The Gunpowder Plot and Lord Mounteagle's Letter, Being a Proof, with Moral Certitude, of the Authorship of the Document / Together with Some Account of the Whole Thirteen Gunpowder Conspirators, Including Guy Fawkes

Henry Spink

RECAPITULATION OF PROOFS, ARGUMENT, AND CONCLUSIONS.

SUPPLEMENTA. Supplementum I. Guy Fawkes.

APPENDICES. Appendix A. Circumstantial Evidence Defined and Described.

NOTES.

FINIS.

“Veritas temporis filia. Truth is the daughter of Time, especially in this case, wherein, by timely and often examinations, matters of greatest moment have been found out.” — Sir Edward Coke (the Attorney-General who prosecuted the eight surviving conspirators).

“Suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which History has the power to inflict on Wrong.” — Lord Acton.

“History, it is said, revises the verdicts of contemporaries, and constitutes an Appeal Court nearest to the ordeal of heaven.” — Dr. James Martineau.

TO

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE CHARLES LINDLEY
SECOND VISCOUNT HALIFAX

OF HICKLETON AND GARROWBY
IN THE COUNTY OF YORK
ONE OF YORKSHIRE’S MOST GIFTED AND DISTINGUISHED SONS
THIS BOOK
WHICH
AMONGST OTHER THINGS
TELLS OF SOME OF THE WORDS AND DEEDS
OF CERTAIN YORKSHIREMEN IN
THE DAYS OF SHAKESPEARE
IS
(BY KIND PERMISSION)
MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR.

Bland’s Court,
Coney Street,
York.

To the Right Honourable
Viscount Halifax.

My Lord,

The book which your characteristic generosity has permitted me to dedicate to you wears a two-fold aspect. For it is as to one portion — and predominantly — an Inquiry taking the form of a discourse with questions and proofs, propositions and demonstrations. While as to another portion — but subordinately — it is a History taking the form of a narrative of events, a relation of mental occurrences, a statement of concrete facts. Now these twain aspects will be found duly to play their respective parts in the course of the subsequent pages, in accordance with a selected order and method.

With most of the allegations of fact and the inferences therefrom, and with many of the assumptions and conclusions which this work contains, your Lordship will agree. From others you will disagree. Whilst in the case of a third class, it may be that you will deem a suspension of judgment to be the part which wisdom and justice alike enjoin.

Speaking for myself, both as a man and as a native of our great County of Yorkshire — whose sons are at once speculative and practical, imaginative and concrete — necessity, in the form of an imperative sense of duty, has been laid upon me, to declare, with unmistakable emphasis and straightforward directness, what I hold to be the Truth governing the subject-matter wherewith I have sought to deal. For Truth is that which is, and its contradictory is error. This line of action I have pursued with the greater determination, inasmuch as daily observation of external events — and, if less frequent, still actual reflection thereupon — has strongly convinced me, even against my will, that much of the “forcible feebleness” and most of the “stable instability” of modern British Statesmen and Politicians have their origin and rise in nothing else than this: — lack of clarity of thought and want of knowledge of those, fixed fundamental intellectual, moral, and political principles which ought to be the sure inheritance of the human Race. And pre-eminently of that portion of the Race which is conscious of a lofty imperial mission. “For evil is wrought by want of thought as well as by want of heart.”

The ancient Stagyrite ranked Poetry above History, because the former bequeaths to Man universal principles of action, whereas the latter bestows upon Man only a relation of individual facts.

But the History of the Gunpowder Treason Plot rises to a higher unity. Because for a man to have read and mastered an impartial record of that deliberate and appalling scheme of “sacrilegious murder,” which happily Destiny first frustrated, and afterwards, through Nemesis, her unerring executioner, signally avenged in the sight of all men, is to have witnessed, with the eye of the historic imagination, a drama that is a poem in action.

Nay, more; it is to have had a personal, experimental realization, through the historic feeling, of what is meant, in the realm of Moral actualities, by the infliction of Retribution, the working out of Expiation, the regaining of Justness, the restoration of Equality between outraged Right and outraging Wrong, and the attaining by the tempestuous, passionate human heart of final tranquillity, rest, and peace.

For one of the greatest recorded Tragedies in the world is the History of the Gunpowder Treason Plot, regard being had to the intellectual and moral ends effected by that history’s recital.

The man who has truly, if indeed but commemoratively, through force of the medium of language merely, taken his part in this great Action, even at a distance of well-nigh three hundred years, will have had his soul cleansed and purified by cleansed and purified pity and terror. Then will he have had that soul soothed and healed. He will have been first abased and then exalted.

For so to act is to weep with a Humanity that weeps. Then with that same Humanity to join in a triumphant pÆan of victory that has for its universal and glorious theme this reality of realities which cannot be broken, namely, that Universe — whereof Man, though not the measure, constitutes so large a part — is primevally founded and everlastingly established in Goodness, Being, and Truth.

Trusting that your Lordship will crown your gracious kindness by pardoning the great length of this Introductory Letter,

I beg to remain,
My dear Lord Halifax,
Yours sincerely and gratefully,
HENRY HAWKES SPINK, Jun.

Saturday, 26th October, 1901.

Tragedy primarily implies imitation of Action by action, not by language, although of course language forms a constituent part.

See the “Poetics of Aristotle,” chap. vi.

“Although it is by no means proved to be impossible that this nobleman [Lord Mounteagle] was a guilty confederate in the Plot, the weight of evidence is at present in his favour. It is, however, a most curious State mystery: and I am persuaded that, if the truth is ever discovered, it will not be by State papers, or recorded confessions and examinations. When such expert artists as Bacon and Cecil framed and propagated a State fiction in order to cover a State intrigue, they took care to cut off or divert the channels of history so effectually as to make it hopeless, at the distance of three centuries to trace the truth by means of documents which have ever been in their control. If the mystery should hereafter be unravelled, it will be probably by the discovery of some letters or papers of a domestic nature, which either slumber in private repositories, or remain unnoticed in public collections.” — Letter by David Jardine, Editor of “Criminal Trials,” to Sir Henry Ellis, F.R.S., “ArchÆologia,” pp. 94-95. Dated 30th November, 1840.

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