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
Guy Fawkes probably was authorised to impart and possibly actually did,
under the oath, impart some knowledge of the Plot to Captain Hugh Owen, a
Welsh Roman Catholic soldier of fortune serving in Flanders under the
Archdukes.[102] Owen’s name figures in the Earl of Salisbury’s
instructions to Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney-General who prosecuted the
surviving Gunpowder conspirators in the historic Westminster Hall.
Moreover, I have thought that at least some of the powder must have been
purchased in Flanders through the good offices of the said Captain Owen.
The powder and the mining tools and implements appear to have been stored
at first in the house at Lambeth and placed under the charge of Robert
Keyes and, eventually, of Christopher Wright. The powder was, I take it,
packed in bags, and the bags themselves packed in padlocked hampers.
Afterwards, I conclude, the powder bags were deposited in the barrels, and
the barrels themselves carried by two of the conspirators, with aid of
brewers’ slings, and deposited in the cellar, which apparently had at
least two doors.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Now, when deep within the depths of the moral being of Christopher Wright
there first arose that tender day-spring, a realization of guilt and
shame: that crimsoned dawn, a sense of grief and sorrow for those two high
crimes whereby his wretched conscious-self had been made darksome and
deformed: acts, wondrous in the telling, in that soul had been indeed
wrought out; regard being had to the overmastering power of Man’s
conditioned yet free will.
Furthermore, the historical Inquirer cannot but seek, if possible, by the
exercise of the philosophic faculty, to penetrate to what, on the human
side, may have been the originating cause, the moving spring, of the
limited yet responsible moral nature of a guilty creature, whose eyes for
well-nigh three hundred years have been closed by a violent death; of a
guilty creature who, in the awful tragedy of his end, verified in himself,
in the sight of all men, the sublimely terrible words of the old Greek
tragedy, “The guilty suffer.”
For wrong-doing, by a steadfast law of the universal reason, “till time
shall be no more,” will ever entail temporal punishment; and, by nature,
expiation and atonement must be wrought out in the criminal’s own keen
consciousness.
Yet, by a compensating law of universal reason, as inexorable as its
fellow, according as Man does work out that measure of punishment,
expiating and atoning, which to him Destiny has allotted for his guerdon,
in that proportion does his soul regain its forfeited harmoniousness and
peace.
Now the originating cause, the moving spring, in the case of the, I hold,
contrite Christopher Wright was, on the human side, the flooding of his
soul by memories pure and bright of days long, long ago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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