Now, if Dr. Williams solemnly had said that he knew Mrs. Abington personally, and that she (Mrs. Abington) had told him (Williams) with her own lips that she had writ the Letter, the case would have been a good way towards being established: assuming the lady to have been intellectually and morally capable at the time when she made such statement, and Williams himself a man whose word could be relied on.

Or, if Mr. Abington had told Williams that he knew his wife had writ the Letter because he saw with his own eyes the lady do it, then the case would have been also a good way towards being established.

Or, if Mr. Abington had told Williams that he believed his wife had writ the Letter because she had told him (Abington) she had done so immediately after she alleged she had performed the meritorious deed, the case would have been some slight way towards being established.

But when the only shred or patch of evidence we have to support the stupendous article of belief that Mrs. Abington accomplished the immortal feat is an uncircumstantial, uncorroborated allegation by Dr. Williams that some person or another unknown (on the most favourable view) told him (Williams) that Mrs. Abington had writ the Letter merely because her husband said so, then the case for Mrs. Abington’s authorship of the document is in no way towards being established.

And, therefore, the story falls to the ground.

And, therefore, it should be, in reason, henceforward consigned to the limbo of exploded myths and idle tales.

It is true that Dr. Nash in his work on Worcestershire,[115] written in the eighteenth century and published in 1780, declares that “Tradition in this county says that she [i.e., Mrs. Abington] was the person who wrote the Letter to her brother, which discovered the Gunpowder Plot.”

But then, obviously, this alleged tradition is absolutely worthless, unless it can be shown to have been a continuous tradition from the year 1605 down to the time when Nash was writing his “History.” For if the tradition sprang up at a later date, for the purposes of true history its value as a tradition is plainly nothing.

The learned David Jardine— to whom all students of the Gunpowder Plot will be for ever indebted for his labours in this conspiracy of conspiracies— in his “Narrative,” published in the year 1857, and to which reference has been already frequently made in the course of this Inquiry, says,[116] “No contemporary writer alludes to Mrs. Abington as the author of the Letter.”

And Jardine evidently does not think that the penmanship of the document can be brought home to this lady.

Moreover, if Mrs. Abington had written the Letter of Letters, surely she would have, at least, shared her brother Lord Mounteagle’s reward, which was £700 a year for life, equal to nearly £7,000 a year in our money.

For if £700 a year was the guerdon of him that merely delivered this Letter of Letters, what should have been the guerdon of her that actually penned the peerless treasure?

But the hypothesis that Mrs. Abington penned the Letter of Letters has absolutely no foundation in contemporary evidence. For there is not the faintest echo of an echo of testimony, nor the merest shadow of a shade of proof that either she or Mr. Abington had the remotest previous knowledge of the Gunpowder Treason Plot.

And the mere fact that Mr. Abington, although the harbourer of Fathers Garnet and Oldcorne, was spared from undergoing the extreme penalty of the law, in itself tends to disprove the allegation that either he or his wife had been in any way privy to the Plot. For no plotter’s life was spared.

Mr. Abington became a celebrated antiquary, especially in regard to his own County of Worcestershire, within the confines of which he was ordered by the King to remain for the rest of his days.— See Jardine’s “Narrative,” p. 212.[A]

In these circumstances, Dr. Nash’s alleged tradition cannot possibly outweigh the inferences that the facts known and inferred concerning the Plot all tend to establish. For these inferences, both in respect of what happened before and after the penning of the Letter, all go to show this: that the conjectures, surmises, and suggestions of this Essay are indeed probable to the degree of moral certitude.

And I respectfully submit these same conjectures, surmises, and suggestions cannot be upset, still less broken, by knowledge commensurate with zeal.

Jardine mentions the singular hypothesis that this famous Letter was penned by the Honourable Anne Vaux, at the dictation of the Honourable Mrs. Abington.

Now, the Honourable Anne Vaux was one of the daughters of the Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in Northamptonshire, at whose house Father Henry Garnet (the chief of the Jesuits in England) lived for many years, from 1586, when Garnet returned to England from Rome. Anne Vaux and her sister, the Honourable Eleanor Brookesby, were high-minded women who lived at White Webbs, Stoke Pogis,[A] Wandsworth, and other places of Jesuit resort, rendering, along with Edward Brookesby,[B] Esquire (the husband of Eleanor Brookesby), the members of the Jesuit Society in England signally devoted service.

This was especially so in the case of the Honourable Anne Vaux, who spent and was herself spent in behalf of labours wherein the English Jesuits busied themselves for, as they thought, the greater glory of God and the greater good of man.

Jardine, however, after comparing the Letter with many letters and papers at the then State Paper Office, which are undoubtedly in the Honourable Anne Vaux’s handwriting, says, “I am quite unable to discover the alleged identity of the handwriting.”[117]