Again: the primary instinct of self-preservation alone would have assuredly impelled the bravest of the brave amongst the nine malefactors, including Tresham, who were incarcerated in the Tower of London, either to seek to save his life when awaiting his trial in Westminster Hall, or, at any rate, when expecting the scaffold, the ripping knife, the embowelling fork, and the quartering block, in St. Paul’s Churchyard or in the old Palace Yard, Westminster, to seek to save his life, by divulging the mighty secret respecting his responsibility for the Letter of Letters, had anyone of them in point of fact penned the document. For “skin for skin all that a man hath will he give for his life.”

Hence, from the silence of one and all of the survivors— a silence as unbroken as that of the grave— we can, it stands to reason, draw but this one conclusion, namely, that the nine surviving Gunpowder conspirators were stayed and restrained by the omnipotence of the impossible from declaring that anyone of them had saved his King and Parliament.

Hence, by consequence, the revealing conspirator must be found amongst that small band of four who survived not to tell the tale.

Therefore is our Inquiry reduced to within a narrow compass, a fact which simplifies our task unspeakably.

If it be objected that “a point of honour” may have stayed and restrained one of the nine conspirators from “discovering” or revealing his share in the laudable deed, it is demonstrable that it would be a false, not a true, sense of duty that prompted such an unrighteous step.

For the revealing plotter, whoever he was, had duties to his kinsfolk as well as to himself, and, indeed, to his Country, to Humanity at large, and also to his Church, which ought, in justice, to have actuated— and it is reasonable to believe would have assuredly actuated— a disclosure of the truth respecting the facts of the revelation.

But I hold that the nine conspirators told nothing as to the origin of this Letter of Letters, because they had none of them, anything to tell.

Moreover, I suggest that what Archbishop Usher[139][A] meant when he is reported to have divers times said, “that if Papists knew what he knew, the blame of the Gunpowder Treason would not lie on them,”[140][B] was this:—

That it was “the Papist Doctrine” of the non-binding force of a secret, unlawful oath that (Deo juvante) had been primarily the joint-efficient cause of the spinning right round on its axis of the hell-begotten Gunpowder Plot.

It is plain that King James’s Government[A] were mysteriously stayed and restrained in their legislative and administrative action after the discovery of the diabolically atrocious Gunpowder Treason Plot.

And illogical and inconstant as many English rulers too often have been throughout England’s long and, by good fortune, glorious History, this extraordinary illogicalness and inconstancy of the Government of King James I. betokens to him that can read betwixt the lines, and who “knows what things belong to what things”— betokens Evidence of what?

Unhesitatingly I answer: Of that Government’s not daring, for very decency’s sake, to proceed to extremities.

Now, by reason of the primal instincts of human nature, this consciousness would be sure to be generated by, and would be certain to operate upon, any and every civilized, even though heathen, government with staying and restraining force.

Now, the Government of James I. was a civilized government, and it was not a heathen government. Moreover, it certainly was a Government composed of human beings, who, after all, were the persecuted Papists’ fellow-creatures.

Therefore, I suggest that this manifest hesitancy to proceed to extremities sprang from, and indeed itself demonstrates, this fact, namely, that the then British Government realized that it was an essentially Popish Doctrine of Morals which had been the primary motive power for securing their temporal salvation. That doctrine being, indeed, none other than the hated and dreaded “Popish Doctrine” of the “non-binding force” upon the Popish Conscience of a secret, morally unlawful oath which thereby, ipso facto, “the Papal Church” prohibited and condemned.

Hence, that was, I once more suggest, what Archbishop Usher referred to, in his oracular words, which have become historic, but which have been hitherto deemed to constitute an insoluble riddle.

For certainly behind those oracular words lay some great State mystery.

The same fact possibly accounts for the traditional tale that the second Earl of Salisbury confessed that the Plot was “his father’s contrivance.”— See Gerard’s “What was the Gunpowder Plot?” p. 160.

For the Plot was “his father’s contrivance,” considered as to its broad ultimate effects on the course of English History, in that the Plot was made a seasonable handle of for the destruction of English Popery. And a valuable and successful handle it proved too, as mankind knows very well to-day. Though “what’s bred in the bone” is apt, in this world, “to come out in the flesh.” Therefore, the British statesman or philosopher needs not be unduly alarmed if and when, from time to time, he discerns about him incipient signs, among certain members of the English race, of that “staggering back to Popery,” whereof Ralph Waldo Emerson once sagely spoke.

“’Tis a strange world, my masters! And the whirligig of Time brings round strange revenges!”