We have now considered the Evidence leading up to the commission of the respective acts that this Inquiry, at an earlier part, has attributed severally to Christopher Wright and Father Oldcorne, who stand, as it were, at the angular points in the base of that triangular movement of revelation, at whose vertex is Thomas Ward (or Warde), the entirely trustworthy friend and diplomatic intermediary common to both the repentant conspirator and the beneficent Priest of the Society of Jesus.

But before proceeding with the Evidence and the deductions and suggestions therefrom, which tend to prove that, subsequent to the dictating of the Letter by Christopher Wright and the penning of the same by Father Oldcorne, these two Yorkshiremen were conscious of having performed the several parts attributed unto them, let us deal with certain objections that may be put forward as preliminary objections fatal to the contentions of this Inquiry.

Now, there is an objection which, with a prim facie plausibleness, may be advanced against the hypothesis that Christopher Wright was the dictating, repentant, revealing conspirator, through whom primarily the Plot was frustrated and overthrown.

And there is also a second objection that may be urged against the hypothesis, with even still greater prim facie plausibleness, that Father Edward Oldcorne, Priest and Jesuit, was the meritorious Penman of the dictated Letter.

Each objection must be dealt with separately.

Let us take the objection in the case of Christopher Wright first, and, having laid that one, proceed to the objection in the case of Edward Oldcorne.

Now, a certain William Handy, servant to Sir Everard Digby, on the 27th day of November, 1605, before (among others) Sir Julius CÆsar, Kt., Sir Francis Bacon, Kt.,[110] and Sir George More, Kt., High Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex, deposed (among other things) the following:—

That early on Wednesday morning, the 6th of November, as the fugitives were proceeding from Norbrook to Alcester, he (Handy) heard the younger Wright say, “That if they had had good luck they had made those in the Parliament House fly with their heels upward to the sky;” and that “he spake these words openly in the hearing of those which were with him, which were commonly Mr. John Grant, the younger Grant, and Ambrose Rookwood.”[111]

Now, Christopher Wright may have used these words in the early part of that November day, and every candid mind must allow that they are not the words that one would expect to find in a sincerely repentant criminal.

But the philosopher knows that there is “a great deal of human nature in Man.” While the experienced citizen of the world who knows men practically, as the philosopher knows Man theoretically, will not be literally amazed, or even unduly startled, at finding these words recorded against Christopher Wright, even after (ex hypothesi) he had become as one morally resurrected from the dead.

For it is to be remembered that Christopher Wright was the brother of John Wright, and the brother-in-law of Thomas Percy, Thomas Percy having married Martha Wright, of Plowland Hall. Now, concerning John Wright and his brother-in-law, Thomas Percy, the following traits of character are chronicled by their contemporary, Father John Gerard.[112]

“It was noted in him [i.e., Thomas Percy] and in Mr. John Wright (whose sister he afterwards married) that if they had heard of any man in the country to be esteemed more valiant and resolute than others, one or the other of them would surely have picked some quarrel against him and fought with him to have made trial of his valour.”

On the march then, with such relatives as these close at hand, there is no antecedent improbability, but the contrary, in the supposal that Christopher Wright used these words by way of a feint, to the end that he might, peradventure, draw his companions away from those scaring suspicions, by the haunting fear of which Wright’s self-consciousness would be sure to be continually visited.

For “Conscience doth make cowards of us all.”

Truly, “The guilty suffer.” And it was part of the awful temporal punishment wherewith severe, just Nemesis, the dread executioner of Destiny, visited this— I still hold, all outward shows to the contrary notwithstanding— repentant wrong-doer, that he should be fast bound to one of the spiked, lacerating wheels of a flying chariot that he desired, “to the finest fibre” of his tortured, writhing being, to have no part nor lot in driving: fast bound, for the residue of that all too brief mortal career, which, on that chill November morning, was rapidly drawing to its shattered close.