Probably Shakespeare knew Grant personally, and not only Grant, but Catesby, Percy, the Winters (Robert and Thomas Winter were likewise akin to the Throckmortons), and Tresham. That the bard of Avon knew Lord Mounteagle, the associate of his friend and patron the Earl of Southampton, is even still more probable. How is it that Shakespeare never in his writings sought to make political capital (as the sinister phrase goes) out of the Gunpowder Plot? For several reasons: first, his heart (if not his head) was with the ancient faith he had learned in the old Warwickshire home; secondly, his large humanity prompted him to sympathise with all that were oppressed. I hold that in this studied silence, this dignified reserve of Shakespeare, we may discern additional proof of the nobleness of the man, supposing that he knew personally any of the plotters. He would not kick friends that were down, when those friends were even traitors. He could not approve their action——far from it. He might have condemned with justice, and with the world’s applause. But upon himself a self-denying ordinance he laid, tempting as it must have been to him to perform the contrary, especially when we recollect the course then followed by his brother-poet——Jonson. But Shakespeare would not “take sword in hand” with the pretence of restoring “equality” between these wrong-doers and their country. He deemed that the ends of justice——exact, strict Justice——were met in “the hangman’s bloody hands”——“Macbeth,” 1606——and that sufficed for him. Since writing the above note I find it stated in “_The Religion of Shakespeare_,” by Henry Sebastian Bowden (Burns & Oates, 1899)——chiefly from the writings of that great Elizabethan scholar, the late Richard Simpson——that “among the chief actors in the so-called Gunpowder Plot were Catesby; the two Bates; John Grant, of Norbrook, near Stratford; Thomas Winter, Grant’s brother-in-law; all Shakespeare’s friends and benefactors” (p. 103); so that my conjecture is, belike, warranted that the poet knew Catesby, Winter, and Grant. Moreover, from the same work, it appears that Shakespeare, through the Ardens and Throckmortons, was connected by family marriages, not only with Catesby, the Winters, and Tresham, but distantly with the Earl of Southampton himself, who was a relative of Lord Mounteagle. Hence it is still more probable that Shakespeare knew Mounteagle personally.