Father Tesimond had proceeded to Huddington, doubtless mainly in the hope, let us trust, of stirring up in the hearts of these desperate creatures sorrow——that great natural sacrament——for their awful crimes that, not in vain, had cried to Heaven for vengeance! For truly the guilty suffer and the blood-guilty man shall not live out half his days. CHAPTER XV. Now there is a sentence in the Letter whose wording is peculiar, but which, I submit, is pre-eminently a wording likely to be used by two natives of Yorkshire. I mean the sentence, “I would aduyse yowe as yowe _tender_ your lyf to deuys some excuse to _shift off_ youer attendance at this parleament,” meaning thereby, “I would advise you as you _have a care_ for your life to devise some excuse to _put off_[60] your attendance at this parliament.” Once more, a comparison of the Letter sent to Lord Mounteagle with a Declaration not only signed by Father Oldcorne but entirely in his handwriting, dated the 12th of March, 1605-6,[61] reveals this remarkable fact that there is, first, a general similarity between the penmanship of both documents; and, secondly, there is a particular similarity in the case of the following letters:——the small c/s, l/s, i/s, b/s, w/s, r/s, long s/s (as initials), and short s/s (as terminals); also the m/s and n/s are not inconsistent with being written by one and the same hand. The handwriting in the Letter is, for the most part, not in round hand, but in roman character. The letters do not all lean at the same angle to the horizontal. Evidently the writer had endeavoured “painfully” to disguise his handwriting, but conscientious carefulness and a disciplined will emphatically characterise both documents.[62] See Appendix. Now Thomas Ward, the gentleman-servant of Lord Mounteagle, was, I maintain, the intermediary——the diplomatic intermediary——through whom Christopher Wright (_ex hypothesi_) acted in communication with Mounteagle. And this, with the express knowledge and consent of Father Edward Oldcorne, who was, almost certainly, well acquainted with Thomas Ward.[63] In short, the revelation was a curvilinear triangular movement. CHAPTER XVI. Mounteagle, we are told, knew there was a Letter to be sent to him before it came.[64] Lingard says the conspirators suspected that Tresham had sent the Letter, and that there was a “secret understanding between him and Lord Mounteagle,[A] _or at least the gentleman who was employed to read the Letter at the table_.” (The italics are mine.) [Footnote A: It is to be recollected that the conspirators themselves suspected that there was a secret understanding, at least between the gentleman-servant of Mounteagle and Tresham, whom they thought was the revealing conspirator.——See Greenway’s MS., quoted by Lingard.]