to live a long life, but his progeny would succeed him, the heirs of his authority and cruelty; and being constitutionally a coward and an intriguer, he was bent on making peace with foreign powers, and thus cutting off all sympathy which the Catholic sovereigns might have felt it their interest to express for their suffering co‐religionists in Great Britain. Though the principles of reciprocal protection and allegiance were not as well defined at that period as, they have since been, the Catholics of England would have been more or less than human if they could have regarded James’ government with any feeling other than detestation, and the wonder is not that a plot was laid to destroy it, but that so very few of the persecuted multitude could be found to embark in it, notwithstanding the manifold reasons afforded by the king and parliament for their destruction. It was an age of conspiracies and counterplots, when the highest and most trusted in every land endeavored by force or fraud to accomplish political and personal ends, success being the only criterion of merit. The history of Europe from the middle of the preceding century is full of dark schemes and secret contrivances, in which nobles and princes figure alternately as the bribers or the bribed, the patrons or the victims of the assassin, now devoted patriots and anon double‐dyed traitors. The long civil wars, the vicious legacy of the Lutheran attempt to unsettle the faith of Christendom, had nearly ceased from sheer exhaustion, and unemployed soldiers of desperate fortunes but undoubted courage were to be easily had for any enterprise, no matter how dangerous. Of this character was Guy or Guido Fawkes, whose name, though not himself the originator of the Gunpowder Plot, is most intimately associated with it in popular tradition. The real authors were Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, Thomas Winter, and John Wright; all of whom were country gentlemen of good family and education, but, except Catesby, very much reduced in circumstances owing to the unjust and repeated exactions of the penal laws, which had not only robbed them of their property and shut them out from all public employment, but had branded them with the stigma of traitors to their country and enemies to their sovereign; for, having in the early part of their lives conformed to Protestantism, they had subsequently returned to the church into which they had been baptized—an offence in the eyes of the rulers of that day of the deepest dye.