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] of Naworth 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]

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.