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 FawkesSpink, Henry
History
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
Spink, Henry
Gunpowder Plot, 1605; Monteagle, William Parker, Baron, 1574 or 1575-1622
Again; at either Harrowden or Gothurst, Miss Vaux sought out her father’s
friend, and her own honoured and beloved spiritual counsellor, the chief
of the English Jesuits, and told him that she feared that some trouble or
disorder was a-brewing; and, moreover, that some of the gentlewomen,
namely, the wives of the conspirators, “had demanded of her where they
should bestow themselves until the burst was past in the beginning of the
Parliament.”
Garnet, in reply, asked his inquirer who told her this; but she said “she
durst not tell who told her so; she was [choked] with sorrow.”[A]
[Footnote A: Garnet’s examination of the 12th March. Foley’s “_Records_,”
vol. iv., p. 157.]
At Coughton, Father Garnet said Mass on the 1st of November, All Saints’
Day.
There “assisted” at this Mass the Lady Digby,[B] Mr. and Mrs. Brookesby,
Miss Anne Vaux, and almost the whole of Sir Everard Digby’s Gothurst
household.
[Footnote B: Lady Digby had been brought up a strong Protestant, and, like
most converts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Church of
Rome from Calvinistic Puritanism, she became an ardent devotee of the
Jesuits. (The point of contact was probably a common interest in the
problems of the mystical life, and a tendency towards a grave, sober,
strict regularity of “daily walk and conversation.”) George Gilbert, a
gentleman of high Suffolk family and great wealth, was likewise a convert
from Calvinism, through the instrumentality of the Jesuit Fathers,
Darbyshire and Parsons. Gilbert, as a young man, daily “waited upon the
ministry” of the once celebrated Puritan Divine, Dering, the friend of
Thomas Cartwright. George Gilbert died in Rome in 1583, holding in his
hand a crucifix made in prison by “the Blessed” Alexander Briant, a martyr
friend of “the Blessed” Edmund Campion. Of Briant it is said he was “of a
very sweet grace in preaching,” and that he was “replenished with
spiritual sweetness” when suffering the tortures of the rack. George
Gilbert mainly defrayed the cost of painting on the walls of the Church of
the English College at Rome certain pictures of some of “the English
Martyrs,” although “old Richard Norton,” of Norton Conyers, near Ripon,
and some others who as exiles had “with strangers made their home,”
likewise subscribed to the expense of the pious and artistic work. I saw,
on the 13th October, 1900, through the kind courtesy of the Right Reverend
Monsignor Giles, D.D., Rector of the English College, copies of these
remarkable pictures, copies which are painted on the walls of that very
College where Father Oldcorne himself had been educated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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