In the summer of the year 1605, Sir Everard Digby spent a week in London, and stayed at the lodgings in the Savoy of his friend Roger Manners,[122] the eldest brother of Sir Oliver Manners, whose conversion to the Catholic faith has been already noticed. This Roger Manners married the daughter and heir of the famous Sir Philip Sydney, and eventually succeeded his father, as fifth Earl of Rutland. Although Sir Everard stayed with Roger Manners, he “commonlie dieted at the Mearmaid in Bred Streete.”[123] He spent much of his time with the excellent Sir Oliver Manners, which was all very well; but, unfortunately, Robert Catesby also “kept him companie”a great deal; without, however, letting him know what was chiefly occupying him in London just at that time. Thomas Winter also came to see Sir Everard whilst he was in London, and his friendship with men who were conspiring to an evil end was endangering Digby without his knowing it. At that time he had no idea that any plot was in existence, although he was doubtless aware that many Catholics were considering what steps could be taken to relieve their condition; and the fact of his staying with Roger Manners proves that he had not come to London with any design of conferring with restless Catholics in a secret or underhand fashion.

After his visit to London, Sir Everard seems to have returned to Gothurst and to have continued his usual innocent country life, with its duties and pleasures. A letter among the Hatfield MS., written to him on the eleventh of June—his eldest boy’s birthday by the way[124]—treats of otter-hunting, and it is likely enough that Sir Everard practised this sport in the Ouse as well as in the other rivers and brooks of Buckinghamshire.

About the end of August, or perhaps early in September, 1605, a large party met at Gothurst, as guests of Sir Everard and Lady Digby, but with an ulterior purpose. To pray for the much-oppressed cause of the Catholic religion in England, for their suffering fellow-religionists, and for themselves, they had agreed to make a pilgrimage together to the famous shrine of St Winefride at Holywell, in Flintshire,[125] which would entail a journey of a hundred and fifty miles.[126] Sir Everard does not appear to have accompanied it; but, among those assembled at Gothurst who were to go on the pilgrimage were his young wife, Miss Anne Vaux, Brooksby and his wife, Thomas Digby, Sir Everard’s brother, who had evidently followed his example and become a Catholic, Sir Francis Lacon and his daughter, Father Garnet, the Provincial of the Jesuits, a lay-brother named Nicholas Owen, who usually accompanied him, and Father Strange, Sir Everard’s chaplain, making, with their servants and others, a party of pilgrims numbering little short of thirty. Later on, Father Darcy and Father Fisher also joined them.[127]

If, as it seems, Sir Everard did not go with the pilgrimage, the reason may have been that he was engaged in endeavouring to negotiate the proposed marriage between young Lord Vaux and a daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, although it seemed early to do so, as the boy was then only about fourteen.

“Riding westward,[128] the party of pilgrims would stop for the night at some Catholic friend’s house, and in the morning the two priests would say Mass. Even at Shrewsbury, when they had to put up at an inn, and at ‘a castle in a holt at Denbighshire,’ the daily Masses were said without interruption, and even the servants were present. At St Winefride’s Well, too, though the inn must have been small for so large a number, the Holy Sacrifice was again offered, and then the ladies went barefoot to the Well.[129] At Holywell they stopped but one night. Returning next day, they slept at a farmhouse seven miles from Shrewsbury, and after that they were again in the circle of their friends.”[130]

About the end of September (1605) Sir Everard Digby went to stay at Harrowden with young Lord Vaux. While he was there, his host’s mother, her sister-in-law, Anne Vaux, and Father Garnet came thither on their return from the pilgrimage. His friend Catesby also arrived from a visit to Lord Mordaunt[131] at Turville. Anne Vaux, who, as I have said, had been uneasy about Catesby’s proceedings, was in a hurry for his departure to Flanders, where he was to command an English regiment. Father Garnet wrote a letter of introduction for him to a Jesuit priest in that country, and Catesby himself showed this letter to his nervous cousin, assuring her that he was so anxious to start that he would spend £500 in obtaining a license[132] to go abroad with his men and horses, about which, he pretended, there was some difficulty.

After a few days’ visit at Harrowden, the family seat of the Vaux’s, which was then in a rather dilapidated condition,[133] Sir Everard Digby invited Catesby, Mrs Vaux, and Father Garnet to stay with him at Gothurst; and he started with Catesby to ride home, leaving his other guests to follow them. The distance between Harrowden and Gothurst was something like fifteen miles, and Digby and his friend became very confidential in the course of it.

Perhaps there are few occasions on which it is easier to converse freely than a long ride with a single companion; in most cases, no one can possibly be within earshot, therefore the voice need not be unnaturally lowered; the speakers are not confronting each other, and this prevents any nervous dread lest the mention of subjects on which either feels strongly should raise a tell-tale blush or a quiver of a lip or eyelid; and, if the topic should become embarrassing, the surroundings of those on horseback enable them to change it more easily, and with less apparent effort or intention, than under almost any other conditions. Lastly, the fresh country air, as it is inhaled in the easy exercise of riding, clears the brain and invigorates the energies, and when is it fresher or pleasanter than on a fine day at the end of September, such as we can imagine Sir Everard Digby and Robert Catesby to have enjoyed on their ride from Harrowden to Gothurst? Both of them, as we read, were fine men, fine horsemen on fine horses, and old friends; and they must have made a handsome and well-assorted pair, as they went their way along the roads, through the woods, and over the commons of Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire.

Early in their ride, when they were well clear of the outskirts of the little market town of Wellingborough,[134] beside the famous Red Well of which, some twenty years later, Charles I. and his Queen were to dwell in tents, in order to drink its medicinal waters, Catesby told his companion that he had a communication of the greatest importance to make to him; that he was only at liberty to convey it upon an oath of secresy; and that from all others intrusted with the subject of this communication, the oath had not been accepted unless sealed and confirmed by Holy Communion—which alone would demonstrate its sacred and religious nature—but that, in the case of so honourable a man as Digby, a simple oath would suffice. This was paying a very flattering compliment, and, when Catesby drew a small poignard, handed it to him, and asked him to swear secresy upon it,[135] Sir Everard, thinking that the matter would concern some “stirres in Wales”on behalf of the persecuted Catholics, of which Catesby had talked at Gothurst during the summer, took the oath without much hesitation, and returned the little weapon.

Then Catesby began a long, earnest, and serious discourse. There can be little doubt that he would first dwell upon the desperate condition of their co-religionists in Great Britain, the hopelessness of redress or any improvement in their state, and the likelihood of their persecution becoming still more intolerable under the incoming parliament. At last, he told his patient and sympathetic listener that the time had come for action. They could expect no help from the king, no help from the parliament, no help from foreign Catholic princes or powers, no help from a general, an ordinary, and a legitimate rising among their Catholic fellow-countrymen; there was nothing for it, therefore, but to help themselves. It was plain enough where, and from whom, their greatest danger lay. The few must be sacrificed to save the many. He had been reading his Bible[136]—the very Protestants who so cruelly oppressed them would commend that—and there he found instances in which the deliberate assassination of tyrants appeared to be not only tolerated but commended.

I cannot guarantee that Catesby said exactly all these things to Digby; I merely enumerate the arguments which he is stated, on good authority, to have used in persuading those who joined in his plot; and it is well known that he found no other of his adherents so difficult to convince as Sir Everard; therefore it is most unlikely that he omitted one of his pleas in this case.

Between the Catholics and the Protestants, Catesby considered that there was a regular warfare; no war could be conducted without bloodshed, and in war all was fair. It might even be maintained that the righteous Catholics were in the position of executioners, who should carry out the extreme sentence of death upon the iniquitous and murderous villains who, under the names of princes and rulers, were persecuting and slaying God’s innocent people. Who were these princes and rulers? King James and his parliament. They richly deserved to die the death, and unless they were destroyed they would work even greater evils. Let the sword of justice fall upon them.

Were the Catholics to rise and invade the houses of parliament with drawn sabres? No. Such a thing would be impossible. Resort must be had to stratagem, a method to which holy men had often resorted in ancient times, as might be read in the sacred pages of the Old Testament. But, unlike the warriors of Israel, the modern Christian soldier fought less with the sword than with that much more powerful medium known as gunpowder. It had already been the principal agent of destruction in many great battles; let it be used in the strife between the oppressed English Catholics and the king with his parliament.

Before entering into details of the proposed attack, it would be well to consider that the end aimed at was not any private revenge or personal emolument.[137] The sole object was to suppress a most unjust and barbarous persecution by the only expedient which offered the least prospect of success. There could be no doubt as to its being lawful, since God had given to every man the right of repelling force by force. If Digby should consider the scheme cruel, let him contrast it with the cruelties exercised during so many years against the English Catholics; let him calculate the number of innocent martyrs who had been butchered by the public executioner, or had died from ill-treatment or torture in prisons; let him estimate the thousands who had been reduced by the penal laws against recusants, from wealth or competence, to poverty or beggary; and then let him judge whether the sudden destruction of the rulers who had been guilty of such fearful persecutions, and avowedly intended persecutions yet more atrocious, could be condemned on the charge of cruelty. Nay, more; unless a decisive blow were delivered very shortly, something like a massacre of Catholics might be expected, and,[138] “Mr Catesby tould him that the papistes throate should have been cutte.”

Catesby would then tell his friend and companion, as they rode through the peaceful Midland scenery, with its horse-chestnuts and its beeches in their rich autumn colouring, on that September afternoon, how he must be a man, and nerve himself to hear the means which it was proposed to employ for carrying out the judgment of God upon their wicked oppressors.[139] Every Catholic peer was to be warned, or enticed from the House of Lords on a certain day, and then, by the sudden explosion of a large quantity of gunpowder, previously placed beneath the Houses of Parliament, the king and his councillors, his Lords and his Commons, were to be prevented from doing any further mischief in this world. As soon as the execution was over, the Catholics would[140] “seize upon the person of the young prince, if he were not in the Parliament House, which they much desired. But if he were,”in which case, of course, he would be dead, “then upon the young Duke Charles, who then should be the next heir, and him they would erect, and with him and by his authority, the Catholic religion. If that did also fail them, then had they a resolution to take the Lady Elizabeth, who was in the keeping of the Lord Harrington in Warwickshire; and so by one means or other, they would be certain to settle in the crown one of the true heirs of the same.”How loyal they were!

On first hearing of this inhuman, detestable, and diabolical scheme, Sir Everard was overcome with horror, as well he might be, and it was with the greatest difficulty that Catesby induced him to consider it any further.[141] If Sir Everard had been a man of firm will and determination of character, he would have obeyed his conscience and resolutely followed his own good instincts; but instead of doing so, he was weak enough to listen with attention and interest to the arguments of Catesby. To a man of a religious mind like Sir Everard Digby, those of a Scriptural character would be some of the most persuasive, and his companion would hardly fail to point out the wholesale massacres and cruelties apparently sanctioned in the Old Testament.

If he so pleased, he could quote plenty of biblical precedents for slaying and maiming, on a far larger scale than was proposed in the Gunpowder Plot, which would be a mere trifle in comparison with some of the following butcheries:—“They warred against the Midianites,”“and they slew all the males. And they slew the kings of Midian.”[142] “They slew of them in Bezek ten thousand men.”“And they slew of Moab at that time ten thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man.”[143] “David slew of the Syrians two and twenty thousand.”[144] “The other Jews,”“slew of their foes seventy and five thousand.”[145] “Pekah the son of Remaliah slew in Juda an hundred and twenty thousand in one day, which were all valiant men, because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers,”[146] just as King James and the English Government had forsaken Him, in Catesby’s and Sir Everard’s opinions.

If it were objected that all these fell in battle, and that it was quite a different thing to murder people by stealth in cold blood, could not Catesby have replied that “Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him [Sisera], and smote the nail into his temple, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.”[147] Jael Heber’s wife was acting as hostess to a friend who had come into her tent for shelter and protection, and had fallen asleep. Yet Deborah and Barak sang in honour of this performance:—[148] “Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent. He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish. She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.”“So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord.”[149] Might not, and ought not, the English Catholics to sing much such a song in honour of Catesby, Digby, and their fellow-conspirators, when the king and the Parliament should be blown up, and fall, and lie down, at their feet, where they should fall down dead? Was there not something biblical and appropriate, again, in destroying the enemies of the Lord with fire? “Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them.”[150] “Thou shalt be fuel for the fire; thy blood shall be in the midst of the land.”[151] And had not the very gentlest of men, even the God-man, said, “I am come to send fire on the earth?”Surely, too, if Holy Writ did not specially mention gunpowder, it constantly threatened one of its ingredients, namely brimstone, to the wicked!

Under the old dispensation, it was considered a religious duty to fall upon the enemies of the Lord and slay them; under the new, it would be as religious a duty to get under them and slay them. This was merely a detail, a simple reversal of the process, conducing to exactly the same results, and quite as Scriptural in its character.

A massacre by means of an explosion of gunpowder was neither a novel nor an exclusively Catholic notion. Persons observed, “There be recounted in histories many attempts of the same kynds, and some also by Protestants in our days: as that of them who at Antwerp placed a whole barke of powder in the great street of that citty, where the prince of Parma with his nobility was to passe: and that of him in the Hague that would have blown up the whole councel of Holland upon private revenge.”[152]

Within the last half century, had not great earls and statesmen, in Scotland, conspired together to blow up with gunpowder the Queen’s own husband, as he lay ill in bed, in his house; had not four men been destroyed by this means,[153] and had not the principal conspirator “declared,”with how much truth or falsehood it is not necessary to pause here to inquire,[154] “that the Queen”—the very pious martyr-queen, Mary, herself,—“was a consenting party to the deed,”[155] and had not that very pious queen married that very conspirator after he had brought about the murder of her first husband?

It would be scarcely too much to say that, early in the seventeenth century, the ethics of explosives were not properly understood. Catesby might argue that gunpowder was a destructive agent, the primary and natural use of which was to kill directly, and that its indirect use, by exploding it in a tube, thereby propelling a missile, was a secondary, less natural, and possibly less legitimate use. And, if it were objected that to employ it in either way would be right in war, but wrong in peace, he could bring forward the exceedingly dangerous theory (which has been made use of by Irish-American dynamitards in the nineteenth century), that oppressed people, who do not acknowledge the authority of those who rule over them, may consider themselves at war with those authorities, a theory which Catesby’s Jesuit friends would have negatived instantly, if he had asked their opinion about it.

Any attempt to prove the iniquity of Catesby’s conspiracy is so unnecessary that I will not waste time in offering one. I have only to endeavour to imagine the condition of mind in which he and his friends were able to look upon it with approval, and the arguments they may have used in its favour.

Next to passages and precedents from Scripture in support of his diabolical scheme, Catesby would be well aware that its approval by authorities of the Church, and especially by Fathers of the Society of Jesus, would have most influence with his friend Sir Everard. To the surprise of the latter, he informed him that he had laid the matter before the Provincial of the Society, and had obtained his consent to the scheme.

He admitted that the Jesuits were not fully aware of all the particulars; it was not intended to put them to the dangers of responsibility for the deed itself, or anything connected with it; already their very priesthood was high treason, and the last thing that Catesby and his friends desired was to add to their perils; but their approval of the design in general was of such importance that neither Catesby himself, nor any of those admitted into the secret, would have acted without it, and this Catesby declared he had obtained.

Upon a zealous convert, like Sir Everard Digby, such an assurance would exercise a great influence. Nor was it only of sacerdotal approval that Catesby boasted; he was able to add that he had obtained the consent, as well as the assistance, of John Wright, a Catholic layman and a Yorkshire squire; of Sir Everard’s own friend, Thomas Winter; of his eldest brother, Robert Winter,[156] “an earnest Catholic,”at whose house the pilgrims to St Winefride’s Well had stayed for a night on their way thither; of Ambrose Rookwood, a Catholic,[157] “ever very devout,”who had actually been one of the pilgrims; of John Grant,[158] “a zealous Roman Catholic,”who, like his brother-in-law, Robert Winter, had entertained the St Winifride’s pilgrims for a night in his walled and moated house, and of Thomas Percy, a relative of the Earl of Northumberland’s, and a very recent and earnest convert to the Church.