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 LIX.

Now, the contention is this: That regard being had to the extraordinary heinousness of the Gunpowder Plot, in point of underhand stealthiness and secrecy as well as of deliberateness, malice, magnitude, and cruelty, no man of moral uprightness and intellectual keenness could be— without doing a violence to his human nature that is all but incredible— so unspeakably reckless and utterly insane as to fling broadcast to the winds, for the wayfaring man and the fool to pick up and con for their own and their hapless fellow-creatures’ moral destruction, an oral statement as to this diabolical Plot, that expressed ways of looking at the Plot merely speculative and simply in the abstract,[A] save and except on one condition only, namely, that such speaker had had both from without and from within, et ab extra et ab intra, a special knowledge.

[A] It is to be noted that in this momentous Declaration of the 12th March, 1605-6, Oldcorne in the first part reserves or conceals “partial truth;” that is to say, in this case, truth in the concrete, or truth in action. While in the second part of the Declaration Oldcorne orally disclaims, denies, or dissembles integral truth, that is here a special and particular knowledge of the end the plotters had in view, and the means they purposed to adopt. The knowledge he had received was of a nature official, and at least conditionally, though not absolutely, private knowledge.

Furthermore, a special knowledge, with absolute certitude, which warranted the speaker in mentally surveying that Plot not merely as it then was at the moment when he was giving utterance to his speculative statement concerning it, but, as he full well knew, at some point of time prior to that fateful day, November the 5th, 1605, it had been destined to be perpetually, namely, A PLOT ante factum in Æternum, a mere abstract mental plan for ever. Aye, a mere abstract mental plan to all eternity; because transmuted and transformed by some process wherein that speaker had himself taken a primal, an essential, a meritorious part.[A]

[A] The argument is that a man at once good and clever, like Edward Oldcorne, would not, according to the rules that govern human nature and daily experience, have clothed in words and then let loose to wander about the world seeking whom it might fall in with and victimize, a bare abstract proposition regarding the Plot, unless he had been first absolutely certain that the foundation-thing, the Plot itself, was too attenuated and ghost-like to work hurt or mischief to any human creature.

Now, since Littleton propounded his question after the 5th of November, Oldcorne had an ordinary ground for allowing himself to speak of the defunct Plot purely in the abstract. But this was an obviously very dangerous thing to do, both for Littleton’s sake, the general public’s sake (Catholic or Protestant), and for the speaker’s own sake. Therefore the fact that Oldcorne did so speak postulates something more than ordinary. Hence, as Oldcorne was a man of virtue both intellectually and morally, the reasonable inference is that Oldcorne had an extraordinary ground for his answer which endued him with a special liberty of abstract speech in regard to the matter. That extraordinary ground, I maintain, was based deep down within the depths of his own interior knowledge.

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