Whilst a third class were persuaded, by intense intellectual, moral, and spiritual conviction that——“in and by the power of divine grace”——come what might, nothing should separate them from those hereditary beliefs which were dearer to them far than not merely earthly goods, lands, and personal liberty, but even than their very life. This last-mentioned class, from and after the year 1580, “the year of the Lord’s controversy with Sion,” as the old English Catholics regarded it, who loved to recall that “good time” when Campion and Parsons “poured out their soul in words,” especially Campion, who was remembered in the north for three generations: this last-mentioned class, I say, were oftentimes, though certainly not always, found to be greatly attached to the then new Society of Jesus, which, in England, was in the glow and purity of its first fervour. This last-mentioned class——I mean the Jesuitically-affected class of English Catholics——were also again sub-divided into three sub-divisions. One sub-division was composed of Mystics; another of Politicians; and a third of those who, realising a higher unity, were at once Mystics _and_ Politicians——or, in other phraseology, _they were Men of Thought and Men of Action_. Now, the Gunpowder conspirators belonged to the last-mentioned class, and to the second division of that class. That is to say, they were mere Politicians, speaking broadly and speaking generally. CHAPTER VI. It hath been truly observed by one of the most knowing and candid of modern students of Elizabethan biographical literature, that Sir William Catesby, the father of the arch-gunpowder conspirator, Robert Catesby, in common with the great majority of the country gentry throughout England, who were resident upon their own estates, and unconnected with the oligarchy which ruled in the Queen’s name (_i.e._, Queen Elizabeth’s) at Court, threw in his lot with the Catholic party, and suffered in consequence of his conscientious adherence to the old creed.[A] [Footnote A: Dr. Augustus Jessopp: Article——“Robert Catesby,” “_National Dictionary of Biography_.”] While Sir Thomas Tresham (the brother-in-law of the last-mentioned Sir William Catesby and father of Francis Tresham, one of the subordinate conspirators), was so attached to the ancient faith of the English people that, we are told, he not only regularly paid——by way of fines——for more than twenty years, the sum of £260 per annum, about £2,080 a year in our money, into the Treasury rather than not maintain what (to him) was “a conscience void of offence,” but he also spent at least twenty-one years of his life in prison, after being Star-Chambered in the year 1581 along with Lord Vaux of Harrowden and his brother-in-law, Sir William Catesby, on a charge of harbouring Campion.