Before we well-nigh finally take our leave of Christopher Wright, I should like to bring before my readers two pieces of Evidence, from each of which, at any rate, may be drawn the inference that it was one of the conspirators themselves that revealed the tremendous secret.

That Christopher Wright was that revealing conspirator, the manifold considerations which the preceding pages of this Inquiry have established, I trust, will satisfy the intellect of my readers, seeing that those considerations, I respectfully but firmly urge, must be held to have built up a “probability” so high as to amount to that “moral certitude” which is “the very guide” of Man’s terrestrial life, in that it furnishes Man with those sufficient rules which direct his daily action.[129]

But, in bringing the first piece of Evidence to which I allude before the eyes of my readers, I desire, with great respect, to say that I am keenly conscious that I run the risk of incurring the condemnation implied in the words: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

But, since “circumstances alter cases,” I feel warranted (under correction) in adventuring, in this one instance, upon a particular line of argument which I feel is, as an affair of taste, prim facie unseemly, and, as a matter of feeling, a line of action, in ordinary cases, to be rigorously eschewed.

Yet, seeing that such a course of conduct cannot be held to be morally wrong, my plea is— and I respectfully submit my all-sufficient plea is— that an Inquiry, having for its purpose the elucidation of the hitherto inscrutable mystery as to who revealed, or who were instrumental in revealing, so satanic an enterprise as the Gunpowder Plot, being far, far removed beyond the range of mere logic-chopping, dry-as-dust, non-human investigations, justifies the following, in one instance, of a course of action which unquestionably would clash with mere, decorous taste, and would collide with mere delicate feeling, except, by the case being altered, it were lifted into the realm of the categories of the extraordinary and the special.

Then the nature of the act or action composing that course of conduct would be, in a sense, fundamentally and meritoriously changed. And, therefore, it would be, by a double title, morally justifiable.

Now, when the Gunpowder conspirators were at Huddington, the mansion-house of Robert Winter, on Thursday, the 7th day of November, certainly most of the conspirators, and probably all of them, received the Sacrament of Penance through the ministry of a Jesuit Father, named Nicholas Hart (alias Strangeways and Hammond), who besides being an alumnus of Westminster School, and for two years a student of the University of Oxford, had, prior to his becoming a Priest and a Jesuit, “studied law in the Inns of Court and Chancery in London.”[130]

Now, William Handy, the serving-man of Sir Everard Digby (of whom we have already heard), further deposed as follows:[131]

“On Thursday morning, about three of the clock, all the said company, as well servants as others, heard Mass, received the Sacrament, and were confessed, which Mass was said by a priest named Harte, a little man whitely complexioned, and a little beard.”

Now, Ambrose Rookwood, on the 21st day of January, 1605-6, deposed[132] that he confessed to Hammond at Huddington, on Thursday, the 7th of November, that he was sorry he had not revealed the Plot, it seeming so bloody, and that after his confession Hammond absolved him without remark.

The precise words of the ill-fated Rookwood hereon are these:—

Gunpowder Plot Books— No. 177.