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 LXI.

Now, in the first part of his Declaration, Father Oldcorne uttered concerning the Gunpowder Plot a proposition which expressed partial truth alone. Because he expressed truth in the abstract only, not truth in the concrete also, concerning that nefarious scheme.

In other words, Father Oldcorne severed in thought the two kinds of truth, the two aspects of truth, the two parts of truth, which being unified gave the whole truth respecting the moral mode of judging the Gunpowder Treason Plot.

Oldcorne severed concrete truth from abstract truth,[A] practical truth from speculative truth, and so far as his hearer, Humphrey Littleton, was concerned, held that concrete truth, that practical truth, suspended at the sword-point over Littleton’s head.

[A] Or, it may be said, Oldcorne separated concrete truth from abstract truth, practical truth from speculative truth, holding the former in solution, and putting into the hands of Littleton the latter alone, in the form of a dangerous precipitate.

Now, I maintain that, regard being had to the terrific danger of Littleton’s occasioning mischief, either through stupidity, malice, or both, a man of the intellectual and moral calibre of Edward Oldcorne would have never suffered his tongue to give utterance to a proposition dividing, as with a sword, concrete truth from abstract truth, practical truth from speculative truth, and then holding the former suspended above the head of his questioner, unless and until that great Priest and Jesuit had been first possessed of the living consciousness that he had had, and then was, at that very instant of time when speaking, having that Plot, which represented “the sum of all villainies,” in that it involved “sacrilegious murder,”[A] firmly and unconquerably crushed under his feet.[164]

[A] This phrase is used by Shakespeare in “Macbeth” (1606), I suggest, with indirect reference to the Gunpowder Plot, which Shakespeare must have followed with the most breathless, absorbing interest. For Norbrook was in Snitterfield, where his mother (Mary Arden) had property; while Coughton was the home of the Throckmortons, the Ardens’ relatives. Clopton House, where Ambrose Rookwood was living from Michaelmas, 1605, Lapworth, where John Wright resided from May, 1605, and where Christopher Wright and Marmaduke Ward visited him (all of which places were in that “garden of England,” Warwickshire), must have been as familiar to the poet almost as his own Stratford-on-Avon.

I find the name “Robert Arden,” of Pedmore, Worcestershire, 1¹/₂ miles from Stourbridge, down as “a popish recusant” for the year 1592, in the “Hatfield MS.,” part iv.

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