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
[Footnote 3:——Lord Mounteagle had been a party to the sending of Thomas
Winter and Father Oswald Tesimond into Spain in 1601 to negotiate with
King Philip III. of Spain an invasion of England with an army on
Elizabeth’s death. In 1601 he seems to have been a prisoner in the house
of Mr. Newport, of Bethnal Green. But in 1602 he was with Catesby at White
Webbs, by Enfield Chase, near London; so he was then at liberty. On the
accession of James I., Mounteagle——along with the Earl of Southampton
(Shakespeare’s patron and friend), and Francis and Lewis Tresham——held the
Tower of London for the King, who seems to have welcomed Mounteagle at
Court from the first. After James’s accession Christopher Wright and Guy
Fawkes were sent on a mission to Spain to urge upon the Spanish King to
invade the realm. This mission seems to have been a continuation of the
mission in 1601 of Winter and Tesimond. Mounteagle, however, took no part
or lot in despatching the second mission. (It is important to notice the
fact that as far back as 1601 and 1603 Thomas Winter and Tesimond,
Christopher Wright and Fawkes, were co-workers in revolutionary designs
against the Government of the day.)
Mounteagle’s father, Lord Morley, was living in 1605. He did not die till
1618, when his son and heir succeeded him as eleventh Baron Morley.
Mounteagle was called to the House of Lords in the autumn of 1605, under
the title of Baron Mounteagle, in right of his mother. “Mounteagle,” says
Father Oswald Tesimond, alias Greenway, “was either actually a Catholic in
opinion and in the interior of his heart, or was very well-disposed
towards the Catholics, being a friend of several of the conspirators and
related to some of them.” After the Plot, Mounteagle evidently left the
religion of his ancestors, though his wife (_née_ Tresham) continued
constant herein, and brought up her children Catholics; but Mounteagle
“died a Catholic.”
Jardine thinks that Mounteagle held some ceremonial office at Court,
probably in the Household of Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of James I., who
was at heart a Roman Catholic, though most probably never received into
that Church.——See “_Carmel in England_” (Burns & Oates, 1899), p. 30. We
hear of Mounteagle about ten days before the 5th November, 1605, calling
at the Palace at Richmond to kiss the Prince’s hands (_i.e._, Henry Prince
of Wales). Thomas Winter told Catesby that Mounteagle, at that time,
gathered from what he heard at the Royal Household that the Prince would
not be present at the opening of Parliament. Somerset House was Queen
Anne’s Palace. It would be the centre for all the most brilliant wits,
ambassadors, and diplomatists of the day.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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