The Fleet prison in London, Banbury Castle and Ely——his “familiar prison,” as Sir Thomas Tresham pleasantly styled the last-named place of incarceration——were the habitations wherein he was enabled to make it his boast in a letter to Lord Henry Howard, afterwards the Earl of Northampton, writ in the year 1603, “that he had now completed his triple apprenticeship in direst adversity, and that he should be content to serve a like long apprenticeship to prevent the foregoing of his beloved, beautiful, and graceful Rachel; for it seemed to him but a few days for the love he had to her.”[A] [Footnote A: Quoted from papers found at Rushton in Northamptonshire, the seat of Sir Thomas Tresham, which he himself designed, being an architect of some skill.] Well may the spiritual descendants to-day of these grand old Elizabethan Catholics exclaim:——“_Their_ very memory is pure and bright, and our sad thoughts doth cheer!” CHAPTER VII. The men known to history as the Gunpowder Plotters were thirteen in number. They were at first Robert Catesby, already mentioned, Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy (or Guido) Fawkes. Subsequently, there were added to these five——Robert Keyes, Christopher Wright (a younger brother of John Wright), and lastly Robert Winter (an elder brother of Thomas Winter),[A] Ambrose Rookwood, John Grant, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, and Thomas Bates. [Footnote A: Lord Edmund Talbot, brother to the present Duke of Norfolk, K.G., Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, is allied to Robert Winter, through the latter’s marriage with Gertrude Talbot, the daughter of John Talbot, Esquire, of Grafton in Worcestershire. The brother of Gertrude Winter became Earl of Shrewsbury. John Talbot had married a daughter of Sir William Petre. Lord Edmund Talbot, I believe, now owns Huddington.] Of these thirteen conspirators, all, with the exception of Thomas Bates, a serving-man of Robert Catesby, were, as Fawkes said, “gentlemen of name and blood.” Thomas Percy was the eldest of the conspirators and in 1605 was about forty-five years of age. Sir Everard Digby was the youngest, being twenty-four years of age, whilst the ages of the others ranged betwixt and between.[15]