Lord Mounteagle consorted much with English Roman Catholics, and, in some sense, prior to the year 1605, was of that religion himself. He had been present with his wife’s brother Francis Tresham a little after the Midsummer of 1605 at Fremland in Essex, on the occasion of the celebrated meeting when Father Henry Garnet, the head of the Jesuits in England, took occasion to have special warning speech with Catesby respecting a general question propounded by Catesby to Garnet about a month or six weeks previously (_i.e._, the beginning of Trinity Term, 1605), and from the answer to which general question Catesby shamefully drew that particular conclusion which the promptings of his evil will desired, in order that the enormity he had purposed might be made acceptable to the wavering conscience of any dubious fellow-plotter against whose resurgent sense of right and wrong he thought he might have to strive. Lord Mounteagle is a difficult man accurately to reckon up, either intellectually, morally, or religiously. For he seems in all three aspects to have been a slightly ambiguous person.[A] Yet certainly he was no mere titled fool, with a head-piece like a windmill. Far from it: he was probably a man of sufficient, though not, I think, of the very highest intelligence, good-natured, easy-going, and of very engaging manners.[B] [Footnote A: It is curious and amusing to hear that the following was the opinion of Robert Catesby concerning the peerage of his day:——“He made account of the nobility as of atheists, fools, and cowards; and that lusty bodies would be better for the commonwealth than they.”——See “_Keyes’ Examination_,” Record Office.] [Footnote B: A certain English periodical, a few years ago, spoke admiringly of Lord Mounteagle’s twentieth century connection, the present Duke of Devonshire, as being one’s _beau-ideal_ of the “you-be-damned” type of Englishman. Probably the same periodical would have found, had it been in existence in the seventeenth century, a similar contentment in the contemplation of the fourth Lord Mounteagle.] By his contemporaries, it is evident that even prior to 1605 Mounteagle was made much of and greatly courted. But less, I opine, on account of the intellectual and moral qualities wherewith he was endowed, than on account of the exalted station of his kith and kin and the general excellency and eminency of his own external graces and gifts of fortune. So much, then, for the present, concerning the now famous William Parker fourth Baron Mounteagle, whom History has crowned with a wreath of immortals. CHAPTER IV. On Saturday, the 26th of October, ten days before the intended meeting of Parliament,[A] Lord Mounteagle, we are told, unexpectedly and without any apparent reason or previous notice, directed a supper to be prepared at his mansion at Hoxton, where he had not been for more than a twelve-month before that date.