It should be also remembered that Edmund Neville, the claimant of the Earldom of Westmoreland, was the man who accused Dr. William Parry of a plan to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. Now this Neville became a suitor for the hand of Mary Ward, though about double her age. Neville would be related to the Wards, and perhaps knew Thomas Ward when in 1584 Parry was tried and executed. Parry had invited Neville to join in assassinating the Queen. I believe Parry to have been a great liar; but all the same it is not absolutely certain that the wretch was not the victim of a state intrigue. If we could ascertain at Hatfield more about Thomas Ward there might be a clue to the Parry mystery.] Now, the suggestion that Thomas Ward was probably in the Midland counties of Warwickshire and Worcestershire sometime about the 11th of October, 1605,[107] is, I maintain, to some very slight extent supported by the fact that we know for certain that Marmaduke Ward came up from Yorkshire to Lapworth about thirteen days afterwards, and that he was bracketed with those who were said to have been at the houses of John Wright, Ambrose Rookwood, and John Grant at that time.[A] [Footnote A: See the List of the names of conspirators, insurgents, and others arrested in the Midlands given in the Appendix.] Now, if about the 11th of October Thomas Ward found at Lapworth, Clopton, and Norbrook every inchoate evidential sign of a heady, hopeless, armed rebellion, what was there more natural than that he should have despatched some trusty horseman, fleet of foot, “from the heart of England” down into Yorkshire, bearing an urgent missive adjuring Marmaduke Ward, by the love that he bore to his kith and kin, to come up to Lapworth with all speed possible? To the end that he might use his counsels and entreaties to induce his late wife’s combative brother, John Wright,[108] the close-natured Christopher Wright, the gallant Ambrose Rookwood, and the strong-willed John Grant, to abandon all designment of insurrectionary stirs. For Thomas Ward, from the experience of a man at Court aged forty-six, who knew from the daily observation of his own senses, how firmly James’s Executive was certainly established, must have clearly perceived that, at that time Catholic stirs against the Government could be fated to have only one unhappy issue and disgraceful termination, namely, the utter, bloody, irretrievable ruin of all that were so thrice wretchedly bewitched as to have become entangled in them.[A]