The "cellar" was not really hired till a little before Easter,
March 31st.

Upon this James himself intervened, submitting to the Commissioners a
series of questions with the object of drawing out of the prisoner a true
account of himself, and of his relations to Percy. A letter had been
found on Fawkes when he was taken, directed not to Johnson, but to
Fawkes, and this among other things had raised the King's suspicions. In
his third examination, on the afternoon of the 6th, in the presence of
Northampton, Devonshire, Nottingham, and Salisbury, Fawkes gave a good
deal of information, more or less true, about himself; and, while still
maintaining that his real name was Johnson, said that the letter, which
was written by a Mrs. Bostock in Flanders, was addressed to him by
another name "because he called himself Fawkes," that is to say, because
he had acquired the name of Fawkes as an alias.

"If he will not otherwise confess," the King had ended by saying, "the
gentler tortures are to be first used unto him, _et sic per gradus ad ima
tenditur_." To us, living in the nineteenth century, these words are
simply horrible. As a Scotchman, however, James had long been familiar
with the use of torture as an ordinary means of legal investigation,
while even in England, though unknown to the law, that is to say, to the
practice of the ordinary courts of justice, it had for some generations
been used not infrequently by order of the council to extract evidence
from a recalcitrant witness, though, according to Bacon, not for the
purpose of driving him to incriminate himself. Surely, if the use of
torture was admissible at all, this was a case for its employment. The
prisoner had informed the government that he had been at the bottom of a
plot of the most sanguinary kind, and had acknowledged by implication
that there were fellow-conspirators whom he refused to name.

If, indeed, Father Gerard's view of the case, that the government, or at
least Salisbury, had for some time known all about the conspiracy,
nothing--not even the Gunpowder Plot itself--could be more atrocious than
the infliction of torments on a fellow-creature to make him reveal a
secret already in their possession. If, however, the evidence I have
adduced be worth anything, this was by no means the case. What it shows
is that on the afternoon of the 6th all that the members of the
government were aware of was that an unknown number of conspirators were
at lar