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, we are told——“_Life of Mary Ward_,” vol. i., p. 17——that one day
Mary came to her grandmother, “who was singing some hymns,” and the child
asked the old lady whether she would not send “something again to the
prisoners,” a question, we are told, which “pleased” Mrs. Wright “very
much.”
Lastly, the gifted daughter of Marmaduke Ward, and the niece of Thomas
Ward, bears this striking testimony concerning one aspect of her aged
relative’s gracious life, that “so great a prayer was she” that during the
whole five years that the child lived with her grandmother, the most of
which time she lodged in the same chamber, she “did not remember in that
whole five years she ever saw her grandmother sleep, nor did she ever
awake when she perceived her not at prayer” (p. 15).]
[Footnote 104:——Maybe Christopher Wright, from his earliest school-days,
had with reverence looked up to Edward Oldcorne, for the latter was the
senior of the former by no less than ten years, so that when Oldcorne was
a clever youth of fifteen years Christopher would be a little fellow of
five, “with his satchel and shining morning-face,” though we may be
permitted to hope that little Kit Wright did not “creep like snail
unwillingly to school.” For it was at a school second to none in England
that the future ill-fated Yorkshireman learned to con his “_hic, hæc,
hoc_.” It was a school originally founded by Egbert, Archbishop of York,
in the eighth century, and which, as the Cathedral Grammar School, had
been rendered famous by Alcuin himself, the tutor of Charlemagne. It was a
school re-founded and re-endowed in the Horse Fayre, now Union Terrace, on
the left-hand side going down Gillygate, outside Bootham Bar, by King
Philip and Queen Mary, especially for the training of priests for the
northern parts.——See in Leach’s “_Endowed Schools of Yorkshire_” for an
account concerning St. Peter’s School, Clifton, York, but no register of
scholars of this ancient seat of learning now exists prior to the year
1828. (Title deeds and writings lent by Mrs. Martha Lancaster, of York,
have enabled me to identify the site of the old school.)
It is, I take it, furthermore possible that Edward Oldcorne may have
taught Christopher Wright; and if the relation of pedagogue and scholar
ever subsisted between them, a bond of mutual regard would be created
which the lapse of long years would not weaken. For an account of the kind
of education given in a Grammar School in “the spacious days of Good Queen
Bess,” see Dr. Elzé’s “_Life of Shakespeare_” (Bell & Sons), also H. W.
Mabie’s very recent and able American “_Life of Shakespeare_”
(Macmillan).]
[Footnote 105:——“_Surgam, et ibo ad patrem meum, et dicam ei: Pater,
peccavi in cælum et coram te!_” “I will arise.”]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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