The remainder of Garnet's story is given in the tale, and is almost pure history as there detailed. In his conferences with Hall, he made no real profession of innocence, only perpetual assurances that he "trusted to wind himself out" of the charges brought against him; and when Lord Salisbury said--"Mr Garnet, give me but one argument that you were not consenting to it [the plot], that can hold in any indifferent man's ear or sense, besides your bare negative,"--Garnet made no answer. He persistently continued to deny any knowledge of White Webbs, until confronted with Johnson; and all acquaintance with the plot before his receipt of Digby's letter at Coughton, until shown the written confession of Hall, and the testimony of Forset and Locherson concerning his own whispered admissions. When at last he was driven to admit the facts previously denied with abundant oaths, he professed himself astonished that the Council were scandalised at his reckless falsehoods. "What should I have done?" he writes. "Why was I to be denied every lawful [!] means of escape?" That the Government did not deal fairly with Garnet--that, as is admitted by the impartial Dr Jardine, "few men came to their trial under greater disadvantages," and that "he had been literally surrounded by snares,"--may be allowed to the full; but when all is said for him that honesty can say, no doubt remains that he was early acquainted with and morally responsible for the Gunpowder Plot. The evidence may be found in Jardine's Narrative of the Plot; to produce it here would be to swell the volume far beyond its present dimensions. One point, however, must not be omitted. There have been two raids on the Public Record Office, two acts of abstraction and knavery with respect to these Gunpowder Plot papers; and it can be certainly stated, from the extracts made from them by Dr Abbott and Archbishop Bancroft, that the stolen papers were precisely those which proved Garnet's guilt most conclusively. A Manuscript letter from Dr Jardine to Mr Robert Lemon, attached to the _Gunpowder Plot Book_, states that Mr Lemon's father had "often observed to me that `those fellows the Jesuits, in the time of the Powder Plot (not the Gunpowder Plot) had stolen away some of the most damning proofs against Garnet.' That thievery of some kind abstracted such documents as the Treatise of Equivocation, with Garnet's handwriting on it--the most important of the interlocutions between Garnet and Hall in the Tower--and all the examinations of Garnet respecting the Pope's Breves, is quite clear. _The first thievery I have proved to have been made by Archbishop Laud_; the others probably occurred in the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second, when Jesuits and `Jesuited persons' had free access to the State Paper Office." An old proverb deprecates "showing the cat the way to the cream;" but there is one folly still more reprehensible--placing the cat in charge of the dairy.