"Gunpowder Plot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... away to make room for Henry VII.'s chapel. Nor must we forget that Ben Jonson lived and died in a house over the gate or passage from the churchyard to the old palace. In the south-east corner of Old Palace Yard stood the house hired by the Gunpowder Plot conspirators for the conveyance of the barrels into the vault. And it was in Old Palace Yard that four ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... it, he exclaimed, 'One of the most dreadful things that has happened in my time.' The phrase my time, like the word age, is usually understood to refer to an event of a publick or general nature. I imagined something like an assassination of the King—like a gunpowder plot carried into execution—or like another fire of London. When asked, 'What is it, Sir?' he answered, 'Mr. Thrale has lost his only son!' This was, no doubt, a very great affliction to Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, which their friends would consider accordingly; but from the manner ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Waad himself would not have dared to harass and worry him, if he had not been confident that his tyranny would be approved at Court. His foes there were perpetually on the watch for excuses for tightening and perpetuating his bonds. He had to defend himself from a suspicion of complicity with the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Commissioners, of whom Waad was one, were appointed to inquire. Lord Northumberland had been sent to the Tower by the Star Chamber for misprision of treason, on the flimsy pretext of his intimacy with Thomas Percy. He was questioned on his communications at the Tower with ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... as a Protestant, so he was welcome to England. The first step toward uniting the two halves of the island was made when they thus came under a common sovereign. The same atmosphere of plot and treachery which had surrounded Elizabeth reached also to her successor. In 1605 was unearthed the "Gunpowder Plot," a scheme to blow up James with all his chief ministers and subjects in the House of Parliament. The date of its discovery is still kept as a national holiday ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... returned in 1603, they set to work again;[176] and the assassin Ravaillac, who succeeded in removing the obnoxious champion of European independence in 1610, was probably inspired by their doctrine.[177] They had a hand in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and were thought by some to have instigated the Massaere of S. Bartholomew. They fomented the League of the Guises, which had for its object a change in the French dynasty. They organized ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Caledon, writing, about the same date, to Lady Elizabeth Stuart, says, “Since the Gunpowder Plot there has been nothing so terrible. Sir Willm. Scott says there was a plan to set London on fire in twelve places. They only waited for the signal that the assassination had taken place at Lord Harrowby’s. Seven thousand ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... omens than that at which we have now arrived. The new King had not been on the throne a month, when a conspiracy was discovered, surpassing in its treasonable atrocity any that had been heard of in the kingdom since the days of the Gunpowder Plot; and, even before those concerned in that foul crime had been brought to punishment, the public mind was yet more generally and profoundly agitated by a scandal which, in one point of view, was still more ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Luddites, and a special committee sent over by the Pope at the instigation of the beastly Corsican fiend, for destroying all the loyal part of the audience on the anniversary of that deeply-to-be-abhorred-and-highly-to-be-blamed stratagem, the Gunpowder Plot, which falls this year on Thursday the fifth of November. The whole is under the direction of a delegated committee of O. P.'s whose treasonable exploits at Covent Garden you all recollect, and all of whom would have been hung from the chandeliers at that time, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... would be a bonfire to-night. It was the Fifth of November. He had had to write the date two hundred times so he was fairly certain of it. He was afraid of saying too much or too little. And for the life of him he could not remember the date of the Gunpowder Plot. Still he must say something, so ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... and Americans sneer at the instability, turbulence, and convulsions of the French nation for the last century, let us ask ourselves what our history would have been had the "Gunpowder Plot" succeeded, and the whole element of the reformation been exterminated. It is true, vitality and reactive energy might have survived such a process; but that vitality would have shown itself just as it has in France—in ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... all who dissented from the Church of England; and after the Gunpowder Plot the Roman Catholics were practically deprived of the protection of the law, and subject to terrible oppression. In James's reign Bartholomew Legate, a Unitarian, was burned at West Smithfield Market, London (1612), for denying the doctrine of the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... for the king's evil (IV, iii, 140-159),—a custom which James revived. The reference to an equivocator in the porter's soliloquy (II, iii) may allude to Henry Garnet, who was tried in 1606 for complicity in the {190} famous Gunpowder Plot, and who is said to have upheld the doctrine of equivocation. The date of composition is ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... engines of pain, I have heard many dismal tales told; but all had long fallen into disuse before my time. The last persons tortured within the Tower walls were, I believe, Colonel Faux (Guido) and his confederates, for their most abominable Gunpowder Plot, which was to put an end to the Protestant Religion and the illustrious House of Stuart at one fell blow; but happily came to nothing, through the prudence of my Lord Monteagle, and the well-nigh superhuman ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... among the nondescripts of the Caroline school, deserves to be mentioned William Habington, a Roman Catholic gentleman of good upper middle-class station, whose father was himself a man of letters, and had some trouble in the Gunpowder Plot. He was born at Hindlip Hall, near Worcester, in the year of the plot itself, courted and married Lucy Herbert, daughter of his neighbour, Lord Powis, and published her charms and virtues in the collection called Castara, first issued in 1634. Habington also wrote a tragic comedy, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... lady from Highgate had become known, and had aroused almost as much alarm as if some frightful calamity had overtaken the State. Confusion and alarm pervaded the court. The Gunpowder Plot itself hardly shook up the gray heads of King James's cabinet more than did the flight of this pair of parted doves. The wind seemed to waft peril. The minutes seemed fraught with threats. Couriers were despatched ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... pretended was only full of coats and trousers. In this coffer, his riches hid themselves with such a tenacious modesty, that the smallest instalments could only be tempted out by artifice; so that Peggotty had to prepare a long and elaborate scheme, a very Gunpowder Plot, for every Saturday's expenses. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... suppose that the nation which sheepishly let Charles and Laud and Strafford coerce it, gained anything because it afterwards, still more sheepishly, let a few strongminded Puritans, inflamed by the masterpieces of Jewish revolutionary literature, cut off the heads of the three? Suppose the Gunpowder plot had succeeded, and set a Fawkes dynasty permanently on the throne, would it have made any difference to the present state of the nation? The guillotine was used in France up to the limit of human endurance, both on Girondins and Jacobins. Fouquier Tinville followed Marie ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... I was thinking of the same thing last night, because the clerk gave out in the church that there would be prayers on the fifth of November, on account of the Gunpowder Plot; and, as I came out of the church porch I saw a very old woman sitting there. She looked just like an old witch, and I said to myself, 'I should like to seize ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... I have not been busy—and very busy, too. I have written, since May, good six hundred pages, had them rewritten, cut up, corrected, and got fairly ready for press—and am going to press with the first of them on Gunpowder Plot day, with a great hope of disturbing the Public Peace in various directions. Also, I have prepared above thirty drawings for engravers this year, retouched the engravings (generally the worst part of the business), and etched some on steel myself. In the course ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood |
