TREASON GUNPOWDER & PLOT ,

A clerk noted in the margin of the journal of proceedings of the House of Commons, 5 November 1605: “This last night the Upper House of Parliament was searched by Sir Tho. Knevett; and one Johnson, servant to Mr Thomas Percye, was there apprehended; who had placed 36 barrels of gunpowder in the vault under the House, with a purpose to blow King and the whole Company, when they should there assemble. Afterwards divers other gentlemen were discovered to be of the Plot.”

It is a remarkably dry, bureaucratic record of a conspiracy that came within a whisker of blasting King James I, the Lords and Commons to high Heaven, and later a shocked Parliament would rage over the “most barbarous, monstrous, detestable and damnable Treasons.”