Humphrey Littleton “died with show of great repentance, and so with sorrow and humility and patient acceptance of his death made amends for his former frailty and too unworthy desire of life.” Stephen Littleton, the Master of Holbeach——who had likewise joined in the rebellion in the Midlands, under Sir Everard Digby, which grew out of the Gunpowder Plot, although a distinct movement from it, albeit connected with the Plot——was made a public example of in his native County of Staffordshire, _in terrorem_, as a terror to evil-doers: this unfortunate English gentleman suffering the extreme penalty of the law, according to his contemporary, the aforesaid Father John Gerard, in the ancient town of Stafford. CHAPTER LXVIII. We now come to the second and latter part of Father Oldcorne’s Declaration to Humphrey Littleton, from the whole of which Declaration Littleton drew the conclusion that Oldcorne answered “the action was good, and seemed to approve of it.”[A] [Footnote A: By thus disclaiming knowledge of “_these_”——that is, the object the plotters had in view in their nefarious Plot, and the means they purposed having recourse to, to attain their object——Oldcorne deliberately throws a veil over the full orb of truth. But Littleton might have discerned, had he taken the trouble so to do, that Oldcorne was equivocating under a sense of prior obligation; and the clue was afforded by the person of the speaker and the tenour of the answer itself. In the former part of the Declaration, by leaving Littleton _in abstracto_, he had thrown a veil over a portion of the full orb of truth. Just as the silvery moon, on some tempestuous night, may be first partially obscured, by a thick, dark, driving cloud, and then afterwards wholly obscured, from the view of the gazer.] “And thus I applied it to this fact of Mr. Catesbie’s; it is not to be approved or condemned by the event, but by the proper object or end, and means which was to be used in it; _and because I know nothing of thes_, I will neither approve it or condeme it, but leave it to god and ther owne consciences, and in this wary sort I spoke to him bycause I doubted he came to entrap me; and that he should take noe advantage of the words whither he reported them to Catholics or Protestants.”[B] [Footnote B: Oldcorne’s full answer to Littleton would be, “and because I know nothing of these [that I am at liberty to tell you, Humphrey Littleton”]: _these last words being interiorly expressed, perhaps_.] Now, in the first place, let it be remembered that these words were spoken _not before but after_ Wednesday, the 6th of November, when, as Oldcorne himself has left on record, and which indeed we have seen already, Father Tesimond came from Coughton to Huddington, and from Huddington to Hindlip; and when “_he said that there were certain gentlemen that meant to have blown up the Parliament House, and that their plot was discovered a day or two before_.”[A]