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My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care for your preserva-lion. Therefore I would advise you, as you lender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament, for God and man hath concurred to punish viekedness of this time. And think not of this advertisement, but retire yourself into your country. where you may expect the event in safety, for though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow the Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them.
This counsel is not to be condemned, because it may do you good and can do you no harm, for the danger is past as soon as you have burnt the letter: and I hope God will give you the grace to n ake good use of it, to Whose holy protection I commend you.
That famous letter on this day three hundred and thirty-three years ago put an end to the plot conceived and prepared for well over two years for the destruction of King James I and his Parliament, Only the day before Lord Monteagle at Haxton had received it from some anonymous correspondent, probably one of the plotters themselves, for plotters no matter how callously they may regard the fate of their intended victim, have soft spots in their hearts for their friends, and it was through such a sentiment that the whole scheme was brought to naught, and a large number of the schemers,—i cluding the wretched Guido Fawkes himself, caught ready to light the fuse to explode the gunpowder under Parliament,—to the scaffold. Robert Catesby for two long years had been devising a means of getting rid of the King, and as a result of his scheming, sufficient explosive had been smuggled into the cellar beneath the House. He, the previous night, having been warned that the plot had been divulged, refused the advice to flee, and Fawkes satisfied that nothing had up to then been touched in the cellar, returned to his station to set aff, at the appropriate moment, the ton-and-a-half of powder which lay hidden beneath a stack of coal and fag-gots. The authorities acted quickly and in the course of a search which has been repeated ever since prior to the assembly of Parliament, the unhappy Fawkes was apprehended and the whole plot revealed. Nine men were executed. for complicity, and England rejoiced that a monarch who had never up to then captured its fancy had so escaped. Indeed it continues, to do so, not, perhaps, with all the enthusiasm of former years, but at least with all the joy of that youth which knows but the bare outlines of the story, and nothing of what underlay it.
Nor is it intended here to go into such matters, but rather to think a little of the survival of such quaint customs centuries after all real significance has disappeared from the story. So during the whole of this week groups of smutty-faced schoolboys, some carrying with them a guy, and other without, have paraded the streets of England, shouting with their shrill voices the old retrain of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.