But not yet had justice overtaken all the perpetrators of this villainy.
Three important traitors were yet at large, and they were all Jesuit
priests. Greenway, who had fled from Holbeach with Robert Winter, had
not continued in his company. For ten days he hid in barns and cottages
in Worcestershire; but when the proclamation was made for his arrest,
thinking it safest to be lost in a crowd in the metropolis, he came to
London. Here he was one day seized by a man, as they stood among others
reading the proclamation for his arrest. Greenway, with artful
composure, denied the identity, but went quietly with his captor till
they reached an unfrequented street, when the priest, who was a very
powerful man, suddenly set upon his companion, and escaping from him,
after a few days' concealment fled to the coast, whence he safely
crossed to the Continent. He afterwards wrote for his superiors a
narrative of the plot, wherein all the conspirators are impeccable
heroes of the romantic novel type, and the plot--which during its
existence he upheld and fervently encouraged--is condemned as a "rash,
desperate, and wicked" piece of business. He succeeded so well in
deceiving his superiors (or else they were equally hypocritical with
himself), that he was appointed Penitentiary to the Pope, and ended his
life in the full favour of that potentate.
Gerard, also, who had originally assisted the plotters in taking their
oath of secrecy, had now disappeared. So excellent an opinion had the
Roman Catholics of him, that many refused to believe "that holy, good
man" could have had any share in the conspiracy. The description of
this worthy, as given in the proclamation for his arrest, is curious in
its detail, and the better worth quoting since it has apparently not
been printed:--
"John Gerrarde the Jesuit is about thirty years old, of a good stature,
something higher than Sir Thomas Leighton [this name is crossed out, and
replaced by the word] ordinary, and upright in his pace and countenance;
somewhat staring in his looke and Eyes, curled headed by Nature, and
blackish, and not apt to have much hair on his beard. His Nose somewhat
wide, and turning up; blebberd lipped [thick-lipped], turning outward,
especially the upper lip, upward toward the Nose. Curious in speech, if
he do continue his custom, and in his speech he flewreth [Note 2] and
smiles much, and a faltering, lisping, or doubling of his tongue in his
speech." [Note 3.] What a picture of a Jesuit! This is the type of
man who practises an art which I never saw to such perfection as once in
the Principal of a Jesuit College--that of:
"Washing the hands with invisible soap
In imperceptible water."
Lastly, what had become of Garnet? He had not escaped nor left England,
yet he seemed in some inscrutable manner to have vanished from the face
of the earth, as completely as a morning mist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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