It hath been truly observed by one of the most knowing and candid of modern students of Elizabethan biographical literature, that Sir William Catesby, the father of the arch-gunpowder conspirator, Robert Catesby, in common with the great majority of the country gentry throughout England, who were resident upon their own estates, and unconnected with the oligarchy which ruled in the Queen’s name (i.e., Queen Elizabeth’s) at Court, threw in his lot with the Catholic party, and suffered in consequence of his conscientious adherence to the old creed.[A]

While Sir Thomas Tresham (the brother-in-law of the last-mentioned Sir William Catesby and father of Francis Tresham, one of the subordinate conspirators), was so attached to the ancient faith of the English people that, we are told, he not only regularly paid— by way of fines— for more than twenty years, the sum of £260 per annum, about £2,080 a year in our money, into the Treasury rather than not maintain what (to him) was “a conscience void of offence,” but he also spent at least twenty-one years of his life in prison, after being Star-Chambered in the year 1581 along with Lord Vaux of Harrowden and his brother-in-law, Sir William Catesby, on a charge of harbouring Campion.

The Fleet prison in London, Banbury Castle and Ely— his “familiar prison,” as Sir Thomas Tresham pleasantly styled the last-named place of incarceration— were the habitations wherein he was enabled to make it his boast in a letter to Lord Henry Howard, afterwards the Earl of Northampton, writ in the year 1603, “that he had now completed his triple apprenticeship in direst adversity, and that he should be content to serve a like long apprenticeship to prevent the foregoing of his beloved, beautiful, and graceful Rachel; for it seemed to him but a few days for the love he had to her.”[A]

Well may the spiritual descendants to-day of these grand old Elizabethan Catholics exclaim:— “Their very memory is pure and bright, and our sad thoughts doth cheer!”