PRELUDE.

Page 19, line 14 from top. — Put ) after word “conspirators,”notafter word “Tresham.”

Page 77, line 9 from top. — Read: and “great great grandfather of Philip Howard Earl of Arundel,”instead of “great-grandfather.”

Page 79, in note, line 5 from top. — Read: “ninth Earl of Carlisle,”instead of “seventh Earl of Carlisle.”

Page 87, in note, line 8 from bottom. — Read: “Burns & Oates.”

Page 117, line 5 from top. — Read: “William Abington,”instead of “Thomas Abington.”

Page 122, in note, line 2 from top. — Read: “Duke of Beaufort,”instead of “Duke of St. Albans.”

Page 140, line 4 from top. — Read: “incarcerated,”instead of “inccarerated.”

Page 285, in note, line 2 from top. — Read: “kinswoman,”instead of “kinsman.”

Page 321, line 16 from top. — Read: “Deprave,”instead of “depeave.”

In order that the problem of the Gunpowder Plot may be understood, it is necessary for the reader to bear in mind that there were three movements — distinct though connected — against the Government on the part of the oppressed Roman Catholic recusants in the year 1605. The first of these movements was a general wave of insurrectionary feeling, of which there is evidence in Yorkshire as far back as 1596; in Lancashire about 1600; and in Herefordshire, at a later date, much more markedly. Then there was the Gunpowder Plot itself. And, lastly, there was the rebellion that was planned to take place in the Midlands, which, to a very limited extent, did take place, and in the course of which four of the conspirators were slain. That Salisbury’s spies and decoys — who were, like Walsingham’s, usually not Protestants but “bad Catholics” — had something to do with stirring up the general revolutionary feeling is more than probable; but that either he or they planned, either jointly or severally, the particular enterprise known as the Gunpowder Treason Plot — which was as insane as it was infamous — I do not for a moment believe.

All students of English History, however, are greatly indebted to the Rev. John Gerard, S.J., for his threerecent critical works on this subject; but still that the main outlines of the Plot are as they have come down to us by tradition, to my mind, Dr. Samuel Rawson Gardiner abundantly proves in his book in reply to the Rev. John Gerard.

The names of the works to which I refer are: — “What was the Gunpowder Plot?” the Rev. J. Gerard, S.J. (Osgood, McIlvaine & Co.); “The Gunpowder Plot and Plotters” (Harper Bros.); “Thomas Winter’s Confession and the Gunpowder Plot” (Harper Bros.); and “What Gunpowder Plot was,” S. R. Gardiner, D.C.L., LL.D. (Longmans).

The Articles in “The Dictionary of National Biography” dealing with the chief actors in this notable tragedy are all worthy of careful perusal.

“The History of the Jesuits in England, 1580-1773,” by the Rev. Ethelred L. Taunton, with twelve illustrations (Methuen & Co., 1901), contains a chapter on the Gunpowder Plot; and the Plot is referred to in Major Hume’s recent work, entitled, “Treason and Plot” (Nisbet, 1901).

One of the unsolved problems of English History is the question: “Who wrote the Letter to the Lord Mounteagle?” surely, one of the most momentous documents ever penned by the hand of man, which discovered the Gunpowder Treason, and so saved a King of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland — to say nothing of France — his Royal Consort, his Counsellors, and Senators, from a bloody, cruel, and untimely death.

In every conspiracy there is a knave or a fool, and sometimes, happily, “a repentant sinner.”

Now it is well known that the contrivers of the Gunpowder Treason themselves suspected Francis Tresham — a subordinate conspirator and brother-in-law to Lord Mounteagle — and many historians have rashly jumped to the conclusion that, therefore, Tresham must have been the author.

But, when charged at Barnet by Catesby and Thomas Winter, two of his infuriated fellow-plotters, with having sent the Letter, Tresham so stoutly and energetically denied the charge that his denial saved him from the point of their poniards.

Moreover, the suspected man when a prisoner in the Tower of London, and even when in the act of throwing himself on the King’s mercy, never gave the faintest hint that the Letter was attributable to him. But, on the contrary, actually stated first that he hadintendedto reveal the treason, and secondly that hehad been guiltyof concealment.

Now, as a rule, “all that a man hath will he give for his life.” Therefore it is impossible, in the face of this direct testimony of Tresham, to maintain that to him the discovery of the Plot is due: and the force of the argument grounded on Tresham’s being the brother-in-law to Mounteagle, and that the accused man showed an evident desire that the Plot should be postponed, if not altogether abandoned, melts away like snow before the sun.[1][2][A]

[A]See Notes at End of Text, indicated by figures in [ ].

To whatever decision the Historical Inquirer into this hitherto inscrutable mystery is destined to come after reviewing and weighing the Evidence now available — which to-day is more abundant from a variety of accidental circumstances, than when Lingard and Mackintosh, and even Gardiner and Green, wrote their histories — it is manifest that the Inquirer’s decision in the matter cannot be as certain as a mathematical conclusion. But, it may be morally certain, because of the many degrees of probability that the information now ready to our hand will inevitably give that are favourable to the conclusion which the following pages will seek, by the evidence of facts, to sustain. And, as the ancient historian tersely says: “Ubi res adsunt, quid opus est verbis?” — “Where facts are at hand, what need is there for words?”

The Evidence to be relied on is mainly the evidence known as Circumstantial,[B]and consists of two classes of acts. One of these classes leads up to the performance of the transaction — namely, in the one case, the dictating of the Letter by the primary Author; in the other case, the penning of the Document by the secondary Scribe. Whilst the other class of acts tends todemonstrate that the Author of the Letter and the Penman respectively were conscious,subsequentto the commission of the transaction — in the former case, of having incurred the responsibility of being the originating Cause of the Document; in the latter case, of being the Agent for its physical production.

[B]As to the nature of Circumstantial Evidence — see Appendix.

Before we begin to collect our Evidence, and,à fortiori, before we begin to consider the inferences from the same, we ought to bear in mind certain fixities of thought, or, in other words, certain self-evident fundamentals which are grounded in logic and daily experience. These fixities of thought or self-evident fundamentals will be points from which the reason of the Historical Inquirer can take swing. And not only so; but — like the cords of the rocket life-saving apparatus of the eager mariner — they will be lines of attachment and rules of thought, whereby first to secure to ourselves the available Evidence; and secondly, to prove to the intellect the truth of a theory which, if allowed, shall redound, in respect of courage and integrity, to the praise and honour of Man.

Now, to my mind, it is a proposition so plain as not to require arguing, that there must have been at leasttwopersons engaged in the two-fold transaction of dictating the Letter and of being the penman of the same. For although it is, of course, physically possible that the work may have been accomplished by one and the same person, yet that there was a division of labour in the two-fold transaction is infinitely the more likely supposal: because of the terrible risk to the revealing conspirator of his handwriting being detected by the Government authorities, and, through them, by his co-partners in guilt, should he have rashly adventured to be his own scribe; and this though he feigned his penmanship never so cunningly.

Now if such were the case, it follows that there must have been some second person — some entirely trustworthy friend — in the conspirator’s confidence. Nay, if the exigencies of the nature and posture of affairs demanded it, a third person, or even a fourth, might have been also taken into confidence. But only if absolutely necessary. For the risk of detection would be proportioned to the number of persons in the secret: — it being a rule of common prudence in such cases that confidences must not be unnecessarily multiplied.

Therefore it follows that, supposing there was a second person in the confidence of the “discovering” or revealing conspirator to pen the Letter; and supposingthere was a third person in the confidence of that conspirator, with or without the knowledge and consent of the second person, to act as a go-between, an “interpres,” between the conspirator and Lord Mounteagle, these two persons must have been very trustworthy persons indeed.

Now a man trusts his fellow-man in proportion as he has had knowledge of him either directly or indirectly; directly by personal contact, indirectly through the recommendation of some competent authority.

Experientia docet.Experience teaches. A man has knowledge of his fellow-man as the resultant of the experience gained from relationship of some kind or another. And relationship is created by kinship, friendship, or business — intending the word “business” to embrace activity resulting from thought, word, and deed extending to the widest range of human interests conceivable. Relationship creates bonds, ties, obligations between the several persons united by it.

Hence, the practical conclusion is to be drawn that if “the discovering” or disclosing Gunpowder conspirator, with a view to revealing the intended massacre, had recourse to one or more confidants, they must have been one or more person or persons who were united to him by kinship, friendship, or business, in the sense predicated, possibly in all three, and that they must have been persons bound to him by bonds, which if “light as air were strong as iron.”

Let us now turn to the Evidence to-day available bearing upon the momentous document under consideration. We will begin by saying a few words respecting the Lord Mounteagle, whose name, at least, the Gunpowder Treason will have for ever enshrined in the remembrance of the British people.

William Parker,[3]the son and heir of Lord Morley, whose barony had been created by King Edward I. in 1299, was called to the House of Lords as the fourth Baron Mounteagle, in right of his mother the Honourable Elizabeth Stanley, the only child and heiress of the third Baron Mounteagle, whose wife was a Leybourne of Westmoreland.

At the time of the Plot (1605) the fourth Lord Mounteagle was thirty years of age. His principal country residence appears to have been at Great Hallingbury, near Bishop Stortford, in the County of Essex. His chief town-house seems to have been in the Strand. He married before he was eighteen years of age, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton, Northamptonshire, a high-minded, scholarly Roman Catholic gentleman of great wealth, who had been knighted at Kenilworth by Queen Elizabeth in 1577.

Mounteagle was connected through his mother alone, to say nothing of his father, with some of the noblest families in the land. Besides the then well-nigh princely Lancashire House, the Stanleys Earls of Derby, to whom he was related in both the paternal and maternal lines, through his mother Elizabeth Stanley, Mounteagle was related, as cousin once removed, to those twain gracious, beautiful souls, Anne Dacres Countess of Arundel and Surrey, widow of the sainted Philip Howard Earl of Arundel and Surrey, and to her sister the Lady Elizabeth Howard, wife of “Belted Will Howard”[4]ofNaworth Castle, the ancient home of the Lords Dacres of Gilsland, near Carlisle, commonly called the Lords Dacres of the North, in contradistinction to the Lords Dacres of the South, of Hurstmonceaux Castle in the County of Sussex.

Mounteagle was, therefore, through his mother, a near kinsman to the remarkable Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, who married Aletheia, the only child and heiress of Gilbert, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, and god-daughter of Queen Elizabeth.

This Earl of Arundel eventually became the well-known patron of the fine arts. But in the year 1605 the young peer had not yet quite attained his majority.

Mounteagle, again, through his mother’s relationship with the gifted Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel just mentioned, would be also connected with a nobleman who at that epoch was counted a very model of “the pomp, pride, and circumstance of ancient nobility,” with John Lord Lumley[5]of Lumley Castle in the County Palatine of Durham, whose wife was Jane, daughter of Henry Fitzalan Earl of Arundel, a nobleman “exceeding magnifical,” who indeed in his day had even cherished aspirations to the hand of the last representative of the Royal House of Tudor herself.

Lord Mounteagle consorted much with English Roman Catholics, and, in some sense, prior to the year 1605, was of that religion himself. He had been present with his wife’s brother Francis Tresham a little after the Midsummer of 1605 at Fremland in Essex, on the occasion of the celebrated meeting when Father Henry Garnet, the head of the Jesuits in England, took occasion to have special warning speech with Catesby respecting a general question propounded by Catesby to Garnet about a month or six weeks previously (i.e., the beginning of Trinity Term,1605), and from the answer to which general question Catesby shamefully drew that particular conclusion which the promptings of his evil will desired, in order that the enormity he had purposed might be made acceptable to the wavering conscience of any dubious fellow-plotter against whose resurgent sense of right and wrong he thought he might have to strive.

Lord Mounteagle is a difficult man accurately to reckon up, either intellectually, morally, or religiously. For he seems in all three aspects to have been a slightly ambiguous person.[A]Yet certainly he was no mere titled fool, with a head-piece like a windmill. Far from it: he was probably a man of sufficient, though not, I think, of the very highest intelligence, good-natured, easy-going, and of very engaging manners.[B]

[A]It is curious and amusing to hear that the following was the opinion of Robert Catesby concerning the peerage of his day: — “He made account of the nobility as of atheists, fools, and cowards; and that lusty bodies would be better for the commonwealth than they.” — See “Keyes’ Examination,” Record Office.

[B]A certain English periodical, a few years ago, spoke admiringly of Lord Mounteagle’s twentieth century connection, the present Duke of Devonshire, as being one’sbeau-idealof the “you-be-damned” type of Englishman. Probably the same periodical would have found, had it been in existence in the seventeenth century, a similar contentment in the contemplation of the fourth Lord Mounteagle.

By his contemporaries, it is evident that even prior to 1605 Mounteagle was made much of and greatly courted. But less, I opine, on account of the intellectual and moral qualities wherewith he was endowed, than on account of the exalted station of his kith and kin and the general excellency and eminency of his own external graces and gifts of fortune.

So much, then, for the present, concerning the now famous William Parker fourth Baron Mounteagle, whom History has crowned with a wreath of immortals.

On Saturday, the 26th of October, ten days before the intended meeting of Parliament,[A]Lord Mounteagle, we are told, unexpectedly and without any apparent reason or previous notice, directed a supper to be prepared at his mansion at Hoxton, where he had not been for more than a twelve-month before that date.

[A]Parliament had been prorogued from the 3rd of October to the 5th of November. Lord Mounteagle was one of the Commissioners.The “Confession” by Thomas Winter, which I regard as genuine, I have also drawn upon freely in my relation of facts. — See Appendix.

[A]Parliament had been prorogued from the 3rd of October to the 5th of November. Lord Mounteagle was one of the Commissioners.

The “Confession” by Thomas Winter, which I regard as genuine, I have also drawn upon freely in my relation of facts. — See Appendix.

It will be well, however, to relate the history of what occurred in the exact words provided for us in a work published by King James’s printer, and put forth as “the authorised version” of the facts that it recorded. The work bears the title — “A Discourse of the late intended Treason,” anno 1605. “The Discourse” says: — “The Lord Mounteagle, sonne and heire to the Lord Morley, being in his own lodging ready to go to supper at seven of the clock at night one of his footmen whom he had sent of an errand over the streete was met by an unknown man of a reasonable tall personage[6]who delivered him a Letter charging him to put it in my Lord his Master’s hands, which my Lord no sooner received but that having broken it up and perceiving the same to be of an unknown and somewhat unlegible hand, and without either date or subscription, did callone of his men unto him for helping him to read it. But no sooner did he conceive the strange contents thereof, although he was somewhat perplexed what construction to make of it ... yet did he as a most dutifull and loyall subject conclude not to conceal it, whatever might come of it. Whereupon notwithstanding the latenesse and darknesse of the night in that season of the year, he presently repaired to his Majesties palace at Whitehall and there delivered the same to the Earle of Salisbury his majesties principall secretarie.”

The Letter was as follows: —

“My lord out of the loue i beare yowe to some of youere frends i haue a caer of youer preseruacion therfor i would aduyse yowe as yowe tender youer lyf to deuys some exscuse to shift of youer attendance at this parleament for god and man hath concurred to punishe the wickednes of this tyme and thinke not slightlye of this aduertisment but retyere youre self into youre contri wheare yowe maye expect the euent in safti for thowghe[7]theare be no apparance of anni stir yet i saye they shall receyue a terrible blowe this parleament and yet they shall not sei who hurts them this councel is not to be contemned because it maye do yowe good and can do yowe no harme for the dangere is passed as soon as yowe have burnt the letter and i hope god will give yowe the grace to mak good use of it to whose holy proteccion i comend yowe.”

(Addressed on the back) to “the ryght honorable the lord mouteagle.”

The full name of the member of Lord Mounteagle’s household who read the Letter to Lord Mounteagle, we learn, was Thomas Ward.[8]

Ward was acquainted with Thomas Winter, one of theprincipal Gunpowder plotters; for Winter himself had formerly been in Mounteagle’s service, and at the time of the Plot was almost certainly on amicable terms with the young nobleman.

On the 27th of October, the day following the delivery of the Letter,Thomas Ward came to Thomas Winter(being Sunday at night) and told him that a Letter had been given to Lord Mounteagle, which the latter presently had carried to Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury. — “Winter’s Confession.”

Winter, thereupon, the next day, Monday, the 28th October, went to a house called White Webbs, not far from Lord Salisbury’s mansion Theobalds.

White Webbs was a lone and (then) half-timbered dwelling, “with many trap doors and passages,” surrounded by woods, near Enfield Chase, ten miles north of Westminster.

At this secluded spot Thomas Winter had speech with Catesby, the arch-conspirator, “assuring him withal that the matter was disclosed and wishing him in anywise to forsake his country.” — “Winter’s Confession.”

Catesby told Winter, “he would see further as yet and resolved to send Mr. Fawkes to try the uttermost protesting if the part belonged to himself he would try the same adventure.” — “Winter’s Confession.”

On Wednesday, the 30th October, from White Webbs, “Mr. Fawkes,” as Thomas Winter styles him, went to the cellar under the House of Lords, where thirty-six barrels of powder, wood, and coal were stored in readiness for the bloody slaughter purposed for November the Fifth.

Fawkes returned to White Webbs at night, at which the conspirators “were very glad.” Fawkes had found in the cellar his “private marks” all undisturbed.

“The next day after the delivery of the Letter,” says Stowe (though as a fact it was probably five days after the delivery of the momentous document, namely, on the following Thursday),this self-same “Thomas Winter told Christopher Wright”— a subordinate conspirator, — “that he (Winter) understood an obscure letter had been delivered to Lord Mounteagle, who had conveyed it to Salisbury.”[9]

Hence, most probably, either Thomas Winter went in search of Christopher Wright to afford him this piece of information; or Wright went in search of Winter to obtain it.

At about five o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, November, the Fifth, about five hours after Fawkes’ apprehension by Sir Thomas Knevet and his men,[10]the said Christopher Wright went to the chamber of the said Thomas Winter and told him that a nobleman (i.e., the Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse) “had called (i.e., summoned) the Lord Mounteagle, saying, ‘Rise and come along to Essex House,[11]for I am going to call up my Lord of Northumberland,’ saying withal, ‘the matter is discovered.’” — “Winter’s Confession.”

Of this conspirator, Christopher Wright, it is said,[12]that “he was the first to ascertain that the Plot was discovered.” Probably this refers to the information he (Christopher Wright) obtained as the upshot of his interview with Winter on (probably) Thursday, the 31st October.

Christopher Wright was, likewise, the first to announce the apprehension of Fawkes on the morning of the 5th of November.

It is also further said of Christopher Wright by one[13]who wrote during the last century, that “He advised that each of the conspirators should betakehimself to flight in a different direction from his companions. Had this been followed several of them would have probably succeeded in making their escape to the continent. The conspirators, however, adopted another course, which issued in their discomfiture in Staffordshire, where Christopher Wright was also killed.”

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and during the earlier part of the reign of King James I., almost all those castellated castles, moated halls, and gabled manor-houses which to-day, still standing more or less perfect, “amidst their tall ancestral trees o’er all the pleasant land,” go to constitute that “old England” which her sons and daughters (and their brethren and kinsfolk beyond the seas) know and love so well; during the reign of Elizabeth and during the earlier part of the reign of James I., these now time-honoured, ivy-clad abodes and dwellings of English men and English women, over whom the grave has long since closed, but who in their day and generation were assuredly among the heroic and the supremely excellent of the earth, were the sheltering, romantic roof-trees of those who clung tenaciously to the ancient religious Faith of the English race.

This Faith was indeed that faith which had been taken and embraced by their “rude forefathers” of long ages ago, in the simple hope and with the pathetic trust that it might “do them good.”[A]And this their hope, they believed and knew, had been not in vain, neither had been their trust betrayed.

[A]See the beautiful apologue of the Saxon nobleman of Deira, delivered in the presence of St. Edwin King of Northumbria; given in Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History.”

In the days of the second Henry Tudor —fons et origo malorum— the fountain-head and well-spring of almost all of England’s many present-day religious and social woes — the men and women of England and Wales knew full well, whether they were of Cymric, Saxon, Scandinavian, or Norman race (or a mixture of all four), that to that assemblage of ideas and emotions, laws and rules, habits and customs, which had come to them from men of foreign blood and alien name, dwelling on the banks of the far-off “yellow Tiber” and under sunny, blue Italian skies — these men and women, I repeat, knew full well that to their religious Faith they owed almost everything that was best and truest and most enduring, either in themselves or their kith and kin.[A]

[A]Yorkshire, being the greatest of English Shires, had among the inhabitants of its hills and dales and “sounding shores,” representatives of the various races which compose the English nation. In the West Riding especially, those of the old Cymric or British stock were to be found. (Indeed, I am told, even now shepherds often count their sheep by the old British numerals.) This strong remnant of the old British race in the West Riding probably accounts for the marvellous gift of song wherewith this division of Yorkshiremen are endowed to this day, just as are the Welsh. In none other portion of England was there such a wealth of stately churches and beautiful monasteries as in Yorkshire, the ancient Deira, whose melodious name once kept ringing in the ears of St. Gregory the Great, of a truth, the best friend the English people ever had. But Yorkshire realised that “before all temples” the One above “preferred the upright heart and pure.” Therefore, canonized saints arose from among her vigorous, keen-minded, yet poetically imaginative sons and daughters. York became sacred to St. Paulinus and St. William; Ripon to St. Wilfrid, the Apostle of Sussex; also to St. Willibrord, the Apostle of Holland; Beverley was hallowed by the presence of St. John of Beverley; Whitby by the Saxon princess St. Hilda, the friend of Caedmon, the father of English poetry. The moors of Lastingham were blest by the presence of St. Chad and St. Cedd; and Knaresbrough by St. Robert, in his leafy stone-cave hard-by the winding Nidd.

Now regard being had to the indisputable fact that for well-nigh a thousand years England had been known abroad as “the Dowry of Mary and the Island of Saints,” by reason of the signal manifestations she had displayed in the way of cathedrals and churches, abbeys and priories, convents and nunneries, hospitals and schools (which arose up and down the length and breadth of the land to Northward and Southward, to East and West,thereby, by the aid of art, adding even to England’s rare natural beauty), it was never at all likely that the bulk of the English people would, all on a sudden, cast off their cherished beliefs and hallowed affections respecting the deepest central questions of human life.[14]

Moreover, it may be taken as a general rule, to be remembered and applied by princes and statesmen, all the world over and for all time, that Man is a creature “full of religious instincts:” — “too superstitious,” should it be thought more accurate and desirable so to describe this undoubted habit and bent of the human mind.

Thence it follows that it is the merest fatuous folly for princes and statesmen if and when they have got themselves entangled in a false position, from some external cause or causes having little or no relation to the Invisible and the Eternal, to bid their subjects and denizens, “right about turn,” at a moment’s notice: however “bright and blissful” such mental evolutions may be deemed to be by those who have unwisely taken it into their foolish head to issue the irrational command.[A]

[A]That able and strong-minded Englishman, Dr. Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, said (in 1901) in the House of Lords, during the debates on that pathetically ridiculous document, the Sovereign’s Declaration against Popery, when speaking on Lord Salisbury’s proposed amended form, that England was resolved “to stand no interference with her religion from the outside.” It is a good thing that the heathen Kings Ethelbert and Edwin wereless abnormally patriotic1300 years ago. For the idea of “independence” has to be held subject to the “golden mean” of “nothing too much.” A fetish must not be made of that idea, especially by a people conscious of lofty imperial destiny. And “unity” must there be between ideas that are controlling fundamentals — in other words, between ideas intellectual, moral, and spiritual.

Now, in the days of Queen Elizabeth[A]those whom religious loyalty prompted to worship supremely “the God of their fathers” after a manner that those eager for change counted “idolatry,” were marked by different mental characteristics. This was so throughout England; but especially was it so in those five northern counties which comprised what was then by Catholics proudly styled “the faithful North.”

[A]The mother of Queen Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn, died reconciled to the Church of Rome. Her daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, was brought up in the tenets of that Church; but, like one type of the children of the Renaissance, Elizabeth was unconsciously “a Tribal Deist.” Margaret Roper, the daughter of Sir Thomas More, was equally “cultured,” but she accepted the Catholic tradition in its letter and in its spirit. I may here state that I have a great intellectual admiration for Queen Elizabeth, whose virtues were her own, while her faults, to a large extent, were her monstrous father’s and her Privy Counsellors’,who told her not what she ought to do but what she could do, which no really faithful adviser of a Sovereign ever does.

Some of these English “leile and feile,” that is loyal and faithful, servants of Rome were, on the subjective side, retained in their allegiance to the Visible Head of Christendom by bonds formed by mere natural piety and conservative feeling — dutiful affections of Nature which are the promise and the pledge of much that is best in the Teutonic race.

Others were mainly ruled by an overmastering sense of that lofty humility which foes call pride, but friends dignity.

Whilst a third class were persuaded, by intense intellectual, moral, and spiritual conviction that — “in and by the power of divine grace” — come what might,nothing should separate them from those hereditary beliefs which were dearer to them far than not merely earthly goods, lands, and personal liberty, but even than their very life.

This last-mentioned class, from and after the year 1580, “the year of the Lord’s controversy with Sion,” as the old English Catholics regarded it, who loved to recall that “good time” when Campion and Parsons “poured out their soul in words,” especially Campion, who was remembered in the north for three generations: this last-mentioned class, I say, were oftentimes, though certainly not always, found to be greatly attached to the then new Society of Jesus, which, in England, was in the glow and purity of its first fervour.

This last-mentioned class — I mean the Jesuitically-affected class of English Catholics — were also again sub-divided into three sub-divisions. One sub-division was composed of Mystics; another of Politicians; and a third of those who, realising a higher unity, were at once MysticsandPoliticians — or, in other phraseology,they were Men of Thought and Men of Action.

Now, the Gunpowder conspirators belonged to the last-mentioned class, and to the second division of that class. That is to say, they were mere Politicians, speaking broadly and speaking generally.

It hath been truly observed by one of the most knowing and candid of modern students of Elizabethan biographical literature, that Sir William Catesby, the father of the arch-gunpowder conspirator, Robert Catesby, in common with the great majority of the country gentry throughout England, who were resident upon their own estates, and unconnected with the oligarchy which ruled in the Queen’s name (i.e., Queen Elizabeth’s) at Court, threw in his lot with the Catholic party, and suffered in consequence of his conscientious adherence to the old creed.[A]

[A]Dr. Augustus Jessopp: Article — “Robert Catesby,” “National Dictionary of Biography.”

While Sir Thomas Tresham (the brother-in-law of the last-mentioned Sir William Catesby and father of Francis Tresham, one of the subordinate conspirators), was so attached to the ancient faith of the English people that, we are told, he not only regularly paid — by way of fines — for more than twenty years, the sum of £260 per annum, about £2,080 a year in our money, into the Treasury rather than not maintain what (to him) was “a conscience void of offence,” but he also spent at least twenty-one years of his life in prison, after being Star-Chambered in the year 1581 along with Lord Vaux of Harrowden and his brother-in-law, Sir William Catesby, on a charge of harbouring Campion.

The Fleet prison in London, Banbury Castle and Ely — his “familiar prison,” as Sir Thomas Tresham pleasantly styled the last-named place of incarceration — were the habitations wherein he was enabled to make it his boast in a letter to Lord Henry Howard, afterwards the Earl of Northampton, writ in the year 1603, “that he had now completed his triple apprenticeship in direst adversity, and that he should be content to serve a like long apprenticeship to prevent the foregoing of his beloved, beautiful, and graceful Rachel; for it seemed to him but a few days for the love he had to her.”[A]

[A]Quoted from papers found at Rushton in Northamptonshire, the seat of Sir Thomas Tresham, which he himself designed, being an architect of some skill.

Well may the spiritual descendants to-day of these grand old Elizabethan Catholics exclaim: — “Theirvery memory is pure and bright, and our sad thoughts doth cheer!”

The men known to history as the Gunpowder Plotters were thirteen in number.

They were at first Robert Catesby, already mentioned, Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy (or Guido) Fawkes.

Subsequently, there were added to these five — Robert Keyes, Christopher Wright (a younger brother of John Wright), and lastly Robert Winter (an elder brother of Thomas Winter),[A]Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, and Thomas Bates.

[A]Lord Edmund Talbot, brother to the present Duke of Norfolk, K.G., Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, is allied to Robert Winter, through the latter’s marriage with Gertrude Talbot, the daughter of John Talbot, Esquire, of Grafton in Worcestershire. The brother of Gertrude Winter became Earl of Shrewsbury. John Talbot had married a daughter of Sir William Petre. Lord Edmund Talbot, I believe, now owns Huddington.

Of these thirteen conspirators, all, with the exception of Thomas Bates, a serving-man of Robert Catesby, were, as Fawkes said, “gentlemen of name and blood.”

Thomas Percy was the eldest of the conspirators and in 1605 was about forty-five years of age.

Sir Everard Digby was the youngest, being twenty-four years of age, whilst the ages of the others ranged betwixt and between.[15]

Thomas Percy, a native of Beverley, an ancient and historic town in the East Riding of Yorkshire, was therefore a Yorkshireman by birth. He was the son of EdwardPercy and Elizabeth his wife. Though not the ringleader of the band of conspirators, Thomas Percy must have cut the greatest figure in the eyes of the public at large. For he was a “kinsman” of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland, according to the testimony of the Earl himself,[16]and through this nobleman Thomas Percy had been made Captain of the Pensioners-in-Ordinary — Gentlemen of Honour — in attendance at Court. At the time of the Plot, too, Thomas Percy — the Constable of Alnwick and Warkworth Castles — acted as officer or agent for his noble kinsman’s large northern estates, at Alnwick, Warkworth, Topcliffe, Spofforth, and elsewhere.

Robert Catesby, the arch-conspirator, was — as we have seen already — the son and heir of Sir William Catesby, whose wife was a daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton in Warwickshire.

Sir William Catesby was a gentleman of ancient, historic and distinguished lineage, who had large possessions in Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire, yielding him about £3,000 a year, or probably from £24,000 to £30,000 a year in our money.

These large estates his ill-fated son Robert Catesby succeeded to in expectancy in 1598.[17]

Catesby, the younger, diminished his annual revenue very considerably by involving himself in the rising of the brilliant Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex (1601), who had given to Catesby a promise of toleration for Catholic recusants, who chafed greatly under a system of politico-theological persecution, at once galling, cruel and despicable.

But this promise of toleration was conditioned by the very vital condition precedent that the insurrectionary movement of the gallant but rash Essex against the Government of Elizabeth had a successful issue.

The movement, however, was emphatically not smiled on by Fortune, that fickle goddess, with the result that Catesby found himself locked up in prison, and was only ransomed by payment of a sum of £3,000.

This heavy fine, together with the fact that in the year 1605 his mother, the Dowager Lady Catesby, was living at Ashby St. Legers in Northamptonshire, and owned for life all rents of the estates, except Chastleton near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, seems to have been the cause that, at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, Catesby had not any very great amount of ready money in hand.

Besides this, until some four or five years prior to 1603, the year of the death of Queen Elizabeth, when he began to practise the religion which in 1580 his father, Sir William Catesby, had embraced or re-embraced, and for which the latter had suffered imprisonment and heavy fines, Robert Catesby “was very wild; and as he kept company with the best noblemen of the land, so he spent much above his rate, and so wasted also good part of his living.”

“He was of person above two yards[18]high, and though slender, yet as well proportioned to his height as any man one should see.” He was, moreover, reputed to be “very wise and of great judgment, though his utterance was not so good. Besides, he was so liberal, and apt to help all sorts, as it got him much love.”

At the time of the Plot Catesby was about thirty-five years of age. He had married Catherine Leigh, a daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh, of Stoneleigh, a Protestant gentleman of wealth and influence in Warwickshire. The Parish Register of Chastleton has the following entry: — “Robert Catesbie, son of Robert Catesbie, was baptised the 11th day of November, 1595.”[19]He had only this one surviving child, who is said to have married the only child of Thomas Percy.

Catesby had the misfortune to lose his wife by death before the year 1602, and at the time of the Plot his home seems to have been with his mother, the Dowager Lady Catesby, at Ashby St. Legers in the County of Northampton, the family ancestral seat. For in 1602 he had sold his residence, Chastleton, in Oxfordshire.

Now, as Robert Catesby, it seems by many circumstances, was the first inventor and chiefest furtherer of the Plot, it is worth while thus lingering on a description of what manner of man he was.

It, however, may be asked how came it to pass that this one person gained such prodigious ascendency over twelve other persons so as to make them, in the event, as mischievously, nay fatally, deluded as himself?

The answer is manifold: for besides the wrongs which these ruthless plotters sought to avenge, they evidently came under a potent psychological spell when they came under the influence of this wayward, yet fascinating, son of the brilliant age of Elizabeth — an age in which men’s intellectual and physical powers too often attained a complete mastery over their moral powers.[20]

For a proof of Catesby’s immense influence over others, it may be mentioned that Ambrose Rookwood, one of those whose blood afterwards stained the scaffold at the early age of twenty-seven for his share in the wicked scheme, says of Catesby that “he (Rookwood) loved and respected him as his own life.”[21]

Four things seem to have caused those who came in contact with Robert Catesby to have been carried captive at his will, if from the first they were at all well affected towards him — his personal appearance, his generosity, his zeal, and his skill in the use of arms.

We are told that Tesimond (alias Greenway), another contemporary of Catesby, says that “his countenancewas exceedingly noble and expressive. That his conversation and manners were peculiarly attractive and imposing, and that by the dignity of his character he exercised an irresistible influence over the minds of those who associated with him.”[22]

His zeal was of that kind which is contagious and kindles responsive fire.

As for his martial prowess, it was sufficiently attested by his behaviour at the time of the Essex rising, when Father Gerard, his contemporary, tells us that “Mr. Catesby did then show such valour and fought so long and stoutly as divers afterwards of those swordsmen did exceedingly esteem him and follow him in regard thereof.”[23]

Thomas Winter came of a Worcestershire family. His father, George Winter (or Wintour), had married Jane Ingleby, the daughter of Sir William Ingleby, a Yorkshire knight of historic name, whose ancestral seat was Ripley Castle, near Knaresbrough[24]in Nidderdale, one of the most romantic valleys of Yorkshire.

Jane Winter’s brother, Francis Ingleby,[25]a barrister, and afterwards a Roman Catholic priest, was hanged, drawn and quartered at York, on the 2nd of June, 1586, for exercising his priesthood in York and his native County.

He was a man of rare parts, and the heroic story of his life and death must have often thrilled the hearts of his sister’s children.

Would that they had taken him as their model. For of all those many Roman Catholic Yorkshiremen[A]who, of divers ranks and degrees, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, preferred “death” to (what to them) was “dishonour,” none has left nobler memories than this self-sacrificing, exalted soul.[26]

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