Garnet, and asks him about the morality of entering into an undertaking which might involve the destruction of the innocent, together with the guilty.
Garnet answers that such actions could often be excused, but according to his own account later admonished Catesby during a second meeting in July in Essex, showing him a letter from the pope which forbade rebellion.
Soon after, the Jesuit priest Oswald Tesimond tells Garnet he had taken Catesby's confession, in the course of which he had learned of the plot.
People
Groups
Topics
Commodities
Subjects
Regions
North Europe
View →Subregions
