Believing that his principal friends, and the priests for whom he felt the greatest veneration, had either joined in or expressed their approval of the scheme, Sir Everard began to be half inclined to consent to it. Was there to be a great enterprise, entailing personal activity and danger for the good of the Catholic cause, and was he to shrink from taking part in it? Was he alone, among the most zealous Catholic laymen of England, to show the white feather in a time of peril? Could he call himself a man if he trembled at the very thought of bloodshed? Yet, in truth, the idea of the cold-blooded massacre which was proposed appalled him; fair fighting he would rather rejoice in, but wholesale assassination was to the last degree repulsive to his nature. Hesitating and miserable, he reached Gothurst with his guest without giving any definite answer to the question whether he would join in the conspiracy.

When they were in the house, Catesby showed him a book justifying proceedings which he claimed to be similar to the proposed plot. “I saw,”he wrote afterwards to his wife,[159] “I saw the principal point of the case, judged by a Latin book of M. D., my brother’s father-in-law.”What book it may have been we have no means of knowing; but we do know that the perils of comparing parallel cases are notorious: and, unfortunately, the production of this book had the effect of turning the scale, and inducing Digby to join in the infamous plot.

Necessary as it is for a biographer of Sir Everard Digby carefully to consider all the arguments that are likely to have influenced him in consenting to the Gunpowder Plot, it is all-important to keep before the mind the cause which, on his own admission,[160] was the first and most potent of his assent to the conspiracy. This was[161] “the friendship and love he bare to Catesby, which prevailed so much, and was so powerful with him, as that for his sake he was ever contented and ready to hazard himself and his estate.”

Sir Everard was a man of what may be termed violent friendship. We have already seen his almost immoderate attachment to Father Gerard. It was an excellent thing that he should have such a man for a firm friend; but his feeling towards him was something much more than that. Father Gerard was “his brother.”The Jesuits make a rule of avoiding what they term “particular friendships,”and the great aggression of affection would certainly not come from Father Gerard’s side. And now we find him loving Catesby to such an extent as to be “ready to hazard himself and his estate”“for his sake.”

There is such a thing as an undue admiration for “the man who thinks as I do.”It proceeds from a combination of pride and weakness. The man in question is the embodiment of “my”principles, and therefore to be worshipped, and, holding “my”principles, his decisions, which are presumably formed upon those principles, must be right, and “my”adoption of them will save me the trouble of forming any for myself. Such is the line of argument which men of Sir Everard Digby’s type mentally follow. When, again, some difficulty presents itself, concerning which they have never thought at all, they argue to themselves after this fashion. “My friend agrees with me about A, B, and C, topics on which we are both well informed; therefore I may safely follow his advice about D, a subject of which I at present know nothing, but about which, when I have studied it, I may logically assume that I shall agree with him.”

Few men act on principle at first hand. To a vast majority, it is too invisible, intangible, difficult to define, and difficult to realise, to serve as either a guide or a support. Yet some of those who are least able, coolly, logically, and consistently to understand and adhere to a principle in the abstract, are the most enthusiastic in advocating, the most vigorous in defending, and the most extravagant in extending to the most extreme limits, its reflection, or supposed reflection, in the person and behaviour of a friend; and they are apt, in their devotion to the friend, to forget the principle. It was thus in the case of Sir Everard Digby and Robert Catesby. In his friendship with Catesby, Sir Everard was eager to be one of the most pronounced champions of the Catholic religion, yet when Catesby acted in direct opposition to the fundamental principles of that religion, Sir Everard clung to the visible friend to the neglect of the invisible principle, which, theoretically, he held to be more precious than life itself.

When one idea takes too forcible possession of the mind, although the objections to it may collectively be overpowering, if taken one by one, it is easy to dispose of them, and then to blind the eyes, to stifle the conscience, and to imagine a glamour of righteousness, unselfishness, and heroism, in iniquity, self-pleasing, and even cruelty. Digby experienced this fatal facility. He did not at once consent to Catesby’s request without the least pretence of considering its merits; but he combatted the objections to it one by one, and thus easily defeated them. He endeavoured to regard the matter from Catesby’s point of view, and he found the process simple, if not agreeable.

And here let me say that I wish I could honestly represent Sir Everard as having consented hurriedly to the plot in a hot-headed love of adventure. The evidence, unfortunately, all points the other way. He was persuaded with great difficulty by Catesby. He disliked the look of the whole thing, and he finally consented to it after cool and deliberate reflection. I admit that he was impulsive; I do not deny that, in this instance, he may have acted on sudden impulse at particular stages of his lengthened agony of doubt and indecision, or that, after being too slow in obeying his first impulse to refuse to hear another word about the atrocious project, he may have yielded too hurriedly to his later impulse to throw in his lot with the friend whom he trusted; but I cannot excuse him on the ground that his adhesion to the conspiracy was the result of a momentary convulsion of enthusiastic folly.

He objected; he feared the destruction of Catholic peers; he talked over the pretended opinions of the Jesuit Fathers; he read a so-called authority in a book shown to him by Catesby; he calculated the chances of success and failure; he thought over the question of men, money, arms, and horses; and then, with false conclusions, on false premises, in a sort of spasm of wrongheadedness, he, who had been depending excessively on clerical direction—even Jesuits admit that there is such a thing as being over-directed—suddenly acted, upon a question involving an enormous issue, without any advice whatever except that of the man who was tempting him to what, he must have seen, had, prima facie, the colour of a most odious crime. I am not forgetting that Catesby vaunted Jesuit approval; but what good Catholic would take clerical advice upon an intricate point at second hand from another layman? Or, to put it in another form, what prudent man would commit himself to a lawsuit simply because a friend told him that his lawyer recommended him to sue an adversary under very similar circumstances? Digby had good reason for knowing that the Jesuit Father, whose opinion he most valued—Father Gerard—would strongly object to what was proposed; but he fancied that he himself knew better what was for the good of the Church; so, after meekly wavering in a state of great uncertainty, like the weak man that he was, he suddenly yielded and agreed to partake in what he persuaded himself to be a pious act on behalf of his religion, but was in reality a piece of unprecedented pious folly; and few things are more certain than that, be his personal virtues ever so exalted, and his intentions ever so pure, the pious fool can do, and often does, more to injure the cause of religion than even the scientific fool to injure that of science, which is saying much.

It is now my duty to explain how grossly Sir Everard was deceived by Catesby, when he was assured that any Jesuit Fathers had approved of the conspiracy “in general, though they knew not the particulars.”What I am about to write may appear a long digression; but it should be remembered that it was chiefly upon Catesby’s assurance of the approval of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus that Sir Everard consented to join in the conspiracy; therefore the amount of consent actually obtained from them, if any, is of the utmost importance to my story.

Here is Father Gerard’s account of the so-called approval of the plot, which Catesby had extracted from Father Garnet, and on the strength of which he persuaded Sir Everard Digby and others to join in it.[162] “Having a great opinion both of the learning and virtue of the Fathers of the Society, Mr Catesby desired to get, by cunning means, the judgment of their Superior, so as he should never perceive to what end the question were asked.”This makes Father Gerard’s opinion of Catesby’s shameful dishonesty in the affair unmistakably clear. “Therefore,”he continues, “coming to Father Garnet, after much ordinary talk, and some time passed over after his arrival”(at a house in Essex, in June 1605, that is to say, about three months before he revealed the plot to Sir Everard) “one time he took occasion (upon some speech proposed about the wars in the Low Countries or such like)”—observe the fraud of this! Catesby was to have command of a regiment in the “Low Countries,”so he clearly intended to lead Father Garnet to suppose that he was contemplating a position in which he might very probably find himself when there—“to ask how far it might be lawful for the party that hath the just quarrel to proceed in sacking or destroying a town of the enemy’s, or fortress, when it is holden against them by strong hands. The Father answered that, in a just war, it was lawful for those that had right to wage battle against the enemies of the commonwealth, to authorise their captains or soldiers, as their officers, to annoy or destroy any town that is unjustly holden against them, and that such is the common doctrine of all Divines: in respect that every commonwealth must, by the Law of Nature, be sufficient for itself, and therefore as well able to repel injuries as to provide necessaries; and that, as a private person may vim vi repellere, so may the commonwealth do the like with so much more right, as the whole is of more importance than a part; which, if it were not true, it should follow that Nature had provided better for beasts than for men, furnishing them with natural weapons as well to offend as to defend themselves, which we see also they have a natural instinct to use, when the offence of the invader is necessary for their own defence. And therefore that it is not fit to think that God, Who, by natural reason, doth provide in a more universal and more noble manner for men than by natural instinct for beasts, hath left any particular person, and much less a commonwealth, without sufficient means to defend and conserve itself; and therefore not without power to provide and use likely means to repel present injuries, and to repress known and hurtful enemies. And that, in all these, the head of the commonwealth may judge what is expedient and needful for the body thereof.”Much of all this was useless to Catesby’s purpose; but he waited patiently, and when Father Garnet had finished speaking, he answered, “that all this seemed to be plain in common reason, and the same also practised by all well-governed commonwealths that ever have been, were they never so pious or devout. But, said he, some put the greatest difficulty in the sackage of towns and overthrowing or drowning up (sic) of forts, which, in the Low Countries”—the Low Countries again! mark his deceitfulness—“and in all wars is endeavoured, when the fort cannot otherwise be surprised, and the same of great importance to be taken. How, then, those who have right to make the war may justify that destruction of the town or fort, wherein there be many innocents and young children, and some perhaps unchristened, which must needs perish withal? Unto this the Father answered, that indeed therein was the greatest difficulty; and that it was a thing could never be lawful in itself, to kill an innocent, for that the reason ceaseth in them for which the pain of death may be inflicted by authority, seeing the cause why a malefactor and enemy to the commonwealth may be put to death is in respect of the common good, which is to be preferred before his private (for otherwise, considering the thing only in itself, it were not lawful to put any man to death); and so because the malefactor doth in re gravi hinder the common good, therefore by the authority of the magistrate that impediment may be removed. But now, as for the innocent and good, their life is a help and furtherance to the common good, and therefore in no sort it can be lawful to kill or destroy an innocent.”

Determined as Catesby was to twist Father Garnet’s words into “a parallel case,”he wanted something more tangible than this to work upon. Accordingly he said:—“That is done ordinarily in the destruction of the forts I spake of.”“It is true, said the Father, it is there permitted, because it cannot be avoided; but is done as per accidens, and not as a thing intended by or for itself, and so it is not unlawful. As if we were shot into the arm with a poisoned bullet, so that we could not escape with life unless we cut off our arm; then per accidens we cut off our hand and fingers also which were sound, and yet being, at that time of danger, inseparably joined to the arm, lawful to be cut off, which it were not lawful otherwise to do without mortal sin. And such was the case of the town of Gabaa, and the other towns of the tribe of Benjamin, wherein many were destroyed that had not offended. With which Mr Catesby, seeming fully satisfied, brake presently into other talk, the Father at that time little imagining at what he aimed, though afterwards, when the matter was known, he told some friends what had passed between Mr Catesby and him about this matter, and that he little suspected then he would so have applied the general doctrine of Divines to the practice of a private and so perilous a case, without expressing all particulars, which course may give occasion of great errors, as we see it did in this.”

If Sir Everard Digby had heard the conversation on which the vaunted “consent”of the Jesuits had been founded, there can be little doubt that he would have refused to have anything to do with the conspiracy on such grounds. Father Gerard probably heard the account of the interview, after the failure of the plot, from Father Garnet himself.

Father Garnet’s own much shorter account of the conversation may be given here.[163] Mr Catesby “asked me whether, in case it were lawful to kill a person or persons, it were necessary to regard the innocents, which were present, lest they also should perish withal. I answered that in all just wars it is practised and held lawful to beat down houses and walls and castles, notwithstanding innocents were in danger, so that such battering were necessary for the obtaining of victory, and that the multitude of innocents, or the harm which might ensue by their death, were not such that it might countervail the gain and commodity of the victory. And in truth I never imagined anything of the King’s Majesty, nor of any particular, and thought it, as it were, an idle question, till I saw him, when we had done, make solemn protestation that he would never be known to have asked me any such question as long as he lived.”

That Father Garnet believed Catesby to have deceived him and to have told untruths about him is evident from one of his letters written in orange juice in the Tower. He says[164] “Master Catesby did me much wrong, and hath confessed that he tould them that he said he asked me a question in Q. Eliz. time of the powder action, and that it was unlawfull. All which is most untrew. He did it to draw in others.”Again he writes[165] “I doubt not Mr Catesby hath fained many such things for to induce others,”Sir Everard Digby, of course, among the rest.

Some of the modern admirers of Father Garnet have maintained that the worse Catesby, the worse Garnet; the better Catesby, the better Garnet. Without suggesting the exact converse, I would venture to point out the danger to Garnet’s memory in anything that might tend to show some sort of co-partnership in spirit and intention between himself and Catesby. All the facts lead me to a very different conclusion, and one which is much more to the interest of Garnet’s memory, namely, that Catesby deceived him from first to last, and that he was, in fact, the innocent dupe of Catesby. To begin with, Catesby, when, during the first half year of James’s reign, Garnet desired him not to join in “some stirring, seeing the King kept not his promise,”deceived Garnet by assuring him “he would not.”[166] He deceived him in 1604, when, on Garnet’s urging him not to take up arms, etc., against the king,[167] “he promised to surcease.”He deceived him when he put a case before him on the question of slaying “innocents together with nocents,”as if it concerned his projected campaign in Flanders, when it really concerned the Gunpowder Plot. He deceived him at the[168] “house in Essex,”when he “assured”him “that all his plans were unexceptionable.”He deceived him when he[169] “promised”“to do nothing before the Pope was informed by”“messenger.”He deceived him at White Webbs, when he told him that what he had in hand was quite “lawfull.”He deceived him at Harrowden when he said that he was going to start for the war in the Low Countries as soon as he possibly could.

In other places I either have shown, or will show, that he deceived all his fellow-conspirators, that he induced them to join in the plot on false pretences, and that he told the lie direct to Sir Everard Digby at Dunchurch. Undoubtedly he had a charming manner, he was an agreeable and well-informed companion; there is much in his history that is interesting, much that is romantic, much that excites pity, but let not any modern Catholics imagine that by attempting to minimise his misdoings they will do any credit to the cause of the Church; for the man began as a libertine, and, after a period of spasmodic piety, ended as a liar. Catesby was one of those people who are fond of asking for priestly advice, obey it only if it coincides with their own wishes, and have no scruple whatever in misquoting it to their friends. This race is not extinct, nor is it limited to the male sex. Sometimes the performance is varied: instead of misquoting the advice of the priest, these candid penitents misstate the case on which they ask the priest to form an opinion.

Such people are exceedingly dangerous, and do immense mischief to the cause of the Catholic Church. When we consider the evil that may be wrought by one inaccurate and not over-scrupulous woman of this sort, who says to her friends:—“Oh, you may be quite easy in your mind. I asked Father Dash, and he told me there was no harm whatever in it,”of some action which that Father would have condemned in the most unqualified terms, what limit can be put to the disaster that a man like Catesby might bring upon a credulous friend such as Sir Everard Digby?

It is unfortunate that there should be men of the Digby class as well as the Catesby! A priestly judgment has to be given in a court in which the inquirer is witness for both plaintiff and defendant, as well as advocate for both plaintiff and defendant. The friend, therefore, of the inquirer, who is asked to accept the decision which he brings from that spiritual court, ought not to do so unless he feels assured either that he would lay his case with absolute impartiality before that tribunal, or that the judge would discredit his evidence if given with partiality. Now, knowing Catesby very intimately, had Sir Everard Digby good reasons for believing that he could be trusted as an absolutely impartial witness and an absolutely impartial advocate on both sides? or else that the priest consulted would certainly detect any flaw in the evidence of a man so notorious for his plausibility and his powers of persuasion? If not, and he was determined only to join in the enterprise on the condition that it had priestly consent, he was bound either to go and ask it for himself, or, if his oath of secrecy prevented this, to refuse to have anything further to do with the conspiracy. So far as I have been able to ascertain of the previous history of Robert Catesby, he was one of the very last men from whom I should have felt inclined to take spiritual advice or spiritual consent at second hand; and, on this point, I find it difficult to exculpate Sir Everard Digby, although the difficulty is somewhat qualified by an unhappy remark made to Sir Everard by Father Garnet, to be noticed presently.

But first let us notice an incident which, in the case of two men professing to be practical Catholics, is nothing short of astounding! As a modern Jesuit, the present editor of The Month, the chief Jesuit journal in this country, points out,[170] Catesby “peremptorily demanded of”his associates in the conspiracy, of whom Sir Everard Digby was one, “a promise that they would not mention the project even in confession, lest their ghostly fathers should discountenance and hinder it.”Considering that that project, even when regarded in the most favourable light, was one likely to entail very intricate questions of conscience in the course of its preparation and its fulfilment, it is inconceivable how men called, or calling themselves, good Catholics could either make such a demand or consent to it.

FOOTNOTES: