The Gunpowder Plot and Lord Mounteagle's Letter, Being a Proof, with Moral Certitude, of the Authorship of the Document / Together with Some Account of the Whole Thirteen Gunpowder Conspirators, Including Guy Fawkes

CHAPTER IX.

Let us deal with the inferences from the Evidence, and ascertain to what further suggestions those inferences give rise.

Now, among the first things that must strike the reader of the list of actors in the Gunpowder tragedy is the large number that were, directly or indirectly, connected with the far-stretching, prolific province of Yorkshire. Of the whole thirteen conspirators, four first drew the breath of life in that grandest and fairest of English Counties, namely: Thomas Percy, John Wright, Christopher Wright, and Guy (or Guido) Fawkes. While five of the other intending perpetrators of an action which, if consummated, would have indeed “damned them to everlasting fame,” indirectly had relations with it.

Nay, more; of the four members of the clerical profession whom the Government sought to charge with complicity in this nefarious designment, namely: Fathers Garnet, Tesimond, Gerard, and (subsequently) Oldcorne— two out of the four, Oswald Tesimond and Edward Oldcorne, were likewise Yorkshiremen.[A]

[A] The late Bishop Creighton, in his fine illustrated work entitled, “The Story of some English Shires” (Religious Tract Society), says:— “Yorkshire is the largest of the English shires, and its size corresponds to its ancient greatness.”

Edward Oldcorne was certainly a native of the City of York, and it is very likely indeed that Oswald Tesimond was a native also.[34]

Moreover, Oswald Tesimond, John Wright, Christopher Wright, and Guy Fawkes were all educated at the Royal School of Philip and Mary in the Horse Fayre, at the left-hand side going down Gillygate, York, where Union Terrace is now situated, just outside Bootham Bar, and not far from the King’s Manor, where Henry Hastings Earl of Huntingdon, or his preceding or succeeding Lords President of the North, presided in State over the Council of the North and the Court of High Commission.[A]

[A] Lord Strafford, the representative of Charles I. in Ireland, was in after years Lord President of the North. In his day the King’s Manor was known as the Palace of the Stuart Kings, for both James I. and Charles I. sojourned there. It is now used as a beneficent Institution for the Blind, as a memorial to that illustrious Yorkshireman, William Wilberforce, M.P., the immortal slave emancipator. One of the rooms in the old Palace is called the Earl of Huntingdon’s room to this day. William Wilberforce’s direct heir, William Basil Wilberforce, Esquire, resides at Markington Hall, near Ripon.

The Earl of Huntingdon was a scion of the House of York, and had Elizabeth become reconciled to the Church of Rome the Puritans would have probably rallied round Lord Huntingdon as their King. The Honourable Walter Hastings, the Earl’s brother, was a Roman Catholic. They were, of course, akin to Queen Elizabeth, and were descended from the “Blessed” Margaret Plantagenet Countess of Salisbury.

It is more than probable that Edward Oldcorne also quaffed his first draught of classical knowledge at the same “Pierian spring;” for we are told that his parents “in his young years kept him to school, so that he was a good grammar scholar when he first went over beyond the seas.”[35]

Before going to Rheims and Rome Edward Oldcorne had studied medicine.

Who among these unparalleled conspirators is then the most likely, either through fear or remorse or both feelings, to have first put into motion the stupendous machinery whereby the Gunpowder conspiracy was revealed? Only an energy practically superhuman would be, or could be, sufficient for the accomplishment of such an end, as— well-nigh at the eleventh hour— speedily to swing round on its axis a project so diabolical and prodigious as the Gunpowder Plot.

For the passion— the concentrated, suppressed, yet volcanic passion— that had purposed so awful a catastrophe was deep as hell and high as heaven.

And well might it be, regard being had to the indisputable facts of English History from the year 1569— the year of the Rising of the North, which was stamped out with such cruel severity— down to the year 1605. Truly, the measure of the Gunpowder conspirators’ personal guilt was the measure of their representative wrongs. Yet this, in itself, for these wrong-doers was no ground of pardon or release: for, by a steadfast decree of the universe, “The guilty suffer.”

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