[Footnote A: “Truth will out!”] Now, regard being had (1) to what Salisbury bade Coke _not say_; and (2) to what Coke as a matter of fact _did say_, I infer, first, that it _was_ one of the conspirators who revealed the Plot; because of just scruples that his conscience had, well-nigh at the eleventh hour, awakened in his breast: that, secondly, not only so, but that the Government, through Salisbury, Suffolk, Coke, and probably Bacon, strongly suspected as much: that, thirdly, this was the explanation not only of their _comparatively_ mild treatment of the Gunpowder conspirators themselves,[137] but also, I hold, of the subsequent _comparatively_ mild treatment of the recusants generally throughout the country.[138] For had the Government stripped all English Papists of their lands and goods and driven them into the sea, Humanity scarcely could have complained of injustice or harshness, regard being had to the devilish wholesale cruelty of the Gunpowder Plot. Contrariwise, the entire action of the Government resembles the action of a man in whose hand the stick has broken whilst he is in the act of administering upon a wrong-doer richly deserved chastisement. For, indisputably, the Government abstained from following after, and from reaping the full measure of, their victory (to have recourse to a more dignified figure of speech) _either on grounds of principle, policy——or both_. Moreover, none of the estates of the plotters were forfeited. And this, regard being had to the fact that the plotters were “moral monsters,” and to the well-known impecuniosity of the tricky James and his northern satellites, is itself a circumstance pregnant with the greatest possible suspicion that there was some great mystery in the background.——See Lathbury’s “_Guy Fawkes_,” pp. 76, 77, first Edition. For, even if deeds of marriage settlement intervened to protect the plotters’ estates, an Act of Parliament surely could have swept them away like the veriest cobwebs. For Sir Edward Coke himself might have told the King and Privy Council that “an Act of Parliament could do anything, short of turning a man into a woman,” if the King and Council had needed enlightening on the point. CHAPTER XLIII. Again: the primary instinct of self-preservation alone would have assuredly impelled the bravest of the brave amongst the nine malefactors, including Tresham, who were incarcerated in the Tower of London, either to seek to save his life when awaiting his trial in Westminster Hall, or, at any rate, when expecting the scaffold, the ripping knife, the embowelling fork, and the quartering block, in St. Paul’s Churchyard or in the old Palace Yard, Westminster, to seek to save his life, _by divulging the mighty secret respecting his responsibility for the Letter of Letters, had anyone of them in point of fact penned the document. For “skin for skin all that a man hath will he give for his life.”_