Robert and Thomas Wintour is written about the Gunpowder Plot is derived from Thomas's confession, signed on 23 November 1605; details of the so-called Spanish Treason were added three days later. One of only two confessions printed in the "King's Book" (a highly partial contemporary account of the affair), Thomas Wintour's was the only account the government had of a plotter who had been involved from the beginning; Guy Fawkes, weakened by days of torture, may have been at the heart of the group, but he was not at its first meetings. However, Antonia Fraser views the document with suspicion, not least because Thomas's
Ambrose Rookwood (Jacobite) or assassinate William III. In February Thomas Prendergast, one of the conspirators, turned king's evidence, and the plot was revealed. On 27 March Rookwood was found in bed in a Jacobite alehouse, and committed to Newgate Prison. On 7 April a true bill of high treason was found against Rookwood at the Middlesex county sessions. He was brought before the King's Bench on 21 April. His case, tried with those of Robert Lowick and Charles Cranburn who was a Jacobite quartermaster, was the first treason trial to use the new system of procedure brought in by the Treason Act 1695,