t these laws altered; but they could not, and so they were very angry
and bitter against the King and his Ministers, and joined together to
make a plot to be revenged on them. Guy Fawkes was one of the men in
this plot, and it may have been he who suggested the dreadful idea that
was at last decided upon. However that may be, at first nothing was
done, but the conspirators used to meet together in secret to talk
things over. They dare not meet openly, for if so many Catholic
gentlemen had been discovered together, the King and his Ministers would
have suspected something wrong. In one great house in the country
belonging to a young man called Sir Everard Digby, they met in a secret
room, with a floor that moved, so that if ever the King's officers came
suddenly to surprise them there, they could all escape by means of the
floor, which slipped up and let them out, whence they could go from the
house by means of a secret passage. Digby was quite young, little more
than a boy, and he had just married a young and beautiful girl, when he
became entangled in the detestable Gunpowder Plot.

The plot, when it finally took form, was that the conspirators should
hire a house near to the Houses of Parliament and dig an underground
tunnel, which should reach right beneath the part of the House where the
King would be when the Houses of Parliament were opened the next time;
that they should then put gunpowder there, and blow up the whole
building, killing the King and many of the great Ministers. While
everyone was thrown into terror and confusion by this, the other
conspirators were to seize one of the young princes, the King's sons,
and carry him off; then, when everything was thus in the hands of the
Catholics, they expected to be able to make their own terms, and get the
laws against Catholics repealed by the nation.

All this sounded very grand, but it was very difficult to do. It is
wonderful that the conspirators managed to do so much as they did. They
actually took a room near the Houses of Parliament, and began to dig
their underground passage. But they found this a much more difficult job
than they had anticipated, for every bit of the soil they dug out had to
be carried away in baskets secretly by night; for people would naturally
have noticed it if they had seen it, and begun to ask what was being
done. But just when they had discovered how hard the work was going to
be, they heard that a cellar right under the Houses of